Posts Tagged ‘the heroine’s bookshelf’

As July comes to an end I feel kind of like Laura Ingalls, who scored a paltry 92 in arithmetic after a whirl of gaiety that left her breathless and almost affianced.  The past month has been a whirlwind, first of work, then of travel to LauraPalooza 2010 in Mankato, MN!  It was a lovely trip, and one I won’t soon forget (and my roundup post will be here soon).

In the midst of all that bookish goodness came more bookish news…The Heroine’s Bookshelf has a new cover!  Due to the many machinations of the publishing industry, a new cover was in order, and I think it’s really lovely.  The book will be in hardcover and I can’t wait to see the final iteration.  Many thanks to Christine Van Bree and the folks over at Harper for their patience, savvy, and attention to detail.  Here’s the new cover (click for huge version):

I think every author suffers from Fraud Syndrome at some point.  Symptoms include pinching self, wondering if anyone will find out that on the inside you’re a disastrous, precarious and insecure wreck even though you have it semi-together professionally.  Well, at least I hope every author does, because otherwise I just outed myself.

Still, sometimes news arrives to sweeten the pot.  Yesterday I found out that Italian rights to The Heroine’s Bookshelf have been sold to Orme!

As I plot the Italian adventures of a book that used to be just me and a blinking cursor, I’ve been keeping (very) busy.  I guest blogged for Jesaka Long on roller derby and work/writing balance, and I even contributed a Little Women-themed page to GalleyCat’s World’s Longest Literary Remix.

What’s keeping your mind in the good life these days?

I have a terrible confession to make:  I didn’t read To Kill A Mockingbird in high school, or junior high, or elementary school…or until I was a grown woman.

I’m not sure if it’s because I missed 11th grade English (I was an exchange student in Germany that year) or what, but the book never entered my consciousness until I was already an adult.  Of course, it had been in the public consciousness for a long, long, time by then.  Harper Lee was already the shy, hidden queen of American letters.  Everyone already knew what the words “Scout” and “Atticus” meant.  Except for me.

I read Mockingbird eventually, and I loved it, enough to include it in the slender list of 12 books that make up The Heroine’s Bookshelf. Aside from Mary Lennox, Scout Finch is the youngest heroine of the lot, her creator the most mysterious.  And she’s arguably the one with the widest and most vocal audience, though many would think of Atticus as the book’s hero.

A heady, proud, almost sick with pleasure and agony feeling steals over me whenever I let myself think of all that this book meant in the past and means today.  Think about what it really signified, fifty years ago.  Of course, we wouldn’t have the book at all if Nelle Harper Lee had not failed to be a little lady like her Scout.  When you talk about her, it’s hard not to get caught up in something like resentment for speaking so strongly one time, then being content to take a backseat to her book.  I try to remind myself that as much as I’d like to sit on a porch with Harper Lee, that’s a privilege it’s her right to withhold.  I’ll content myself to having written about her, fifty years on.

Learn more about To Kill A Mockingbird at its 50th anniversary site.

It’s a singularly exciting, overwhelming, and trying time these days.  I find myself on quite the rollercoaster of ups and downs in terms of my day job, my writing, my relationships, and my own self-image.

Maybe it’s some kind of lunar phase or solar phenomenon (since everyone I know seems to be in upheaval), maybe it’s my age or something in the water.  I’m certainly at sea, and it turns out that all I really know for sure is what I have known how to do since the beginning…read myself into comfort and some semblance of sanity.

These days that usually looks like a book by or about Louisa May Alcott, irascible and overworked, overwrought and feisty and cranky as can be.  You wouldn’t know it to read Eight Cousins or Rose in Bloom, which are replete with moral lessons even when they show life’s trials (which usually involve things like struggling to be as good as you should be, or contracting a fever which is healed by a cousin’s devoted care).  But I recently had reason to turn back to Little Women…well, more truthfully, I took advantage of my participation in GalleyCat’s World’s Longest Literary Remix Contest (results coming soon!) to revisit it.  And when I took a close look at Chapter 1, I was startled by the sheer restless, anxious energy that spews forth from the book’s first beloved pages.

Just look at the verbs and descriptions:  over the course of a few passages, Jo

• grumbles
• lies on the rug
• states her work makes her “ready to fly out the window or cry”
• laughs
• stretches
• puts her hands in her pockets and whistles
• pulls off her hairnet and shakes down her hair
• warms Marmee’s slippers
• chokes on her tea and drops her bread, butter side down, on the carpet…
• and sings with her sisters.

Could there be a better portrait of the restless energy of a 15-year-old girl too big for her body and outgrowing everything about her life?  Could there be anything more appealing to a modern girl (or struggling, tired, manic, stressed-out woman)?  The beauty, of course, is that some of that anxious spirit comes from Louisa herself.  And just one chapter in, I’m plunged back into one of my primary reasons for persevering:  my admiration of an unconventional “little woman” and of her creator, who had this to say about strife:

I’m not afraid of storms, for I’m learning to sail my ship.

I got a stack of galleys of my book in the mail.  A stack!

They are perfect for holding atop one’s head in celebration.  My new chapeau.

Apparently I have written and published a book.

And that thrills/excites/scares/thrills/scares/thrills me.  I guess I wasn’t prepared for the tactile quality of the books (cheap paperbacks, of course, in their galley form, but they’ll come out in hardcover so there are still surprises in store).  I wasn’t prepared to feel like maybe, just maybe, I have something in common with the heroines and authors I spent several wild months with last year.

I also wasn’t prepared to have five whole copies, so get ready for some giveaways….