sdkfhsdlk

Question of the Month: Catch-Up Time (and some exciting Book and College news!)

by Susan Henderson on June 3, 2013

I’ve been away for a while so I’d love to catch up a little. How are you? What’s happening in your world these days?

rimrocks

I’m thrilled to say that after a month in Winnett, Montana, I finished the new book and have sent it on to my agent. He will be the first to read any part of it, so there’s always the butterflies in the stomach, the fear of being crushed, but also the excitement that he’ll take something important to me and show me ways to make it better.

laundromat

A little about my trip… at the end of March, I flew to Missoula, Montana, where my brother lives, stayed over night at his place and caught up over wine and risotto. The next morning, we made the 6-hour drive to Winnett, a town of 181 people in Central Montana where my father, uncles, and grandparents used to live, and where I’ve very-fictionally set my book.

My hope was that being in this small town would awaken all my senses and emotions during my final edits and ignite a physicality that seemed to be absent from my book. And, oh man, did it ever! I walked through and around town several times a day, looking, listening, smelling, touching.  The trip was envigorating, lonely, claustrophobic, inspiring.

If you’re my friend on FaceBook, you can see a whole lot of pictures of this trip, from my family cemetery to the mid-April snow to the newborn calf someone drove around in his truck to keep it from freezing. I will be sharing more about the trip and the book over the next few months, but I don’t want to make this post too long, so I’ll stop here for now.

 *

In other news, I am so, so happy to report that after a long, nerve-wracking wait, my 17-year-old has now heard back from all of the colleges he’s applied to, and he’s made a decision about where he’ll attend in the fall. His choice: M.I.T.

MIT

I am full of joy, relief, and gratitude that he’s able to go somewhere that is such a profoundly good fit for him. M.I.T., by the way, sends their good news in a tube rather than an envelope, and then they encourage the students to hack the tube. My son made his into a working stylophone.

 *

Some thank you’s for reviews and links: The Never Dusty Bookshelf, Fru Elde – En dag i mitt liv, Convertiv, Jocosa’s Bookshelf, Bethany Duvall, Crystal Clear As Mud, Well Read Westhampton, De Woordenregen, Laila’s Leseblogg, the Wesleyan University Community Blog, and something that made me cry at Juliet DeWal’s In Spite of All the Damage. Also, thank you to Emily Rapp for writing the beautiful non-fiction book, The Still Point of the Turning World, which I reviewed here at Great New Books.

Beautiful day so I’m going to get outside and walk!

{ 36 comments }

Question of the Month: On Location

by Susan Henderson on March 4, 2013

Tell me what it would be like if you spent some significant time in the setting of your current work-in-progress.

Because that’s what my plan is. I’m headed here to do the final edits on my book. Population: 181. That’s the sign to the hotel where I’ll be staying, and they do not take credit cards, I just discovered, but said they could give me a room with a table in it if I paid for the deluxe suite. Oh, yes, I will splurge for a table!

LitPark is on hiatus until the book is done, and then I’ll have so, so much to share! Be well, everyone!

Oh wait! Can’t leave without saying some thank you’s: Just Jenny, Feeding the Brain and the Body, howaboutabook, Brenda’s Blog, Med Bok og Palett, and to everyone who has ever written an Amazon review for my book because it’s a generous thing to do. Okay, see you on the other side of this adventure!

{ 20 comments }

Question of the Month: Favorites

by Susan Henderson on February 4, 2013

What are some of your favorite books of all time? And what is it about those books that you love?

For me, my absolute favorites include Albert Camus’ The Plague, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, William Maxwell’s They Came Like Swallows, James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain ( I couldn’t find the right size cover for that one so picked another I love), Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, and yes, A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh.

I love these books for big and small reasons–for the dark journey or circumstances that brings the hero’s heart into conflict with itself, for the glimpses of light and dark in the world, for the experience of fully inhabiting both delicate and hardened minds, and for the poetry of individual sentences. (Okay, there’s nothing really so dark about Winnie the Pooh, but it’s some of the most amazing writing I know.)

Besides my all-time favorites, I also have a voracious appetite for gothic stories with Byronic characters facing big moral dilemmas: Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Dracula, and pretty much every Shirley Jackson story. Which leads me to the book I’m working on right now. My first novel was the one I needed to write. This time, I’m trying to write the novel I’ve always wanted to read.

*

A quick interlude… here are my kids (on keys and guitar) and their two best friends playing jazz over the weekend. It was such a great show, and it’s such a great friendship to watch.

I’m grateful to all who blogged about my book this past month: Girlfriends Book Club, Cure for Crankiness, Cure, part 2, A Design So Vast, Jocosa’s Bookshelf,Daisy’s Book Journal, Storybook Careers, and my books, my life.

Okay, enough from me. Let’s hear about some of your all-time favorites!

{ 48 comments }

Question of the Month: Renewal

by Susan Henderson on January 7, 2013

Have you been able to use your winter vacation to rest ? If so, tell me what you did to recharge your battery. And if you find holidays more stressful than relaxing, tell me how you plan to recover so you can go strong into the new year.

Mr. H, the boys and I spent a week with family in Dolores, Colorado, a town of 800 people and one paved road. It was great to be together with no distractions, no lessons or activities competing for their time. There were games (Magic Cards, Ankh-Morpork, Fluxx, Munchkin), long walks in the snow, a day skiing at Telluride, and homecooked meals (everything from posole to spinach saag and dahl, to roast beef and Yorkshire pudding).

It felt great to recharge! I’m looking forward to carrying a renewed sense of energy into the new year. I plan on eating healthier foods (but without obsessing over calories or portions) and continuing my daily exercising (but making it more cardio-focused). Basically tweaking things that are already habits to make sure my time is better spent and I’m enjoying each day. And I’m going to finish the new book in 2013. I promise I’ll talk about it in more detail soon, but I can say I’m fully engaged in the writing and editing, and I’m having so much fun this time around!

*

Some thank you’s: My Novel Thoughts, Bethany Duvall, Jessica Vealitzek, Writer’s Digest, Cure for Crankiness, med bok og palett, BookMovement, Fingers and Prose.

Oh, I published an essay about book clubs at both BookReporter and ReadingGroupGuides.com. Enjoy! And then come back here and hang out a little while!

{ 24 comments }

Question of the Month: Drafts

by Susan Henderson on December 3, 2012

Tell me about your editing process, and where are you in your current project?

In May, I completed what I called a first draft of my new book—that initial dump of all of my ideas that resembled the shape and length of a novel.

Since then, I’ve been structuring, cutting, moving, shaping, developing themes and emotional layers, adding and subtracting characters, simplifying some things and complicating others, panning in, panning out, balancing the length and pace of the chapters. All the while, I’m reading, reading, reading to train my ear, to keep the bar high: Camus, Baldwin, Steinbeck, Brontë, Gaiman, Stoker, Irving, Wharton, Dickens, McCullers. I’m nearly done with this second draft, and I like what I see.

Though I’m close to my next milestone, I still haven’t, and won’t, show my manuscript to a single soul. I’m enjoying this time of creating and dreaming alone. I love marking up a chapter, editing it until all the marks are cleaned up, and then starting again. I imagine two more drafts before I send it to my agent for feedback—the third draft where I pay attention to the individual sentences, concentrating on language, imagery, and rhythm; and the fourth where I spend a few weeks living in the town that inspired my setting. (More on that later. No reason to go on about the fourth step when I still need to nail the second.)

So how about you? Want to say where you are in your current project or anything about your process? I’d love to see how you work.

In other news, I’m interviewed at length in a new book written by Chuck Sambuchino and published by Writer’s Digest Books. CREATE YOUR WRITER PLATFORM is an incredibly fascinating and helpful book about how the publishing industry has changed and how writers can best adjust to the new expectations. I found myself underlining and dog-earing lots of advice, and there’s enough diversity of styles in the book to suit different personality types. I particularly like the interviews with Cal Newport and Lissa Rankin. Definitely worth picking up!

I’ll close with some thank you’s: Suder Blog, Esmee-Jacobs, Girl Called Beloved, Rhody Reader, True STORIES, Bitch Media, and The New York Times. I appreciate the press!

{ 26 comments }

← Previous Entries

sdkfhsdlk