(The above photograph, taken from an online source, represents a library mentioned in The Girl Who Loved Books).
Several readers have asked how I came to write the two novels I have published, soon to be joined, I am pleased to announce, by a third. Why, some wanted to know, did I choose a young female protagonist for Amanda Bell? Were real people the models for Max and Maggie, the angels sent to earth in Dust On Their Wings? What made me want to write about angels?
No set of rules or formulae brought these books into being, yet they do share one attribute of birth. Each derived from an image, a single impression of a scene or character that locked itself in my mind and demanded both explanation and explication, puzzles to be worked out, brushstrokes on a canvas demanding more lines and swatches of paint.
Several readers have asked how I came to write the two novels I have published, soon to be joined, I am pleased to announce, by a third. Why, some wanted to know, did I choose a young female protagonist for Amanda Bell? Were real people the models for Max and Maggie, the angels sent to earth in Dust On Their Wings? What made me want to write about angels?
No set of rules or formulae brought these books into being, yet they do share one attribute of birth. Each derived from an image, a single impression of a scene or character that locked itself in my mind and demanded both explanation and explication, puzzles to be worked out, brushstrokes on a canvas demanding more lines and swatches of paint.
Amanda Bell was a happy accident. An editor for a Catholic newspaper asked me for a piece for their Christmas issue. In less than a week, I punched out a short story about a young woman, a stuffy corporate type, always immaculate in appearance, every hair in place, who lives by the motto “I get the job done” and who finds herself spending Christmas Eve stuck in Dulles Airport. A baby she volunteers to hold throws up on her; a drunk bumps into her, causing her to spill her coffee on her skirt; several fellow travelers, wild with grief or anger, disturb her aloof solitude by seeking her advice regarding love and loss; she wakes to a gray Christmas dawn and finds a man in the chair beside her asleep with his head on her shoulder. Her encounters leave Amanda more human, more “grace-filled”, tumbled about and polished, like a gemstone in a grinder, by her gritty night of adventure.
The story, meant to be humorous in tone, never appeared. The editor called me nearly two years later and apologized, saying she had read and loved the story, but had only just then found it buried beneath some papers in a drawer. I thanked her for not printing it, because had she done so, I would have moved to some other endeavor. Instead, after its failure to appear in print, I had brooded on that story, asked myself what might become of Amanda after her night in the airport, and discovered her fate in Amanda Bell.
Dust On Their Wings snuck up on me during a moment of reverie while sitting on my porch on Cumberland Avenue. It was summer, my teaching duties were at an end until fall, and I wanted to write something besides essays and reviews. For whatever reason that late morning, I thought of angels in movies and on television, how such supernatural beings have for so long fascinated us mortals, and how writers often depict them as falling in love with earthlings.
What, I suddenly wondered, might happen if two angels on a joint mission to earth fell in love with each other?
And so Max and Maggie were born: Max the sophisticate, handsome and tall, the veteran of several hundred manifestations, as the angels call their worldly visits, Max as Cary Grant or Hugh Jackman playing against the novice Maggie, a bumbling but spirited rookie, cute and clumsy, a Meg Ryan type whose sweet heart often clashes with Max’s “let’s cut to business” attitude. From its inception the book was a pleasure to write—I am of the Ray Bradbury school, who declared so many times that writing should be fun—and Max and Maggie were delightful to watch as they fell in love while working their magic on the couple they were sent to bring together.
Which brings me to the latest title, The Girl Who Loved Books, available in book form later this winter. More than the other two books, this novel evolved from a single image imprinted in my heart and head for three years: a girl, a pregnant teenage runaway, rummages through a refrigerator in a dark kitchen in the middle of the night while the owner of the house, a man in his mid-forties, surreptitiously watches her from the kitchen doorway. The girl is hungry, and thirsty, and has broken into his home looking for food and drink. The man studies her, alert as a cat, listening for any accomplices, ready to pounce.
Where did that image come from? I have no idea. In my mind’s eye, I could clearly see both characters: the girl bore the features of a former student, the man the build and face of a tactical officer I had known long ago in military school. Yet what this picture meant or what events might stem from it I hadn’t a clue.
When circumstances drove me to write from that image a year ago, characters and situations centered on these two people spilled out of me. The muse—yes, there is a muse, a shadow summoned by desire and hard work—stood at my elbow, and my mind and fingers raced to tell the story, the words coming fast and furious as snowflakes in a blizzard. Within six months, the rough draft of the book, 94,000 plus words, the fastest I have ever written such a story, sat inside my laptop. And though I have since heavily edited those words, the basic plot remains unchanged.
Like Amanda Bell and Dust On Their Wings, The Girl Who Loved Books is set in Asheville, specifically in the neighborhood of Montford, and Amanda Bell’s Father Krumpler returns as a major player, but the other characters are new: the pregnant girl; the attorney who apprehends her; a teacher fired for a crime of passion; and a young priest who feels he has betrayed his vocation. Through them, The Girl Who Loved Books tells a tale of love and sex, ruination and redemption, and of course, books and the power of books.
So there you have it—or rather, you don’t, do you? Those questions I mentioned in my first paragraph remain unanswered. Ask me about my essays and reviews, and I can tell you I write with a subject in mind and work within the borders of an agenda, but my novels follow no such blueprint. The characters and their stories come to me vivid and bright as new pennies, though they lose some of their luster as they pass through my fingertips and appear as words on a screen. With the exception of those first images mentioned above, however, how and why they arrive remain mysteries to me.
You might ask the muse for her opinion, but alas, that benevolent spirit speaks only through her presence and never with words.
The story, meant to be humorous in tone, never appeared. The editor called me nearly two years later and apologized, saying she had read and loved the story, but had only just then found it buried beneath some papers in a drawer. I thanked her for not printing it, because had she done so, I would have moved to some other endeavor. Instead, after its failure to appear in print, I had brooded on that story, asked myself what might become of Amanda after her night in the airport, and discovered her fate in Amanda Bell.
Dust On Their Wings snuck up on me during a moment of reverie while sitting on my porch on Cumberland Avenue. It was summer, my teaching duties were at an end until fall, and I wanted to write something besides essays and reviews. For whatever reason that late morning, I thought of angels in movies and on television, how such supernatural beings have for so long fascinated us mortals, and how writers often depict them as falling in love with earthlings.
What, I suddenly wondered, might happen if two angels on a joint mission to earth fell in love with each other?
And so Max and Maggie were born: Max the sophisticate, handsome and tall, the veteran of several hundred manifestations, as the angels call their worldly visits, Max as Cary Grant or Hugh Jackman playing against the novice Maggie, a bumbling but spirited rookie, cute and clumsy, a Meg Ryan type whose sweet heart often clashes with Max’s “let’s cut to business” attitude. From its inception the book was a pleasure to write—I am of the Ray Bradbury school, who declared so many times that writing should be fun—and Max and Maggie were delightful to watch as they fell in love while working their magic on the couple they were sent to bring together.
Which brings me to the latest title, The Girl Who Loved Books, available in book form later this winter. More than the other two books, this novel evolved from a single image imprinted in my heart and head for three years: a girl, a pregnant teenage runaway, rummages through a refrigerator in a dark kitchen in the middle of the night while the owner of the house, a man in his mid-forties, surreptitiously watches her from the kitchen doorway. The girl is hungry, and thirsty, and has broken into his home looking for food and drink. The man studies her, alert as a cat, listening for any accomplices, ready to pounce.
Where did that image come from? I have no idea. In my mind’s eye, I could clearly see both characters: the girl bore the features of a former student, the man the build and face of a tactical officer I had known long ago in military school. Yet what this picture meant or what events might stem from it I hadn’t a clue.
When circumstances drove me to write from that image a year ago, characters and situations centered on these two people spilled out of me. The muse—yes, there is a muse, a shadow summoned by desire and hard work—stood at my elbow, and my mind and fingers raced to tell the story, the words coming fast and furious as snowflakes in a blizzard. Within six months, the rough draft of the book, 94,000 plus words, the fastest I have ever written such a story, sat inside my laptop. And though I have since heavily edited those words, the basic plot remains unchanged.
Like Amanda Bell and Dust On Their Wings, The Girl Who Loved Books is set in Asheville, specifically in the neighborhood of Montford, and Amanda Bell’s Father Krumpler returns as a major player, but the other characters are new: the pregnant girl; the attorney who apprehends her; a teacher fired for a crime of passion; and a young priest who feels he has betrayed his vocation. Through them, The Girl Who Loved Books tells a tale of love and sex, ruination and redemption, and of course, books and the power of books.
So there you have it—or rather, you don’t, do you? Those questions I mentioned in my first paragraph remain unanswered. Ask me about my essays and reviews, and I can tell you I write with a subject in mind and work within the borders of an agenda, but my novels follow no such blueprint. The characters and their stories come to me vivid and bright as new pennies, though they lose some of their luster as they pass through my fingertips and appear as words on a screen. With the exception of those first images mentioned above, however, how and why they arrive remain mysteries to me.
You might ask the muse for her opinion, but alas, that benevolent spirit speaks only through her presence and never with words.