Cookies Against Domestic Violence

If you wander down to the train station, you can usually pick up some goodies.  Often, there is someone handing out tissues to publicize a new restaurant or hair salon. Once, activists were handing out free fans to promote awareness of Hansen’s disease (which used to be called leprosy). Sometimes you can get a red feather if you donate money for…something – I forget.  Today there were some grandmas and grandpas distributing cookies embossed with a picture of a woman with arms crossed.  I’d never gotten cookies before.  Intrigued, I had a look at the accompanying flyer and saw that the campaign in progress was against domestic violence.  Well, good for them.  That’s a cause I definitely support.  And good for them for coming up with such a memorable ploy.  It clearly worked because I’m still thinking about it!

Mindy Friddle’s Cover Story: The Importance of Book Covers

Last summer, Mindy Friddle kindly helped get the word out about my new books.  This summer, she’s got a new book of her own out -  Secret Keepers – about three generations of a family in a mill town in South Carolina.  There’s Emma, the matriarch, who had to miss out on a longed-for trip to Europe due to her roguish husband’s untimely demise; Dora, a one-time hippie peacenik who’s now a devout church member and instructor of an aerobics group called Firm Believers at a Christian mall (where she tries hard – and usually fails – to resist  retail therapy) and Kyle, the grandson, who devises a way to get out of Saving Souls to hang out with his wayward grandmother and mentally disturbed uncle.

 

Here, Mindy writes about how her fabulous book cover came to be:

 As an author, I count myself lucky to have a publisher that solicited my ideas for both of my novels’  book covers. When it came time for the art department to put together some cover ideas, I was happy to send along images that I felt captured the feel of my novel. Of course, it was up to the graphic artist to design the covers–and the publisher has the final say–but I found St. Martin’s receptive and eager to consider my ideas—or photographs—in this case. 
 
As booksellers will tell you, readers DO judge a book by its cover. Or, ahem,  “dust jacket”—to use the formal term.  So… should an author get involved with cover art? Only if she wants to. If you happen to have some passages or some images that you feel drawn to, or that you feel inspired your work, by all means share it!
 For example, the cover for my first novel, THE GARDEN ANGEL, went through several different versions. My editor felt the idea of a porch was important—since it figures prominently in the novel—as well as a cemetery angel (the “garden angel” in the story). Easy, right? Well…not after you consider just how many styles of porches and cemetery angels there are out there; angels ranging from grief-stricken and morose, to pixie-ish and cherubic. After several versions, everyone agreed a photograph from a famous cemetery captured the nostalgic feel of the cemetery “garden” angel in the novel. (The publisher purchased the image.) The porch—that’s a different story. 
 
In an early version, the porch appeared much too pristine, and resembled the sort of porch you’d encounter in Charleston, SC, and the southern coast. The Garden Angel is set in a mill town near mountains. So after they requested some examples of  the “ruined finery” feel of the porch that figures prominently in THE GARDEN ANGEL, I sent a few snapshots I’d taken near my neighborhood—beautiful, elegiac but crumbling porches. And they ended up using one of the digital photographs I sent. I must say, that was really thrilling for me: to be part of the visual creative side of the book. The porch in my mind’s eye was there on the cover.
 
Just after SECRET KEEPERS was accepted—and we still had editing in front of us— I met with my editor and we talked about cover ideas. I’d brought a couple of pages from garden magazines that illustrated rescued heirloom gardens.  I also brought along some pictures of vintage seed packets and catalogs. The first version of the book cover –a vintage seed packet illustration–was striking, but a little old-fashioned for the contemporary angle of the story.  My editor asked that I send in more ideas. Although I don’t consider myself a photographer–have had absolutely no training– I love capturing images in my own garden and around town. Point and shoot! I was shocked when I opened up the jpg image of the new cover of SECRET KEEPERS to find they’d selected a photo I sent them. Those boot “planters” are still on my front porch. I’ve made even more of them—from all sorts of recycled boots—and I take a boot planter to every bookstore when I do signings and readings. I have more about the “cover story” of SECRET KEEPERS on my blog—as well as pictures of all the boot plants I’ve given to bookstores, and raffled off to readers. It’s been fun! I call it—in jest of course!—my Bootylicious Book Tour.

More on the Elizabeth Saunders Home

Also from today’s Japan Times is this article on Demian Akhan, who was adopted from the Elizabeth Saunders Home.

My New Hero

Nepalese Kamal Lamichhane is my new hero.  He didn’t start school until he was 11, and now he’s engaged in advanced studies at the prestigious University of Tokyo   He recently presented a on the economic impact of educating the disabled. And he’s blind.

The Hard Part

A couple weekends ago, when I went to Tokyo to launch Call Me Okaasan, a woman asked me how old my children were.  When I told her (they turned ten a few days ago), she smiled knowingly and said, “Ahh.  You haven’t gotten to the hard part yet.”  I think she meant that the older my disabled daughter gets, the more I will see the imperfections in the system meant to support her.  Already, we are getting subtle pressure to transfer our gregarious, active daughter to the School for the Handicapped, where hardly anyone uses sign language, because it has an elevator and Lilia is becoming  hard to carry.

Meanwhile, my son came home from baseball practice in tears because a kid on his team called him a “gaijin”.  At school, his future seems to be in jeopardy because almost every day he forgets one of the ten or so things that he’s supposed to remember to bring to school.  Also, his math scores aren’t so great.  The teacher suggested that he quit baseball, as if it’s some frivolity interfering with his grasp of long division. There are many reasons to continue however, not least because he likes it, and it’s his one chance to run around and play outside.  My son is at school from 8AM to 4:10PM but he isn’t allowed to go out for recess because he has to retake some test every day until he gets it right.

Is this the hard part?

Me at Maw Books!

Natasha at Maw Books Blog interviewed me here. Scroll down to the day before for a review of Losing Kei.

What’s in a Name? – Guest Post by Danette Haworth

One of the first things that attracted me to Danette Haworth’s debut novel, Violet Raines Almost Got Struck by Lightning, was the title.  Names of books – and characters and places – are important.  Here, as part of Danette’s WOW blog book tour, she writes about how she came up with the names in her novel:

 

What’s in a Name?

Danette Haworth

 

 

Any of us who are parents know how important a name is. A name has the power to shape the impression others have of us before they even meet us. Would you ever believe that someone named Bill Bailey would be a rock star? What if his name was Axl Rose? Could Eleanor Gow rock the cover of Sports Illustrated? She did, under the name Elle Macpherson. Who would you be more interested in: Paul Hewson or Bono, Cherilyn Sarkisian or Cher, Mary Cathleen Collins or Bo Derek?

 Planning your summer vacation? Why not visit Square Butte, Montana, or Elephant Butte, New Mexico? If those don’t sound good, you can go to Hell—Michigan, that is, about an hour west of Detroit.

 The fact is that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but if it were called, for instance, limburger, we might not ever partake of the fragrance; the name alone would scare us off.

 That’s a great deal of power given to us as authors. Being wordsmiths, it’s our job to bend words to serve the function we assign them. Character names and place names must do more than identify their antecedent; they must give us insight, whether subtle or blatant, for whom and what we’re reading about.

 Take Scarlett O’Hara of Gone With the Wind, for example. Scarlett was originally named Pansy, which even in the 1930s carried undertones such as sissy or effeminate. On the other hand, scarlet is red, the color of passion and a keyword in one of the best-selling novels of all time, The Scarlet Letter. With its implications of sex and forbidden love, Scarlett proved to be the perfect name for Margaret Mitchell’s southern vixen.

 All fine and good for Margaret Mitchell, you say, but how do I go about choosing names for my characters? Good question! Lots of people recommend starting with a book of baby names, but make sure you get to know your character first. When I wrote Violet Raines, I have to admit, her name just came to me; it was everyone else’s names I had to conjure up.

 Violet’s best friend lives in an old farmhouse and is the eldest of four girls. This girl has lots of chores and rules to follow, so I wanted her to have an old-fashioned name, something that would make her sound loyal, hard-working, and clean cut. As I gleaned the baby names, Charlotte stood out to me because I could nickname her Lottie, and that sounded just right to me. (I had no idea then that her full name would come into play later in the story, but that’s how fitting the name turned out to be!)

The new girl is pretty, blonde, and tall. She’s also from the city. For her, I wanted a soft name, no hard consonants, yet it had to have a contemporary ring to it to match the character’s personality. But now there were a few conditions to her name: it couldn’t end in ie, because I already had Lottie and Eddie (who came with his name); it had to have more than two syllables because Lottie and Eddie already took that rhythm, and even Violet sounds like a two-syllable word. It couldn’t begin with V, L, E, or R. Finally, the name Melissa leaped out at me from the baby books—soft, contemporary, pretty, and three-syllables—perfect!

 Last names were challenging, too. They had to provide rhythm, variety, and character. Nothing better than the white pages for last names. That’s how I came up with Violet Raines, Lottie Townsend, Eddie Brandon, and Melissa Gold.

 Spend time on place names, too, even place names that don’t have a big role in your story. The grocery store in Violet Raines was originally Parsley’s; I changed it to Parker’s after reading the story aloud. Parker’s is just easier to say.

 Violet lives in Mitchell Hammock. The town needed a name to denote its riverside location, yet it had to have a small town sound, something with a southern ring to it. (That’s why I didn’t use Riverside!) I resisted Mitchell Hammock at first; it’s actually the name of a road north of my area. I didn’t want to use real names because I wanted to put Violet’s neighborhood together the way I saw it in my imagination. Research showed me that Mitchell Hammock existed only as a road. There may have been a hammock called Mitchell at one time, but my search engines didn’t uncover it!

 My mom tells several different stories for how she came up with my name. These are big, grand stories involving people we don’t know and odd settings. One of the more boring stories is that she found my name in a book of uncommon names. “I wanted something French,” she says when she tells this version. Somehow, I believe her.

Into the Wardrobe with Me!

And here I am talking about children’s literature.

The Surprise

For some reason I have it in my head that Japan is big on family values, but loyalty to the group ( office co-workers, teammates, etc.) seems to trump family obligations.  To wit, yesterday was my daughter’s sports festival.  This is generally a family affair, and one of the few times when you actually see fathers at the deaf school.  This year we were thinking that Lilia’s father might actually get to see her dashing toward the finish line in her wheelchair, but our son had a baseball game on the same day.  Also, my husband was asked to be an umpire for the game.  Of course I wanted us all be to be together at the sports festival, but I understood that my son wanted to play in this game, and that the team expected him to be there. (He already missed one game because of YMCA Nature camp, which I’d signed him up for long in advance.) So we split up.  I went with Lilia to her sports festival, and my husband went with our son to his baseball game. I figured I’d be sitting there alone on the blue plastic tarp, but guess who showed up?  My mother-in-law! I hadn’t told her about the event (I don’t even have her phone number and I don’t know where she lives), but I guess she heard from her daughter.  It was nice to have her there.  I find that since we are no longer living together, I can be extremely magnanimous: “Lilia, tell Obaachan ‘thank you’ for the huge bag of junk food that you would otherwise not be allowed to eat!” Lilia was pretty happy to see her beloved grandmother, as well.

And another Interview…

Cristy Burne, former JET and author of the forthcoming children’s book Takeshita Demons, interviewed me on her blog. You can read the exchange here.