Today’s guest author is my good friend Maud Carol Markson, whose lovely new novel, Looking After Pigeon, is just out from The Permanent Press. School Library Journal calls it “a neat tapestry of family flaws” narrated by five-year-old Pigeon over the summer when her parents have just separated and her 16-year-old sister becomes pregnant. Anyone in the bay area looking for a real treat, come hear Carol read at Books Inc. in Palo Alto, Wednesday, July 22 at 7:00. - Meg

From the time I was told I would never grow up to be an elephant, I decided instead to grow up to be a writer (of course, to the adults who knew me, both probably seemed equally implausible). I to be the person who wrote all those books I loved as a child, and all those books that kept my father engrossed every night so that when I talked to him he barely heard me. I wanted to be the writer of the books that filled my local library shelves. There I would walk once a week in the summer, and sit among the books, in the air-conditioned stacks, staring at their covers as if they could reveal the magic within. And then stacking up my favorite books to carry on the walk home, where they bumped against my side, reminding me with each step of what awaited me when I actually opened their covers and read their pages.

Books are still magical to me. I look at novels not as a means to escape from myself (although, happily, they often serve that purpose), but as a means to discover myself. As a young child, I discovered aspects of myself and my world in the characters of Harriet in Harriet the Spy and Julie in Up a Road Slowly, or Kit Tyler in The Witch of Blackbird Pond. As an adult, I cherished other favorites– Macon Leary in The Accidental Tourist or Tess of the D’Urbervilles or Garp. It is not that the authors of these books are writing about me, or even about someone like me. What they are doing is finding some truth in their characters and in the human experience.

That is what I aim to do with my own writing. I wrote my first novel When We Get Home (Bantam, 1989), when I was pregnant with my son and anxious about being a parent for the first time. It begins with the line: “In my family we are all disposable,” and it was that line that ran through my head over and over again until the character that speaks that line emerged. And then the rest of her family soon followed—the father with multiple divorces, the step-mother, the brother who flees from one relationship to another.

In my forthcoming novel, Looking After Pigeon (The Permanent Press, July 2009), it was another line that echoed: “My mother named her children after birds.” What kind of mother gives her children bird names? How does growing up with such a name make us who we are? In this novel, five year old Pigeon’s father disappears, leaving her to face a new and bewildering life in an uncle’s house on the Jersey shore. My father never left me as a child, and I don’t even have one uncle, much less one who owns a house at the beach. My older sister never got pregnant. These are characters I have imagined—right out of thin air, and also out of my own obsessions for people and language. These characters are not me, but their emotions are mine. The way they experience the world is mine. They all in some way reveal parts of who I am. And hopefully reveal parts of my readers as well. That is what good writing can do. - Maud Carol Markson

“In the afternoons, Gertrude Stein and I used to go antique hunting in the local shops, and I remember once asking her if she thought I should become a writer. In the typically cryptic way we were all so enchanted with, she said, ‘No.’ I took that to mean yes and sailed for Italy the next day.” - Woody Allen, from The Insanity Defense

The University of Michigan Press annually sponsors The Literary Fiction Award, the prize for which is publication of your novel. It’s a wonderful press that publishes really fine literary fiction. No fees for this contest, either. You do have to have previously published at least one literary novel or story collection in English, though. If you meet that qualification and have a manuscript ready to go, check out the details on The University of Michigan Press website. The deadline is July 1!

If you haven’t published a book yet, but have a fiction manuscript linked the the Great Lakes Region, you might submit to the press’s Sweetwater Fiction series. Best of luck! - Meg

I get so many questions at events and in emails through my website about how to find an agent and get published that I thought I’d rerun a guest blog I did for the Kepler’s Well-Read Donkey blog about how I went about it. For anyone at the looking-for-an-agent stage, do also check out my April post, “On Slush Piles and Finding Agents” as well as the resources linked to on the writers page of my website. - Meg

Growing up (isn’t that when most dreams start?), I was a huge reader. I dreamed of writing books like A Wrinkle in Time, but the adults I knew were businessmen—not even business women; the “ladies” were moms and teachers and nuns. Even a girl going to law school was a stretch. My husband, Mac, was the first adult to whom I admitted my childhood aspirations to write, and he gave me a great big push. He said, basically, “Your dream, Meg. How will you ever know unless you try?”

I used to think that to be a published author you had to be able to leap tall literary buildings in single bounds, something I’m quite sure I’ll never do. I don’t think I bring any unusual talent to the blank page, but what I do bring is an unusual amount of determination. Every writer I know who has gotten published does.

I can’t tell you how many times I submitted my first novel to agents, and how many times I revised it after getting rejected, before I found an agent to represent it. I actually found three agents in the last round, so those last revisions must have done some good - but not enough, apparently, because the first agent I went with didn’t ever sell it. That happened a few years later, after I’d gone back to the drawing board, starting writing stories and essays, and found a new agent.

The first thing I published, an essay in Runner’s World, sold quickly. But I collected hundreds of rejection slips for short stories after that. My approach: sumit, revise, submit again. And again. And again. 

How did I find an agent? I am a big fan of the cold query. The over-the-transom, you-have-no-reason-to-pick-me-except-that-I-can-tell-a-story approach. I honestly believe every agent worth having dreams of finding a great book, and brings nearly as much passion to his or her dreams as we writers do. If you were an agent, wouldn’t you?

An introduction might garner you a slightly more polite rejection - maybe a letter rather than a form. An engaging query letter, though, no matter where it has come from, will find most agents flipping to your first page, and if your first line is engaging, they’ll read on. If your work looses their interest at any point, they’ll likely set it down - again, no matter how your work came to them. If you’re not sure how to write a query or find agents, visit the Writers’ Page on my website, and don’t miss the goodies in the desk drawers there.

The path to publication for my second novel, The Wednesday Sisters, was not a straight line by any means, either. I left the agent who sold my first novel and found another to represent it, only to unraveled the literary knitting I’d done with him six months later and put my needles to work again, alone. I signed with a new agent - my true-love agent - and even then I went through half a dozen drafts, to get it right.

When it was pretty close to right, it sold quickly to a publisher.

Did I revise more then? Yes, indeed. But when The Wednesday Sisters was published, it hit the San Francisco Chronicle bestseller list in its second week out, went into a second printing in its third week, and a third printing in its fourth, becoming a national bestseller, too. Moral of story: revise, revise, revise.

But don’t just take my word for it. Visit my blog, 1st Books: Stories of How Writers get Started, to see lots of stories, mostly written by the authors themselves, about how much persistence it takes to break into print. Even Jane Austen faced rejection: it was fourteen years - yes, fourteen! - from the day Pride and Prejudice was first submitted to a publisher until it was published. And it sure wasn’t because it wasn’t good.

And continue to believe in your work. As Linda in The Wednesday Sisters says, if you don’t believe in your own work, how can you expect anyone else to?

Best of luck with your writing!

-Meg

This is the second in my new monthly Bookstores Worth Browsing series. If you have a favorite bookstore you’d like to spread the news about, I’d love to host you for a guest post. - Meg

The newest bookstore on my block is actually one that’s been around for ages. Books Inc. in Palo Alto was the store where I first saw my debut novel actually on a bookstore shelf - or not even on a shelf, but at a table at the front of the store. My husband, Mac, saw it first. He phoned me and I rushed over and made quite a scene blubbering over the fact of my book - my book! - actually being something a stranger might read. The staff, then as now, were wonderfully indulgent.

So the best thing about the new Books Inc. in Palo Alto is that the staff from that original mall location came over to their lovely new one just a mile from my house. They still don’t frown when you bring in your cup of coffee (from the Peet’s two doors down - but please don’t spill on the books!), and when you leave your little bag of beans behind, they hold it until you return.

Eric, who runs the store, is the best kind of sweet guy - an amazingly well-read one! I’d name everyone else, too, but I’d feel dreadful if I left someone out because they are all terrific. But here’s one example of how astute they are as readers: when I walked into the store one Sunday with a cup of Peet’s coffee in my hand, Jason (in the picture) asked if I’d named the Mrs. Peets - a minor character in my novel, The Wednesday Sisters - after Peet’s coffee shop. Clearly I did on some level, although not a conscious one: I do a lot of writing at the Town & Country Pete’s. Ask any of the Books Inc. booksellers what they’re reading, and you’ll learn a whole lot about books - perhaps even the ones you’ve written!

The inside of Palo Alto Books Inc. is clean and light and inviting, and still somehow cozy, too. They started their author reading series out with a bang - New York Times bestseller Michelle Richmond (The Year of Fog; No One You Know) - and have since hosted wonderful authors like Jean Hanff Korelitz (Admission). Other events include a regular picture book pals group, a graphic novel group, a book group for 9-12 year olds, and my personal favorite, Margie’s Fourth Tuesday group (which is reading Katie Crouch’s Girls in Trucks this month). They just started a store blog, so even if you don’t live in the San Francisco Bay area, you can see what Books Inc. is saying about books.

And it’s close enough that I can walk to it. How cool is that? My dog Frodo likes to come, but that’s dangerous; he’ll sit quietly tied to the bench for the time it takes me to buy a quick book, but not for the extra browsing and chatting time I never can resist when I’m in the lovely new Palo Alto Books Inc. - Meg

I’m delighted to host Cara Black, about whom the New York Times Book Review has said, “If the cobblestones of the old Marais district of Paris could only talk, they might tell a tale as haunting as the one Cara Black spins…” Books in her bestselling Aimée Leduc mystery series have included San Francisco Chronicle bestsellers, Washington Post best books of the years, and Indie Next picks, and she’s been nominated for the Anthony Award. Read below about how she got started writing, inspired by a friend’s story. And then read her books if you haven’t already! - Meg

I never thought I’d write a book, or a book set in Paris, much less a mystery series set there. My only qualifications stem from being a library kid - we went every week - and thinking one day I wanted to write but not ready for the hard work of doing it. I think all writers are readers. Now nine books later, I still can’t say I had a master plan but the series with Aimee Leduc has just evolved.

My driving force to write, the story I grew passionate about, was the story which simmered for ten long years and became my first book, Murder in the Marais, I’d heard a story in Paris, in 1984, from my friend. We were standing on the cobblestones in front of an old apartment building in the Marais and she pointed to the window. ‘My mother lived there during the Occupation. She had to hide, she wore a yellow star.’

She told me her mother had been 14 years old in 1943 and came home from school one day to find her family gone. No word, no note. Not knowing what else to do she asked the concierge for help and lived in the apartment, went to school, hoping her family would return. The concierge kept her presence from the police, furnished her with ration coupons and she waited.

In 1944 at Liberation, she searched for her family at the train stations, at the Hotel Lutetia on the Left Bank where the Red Cross had a terminus center for returning deportees and the hundreds of thousands of displaced people. She searched every day, like so many people, did only to discover by chance that a woman had seen her sister get off the train at Auschwitz. That’s all she ever learned. And it touched something in me. I never forgot my friends’s words or wondering how it would feel for a fourteen year old to suffer such loss.

Ten years later, when I returned to Paris in 1994, the story came back to me in full force. It was now fifty years after the war and I wanted to explore the issues of the past, the collaboration era during the war, the grey area of how people survived, perhaps like my friend’s mother did. Find the old stories I sensed lingering in a generation that was leaving us and how war still touched every generation.

Many people didn’t want to discuss the past or the painful memories. So I learned from shuttered looks, the pointed changes in conversation, to discover an era I would find in historical accounts, memoirs and by research with those willing to talk to me.

And along the way I was figuring out how I could make the story current, bear on the present day Paris of the 1990’s and the remnants of anti-Semitism in the government. I liked mysteries, the format and resolution and along the way figured the detective novel was a great framework to hinge the story. I knew I couldn’t write as a French woman, I can’t even tie my scarf the right way but I grew up in a Francophile family; my father loved good food and wine, I’d attended a Catholic school with French nuns who taught us archaic French and I’d lived in Europe when I was younger. So Aimée developed into having an American mother and French father.

I interviewed three female detectives in Paris who ran their own detective agency and took qualities from each. It was important to me that Aimée be a young, contemporary woman like the Parisian women I know, have a strong fashion sense and be fierce in her pursuit of justice. The justice that eludes people sometimes in daily life. And that she know much more about computers than I do.

By that time I’d taken UC Berkeley extension writing classes and gotten into a writing group. Now I was doing the hard work. Murder in the Marais took three and a half years to write.

To my amazement I sold the book without an agent and the publisher asked for the next book. I had the next book, didn’t I? Of course I said yes, got to work and sent Aimée this time to investigate a murder in Belleville, a vibrant immigrant quartier that I’d been staying in.

I like to think that Paris is a character in my books. This sense of place, that unique part of Paris that speaks to me drives the story. Paris is really a collection of villages, twenty arrondissements or districts that each have a flavor. I always try to think why crime would occur here in this quartier of Paris, what crime would happen here, who lives here, what is the distinct taste of this quartier of Paris and then the story comes. - Cara Black