A single, fattening frappuccino, or copies of one very low-calorie 99¢ nationally bestselling novel for five friends like the friends in The Wednesday Sisters (Random House/Ballantine)? Or if you haven’t already read The Wednesday Sisters, you can get a copy for yourself, and enough change back from your $5 to buy a frappaccino to drink while you read. It’s 99¢ across all platforms this week, so that means Kindle, iTunes, and Barnes and Noble–or you can support your local bookseller by buying Kobo.

And I am so jazzed to share the cover wrap for the follow-up, The Wednesday Daughters, which The Paris Wife author Paula McLain calls “Utterly rich and satisfying.” Sort of like that Caramel Crunch thing! Happy Reading! - Meg

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“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.” – Stephen King

The pier near our cottage on Lake Windermere, where The Wednesday Daughters is Set

I’m celebrating the 10th Anniversary of the Saratoga Library building on Saturday. Look for me there if you’re going! I’ll also be reviewing the book trailer for The Wednesday Daughters, which I’m very excited aboout. And I think I will spend much of the rest of the weekend with a good book! – Meg

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Ten years ago I was newly divorced and sipping on a brand new life. This was a time for trying new things.  I was about to turn forty, and a friend invited me to a kumbaya, life-coaching, find-yourself party at a yoga studio, run by a friend of hers. So NOT my thing. How I did not want to go, but I wanted to be supportive. It wasn’t going to be about me, and I was good with that. Plus, what excuse did I have for not going?

I don’t remember details of that day except that it was, as many things were, not about me. Then, the instructor asked us to close our eyes and picture our futures.  Well, I couldn’t really picture anyone else’s future, could I? I was forced to think about myself even though I was there for the support of a friend.  Every time the instructor had us image ourselves doing what we loved to do, working at what brought us joy, in any scene with people we liked, in the sun on a mountain, next to a river.  In every non-planned scene, in every picture in my mind, I had a laptop, and I was writing.

I didn’t own a laptop and I hadn’t written anything at all, in years.

Closing my eyes at a yoga studio while not doing yoga, and picturing my future, changed all that. After that day I borrowed a laptop from a friend.  I didn’t do anything with it. Then one day someone suggested blogging. I started blogging and then publishing essays and stories a year later, right around the time I started writing my first novel, The Glass Wives.

You remember where you put your keys once you stop looking and recall the name of a great movie after you’ve watched reality TV, right? When I’m focused on something else or someone else, which I often am, is when ideas hit me about how to solve problems in my stories and in real life.  Plot points and bits of dialogue pop in to my head when I have soap in my eyes in the shower.  New characters introduce themselves to me as I’m driving (they’re usually polite passengers).  When I don’t feel like writing I don’t sit in front of the computer, I go grocery shopping or tackle my household to-do list.  When my brain is busy the muse gets jealous and pokes in her head.

Stepping away from myself always leads me back. But sometimes closing my eyes is the only way I can see the right path. – Amy

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And the other thing Santa Barbara has is Chaucer’s Books.

The things you should expect when you walk into Chaucer’s: the smell of espresso brewing; the sound of wind chimes; a wide selection of tchotchke, literary or not. This is an old-fashioned bookstore, where the limited space is limited almost exclusively to things one actually reads. Like most bookstores these days, your first steps into Chaucer’s will be toward the front tables. Here, they are as likely to be filled with a display of the finalist for the National Book Award in poetry as with your garden variety bestseller pulp.

Chaucer’s is the brainchild of Mahri Kerley, who opened it almost 40 years ago. She didn’t worry too much when the big chains moved into Santa Barbara because, she’s said, “I’ve got more books in my 6,500 square feet than Borders had in their 38,000 square feet.” And it’s true. In a second room to the left, there is a terrific children’s section, with as much to offer as almost any stand-alone children’s store. Behind the few front tables in the main room, there are shelves and shelves and shelves of books. Biography. History. Fiction. Science. Religion. Literary magazines. All of it organized so you can actually find exactly what you’re looking for. But if you can’t, there is always someone at the customer service desk whose job is not to take your money, but simply to find something you might like to read. Chaucer’s hosts the best author readings in the area, too – and if there is nowhere to move the books to allow for chairs, no matter. We’re all happy to stand. And if you’re looking for a new journal, this is the place to go. I almost always get mine here. – Meg

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At twenty I married a writer, though I had no idea how to become one myself. The year before I’d stood on a street corner at a New York City pay phone and called Random House, telling the woman I reached that I wanted to be “an editor or a writer.” Unimpressed, she advised me to keep reading, and hung up. Though I felt at least superficially sophisticated–as a jeans-wearing Beatnik with a pungent Galoises cigarette always dangling–cracking the world of writers was incomprehensible to this working-class girl from the sticks. Anyway, what would I write about?

Thus, when I met a brilliant young African American man who vowed he’d soon be published, I was awed. So of course, dear reader, as the old playground rhyme foretold: First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in a baby carriage.  While I raised babies, I worked at numerous low-paying, community-oriented, left-leaning jobs.

And in the evenings, I lovingly edited my husband’s books–for yes, he did fulfill his vow–and encouraged his dazzling output. When I attended the First National Women’s Liberation Conference in Chicago, 1968, as a delegate from my consciousness-raising group, feminists were incensed. “You should be listed as co-author,” they fumed. Yet as I critiqued I learned, and, like so many women before me, found my own creative outlet in a journal where I poured poetry and frustration in equal measure.

Finally, one decade and one divorce later, I began to publish. My articles were small pieces, book reviews and feminist commentaries in underground or local papers. A Unitarian newsletter took one essay, widely reprinted. And then I met the partner of my dreams: the most wonderful woman in the world, convinced that I was a brilliant writer.

With her encouragement my articles grew into a furious series of Op-Eds in major media like USA Today, the LA Times, and Chicago Tribune. Hundreds of bite-sized stories erupted out of me, nearly print-ready, illuminating nuances of race and gender equity. I found I had a personal style and a light touch with “heavy” topics; many pieces were syndicated.

I wrote, for instance, on the herstory of Mother’s Day, with its 1870 origins as a day when Julia Ward Howe called women to “leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel,” a day when women would meet “for a general congress of women without limit of nationality…to promote the alliance of nationalities, the amiable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.” Not, you notice, a day where women were honored with flowers and brunch for their domestic role. But rather, their sphere was properly considered the world.

One op-ed, “Affirmative Action, Family Style,” recalled the small loan my grandpa gave my parents as deposit for their first home, which my parents later passed on to my partner and me. Both white families used savings that, meager as they were, most families of color, with lower-paying jobs and higher unemployment, couldn’t accumulate. Thus the significantly lower rate of home-ownership–many people’s largest asset.

I happily wrote and wrote, with the universe evidently saying “Yes!” since my articles all saw print. Until then one morning, I got a call from a publisher. “Would you consider collecting your essays into a book?”

Would I? On one of the happiest days of my life, I signed a contract for my first book. The Future of White Men and Other Diversity Dilemmas was born, with an amazing edition in hardcover, then a year later one in paper, followed by a still later Back-in-Print soft cover edition.  The publisher sent me on a ten-state book tour (yes, that still happened in ’92), national TV and radio shows, while I kept pinching myself. Reviews poured in; they were good. At last I was a published author.

I discovered the ecstasy of crafting fine sentences, and delighted in learning new genres: personal essay, women’s self-help, biography, young adult fiction, adult fiction. It turns out all those years of multicultural living provided enough juicy material for several life-times of books; I’ve published in all of those genres.

Now that my fifth book, Mama’s Child, has released–a novel, for I’ve turned fully to fiction–and my sixth is under contract, I look back at that first book and understand that, like the birth of a first child, the moment of its publication fundamentally changed me. It marked my evolution from a woman who’d always “wanted to be a writer” to one who, finally, was one.

I’m living the life I could only dream of when I stood on that New York City street corner so long ago, a young woman desperately dialing a pay phone. Now I labor toward deadlines, lunch with writer friends on sunny patios, and cherish a solid 32-year marriage to the wonderful woman.

But best of all: I’m a full-time professional writer. – Joan

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1. Target has chosen The Wednesday Sisters as a “Best of Book Club”! A special edition with the opening of The Wednesday Daughters included will be in Target stores all summer – just in time to take to the beach.

2. Speaking of good beach reads, The Wednesday Daughters, is currently #2 on the Goodreads Best Beach Reads 2013 – a list of books readers plan to tuck into their beach bags this summer. If you’re on Goodreads and haven’t read it but want to, please consider voting for it there. While you’re at Goodreads, you can also enter to win one of the 30 copies they are giving away. I promise the rest of this post will wait until you come back, and if you leave a comment below that you’ve voted for it – just something like “I voted to put The Wednesday Daughters in my beach bag” – I’ll see if I can get some additional early reader copies to folks who don’t get one in the Goodreads giveaway.

If you have already read The Wednesday Daughters, it’s also #16 on the Goodreads Smart Summer Reads list – please add your vote! And then leave a comment below and I will figure out some nice way to say thanks (that will probably involve a book).

OK, I was going to talk about The Wednesday Daughters tour, too, but this is getting unweildy, so I’ll save that for later and move onto…

3. Last but certainly not least, I’m participating in a Mother’s Dozen multi-author book giveaway on my facebook page this weekend, with J. Courtney Sullivan, Kristin Hannah, Meg Wolitzer, Sarah Jio, Eleanor Brown, Sarah Addison Allen, Linda Francis Lee, Cathy Marie Buchanan, Claire Cook, M.J. Rose, Marisa de los Santos, and me. Really wonderful reading for your mom or yourself. Trust me on that if you haven’t read them already. I’ve read books by all but one of them, and have hers on my tbr. - Meg

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