Not long ago I awoke in the middle of the night and realized immediately that it had arrived. The air, when I had gone to bed, was still faintly sultry, the air of evening that comes after a day of golden, soft sunshine. But when I woke in the dark I felt how the temperature had dropped, and the air smelled of autumn. It was like learning a secret, the rest of the city asleep around me, while I felt that I was the first to learn: autumn had come swiftly, quietly, to town. The moment was brief and delicious, and resonant with sudden memories and sensations that pulled me back into the comfort of sleep, and when I woke it was still there, the edge of the chill, but even more – the faint smell of this change in the seasons.

It made me want to read.

There is much said about the "Summer Read," which suggests beaches and lounging and porches and hammocks. But this autumn, for the first time, it came to me that I seem to prefer to read in darkened, cozy places. I don't like to read on a beach. I like to read in messy coffee shops, or on subways (which, believe it or not, can sometimes feel quite cozy), I like to read at night in strange hotels when it is raining outside, or in my own kitchen, late, as I eat peanut butter crackers. And now that it really is autumn and getting dark earlier, it seems the joy of reading has come to me as it came to me when I was a child: that sweet tugging on the senses, come here, come here. It is surprising. I would have thought -- I have always thought -- I am a person who likes to read, and the where and the when didn't matter.

Who knew?

Maybe it is because I am at a stage in life where my schedule is not as regulated by domestic needs as it was when I was raising a family, and all reading was done hungrily anywhere I got the time. Now – even while I still feel there is never enough time, never – I will pop onto the couch with a quilt, and tell myself, Oh, just fifteen minutes and I will get back to work, and then pick up one of the many open books lying around. The loveliness of this! The glory of it, as I snuggle down. Through the window, I see the low clouds of autumn that seem to keep me blanketed inside and safe, while I read the stories of people who have felt this, lived through that, and I do not mind that winter will unfold its own carpet one of these days.


Elizabeth Strout is the author of Abide with Me, a national bestseller and Book Sense pick; Amy and Isabelle, which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. In 2009 she was honored with a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Olive Kitteridge, a collection of connected short stories about a woman and her immediate family and friends on the coast of Maine. She can be found online at www.elizabethstrout.com

Steampunk: It's not as new, confusing, or weird as you may have heard. In fact, this sub-genre of science fiction is actually quite warm and welcoming – and it's loads of fun. So let's take a minute to talk about what it is, and where it came from.

"Steampunk" is a style (of books, video games, comic books, movies, and more) that hearkens back to the fantastic/adventure literature of the nineteenth century. Jules Verne's stories about exploration and mayhem, H.G. Wells and his tales of alien invasion and time travel, and Mary Shelley's tome about science gone awry ... in these famous works you'll find the seeds of the modern steampunk sensibility.

The above-mentioned authors and their literary brethren were writing science fiction – but they were writing it well before the microchip, the internet, or even in some cases, the internal combustion engine. Their idea of the future was colored by the technology they had at hand.

In their day, steam power was the very height of innovation.
Therefore, they assumed that steam would be the power source of the future.

In the 1950s and 1960s, pop culture rediscovered the "feel" of these old stories, and began to revisit them with a mid-century flair. Some people point to the 1954 movie 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea as the first steampunk production, and it's a good contender – with the wonderful, weird, incongruous technology and Victorian vibe; and 1965's Wild Wild West television show demonstrated nicely that strange gadgetry and adventure tech didn't have to be British to be chock full of scope and charm. Disney went back and did it again in 1968 with Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, a lighthearted throwback to the iconic retro mad science oeuvre.

In the 1980s, a fresh band of writers took a look back at the first folks who looked forward. K. W. Jeter, Tim Powers, and James Blaylock in particular were having a marvelous time with these "Victorian fantasies." In fact, it is Jeter who is generally credited with coining the term "steampunk" to describe them. In 1987 he sent a letter to the magazine Locus, wherein he searched for a collective term for the fiction trend, saying it should be called by, "...something based on the appropriate technology of the era; like 'steampunks', perhaps."

The 1990s saw fresh blood added to the field. William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine in 1990 called attention to the possibilities; and Paul DiFilippo's 1995 Steampunk Trilogy brought the term to the forefront. And in 1999 Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comics (and the subsequent movie in 2003) gave the world at large a very good look at what this whole "steampunk" thing could be.

And now its popularity is surging once more, with renewed interest from publishers, movie studios, and video game producers breathing new life into steampunk – and it's poised to become more popular than ever.

At least, I certainly hope so.

My own steampunk novel, Boneshaker, hits the shelves on September 29, and I'm so excited I can hardly see straight ... so I might not be the world's most impartial source on the matter. But I do hope you'll take a chance on the next steampunk book or movie you see. You just might enjoy it, and find it more familiar – yet more exciting and different – than you ever expected.



Cherie Priest is the author of seven novels, including Boneshaker and the Blooker-award winning Four and Twenty Blackbirds, plus Fathom, Wings to the Kingdom, and the Endeavour-nominated book Not Flesh Nor Feathers from Tor. Her short novels Dreadful Skin and Those Who Went Remain There Still are published by Subterranean Press. She lives in Seattle, Washington, with her husband and a fat black cat.
She can be found online at cheriepriest.com and theclockworkcentury.com. Her novel, Boneshaker, can be found in all good US bookstores.

I have a friend who's a very famous author, and the other day I asked her, "What's the first thing you wrote that you were proud of?" And she said it was her first novel. Which is a beautiful novel, but it was written when she was in her thirties. And I thought, What? Because the first thing I remember being proud of (and I'm talking proud, proud) was a poem I wrote when I was nine. It ended with the soul-stirring line, "The beauty enchantment now was broke." I actually submitted this poem to a magazine (where it was promptly rejected, needless to say).

Never mind. I got proud again, very soon afterwards, of something I wrote in the third grade. It was a page-long essay about Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, accompanied for no extra charge by a construction paper silhouette. The essay moved me to tears every time I read it. The last line here was: "He had always wanted to free the slaves, and now he had." So. There you are. Don't you have tears in your eyes?

I turned it my essay (well, essay-ette, I think I might most accurately say) and waited for the teacher to plotz, or at least hold up my page before the class and say, "Now, this is what I was looking for! Elizabeth, will you please come forward and take a bow?" It did not happen. I handed in my essay and it was handed back with a passing grade. Period. But! I still have that essay, hanging out of some mildewed scrapbook, and I'll bet I could get five bucks for it on eBay just like that.

In high school, I wrote an essay about the ills of smoking, and at the top of the first page I glued an actual cigarette on which I had drawn a little face and made hair out of tobacco. The essay was from the point of view of the cigarette, you see. The cigarette was named Charlie, and he was extolling the virtues of smoking, but really he was revealing the vices of smoking. Oh, it was very clever, I thought. And the cigarette glued to the front? Darling. Plus an astonishing feat of artistry, I think you must agree. I got an A on that paper. The teacher thought the cigarette was cute; she liked my "creative approach." She wrote that in the margin in red pencil with an exclamation mark after it. Creative approach! Oh, one lived for those exclamation marks in red, didn't one? Unless they said something like MARGINS!!

In junior high, I wrote a longish play and read the whole dang thing over the phone to my best friend, I was so proud of it. And I thought she loved it too, because she kept so respectfully quiet while I read it to her, but in reality she had gone off to make a sandwich. And eat it. And wash her plate. I discovered this because she did not come back to the phone in time to hear the end of my play. "The End!" I said, with great satisfaction, and then I said, "So! Do you like it?" I waited for a rush of adulation only slightly mitigated by jealousy and heard....nothing. "Hello?" I said. "...Hello?" When she finally picked up the phone again and I asked, "Where did you go?" she told me.

I have now written 19 novels, 2 collections of short stories, and 2 works of non-fiction. And despite the fact that I have won awards for my books and have been the grateful recipient of many glowing reviews, I have never felt the kind of surety I did as a kid about anything I've written. I may love my work, but I do not enjoy that deep seated confidence about it any longer. I've gone wobbly on the inside. I suppose it's an indication of the fact that I have, at least in some respects, grown up and become aware of the fact that book publishing is a business and I am dependent for my livelihood on the opinions of others. And I have become aware of the arbitrary nature of just about everything, the way that the same object can be called black by one person and white by another, and each person is positive they are right. But despite the fact that I'm not as blindly self-assured as I used to be, I still feel a thrill every time I turn a book in. There is still a breathless joy in waiting for the response to the question, "Do you like it?" even when one knows the answer may grievously wound the unprotected heart. I don't know, I guess I hope it will always be that way.

Elizabeth's latest book, Home Safe, will be available in paperback from all good bookstores on September 29th. She can be found online at www.elizabeth-berg.net

Almost every published author will tell you that they got fistfuls of rejection letters before their first book deal; many other would be authors have never received anything but. First time author Maya Frost explains how stepping off the treadmill of convention not only led her and her family into an amazing new debt-free, international lifestyle (despite putting four children through college in almost as many years) but also led to the publication of her first book (a book, I should add, that I've read cover to cover and back again, and already recommended to at least a dozen friends!) - Davina, BookBrowse editor.

I've spent the last decade teaching people how to pay attention, and it never ceases to amaze me how difficult it is to trust our own intuition about what matters most.  Whether we're worried about our child's education or our next career move, we tend to stick with conventional wisdom rather than listen to our hearts.

During the last four years, I've had two remarkable opportunities to see what can happen when I walk away from "normal" and trust my instincts.

In 2005, my husband and I decided to sell everything and leave our suburban American lifestyle behind in order to live abroad. The tricky part: we had four teenage daughters to usher through high school and into college. Most people thought we were sabotaging our girls' education by yanking them out of perfectly good schools at such a critical stage of their lives. We had our doubts, of course, but we also had a hunch that this would be an amazing experience for our family and allow us to save thousands of dollars for college costs.

It turned out to be the smartest decision we have ever made. We stumbled upon some stunningly advantageous options that any U.S. student anywhere can leverage to leapfrog over their test-dazed classmates. Within months, our daughters had joined the new breed of global American students: those who are releasing the old "four-by-four" model (four years of high school, plus four years of college), laughing at the lunacy of the college-prep mindset, and gliding into the global economy at 19 or 20 with a red-hot U.S. or Canadian college diploma, fluency in at least one foreign language, outrageously relevant experience, and no debt.

What do these students have in common? Though their paths vary dramatically, these Bold Schoolers are trusting their own ideas about what is most important in their education. They are flexible, curious, self-directed and absolutely on fire about what they are learning.

But let's face it: it doesn't take much to talk a kid into skipping the SAT, shortening the time until graduation, or studying abroad.  My challenge was to help parents come to terms with the idea of stepping off the traditional track so that their kids could reap the benefits.   Parents are fearful--we tend to stick to what we know even if it's not working. Those who trust their instincts about what's best for their kids are free to help them design a personalized and exhilarating education that allows them to soar.

I knew it was important to get this message out to parents, but once again, I had to listen to my heart and ignore the obstacles:

1. I had zero contacts in publishing
2. I lived a hemisphere away from any English writers' conferences or other schmooze-fests for aspiring authors
3. I had no platform as an expert in education

I followed the old adage, "write what you know" and looked at the questions people ask me most often:

• "What possessed you to move abroad with four teenage daughters?"
• "How did your girls manage to graduate from college at 19?"
• "By what miracle did you pay for four simultaneous college educations with a mid-five-figure annual income and no loans?"
• "How did your daughters get such interesting jobs around the world in such a terrible economy?"
• and my personal favorite: "How on earth did you get past the naysayers who made you feel like a bad parent for doing things differently?

I emailed a three-paragraph query to ten agents I'd researched online. The agency websites posted disclaimers along the lines of "We receive a thousand queries a week, so don't expect to hear from us," but what did I have to lose?

Within 24 hours, I received responses from five of the ten I'd contacted--all asking for a full proposal!  Fueled by adrenaline, I got a little bolder. I decided to listen to that impish little voice--and write directly to the publisher of a similar book to see if she might like to publish mine.

This is a big no-no in publishing, but it shifted things into high gear immediately.  Three weeks later, I had an agent, an editor and an advance from Random House. I wrote the entire book, The New Global Student: Skip the SAT, Save Thousands on Tuition, and Get a Truly International Education, from my living room sofa in Buenos Aires, and didn't meet my agent or editor in New York until my book was on the shelves 17 months later.

What's next? I'm playing with writing a novel. The last fiction I wrote was a fourth grade creative writing assignment about my cat. The odds are stacked against me--it's a tough market to crack, and even though I have been published in nonfiction, my agent assures me that I'm basically starting out as an unknown author in a new genre.  

But I'm paying attention to that same little voice calling out to me, the one I've learned to trust during these last four years. I'm going to follow my heart and forge ahead, diving into unknown territory yet again.

I can't wait. 

You can find more information about Maya, her family and her book at mayafrost.com.

For many authors, writing a novel and getting published is the easy part; the challenge comes in building awareness among readers in a world over-crowded with new books. Savvy authors know that the publicity department of their publisher can only do so much, and such authors look for ways to reach out directly to their readers. One novelist, John Shors, has spoken to about 2,000 book clubs in the past three years!

Dear Reader,

In 2004, the hardcover version of my debut novel, Beneath a Marble Sky, was released. I was blessed because, over the next year, Beneath a Marble Sky did quite well--garnering wonderful reviews, winning a national award, and attracting significant interest from Hollywood. Due to all of these events, I was able to quit my day job and become a fulltime novelist.

I was grateful to readers for their support, and decided that I wanted to do something to support readers in return. So, when Penguin released the paperback version of Beneath a Marble Sky in 2006, I decided to add a letter to the back of the book that invited book clubs to invite me to their evenings (all they needed was a speakerphone). I included my email address.

Well, due to the novelty of what I was doing, my book club program started to get a lot of media attention, and was featured in Newsweek Magazine and on The CBS Evening News. I wasn't sure what kind of interest the media coverage would generate, but now, about three years later, I am happy to report that I've spoken with approximately 1,500 book clubs. Most of these clubs were based in the U.S., though I've spoken with groups in Canada, France, Columbia, and Kenya. I'm fortunate in that readers enjoy Beneath a Marble Sky, and are therefore happy to talk with me about it (I spend fifteen minutes with each group). This simple fact allows my program to flourish on many levels.

During the past three years, I've learned a great deal from readers. For instance, some clubs have said that they would have liked a map to be included in Beneath a Marble Sky (which is based on the story behind the creation of the Taj Mahal). And because of that feedback, there will be a map of Vietnam in my new novel, Dragon House (which is set in modern-day Saigon, but also features other parts of Vietnam) (read BookBrowse member reviews of this book).

Talking with up to eight book clubs a night hasn't been easy, but it's been important. I've done my best to give something back to the readers who support me. And in this age, when books have so much competition with other forms of entertainment, I feel that authors need to go the extra mile to encourage reader/author interaction. I'm trying to get other writers to create similar book club programs, as my experience has been so positive.

I continue to do book club calls (though I am now encouraging two book clubs to get together for each call). I have also created three videos on YouTube that readers can access. This way, people don't have to be in book clubs to see and hear me answer questions about each of my novels (Beneath a Marble Sky, Beside a Burning Sea, and Dragon House).

If readers, librarians, booksellers, or authors are interested in my book club program, I may be contacted through my web site at www.dragonhousebook.com.

I wish everyone the best.

John

John Shors is an internationally bestselling author, whose books have won multiple awards and have been translated into more than twenty languages. He and his books can be found at:
Beneath a Marble Sky: Website; YouTube
Beside a Burning Sea: Website; YouTube
Dragon House: Website; YouTube