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Your next favorite book
is waiting.
I hope this post finds everyone well, and enjoying the start of their new year.
As a reader, I've always been interested in how authors come up with ideas for their novels. So, with that thought in mind, I'd like to offer a few thoughts on how my new novel, Dragon House, came to be, as the road to its creation was as circuitous as one could imagine.
This holiday, in between shopping for presents, I began reading an amazing book, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World by Lewis Hyde. It is, in part, about the cultural meaning of gift exchange, and though my timing in reading it during Christmas was coincidental, the resonances were very welcome. By day, I would buy gifts and experience a familiar twinned pleasure and guilt at all the consumption. By night, I would read The Gift and find myself getting to the source of that dual emotion.
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.
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.
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?
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.
