Claire Legrand giving away ARC

Dear kind reader,

Sorry to be later than normal with my letter today. Hours seemed to evaporate before my eyes as I worked on bookish things (fun treats to give away with my book, an ARC of an amazing new novel by another Alaskan author, a promotional video for The Snow Child … all of which I’ll write about more later).

Visit Claire Legrand's blog (claire-legrand.com) to learn more about her contest.

But when I resurfaced this evening, I was welcomed by a message from fellow author Claire Legrand. After reading an advance reader copy of my novel, she gave it wonderful reviews on Twitter and www.goodreads.com. Today she announced that she is giving away her ARC.

Please stop by her blog claire-legrand.com  and learn more about the contest and Claire herself. She is the author of The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls, which will be published by Simon & Schuster August 2012. It sounds fabulous, and her blog is a fantastic place for book lovers!

Cheers!

Eowyn

A day in the life …

Dear multi-tasking reader,

The other day my literary agent Jeff Kleinman called to discuss some marketing plans with me, and as we talked he asked, “Do you have another line ringing? Do you need to get that?”

“Umm, no,” I said. “That’s just Littlefoot.” As in my youngest daughter’s favorite dinosaur movie, The Land Before Time starring a longneck named Littlefoot.

This is the odd combination of life-changing and life-staying-exactly-the-same qualities of having my first novel being published. Sometimes I find the dichotomy amusing, other times a little jarring, and always interesting.

On Friday I told you my husband Sam had gotten a moose. After I sent my letter off to you, I put on my hunting pants and rubber boots, rain coat and work gloves, and met Sam at the bottom of the mountain. For the next four or so hours, he and I loaded hind quarters and front quarters, ribs and heart, into our backpacks and carried the meat down through birch meadows and alder thickets to the road. Sometimes this is a two- or even three-day job, but this year we were fortunate — the moose was fairly close to home.

It was a beautiful afternoon. Along the mountains the leaves were turning, the air crisp and full of the scent of autumn berries. I managed to stumble only a few times with the heavy pack. Sam and I joked as we worked that this is our idea of a date — packing moose meat.

At 3 p.m., we hurried to the pickup truck with the last of the meat. I rushed home, quickly cleaned up and changed, and headed to my evening shift at Fireside Books. I was 15 minutes late, but by 5 p.m. I was straightening shelves and helping customers find copies of The Help and Franny K. Stein.

Later, when I printed out the bestseller list for the week, I was excited to see that my agent, Jeff, had another one of the books he represents appearing on the list — The Eighty-Dollar Champion: Snowman, the Horse That Inspired a Nation. I sent him a quick email to say congratulations, then went back to arranging the bestseller display.

When I got home that evening, Sam and I fried up some moose heart and ate it with garlic, onions, and mashed potatoes for dinner. Grateful to have meat for the winter, we toasted with a couple of glasses of red wine. Somehow I had managed to navigate through three separate lives in the course of one day. It left me a little worn out and entirely content.

Cheers!

Eowyn

P.S. Just a quick reminder — tomorrow, Tuesday Sept. 6, at 8 p.m. ET you can join me on twitter.com for #BiblioChat, where I’ll answer questions and discuss The Snow Child and my work as a bookseller and writer in Alaska. In preparation for the chat, Biblio-Files blogger Kelly Kegans is giving a sneak peek at the first chapter of The Snow Child on her blog biblio-files.com.

Won’t you join me in Twitterland?

I've saved a seat for you at the party. This image is from Biblio-Files recent guest post on bookish places in England.

Dear brave reader,

I know I’ve mentioned in my earlier letters how the upcoming publication of my first novel has opened new doors for me. It’s meant a couple of trips to New York City, a few speaking engagements, an interview or two. It’s all been very exciting. But someone is opening an entirely new door for me next week, the door to Twitterland. I have been asked to participate in my first “tweet chat,” and I’m hoping you’ll come along with me.

Last month, Biblio-Files blogger Kelly Ryan Kegans contacted me to see if I would like to participate in her #BiblioChat. Of course I said yes — her website is fantastic, and I enjoy her tweets. It was only later that I realized I wasn’t entirely clear on what I was agreeing to do.

Because I’ve attended blog discussions before, where people ask questions and talk via the comment section of a blog post, I assumed that was how we’d do it. But I wasn’t positive, and since I’m the guest, I figured I ought to make sure I had directions to the party.

Kelly kindly explained that no, the discussion would be happening instead on Twitter itself. By using the hashtag #BiblioChat on each entry, people can follow and participate in just that discussion, without being interrupted by all the other chatter on Twitter. She explained that I can also use tweetchat.com in order to simplify it.

I’m really hoping you’ll join us. Just go to twitter.com and set up an account if you’re not already on there. Then on Tuesday Sept. 6, at 7 p.m. Central time or 4 p.m. Alaska, do a search for #BiblioChat. You’ll see a running tab of the discussion. And if you want to comment, just include the #BiblioChat in your tweet so that everyone will be able to see it as part of the discussion. You can also go to tweetchat.com and use it to filter out any other tweets going on, and just focus on our discussion.

We’ll be talking about The Snow Child, which Kelly is reading right now, as well as my life here in Alaska as a bookseller and writer. If you tune in, you’ll be able to ask your own questions and share your own thoughts as well.

For those of you who are not already on Twitter, I know I’m asking you to drive with me down an unmarked, dark road to a party at a stranger’s house. But I also know it will be a ton of fun, and Kelly will put us all right at ease. A person who has such wonderful taste in libraries and books surely will be a great hostess.

So mark your calendar and say you’ll come along with me to the party — Sept. 6, 4 p.m. Alaska time.

Cheers!

Eowyn

P.S. Everyone who participates in Tuesday’s tweet chat will be entered in a drawing to win an advance reader copy of The Snow Child.

A question or two

Dear inquisitive reader,

My first official interview as an novelist appeared here this week on the Northwest Book Lovers blog. The blog’s editor, Jamie Passaro, asked me some great questions about my job as a bookseller at Fireside Books and how I came to write The Snow Child. I ended up having even more fun than I expected.

To give you a taste, here was her first question:

What’s it like working at Fireside?

And my answer?

Fireside Books is on main street in Palmer, a quaint and kind of artsy small town with a farming background. When I come in Saturday morning, I brew the coffee. (Our motto is “good books, bad coffee” but it is actually pretty good.) I turn on some Putumayo jazz or folk music. The bookstore is small and packed full, but neat and organized. It somehow manages to feel both cozy and light and airy. The floors and shelves are a golden, varnished wood, and customers who come in say it smells wonderful—like books and fresh brewed coffee.

Usually within minutes of turning on the OPEN sign, a few of my favorite customers come in, like the older man who swaps stories with me about gardening and snowstorms and old-time Alaska. Then a new customer will arrive, like the woman who, when I asked if she needed help finding anything, said “That’s what I love about a bookstore. If you knew what you were looking for, you’d miss out on half the fun.”

For the rest of the day, I receive new books, shelve, alphabetize, process and clean used books that customers bring in for credit, help people find and order books, answer phone calls, arrange the weekly Indie Bound bestseller display, banter with the customers and my co-workers.

Fireside Books attracts some of the more interesting, thoughtful, diverse people in our community. It is not unusual for several conversations to be going on at once—two teenagers in the young adult section talking about a new manga series, the owner and a customer standing near the counter discussing poetry and politics, two women from the same book club in the bestseller section choosing their next pick, and a mom reading a picture book to her little boy in the children’s section. It is a very stimulating, joyful place to be.

But my favorite question was her last one …

If you want to read the rest of the interview, and learn about some wonderful books and bookstores in the Pacific Northwest, go to www.nwbooklovers.org. And thanks again, Jamie!

Cheers!

Eowyn

Warm kindness of northern people

Dear tenderhearted reader,

This image of Norway, from www.visitnorway.com, reminds me so much of Alaska.

I can’t read a word of Norwegian, but thanks to Google translate, I’ve been following a blog called the Reading Room. Lise, the blogger, is giving away a free copy of The Snow Child, aka Snøbarnet, before it is published there in Norway Sept. 12. She asked people to describe why they want to read it.

Here’s what the first person wrote, as translated by Google:

As I wrote that comment for your review, is the theme close to my heart.  It is difficult to avoid getting personal when the question is why I want to read the book … I can content myself with saying that I and my partner have been in almost the same situation as the couple book is about. I know the grief of having lost a child, I know the sadness of not being able to have more children, I know the vast emptiness, emptiness feeling, difficulty with communication, different patterns of mourning and grief.  In many ways it helps to decrease slightly in grief again, by reading such books. Allowing oneself to cry a little, then move on to life’s highway. Exactly why I was so touched by your review and the book’s action.

And here, just as moving, are the comments from the following three readers. I’ve changed the name of the first person to Jane, to protect her privacy.

* I think the book sounds absolutely fantastic and competitions are always fun. But Jane’s reasoning is so incredible that I would rather attend the Team Jane. It fits perfectly to the description of the book.  So, I think Jane should win the book my ticket in the draw to possibly have her name printed on, and so can buy the book even when it is released 🙂

* I think the book sounds awesome out, and have read reviews with great interest and curiosity.  But I think that line, that Jane’s explanation is very good and will take part in Team Jane (Good idea!).

* I also participate in Team Jane:)

And here is Jane’s response —

You are very, very beautiful and fine .- I’m touched :) BUT!  I want everyone to participate on equal terms, and deny flatly that my explanation will count more than others.  I was very unsure if I would write the real reason, it was not meant to “outperform” everyone else’s comments, but I felt still to suggest why – Transparency is important, both for one’s own benefit and for others in the same situation. Another thing: we all have our problems and challenges, we all have at some time felt more or less the loneliness and emptiness feeling. I hope you prefer wins by just a draw, so everyone has equal chance.

Lise, the blogger, then wrote:

You had a very touching and nice grounds, Jane.  And very thoughtful of you who are on Team Jane. But as Jane requests … everyone will have equal chance. Therefore I encourage all who want to participate in the competition, you also could win the book for yourself :)

And then one last reader added her thoughts:

I obviously want to win this book, because you had such a nice review on it on your blog.  But like the others over here, so I can keep me on the Team Jane and hope she wins it for its fine grounds.

All I can say is I hope I get to visit Norway someday and meet some of these wonderful people.

Cheers!

Eowyn

Turn of the table

Dear bookish reader,

Several years ago I attended the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association trade show in Portland, Oregon. I went with Melissa Behnke, the co-owner of Fireside Books. It was so serious and so fun. We were bona fide booksellers with empty suitcases and notebooks, setting out on an important mission — to learn more about our trade and to discover, and bring home, exciting new books.

But we were also book lovers in a land of books.  We went on giddy binges of greed, walking the trade show floor and filling our arms with free books. We sat in on panel discussions and visited with other booksellers. We talked books, and talked books.

By far the most memorable event was the “feast of authors.” We were all situated at tables in a dining hall. Throughout the meal, selected authors sat down at our table and visited with us. Several authors came to our table that night; I remember two vividly. Floyd Skloot, a wonderful poet, novelist and essayist, told us about his memoir,  A World of Light. Since that dinner, his daughter Rebecca Skloot has published the bestselling The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Another visitor to our table was Laura Numeroff, author of If  You Give a Pig a Pancake among may others sweet children’s books. I couldn’t wait to get home and tell my daughter I had met her.

Never once did I think to myself “I wonder if I’ll be here again someday, but instead as an author.” It didn’t even cross my mind, even though I had already begun work on an early novel.

So imagine my delight and surprise when my publicist emailed the other day to say it was official — I am to be one of the guest authors at this year’s PNBA “feast of authors.”

I would be nervous, except I know how to dress in Portland, Oregon. And I also know — these are my people. They love books. I love books. We’ve got the whole world in common. We’ll talk about their bookstores and Fireside Books, and I’ll have to imagine Marlena my publicist at my shoulder, gently reminding me to not just talk shop with my fellow booksellers, but also tell them a bit about my debut novel. Maybe then I can describe how I was struck with the idea for The Snow Child when I was shelving books at Fireside. I can tell them that being a bookseller is the perfect day job for a would-be novelist.

I can’t wait until October!

Cheers!

Eowyn

A room of my own

A low impact woodland home constructed in Wales and featured on the website www.simondale.net.

Dear reclusive reader,

In her 1929 essay, Virginia Woolf wrote her now-famous words.

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

Lately I’ve been daydreaming — as I type on my laptop at our dining room table covered with books and papers, my husband at the other end with his stacks of work documents and his own laptop, my oldest daughter singing into her ipod, my youngest playing with her train set and watching Spongebob Squarepants with the volume on high, all of us together in our cozy home. I sit and I daydream about a quiet place. A room, with a closing door. A room of my own.

My daydreams have lingered here recently, in this hobbit-style house in Wales, but I’ve also daydreamed about a private library like one of these or a writerly cabin along these lines. Here, in one of these secluded, quaint, peaceful locations, I could lose myself in my next novel. I know I could. That is all that separates me from the freedom to imagine.

But before family guests arrived last month, I took the time to clean out my upstairs “cloffice.” It is an unfinished, windowless walk-in closet with an open doorway. The walls are unfinished Sheetrock, and a bare lightbulb hangs from the ceiling. When I sit in the metal folding chair at the rickety desk, my back touches the clothes on the rack behind me. Books threaten to bring down the one little shelf, and dozens of other books are piled in three-foot high stacks at my feet.

This is where I wrote The Snow Child. Two hours every night, one chapter at a time. It’s strange, but I don’t remember ever sitting here. All I can recall is the unfolding story, the words sometimes flying from my brain, other times coming slowly, painfully.

As I stood in my “cloffice” I realized I have a room of my own, and yet even it is only a metaphor. There hangs my wedding dress in its crinkly bag from nearly 20 years ago, and there my late-grandfather’s corduroy work shirt. Here is my bathrobe beside my husband’s, and there my daughters’ Christmas dresses with their satin green bows. The books have their own titles — Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life, Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, Louise Edrich’s Love Medicine, Report of an Expedition, Fieldguide to Alaskan Wildflowers …

This is the space I occupy when I write.

If I want to lose myself in my next adventure, I don’t need a private hobbit house or an ornate library. If only it were that simple.  Instead, I have to be ready to spend some time up here, in my own mind. It’s not a vast space, and it’s a little rough around the edges, never tidied up or completely finished. It’s plastered with memories, some of the magical and joyful, some melancholy and frightening. Its decor is a haphazard gathering of books and words and art and music.

It isn’t perfect, but it’s my own.

Cheers!

Eowyn

Hello new readers!

Dear generous reader,

This is a quick shout out to several new subscribers to my blog — Dan in Boston (hi!), the North Carolina clan, and here in Alaska, the amazing artist Peggy! Thanks guys. It’s so much fun to know who is receiving my letters each week. By the way, all I can see when you subscribe is your email address and the general area of the country where you live. So with that in mind, I also want to say hi to Carol and a new follower from West Virginia.

Subscribing to the blog just means that each week the letters will be delivered directly to your email so you know when there’s a new letter. I try to post new letters on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. The subscriptions help me know how many people are reading.

The only other way I know you’re reading my letters is when you leave a comment on my blog. I LOVE the comments. You all make the blog fun. It’s fantastic to see a conversation develop between readers in Alaska and Italy, or the Netherlands and Chicago. All the comments together give a more complex, interesting perspective on the topics I’m writing about. So please, if you ever have the slightest notion to participate, please, please do. Comment every day. Comment twice on the same letter. Whether you’re my neighbor, a relative, a friend, or until now a complete stranger, I’d love to have you share your thoughts.

Now, if it will only stop raining, we’re heading out to pick blueberries. I’m being led blindfolded to a secret spot and told I can take no photos that will give away our whereabouts (really), but I’ve been promised 10 gallons.

Cheers!

Eowyn

The inside track to publishing

Dear lovely reader,

There is a myth about publishing, that it is an insider’s club, that the people who get published do so because they are friends with this author, or went to school with this editor, or have an uncle who knows a lawyer who knows an agent. I admit that before my debut novel was picked up by Little, Brown & Co. I worried I didn’t have enough “connections.” I have lived all my life in Alaska, and the closest I had ever come to New York City was to visit my grandparents in Buffalo, NY.

But I have discovered something very exciting along the path to publication — you can start out with no connections whatsoever and, if you’re willing to reach out to others in the writing/reading world along the way, they’ll often extend a hand to you.

When I attended the Kachemak BayWriters’ Conference in Homer, Alaska, several years ago, I couldn’t have been more utterly disconnected from NY publishing. I went to the conference with my mom, Julie LeMay, who is a poet, and she prodded and encouraged and, actually, insisted that I set up a meeting with the New York literary agent presenting at the conference. I had never met a New York literary agent before, and I wasn’t finished with my novel. But I signed up to meet with Jeff Kleinman and gave him my pitch. By the end of the conference, he had offered to represent The Snow Child.

I was thrilled, and a little overwhelmed at this turn of events. Normally I wouldn’t have done such a thing, but I reached out to John Straley, then the Alaska Writer Laureate and one of the biggest names in Alaska’s writing world. He has numerous critically acclaimed novels, and was a lead presenter at the conference. I had read his books, but he didn’t know me from Adam, as they say. Yet, when I asked for help, he extended a hand. He sat down with me at the conference and calmly said “Stay calm.” Several months later, he read my early draft for me and gave me his thoughts and recommendations. This was my very first introduction to the “inside circle” of the publishing world — authors helping authors, readers and writers and book lovers joining forces.

Later, when the owner of Fireside Books casually mentioned to Andromeda Romano-Lax that I was working on a novel and had an agent, Andromeda showed the same kind of generosity and comroaderie. She is an Alaskan writer who has numerous books with major publishers, including The Spanish Bow and the upcoming The Detour. She invited me to guest post on the blog 49 Writers, and agreed to read The Snow Child and endorsed it, even though she must get an overwhelming number of such requests. We regularly “talk shop,” and I am always grateful for her advice and experience.

But this was just the beginning. You know the quotes from big-name authors on book covers? I, too, assumed that they came through insider connections — the same agent, the same publisher, the same MFA program. Not for me. I cold wrote to my favorite authors, explaining how much I loved their books and asked them if they would consider reading my novel. In the case of every endorsement I got, from Robert Goolrick, Sena Jeter Naslund, Robert Morgan, Melanie Benjamin, Keith Donohue, and Ali Shaw, I had absolutely no connection or inside track. I just wrote a letter and said “please,” and they each extended a hand to a fellow author.

I can’t describe how grateful I am to all of these people for being so generous with their time, experience, and credentials. And now I know — the myth, at least in my case, is not true. You don’t have to be an insider with New York connections. You just have to be a writer and book lover who is willing to reach out.

Cheers!

Eowyn

What do you think?

Dear opinionated reader,

So here it is – my very first poll. I have to admit, ever since I launched this blog, I’ve wanted to conduct a poll. So please respond. The answers will help guide me as I continue to send you letters each week. Let me know — what are your favorite topics?

P.S. I’ve noticed that if you pick “Other” and write in the topic you’d like to see, I can’t see your note. Please leave a comment instead, so I can know what other topics you would enjoy reading about.

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