Zigzag Girl Rises from the Box!

 

Hello, my friends! It's been a while. If you follow me on FaceBook, Instagram or Twitter, you know that I'm around, and busy. But I'm rethinking the best ways for me to use social media. Today, I posted for the first time on Substack Notes. Just giving it a try.

Meanwhile let's do a catch-up and round-up. The big news is that I entered my novel, Zigzag Girl, in the ScreenCraft Cinematic Book competition, and it won! 

I'm the Grand Prize winner! With the prize comes a year of mentorship with Richard Kahan. I'm absolutely thrilled. 

Those of you who know me know how long and hard I've worked on this book. I'll say more about it another time, but briefly, it's a mystery suspense novel about a female magician that takes place in Atlantic City. Yup, Atlantic City, with detours into the notorious Pine Barrens. It's got magic, a haunted theatre on the boardwalk, a band of colorful characters, a reluctant killer. And unfortunately, for our hero, Lucy Moon, the mysterious magician she's attracted to is the prime suspect.

I'm looking forward to Zigzag Girl's journey into the world. Meanwhile I'm working on a new novel and a screenplay. More on those later too.

As for the round-up-- I don't know about you, but during the pandemic I got used to watching movies and binging shows and miniseries... I went through a craze during which I obsessed over movies from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Movies before cell phones and computers. I craved the street scenes, watching human beings crowded on a city street. No one looking at a phone. When people needed to make a call, they used a phone booth! 

Detectives went to people's houses to talk to them. Once you left your home or office, you couldn't be reached. Can you imagine? You were incommunicado. When you got home the first thing you did was check if the light on your answering machine was flashing, which meant you had a message. There was something so personal and intimate about human connections and interactions. Which leads me back to those street scenes. 

I'm sure the lockdown and masks and isolation intensified the yearning to see people's faces again-- not on Zoom-- but in person. So I watched movies: Dirty Harry, The Conversation, Blow Out, Three Days of the Condor, Dog Day Afternoon, Moonstruck, Tootsie... 

And for shows set in the present I binged Severance, White Lotus, The Last of Us, and others. I'm currently loving Perry Mason, which is set in 1930s LA, which is retro and moody with brilliant music.

That's enough for now. Hope you're all doing well. And I'll be back soon.

   

Ode to My Library: Guest Post

It's been a long day's night of a summer, working on a couple of projects which I'll tell you about in my next post, but today Kate Racculia is here! Kate is a wonderful writer whose new book, Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts, will be out next month. I can't wait! In the meantime read on to find out about her relationship with her books. Impossible not to relate! You've got me thinking about my shelves and their crazy "organization"....

Here's Kate...


Ah, books and their shelves...

My books and I, we have a problem.

When I say “my books” I mean, of course, the many, many volumes—primarily of fiction, but a smattering of poetry, plays, and nonfiction—I have amassed over my lifetime. The books of my childhood: The Westing Game, The NeverEnding Story, anthologies of Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side. The books of my teen years—a copy of Jurassic Park with SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE emblazed on a red starburst—and of college (Flannery O’Connor, Shakespeare), graduate school (Who Will Run the Frog Hospital, A Room of One’s Own), and beyond, up through the past decade of my life as a professional novelist. The problem my books and I have now isn’t so much that I have too many of them (I do), or even that I have a problem getting rid of them (I don’t, when I bother to weed), but that I possess enough now to comprehend the flaws in my initial organizational system.

            

This system, if you want to call it that, is a mishmash of circumstance and affection, maintained by a mix of habit and laziness. Eternal favorites go here. Current reads are here, and travel back and forth between living room and bedroom. Books I was reading when I moved are shelved here, vintage mass market paperbacks are stacked there. Books I’ve borrowed and intend to return but admittedly probably never will are stashed there. Books that I can feel exerting that special kind of gravity, that I’ll end up writing about someday, even if I’m the only person who will ever be able to trace their influence—are stacked, precariously, there. I am both a re-reader and a used bookstore magpie, and go to my own shelves to revisit gems or discover un-read treasures. The result is that my apartment, which is quite big enough for one person and two cats, is full of not only overstuffed bookcases but random stalagmites of books (from my vantage on the couch, I count five) that I admit are trending less “cozy” and more “cluttered.”

            

But now comes the problem: if I am, as Marie Kondo suggests, to pile all my books into one room, sort through and only keep the ones that give me joy—where and how on earth am I going to put the joy-givers back, and ever hope to find them again? I’ve Kondo-tidied other parts of my life, my kitchen, my closet, so I know the delight and freedom that comes from only surrounding yourself with objects intentionally chosen. And humans better equipped than I have already come up with plenty of useful organizational schema: Melville Dewey gets points for complexity. The alphabet—a classic. I half attempted, several years ago, to make a bookshelf of favorite authors, snuggling my Barbara Pyms up to my Stephen Kings, and plan to return to it (probably around the same time that I read and return those borrowed books). Bookshelves organized by spine color give me hives, though of course this is essentially how my books are organized too: by a design entirely of my own making, based on my recall both of the book’s physicality and when it came into my life. The Scarlet Pimpernel was a gift, is a TV movie tie-in with Jane Seymour on the cover—it’s in the mass market stack. Beloved was a used book sale score, missing its cover: a rough linen spine on the eternal favorites overflow shelf. In order to organize my library in such a way that any human other than me can find anything in it, I need to surrender the very particular ties I have to each of my books as objects. I need to depersonalize it, in other words. Which is probably why the idea feels so uncomfortable, and why I’ll get around to re-organizing as soon as I return those books I’ve borrowed: they’re already organized just so, as the library of my life.

   
Kate Racculia is a novelist living in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She is the author of the novels This Must Be the Place and Bellweather Rhapsody, winner of the American Library Association’s Alex Award. Her third novel, Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts, will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2019. She teaches online for Grub Street, works at her local public library, and sings in the oldest Bach choir in America.          

Visit Kate at:
https://www.kateracculia.com/
Here's information about her latest novel:
https://www.kateracculia.com/tuesday-mooney-talks-to-ghosts

THANK YOU, GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ

I read One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez for the first time on an Israeli kibbutz where I was suffering from a mysterious fever. About midway through the novel I was burning, my fever so intense I had to set down the book and go outside and remind myself that I was still in this world, the one I'd been in before I picked up the book. The moon and stars were close enough to touch, the air smelled of oranges, the turkeys cried, and I wandered, crowned by a wreath of yellow butterflies, just like the young man in the novel. 

García Márquez made me dizzy with the sense of possibility, of how high a writer can aim. Even more he made me realize that his Macondo was no more fantastic or magical than the world that surrounded me—i.e., the Israeli reality, the culmination of centuries of Jewish dreams and fantasies. Jewish history is a primer in understanding magical realism: a small group of wanderers who are persecuted wherever they go because they persist in shooting the clay feet from every idol and in finding God in the imagination rather than in the flesh. Jewish identity, in all its ghetto-mellah-converso-ashkenazi-Sephardic-mizrahi beauty, pain and absurdity, is the essence of magic realism....

I wrote this several years ago when I was asked by Tamara Kaye Sellman, the editor of MARGIN, a journal that focused on magic realism, for a personal definition of what I consider magic realism to be. For me, it was linked with my identity as a writer and a Jew, and I never felt it more powerfully than when I read One Hundred Years of Solitude. 

Gabriel Garcia Marquez died today in Mexico City at age 87. A native of Colombia, he is widely credited with helping to popularize "magical realism," a genre "in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination," as the Nobel committee described it upon awarding him the prize for literature in 1982.

“It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.” 
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

Thank you, Gabriel Garcia Marquez for your brilliance, sense of play, and never-ending dreams that provide inspiration for countless writers all over the world. 

Rest in peace.