January 12, 2007
12:45 pmto1:45 pm

Hey, I will be speaking about my new novel, A Piece of Normal, at the Guilford Senior Center at 12:45 p.m. on January 12, attempting to explain how a person can possibly take seventeen years to write a first novel…and then get assigned to write a second one in just twelve short months.

When you subtract the first three months during which I was in shock at my good fortune–and then the following three months when I beseeched the heavens for a plot and a character to come to me–well, let’s just say that it was a blessing when a bossy character, Lily Brown, came thundering into my head one day and announced that she was an advice columnist from Branford (a town bordering on mine), and that she had a four-year-old son and an ex-husband who was so pathetic that she had to set him up on dates before she felt comfortable finding somebody new of her own.

I could see that Lily had some issues that were going to make her very interesting to write about–and so for six months she lived in my head, entertaining me with stories about her artist mother, her lawyer father, and her flaky tambourine-player-in-a-rock-band little sister who was guarding a family secret so volatile that it tore the whole family apart. Not to mention the cast of characters at the newspaper where she worked, the man she fell in love with, and her neighbors in the beach colony where she was raised and still lives today.

Come and join me and the seniors at the Guilford Recreation Center on Church Street. We’ll chat.