Jenny Holiday

Pack your bags for happily ever after

Books

Audra North & Jenny Holiday on: Narcotics!

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Here's half of Audra's face that one time we drove two hours with an Ikea box shoved between our heads. It was like being in confession. Except there was nothing to say because she already knew it all.
Here’s half of Audra’s face that one time we drove two hours with an Ikea box shoved between our heads. It was like being in confession. Except there was nothing to say because she already knew it all.

So, my friend Audra North and I send each other a lot of emails. Like, A LOT of emails. We decided that it was a good idea to start transcribing our emails for your entertainment. (I’m not really sure why we decided that, but here we are.) So without further ado, I present you the first installment in what I hope will become a series.

Audra
What do you think of these covers? *attaches covers-in-progress for forthcoming series* The placement of the title in the last one seems off. But I don’t know if I’m just looking at these all wonky because they’ve been in front of me for so long.

Jenny
I like them! I liked the closed-eyes kissing thing across the group of them. I am not the person to ask about technical things like fonts and shit, though. Want me to ask Mr. Holiday? Did I ever tell you he used to be a designer?

Audra
I’ll probably sleep on the design and fiddle with it tomorrow. If Mr. Holiday has thoughts and wants to share them I’m happy to get them, but only if he really wants to or doesn’t care. As long as you don’t look at them and go OH MY GODRA NO then I know I’m close to the final version.

I’m pretty sure I’m going to take a Nyquil again tonight. I did last night because I was so stuffy and sneezy. But the thing is…I love Nyquil. I love it so much so I regulate it like crazy. Maybe once a year I’ll take half a dose for two or three nights and that’s it because it makes me feel so good. Danger Will Robinson.

Jenny
Oh I know all about this. When I was in college, I once had a wicked head cold during finals and I discovered Theraflu. It was the only thing that allowed me to sleep. My cold went away, and I kept drinking a cup of it at night. I was like, well, it’s finals, I need all the help I can get. Then I ran out, and sure enough, that night I could not sleep. I was up, dressed, and in the elevator down to the parking lot to go and get more (I HAVE A FINAL AT 8 AM!!!), when I was like WHOA, WHOA, I have to stop this now. So I did. But to this day, I do enjoy the sleep I get when I am sick and I take night time cold meds. Then a few years later, I had to get an endoscopy and they gave me an IV of Valium and Demerol, and I was so happy it was scary. I said to Mr. Holiday, who was picking me up in his “friend” capacity (we weren’t dating yet) that I was never allowed to have those drugs again. To the extent that when they tried to give me Tylenol 3 for my week 12 miscarriage, I refused it because I thought it was a bad road to go down, knowing I would be very depressed afterwards and in possession of a bottle of T3. My point is: Mmmmm, narcotics.

Audra
Friend Mr. Holiday picked you up from an endoscopy. Sweet.

I got my wisdom teeth out at 16 and got laudanum afterward. I took one. It was insanely amazing. As soon as I woke up from my trippy happy laudanum nap, I threw away the entire bottle. So I hope no junkie was going through my trash the next day because whoa. There were like 50 of those suckers left. But the way I loved it scared me shitless.

I have this mental play of Mr. Holiday that I sometimes run through when you’re talking about him. It’s where we three are sitting, playing cards, and he has a secret code while he plays and it’s basically him saying cutting sarcastic things in a gentle way. And then he wins the card game with his secret code (which is just him talking, which makes no sense because we’re all playing against each other, but somehow in my mind it makes sense). After the game is over, he sweeps up all the cards and stacks them neatly and tells us about how the Native Americans used to burn bison dung for fuel in the winter.

Jenny
OMG, I love you so much.

Audra
I realized that sounded like I was being mean. I meant I was thinking about asking him about burning dung as a fuel source for the house (totally jokingly) because that was also super efficient and then I decided against it since he doesn’t know me well and might have thought I was either being mean or totally serious. And then he’d have to feel awkward while he said gentle sarcastic things to find out if I was actually trying to convince y’all to burn poo.

Anyway. Mr. Holiday is great. That is my overall message.

Jenny
LOL! In no way did I take that message as mean! It was bizarrely, delightfully you and I loved it. And he is unnaturally obsessed with light bulb efficiency, so really, is dung burning that far off?

THE NEXT MORNING…

Jenny
I’m sorry I never showed your covers to Mr. Holiday. He fell asleep while lying down with the kid and slept the whole night there!

How was your Nyquil?

Audra
The Nyquil was awesome and now I shall stop taking them. Because it was just so so nice.

And no worries! I’m going to go ahead with these covers. Looking at them again in the light of day, they’re good enough, so it’s lock and load time.

What’s the story for today? What are you working on?

Jenny
Artie and Dawn all day.

Except oh shit, I just remembered I owe a post to my publicist by the end of the day. I can’t think of anything to say. I have nothing. Can I write about my love for you and/or night time cold meds?

Audra

Um…can you imagine what that post would be like, if you wrote about how much you love what is effectively a drug?

I will give you $10 to do it.

Jenny
And I will use that $10 to be like, “One commenter will win a pack of Theraflu!”

Audra
And then you could get a Theraflu spokesperson contract. It might compete with your Maybelline one.

Jenny
Or maybe the deal can be that Maybelline is so reliable that you can go on a Theraflu bender and STILL have great lashes.

Which reminds me, there was something in your book I was beta reading yesterday that made me laugh because it was totes similar to something in Artie and Dawn. But now I can’t remember what it was. I’ll just have to be surprised when you launch your lawsuit.

Audra
Well, you have the upper hand of knowing what it is already so you could preemptively file your lawsuit pre-publication, even.

And good point: bender + lashes are not mutually exclusive.

Probably our voices will start to blend over time and then we’ll be able to write a joint book involving a one-armed man, a castrated duke, a redhead named Meredith, and a camping trip. It will be epic. Sylvia Day will ask us to ghost write her next series. We will refuse because we will be richer than Bill Gates, who will read our books in public.

Jenny
And they both lived happily ever after THE END.

 

 

That time I eloped and accidentally wore the same outfit as the heroine of my romance novel

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Is it me? Or is it Rose? (It's me.) Groom cropped out to protect the innocent.
Is it me? Or is it Rose? (It’s me.) Groom cropped out to protect the innocent.

The Engagement Game, book 3 in my 49th Floor Series, is out today! Yay! I love this book so hard! It’s definitely my favourite of the trilogy, but, oddly, it was the hardest to write. Took me the longest, needed the most intensive editing, and generally drove me the bat-shittiest! I sometimes wonder if that’s why I love it more, but I honestly don’t think so. I just think it’s the best book of the three. Why? Heck if I know. (I would make a bad critic: I’m not very good at talking about books, other than to note the way they make me feel.)

The Engagement Game cover image
The book I hated and then loved.

It’s been a big week because in addition to having a book out, I also:

1. Went to see Taylor Swift in concert.

2. Eloped! Aka, had a super secret surprise wedding that no one knew about!

Ha! And I did both of those things in the same afternoon, practically back-to-back, with a quick stop for dinner and a change of clothes in between.

In other words, it was perfect.

But something funny occurred to me on the train ride home: the outfit I wore to my wedding was exactly the same as one worn by Rose Verma, the heroine of The Engagement Game. And this was NOT on purpose—at least not consciously-on-purpose.

In the book, Rose is on a mission to find a boyfriend—she has a deadline of sorts—so she’s internet dating with a vengeance. Between her serial dates and attending lots of high society events with the book’s hero, with whom she’s entered into a bit of an unholy alliance, she’s often dressed to the nines. Unlike me, Rose is quite a fashionista. I, when I’m not taking part in secret wedding ceremonies, am usually wearing leggings and sweatshirts.

But we do have one thing in common, which is that we like bright colours. Rose, because she has so many events and dates to attend, goes through many consume changes: emerald green dresses, blue-and-silver ballgowns—you name it. One of her outfits—one the hero takes special note of as she heads out on her date, is an electric blue dress with red heels. Now, I don’t wear heels as a matter of principle, the principle being that I enjoy not suffering. But other than that, check me out! I’m wearing Rose’s outfit!

Yep, I am wearing the same outfit as the heroine of my romance novel. It was an accident!

I think? Probably this is the part where we should call in the psychologists, but I’m going to stick with “accident.”

 

 

 

 

 

Some book deal news, y’all!

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HisHeartsRevenge_500-revised

Well, here’s some news: I just signed a deal to add a fourth book to my 49th Floor series published by Entangled’s Indulgence imprint. You know the one with the wounded, cranky, rich CEO dudes who think they aren’t interested in relationships?

And guess what? Book 4, called His Heart’s Revenge, is going to feature not one, but TWO wounded, cranky, rich CEO dudes who think they aren’t interested in relationships. Yep, I’m crashing the m/m romance novel party!

I’m super excited about this for a bunch of reasons.

1. I love reading series where the sexual orientation of the characters varies. You know, JUST LIKE REAL LIFE. Throw a bunch of wounded, cranky, rich CEO dudes into a room and one or two of them is bound to be gay, no?

2. The 49th Floor series is set in my beloved Toronto. The UN calls Toronto the most diverse city in the world. That’s why not everyone in the series is white. You know, JUST LIKE REAL LIFE. Now, not everyone in the series is straight, either.

3. I love that an established category romance imprint is publishing this book. When you write category romances, you’re generally more limited in what you can do—you’ve signed on to write a book that comes with a pre-existing brand. There are rules of the universe, so to speak (which is part of why I love category romance as a reader and as a writer, but that’s another post). I wonder if part of the reason you don’t see a lot of queer category romance is because in addition to imprint-specific rules, we generally take for granted, in established mainstream imprints, that we’re getting a man and a woman. I have to give a big shout out to Entangled here. (Did you know they accept m/m and f/f submissions in all their imprints?) I was also quite delighted, when I was going back and forth with the proposal for this book, that I got some (minor) pushback on a few issues. For example, one plot point required one of the characters to do something that was deemed not in keeping with an Indulgence hero. I love that. (I’m weird that way in general—I love being edited. But I also super-loved that in this case, category tropes were being scrupulously applied, regardless of sexual orientation.)

So, are you ready for TWO Indulgence heroes? His Heart’s Revenge isn’t done yet, but I can tell you that our heroes both work in the financial sector. One is an established bank CEO, and the other is an upstart launching his own private wealth management firm. (If you read my forthcoming book 3 in the 49th Floor Series, The Engagement Game, you’ll recognize our upstart hero as Marcus’s cousin Cary.) They’re in competition for a huge client, and our established CEO is Not. Losing. To. That. Punk. Partly as a matter of pride (he’s an Indulgence hero, after all), but partly because it’s personal. Yes, they have history. Which means some revenge is gonna rear its ugly head. And also: they are forced to go camping together. (Don’t you hate it when that happens?)

Big thanks and high fives to editors extraordinaire at Entangled, Tracy Montoya and Heather Howland, to my friend and former editor Gwen Hayes for match-making me with this project, and of course to my agent and friend and tireless advocate, Courtney Miller-Callihan.

Whee! Here we go!

Taylor Swift is a master of point of view

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Oh, look, it's me and my BFF / imaginary daughter.
Oh, look, it’s me and my BFF / imaginary daughter. (Photo by David Shankbone via Flickr Creative Commons.)

So I have a new book out today, and I’m supposed to write a blog post about it because that’s what one does. But instead I thought I’d write one about Taylor Swift. It’s not actually that much of a stretch because there are shades of Taylor Swift in my new book. Amy, my heroine, looks a lot like Taylor (in fact, she even talked herself into a club once when the bouncer mistook her for her celebrity doppelganger). And when she’s dumped in spectacular fashion at the beginning of the book, she wishes she had Taylor’s ability to chancel her heartbreak into sly songs about her exes, converting breakups into platinum records. And then of course there’s an epic scene in the book in which Amy and her girlfriends do karaoke to “Long Live,” which might be my all-time fave Tay song.

If you know me, or you follow me on Twitter, none of this is a surprise because you already know that I am a superfan. What can I say? I have that kind of celebrity crush on her where I feel like we could be BEST FRIENDS, if only she’d give me a chance. Except in this case, I also feel sort of maternal. I get really excited when she succeeds, and I’m thrilled by her current “girlfriends before boys” phase. So it’s like she’s a cross between my imaginary best friend and my imaginary daughter. (I hasten to add, though, that my imaginary pregnancy with my imaginary daughter happened in my teen years. My EARLY teen years.)

But why? Why am I such a superfan? People ask me this a lot. The obvious answer is that I love her music. It’s clever and infectious, and it makes me happy. But when I interrogate that sentiment further and ask WHY I love her music so much, the answer I come up with is that Taylor Swift is a master of point of view.

Writers talk about point of view all the time. In a crude sense, point of view in a book is about who is narrating. Who knows what, and when do they know it? In many, but not all, romance novels, you get some of the story told from the point of view of the heroine and some from the point of view of the hero. The vogue in romance right now is something called deep point of view. Google it for a more detailed explanation, but basically, we’re talking about a filtering everything through a character. There is no omniscient narrator. For example, the hero walks into a room. Maybe it’s a room with a really cool decor. But if our hero is not an aesthete, not the kind of guy who notices that stuff, we as the readers cannot be told about the teal antique Persian rug over the glossy walnut-stained hardwood. It might be there, but if he doesn’t notice it, we don’t get to know about it. But by seeing everything through his eyes, we get to know more about him as a character. We get a richer, more immersive experience of these characters, and hence of the story. (And if that rug is important, our heroine will have to remark on it later. Or our hero will have to spill his drink on it. Or something.)

Taylor Swift has always been really good at deep point of view. Earlier in her career, I always said that I liked her music because she wrote songs that sounded like songs a teenager would write. She captured an experience I remembered well. Many of her songs reminded me of stuff I would write in my diary. “Fifteen” is about being fifteen. “Mean” captures perfectly the experience of being bulled. Mind you, I didn’t love all her songs from this era. Some of them seemed a little melodramatic to me. But, perhaps counter-intuitively, I liked that. Being a teenager IS melodramatic.

(As an aside, I also think it’s telling that unlike many of her peers, the Taylor Swift of this era didn’t seem to be in any huge rush to grow up, to present as more mature than her actual years. Lots of moms I knew liked this about her because, in a hypersexual culture that fetishizes women’s bodies, they appreciated that their daughters had a role model who wasn’t playing this game.)

So what I’m saying is that Taylor Swift was a teenager writing about being a teenager. It’s simple, really, even though it’s kind of revolutionary.

And here’s why: At the same time she was mastering deep point of view, she was simultaneously the omniscient narrator of her own life. She had a perspective that was really rather amazing, both in general, but also given her youth. She was a teenager, yes, and perfectly capturing that experience, but part of the reason she was so perfectly capturing it was because she somehow knew what it was going to be like later when she was no longer a teenager. She had the wisdom or imagination or the something to know that her point of view was fleeting. That is some serious zen shit. People spend years in yoga and/or therapy trying to get there.

As an example, think about the song “Mean.” On the one hand she’s all:

You, with your switching sides
And your wildfire lies and your humiliation
You have pointed out my flaws
as if I don’t already see them
I walk with my head down…

We’ve all been there, right? (Well, I have!)

But in the same song, she steps back and says:

Someday, I’ll be living in a big old city
And all you’re ever gonna be is mean

She goes on to imagine her tormenter years from now, drunk in a bar, ranting on with no one listening. She’s doing deep point of view, but she’s also the omniscient narrator. Brilliant.

Or take my favourite song, “Long Live.”

It’s one of those songs where it’s hard to tell exactly what it’s about, but in a good way that lets you project onto it. To me, it seems to be about either a couple or a pair of friends getting away with something, playing a prank and reveling in their own success. It’s anthemic and delightfully defiant. But there’s also a built in sense of loss in the song as the narrator instructs herself to “remember this feeling.” And in the same breath that she asks her companion to promise that they’ll be together forever (you can practically see the pinky-swears) she’s telling him to show his future children pictures of her.

I’ve been talking about her early songs, but of course Taylor is not a teenager anymore. But she’s kept up with the perspective shifting, though it’s gotten more sophisticated.

“Out of the Woods” is a master class in this sense. Unlike in “Mean,” where she’s mostly shifting perspectives between verse and chorus, here she is doing both things at once all the time, infusing the whole song with this dual point of view.

We were built to fall apart
Then fall back together
Your necklace hanging from my neck
The night we couldn’t quite forget
When we decided
To move the furniture so we could dance,
Baby, like we stood a chance
Two paper airplanes flying, flying, flying

I find the image of moving the furniture to dance so perfectly indelible. But at the same time, we know—because she knows—it’s fleeting. It isn’t going to last. The fleetingness that we only know because of her omniscient narrator perspective is infused in the moment that is so perfectly crystalized because of her deep point of view perspective.

But it’s not all serious! She’s gone delightfully and wackily meta in “Blank Space:”

“Cause we’re young and we’re reckless, we’ll take this way too far.”

And also, come on, I’m acting like we’re in grad school here. None of this would matter if she wasn’t also writing the catchiest, danciest pop songs known to humankind.

I love her. Mr. Holiday loves her (though I take the credit for slowly and determinedly converting him). My five-year-old son loves her. There has been many an early morning “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” dance party in my house. And perhaps less glibly, there has also been many a family dance party to “Stay,” which I maintain is one of the sweetest and most realistic love songs ever written.

So there you go. My ode to Tay, master of point of view. And, hey, maybe you want to buy my new book. It’s probably not as good as a Taylor Swift album, but I try.

 

 

 

10 thoughts about reviews and how and why (not) to respond to them.

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I almost didn’t write this post. Then I almost didn’t post this post. I’m a newbie. I just published my first book a couple months ago. What the hell do I know? Mostly when the twitterverse explodes with some publishing controversy or other, I keep my mouth shut. But dang. I couldn’t help it.

1. I read all my reviews.
Yup. All of them. I admire authors who don’t read reviews. I want to be them when I grow up. I have a bunch more books coming out this year, and I hope that I won’t always be like this, that I’ll become uber busy and, I dunno, SUCCESSFUL, and I won’t care anymore. But I doubt it. I think it’s just the way I’m wired. I care what you think of me.

 2. Sometimes, I read a review and I think, “Was this person on crack when she read my book?”
Did she even read my book? If she read a book, was it perhaps someone else’s and not mine?

3. When this happens, this is what I do.
I send the review to my writing friends and I say, what the everloving hell? And they say, what the everloving hell? And then I get over it. Because I have other shit to do.

4. When this happens, this is what I don’t do.

a) Contact the reviewer in any form up to and including stalking.
b) Write a blog post about it.
c) Respond in any way other than to send it to my friends and say what the everloving hell?

 5. In fact, I don’t respond to reviews at all.
Sometimes, when I read a good review on a blog and there are some comments, I want to jump in to answer a question or something, but I DON’T DO IT. The only fashion in which I “respond” to reviews at all is when someone tweets at me that they reviewed my book. I usually say, “Thanks for reviewing!” or, if they liked it, “I’m glad you enjoyed!” I stress out about even this. But it seems rude to ignore someone tweeting at you when they took the time to review your book. So I err on the side of vague gratitude (which is underlain by real gratitude). Sarah Wendell gives a great conference session on this topic, and she’s funnier and more articulate than I am on this topic, so I encourage you to check her out if you ever have the chance.

 6. I have become friends/friendly with some reviewers. Sometimes I worry about this.
But I think it’s inevitable. We like the same kinds of books: I write them, and they read them and review them. It’s a kind of self-selection: it’s bound to happen. I also think that if you’re worried about turning into Kathleen Hale, you’re probably not going to turn into Kathleen Hale. You might make some mistakes, but they’re gonna be smaller than hers.

 7. I don’t think this means they owe me reviews on any subsequent books. 

8. I don’t think this means they owe me positive reviews on any subsequent books.

 9. I’m not going to say anything one way or the other if they do or do not review or do or do not like my subsequent books.

 10. Because basically, I hang on to two first principles.

 a) I wrote a book, but then I put it out into the world. I cannot control the world. (If I could control the world, I would not be writing books. Okay, yes I would.) The world is full of people who will not like my book. I cannot make them like my book. All I can do is send their reviews to my friends and say what the everloving hell? Sometimes this is hard, but you know what? So is being a grown up, yet I manage to do that every day—mostly.

b) I am so crazy-lucky that people are reading and reviewing my books.

This is not rocket science, people.

End rant.

Now because that was so heavy, here’s a picture of my boyfriend.

My boyfriend has not reviewed my books. But if he did, I would not respond. I would die, but I would not respond. Photo by Ewen Roberts via Flickr Creative Commons.
My boyfriend has not reviewed my books. But if he did, I would not respond. I would die, but I would not respond.
 I would die, but I would not respond. Photo by Ewen Roberts via Flickr Creative Commons.

 

 

 

 

In praise of critique partners, one in particular.

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Sandy's shy. (Really.)
Sandy’s shy. (Really. I know it’s hard to believe, but you try taking a picture of her.)

Once upon a time there was a girl named Jenny who liked to read romance novels. One day she thought, hey, maybe I should write a romance novel. How hard can it be, really?

Well, the gods heard that one, and after they finished laughing and doing some minor smiting of the prideful, they sent her a critique partner named Sandy.

Sandra Owens and I met in an online chapter of Romance Writers of America. We were both writing Regencies at the time—or trying to. We shared some opinions in common about that experience but I can’t tell you what they are OTHERWISE I WOULD HAVE TO KILL YOU. And I like to leave the suspense-writing to Sandy.

I’ve written before about the weird and awesome relationship that you develop with critique partners, about how you skip all the “real life” getting-to-know-you stuff and get right to the guts of things: you want to be a writer. Hi, you say, here’s this thing I wrote, tell me what’s wrong with it, and also, should I get a blog tour company for this next release or is that just a waste of money?

Sandy was the first person I practiced being a writer with, both technically, in terms of honing my craft, but also emotionally, in terms of ADMITTING I WANTED TO DO SOMETHING I MIGHT FAIL AT. I’ve said before, and I don’t think Sandy would disagree with me, that on paper, we don’t have that much in common. Our books are different, we live in different countries, we’re in different stages of life.

But it never mattered. (I guess it could have. We’ve both talked about what a relief it was to meet for the first time in person and actually, you know, LIKE each other. But I think we were always destined to end up with our feet propped up, drinking wine and talking about the fake worlds inside our heads.)

Sandy and I read each other’s “bad” books. (Hers is getting overhauled; mine will never see the light of day.) When we met each other, neither of us had any pubishing credentials and neither of us had an agent. One of us (not Sandy) might have been a little shaky on the concept of point of view.

Fast-forward a few years. Today, a funny thing happened.

It's like we're at the Olympics and we're on the podium and there's an American flag and a Canadian flag, I didn't check who was #2. Probably the Ukrainians.
It’s like we’re at the Olympics and we’re on the podium and there’s an American flag and a Canadian flag. I didn’t check who was #2. Probably the Ukrainians.

Yes, there we are, #1 and #3 in the Amazon romance series store. Dang. I rewrote this a thousand times because like most women, I’m socialized to be uncomfortable with self-praise, but I’m just going to say it. There was a lot of luck in there, for sure, and a kick-ass literary agent. But there was also a crapload of hard work.

We did it, Sandy.

 

The Thaw: A Christmas Romance

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12 Days of Christmakwanzakah
12 Days of Christmakwanzakah

This is the story of Danny, who is the best friend of Cassie, the heroine in my holiday novel Saving the CEO, which is book 1 in the 49th Floor series. You don’t need to have read Saving the CEO, though, to read this story—it works as a standalone.

In Saving the CEO, Danny spends a lot of time trying to convince Cassie to join him for Christmas at his mother’s hobby farm, where his hippie mom is undergoing a back-to-the-land-themed midlife crisis. Cassie, having visited with him the previous Christmas, decides she’s too fond of things like central heating and running water to accompany him. (And, of course, by the time Christmas rolls around, she’s too busy enjoying her happily-ever-after.) So Danny is on his own.

Enjoy! And check out the other free stories in the 12 Days of Christmakwanzaka blog hop! Some of my favourite authors are participating.

Happy Holidays!
Jenny

The Thaw
by Jenny Holiday

If Danny had known that his mother’s back-to-the-land kick had gotten so serious that she’d let the pipes freeze, he never would have agreed to come up to the farm for Christmas.

“Dammit!” he yelped as he tripped over something on his way to the outhouse. It was only nine o’clock, but on Christmas Eve in Cowbit, Ontario, it had already been dark for a good five hours. And since Mom had also decided that electricity was another bourgeois luxury she didn’t need, it was dark.

The flashlight on his iPhone barely punctured the unremitting black as he swung it around, trying to see what he’d tripped on. He stooped to pick up the large, oblong…butter churn? He wasn’t totally sure because even though Mom used the phrase “back to the land,” as if she were returning to some bucolic past, she had actually spent her whole life before moving to Cowbit in a succession of Toronto apartments. The only time Danny had seen a butter churn had been while watching reruns of Little House on the Prairie in one of those “shoeboxes in the sky,” as she now called them, so he wasn’t overly confident in his ability to ID one in the wild.

The thing about shoeboxes in the sky, though, is that they generally had heat, light, and running water. Not to mention TV, cell service, and nearby delis. In fact, he missed his own shoebox—his gorgeous, tricked out shoebox—something fierce right now.

Sighing, he aimed his phone in the general direction of the outhouse. “Merry fucking Christmas.”

“And happy fucking New Year.”

“Jesus Christ!” Danny jumped about a foot.

“Sorry.” The beam of a strong flashlight came closer, as did the sound of feet crunching in the snow. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”

“It’s okay,” he said, straining his eyes to make out the man behind the low, gravely voice. He was only able to see the guy’s legs, clad in jeans and Sorel boots.

“I’m Jake Arnet. I live over there.”

He could imagine Jake pointing over his shoulder, because other than his mom’s, there was only one other house on this stretch of rural road.

“Daniel Carlson,” he said. “I’m visiting my mom.”

“Ah,” said Jake, and Danny could hear the smile in his voice. “Son of the pioneer woman. Let me guess, you killed a deer for Christmas dinner, and you’re out here tanning its hide.”

“No. I consumed a veggie-soy loaf and a sugar-, dairy-, and gluten-free pumpkin pie for Christmas dinner, followed by a secret bag of potato chips I smuggled onto the premises, and now I am on my way to the outhouse because my mother apparently can’t be bothered to prevent her goddamned pipes from freezing.”

Jake laughed. A throaty, sexy laugh that warmed the frigid air. Danny wondered suddenly how old Jake was. Probably a sixty-something hermit like Danny’s mother. Why would you choose to live out here unless you’d been around the block a few times and/or were slightly mentally unhinged?

“You want to use my bathroom?”

The offer sent a jolt of pleasure through Danny’s frozen system. To take a piss without a coat on. To not have to worry about dropping his phone into the abyss. To wash his hands with hot water. The sound that ripped from his throat sounded vaguely, embarrassingly, orgasmic.

“I take it that’s a yes?”

“A thousand times yes.”

Another chuckle. “I hear you. I’m just out here for some firewood, and it’s cold enough. I don’t know how your mother does it.”

“Can I ask you a question?” Danny said as he let Jake’s beam of light guide him along a shoveled path. “Would you happen to know if my mother has a butter churn?”

“She does indeed.”

Danny shook his head at the impossibly starry night sky, and soon they’d reached Jake’s house, its windows dotted with warm, yellow light.

“Oh, you have electricity. God bless you.”

“And a furnace, and running water. I like to live large.”

Danny tried not to run the last few feet to the door.

“It’s open,” said Jake from behind him. “Just go in. I’m going to leave some of this wood on the porch.”

Danny gratefully did as instructed, pushing open the door and emerging into…the Davy Crockett edition of Architectural Digest.

The house was gorgeous. There was wood everywhere in the open-concept space—floors, a wall of cabinets, an enormous island that divided the kitchen from the living area. Low, warm light made everything glow. This was a log cabin fit for a king.

“Bathroom is just down the hall,” said Jake, coming in behind him and facing away from Danny as he shook the snow off his coat in the entryway.

The voice from the dark, it turned out, inhabited a tall, trim body. The jeans he’d caught a mere impression of outside hugged a spectacular ass. Danny closed his eyes for a moment. Look at him, ogling a straight, elderly mountain man. Had it come to this? This was the last year he spent Christmas in Cowbit.

Jake straightened, turned, and smiled.

Holy shit.

Not only was Jake not elderly, he couldn’t have been more than thirty-five.

Too bad Danny couldn’t also have been wrong about the straight part. Because Jake was gorgeous. But these butch mountain men always were. This one had black hair, green eyes, and full, pink naturally-pouty lips.

“After you use the bathroom, I’ll fortify you with real Christmas dinner—I’ve got leftovers.” When Danny didn’t say anything, just stood there gaping, Jake added, “If you want. Or, just use the bathroom.”

The prospect of contraband mashed potatoes jarred Danny into moving. As he passed a roaring fire in the living room, he almost wept as he stopped for a moment to hold his icy hands up to the flames. “I thought when you said you were getting firewood that maybe you heated this place with a wood stove.”

“Nope, forced air.” Jake grinned. “Just having a fire for the sake of it. If you can’t have a roaring fire on Christmas Eve, when can you?”

###

After standing with his hands under the hot tap for several minutes, Danny came back out to the main room to find a plate full of food on the coffee table in front of the fire.

“Oh my God,” he moaned. He knew he should probably wait until Jake reappeared, but the sight of gravy-drenched turkey and the mashed potatoes of his dreams threw all sense of decorum out the window, and he just sat right down and picked up a fork.

“You want a drink?” Jake asked from the kitchen. “I’m just back from dinner at a friend’s, and I could use one—it’s too dark and icy out here to mess with even one drink when you’re driving. Wine? Beer? I’ve got whiskey, too.”

“You choose,” said Danny, unable to form a more articulate sentence on account of the goat cheese and bacon-flecked mashed potatoes he had just placed on his tongue.

He swallowed as Jake approached with two glasses of red wine. “These potatoes are the best thing I have ever eaten in my entire life.”

“Aww. You’re just saying that because you’ve only had soy loaf today.”

“Did you make them? They’re unnaturally good.”

“I did. Took them to a potluck—all the local strays banded together for Christmas dinner—and I came back with some leftovers of everything.”

“Which I am demolishing,” Danny put his fork down. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” Jake motioned for him to continue. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I imagine staying with your mother is…challenging. Providing some protein and booze is the least I can do.”

“Do you know her well?”

“I’ve only been here ten months, so not really. We’re friendly enough. I tried to give her some advice about her corn last summer.

“Let me guess?” Danny said. “You told her to—I don’t know—water it, maybe?” Danny’s mom was under the impression that nature would provide everything. That all people needed to do was adjust their consumerist ways and then bask in the bounty of nature.

“Guilty as charged. I may have also suggested fertilizer.”

“Oooh. I bet she has a voodoo doll of you somewhere in her house.”

“She has been a little…distant lately.” Jake laughed. “It’s good of you to come visit, though.”

“I almost didn’t. My best friend usually comes with me, but she didn’t this year.” He thought of Cassie, who was no doubt cozied up with her billionaire boyfriend. They had only just admitted their feelings for one another, and it had been a happily-ever-after worthy of a romance novel. He’d be lucky if he ever found that kind love. He was happy for her, but in truth, he was a little jealous. And not just because she had heat and running water this Christmas.

He was getting maudlin. Time to change the subject. “So what about you? You farm?” Danny mother’s use of the word farm was impressionistic. Her place was a hobby farm at best. He hadn’t really noticed any crops in the immediate vicinity, but then, it was the dead of winter, and what did he know?

“Nope. I’m a carpenter.”

“That’s why this place is so gorgeous.” He eyed Jake, who, with the warm glow of the fire dancing on the sharp planes of his face, was just as gorgeous as his house. What a freaking shame. “How does a carpenter such as yourself end up in Cowbit?” He gestured at the wall of cabinets. “You could make a fortune selling those in Toronto.”

“I grew up in Peterborough,” Jake said, naming the small city that lay a couple hours to the south. “I’ve moved around a bit recently.” He smiled sheepishly. “Well, I went through a big break up recently, to be honest. One of those that makes you reassess your whole life, you know?

Danny didn’t know. He’d had a few doses of minor heartbreak, like anyone, but the idea of a love that changed everything was totally foreign to him. If he hadn’t watched Cassie and Jack tumble headlong into it, he would have said it was the stuff of fairy tales.

“I’d always wanted to start my own cabinet-making business, and after I picked myself up and dusted myself off, I thought, why the hell not? I don’t have any more to lose.”

“But why here?”

Jake shrugged. “If I’m being honest, I think part of the answer is that I was running away. My life was so intertwined with my ex. Same friends, all that. I needed something radically different. And this place was cheap, and it has a huge heated outbuilding I use as a workshop.”

Danny wanted to whistle his admiration. Jake seemed to be saying that he was a mess, but Danny saw quite the opposite: a man who’d taken control and changed his life, making it into something worthwhile and admirable.

It was strange to be sitting by the fire with a stranger, listening to him talk so openly. He was struck with the overwhelming desire to reciprocate, and, before he could think better of it, he blurted, “My best friend just got together with the guy of her dreams, and I’m afraid things will never be the same between us.

Where the hell had that come from?

“And also that I’ll be alone my whole life.”

And that?

But instead of getting up and running away screaming, Jake just nodded. “I know the feeling. But if you’ll excuse me going all Walden Pond on you for a moment, I think it’s important to accept that you might be alone forever. Any of us might be.”

“Well, aren’t you a bundle of Christmas joy?” Danny had been trying to lighten the mood, but the joke had almost caught in his thickening throat.

“I’m serious. That’s my big takeaway from the break up. You have to be okay with being alone. I know I sound like a self-help book, but it’s true. It’s impossible to have a meaningful relationship, romantic or platonic, if part of the reason you’re in it—even a tiny part of the reason—is that you’re afraid to be alone.”

Jake shook his head. “Dude. Sorry. I got carried away there.” He poured some more wine into Danny’s glass. “You came over to use the bathroom, and now I’m laying all this philosophy shit on you.”

Danny smiled. “It’s okay.” He refrained from saying that Jake’s comments had hit a little too close to home. He took a big gulp of wine, then cleared his throat. “Well, whoever your ex is, she sounds like a great big idiot to me. If she can walk away from a guy who makes mashed potatoes like this, she’s not right in the head.”

Jake, who had been staring at the fire, swung his gaze to Danny. Stared at him for a long moment.

“He.”

“Excuse me?”

“My ex. The great big idiot who’s not right in the head is a he.”

Oh, shit.

My book has a theme song. My boyfriend Jon Bon Jovi wrote it.

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Oh, look, it's my boyfriend. (Photo by Earl McGehee via Flickr.)
Oh, look, it’s my boyfriend. (Photo by Earl McGehee via Flickr.)

I’m blogging over at Entangled in Romance today about how the official song of my debut romance novel, Saving the CEO, is the theme song to the children’s TV show Blue’s Clues. As I said in that post, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, consider yourself lucky.

I was kidding of course. (Kind of. When I’m old and gray, that song will probably still give me PTSD. And then I’ll arrive at the pearly gates and a pack of blue squeaky dogs will make me solve mysteries before I get in.)

Want to know what the theme song for the book is? Why, it’s Love’s the Only Rule, by my boyfriend, Jon Bon Jovi.

What? You didn’t know JBJ was my boyfriend? That’s okay, he doesn’t either. Jon and I have been dating since the early 1980s, when his hair was bigger than mine, but whatever.

I tried to find a better pic of 1980s era JBJ, but we're all about respecting copyright here at jennyholiday.com, and this was the only creative commons one I could find. But REMEMBER? (Photo by Rhonda Oglesby via Flickr.)
I tried to find a better pic of 1980s era JBJ, but we’re all about respecting copyright here at jennyholiday.com, and this was the only creative commons one I could find. But REMEMBER? (Photo by Rhonda Oglesby via Flickr.)

Love’s the Only Rule is the perfect song for my characters Jack and Cassie, because, man do these two ever have rules. Jack especially is the poster boy for the tightly wound, Type A persona. But as the back cover copy of the book says, you don’t build a business empire without a little discipline.

Enter Cassie, the math genius who is is perfectly positioned to rescue a business deal gone sour for Jack. And, of course, she’s going to force his hand on a few other issues, too. All I will say is: rules will be broken, people. In an enjoyable way.

Joking aside, I actually listened to this song obsessively while working on edits for this book. I love the way it builds, just like a story, until it feels like the chorus is inevitable. Just like a good love story.

Here’s a cupcake and a glass of wine. Don’t worry, your innards are safe with me.

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I went on a retreat, and this was my bath. Really there's nothing else to say, so OI should probably stop here.
I went on a retreat, and this was my bath. Really there’s nothing else to say, so I should probably stop here.

Writing friends are weird. (And by “weird” I mean “THE BEST.”)

You go about your normal life. You have friends. You also have “friends.” Your real-life friends are neighbours or co-workers or older friends you’ve made a point to keep in touch with. Your “friends” are people you care about—or don’t care about but don’t have the balls to unfriend, even when they post status updates about their latest firearms purchases—but don’t really interact with in any meaningful way. If you’re lucky, you have a real life friend who really knows you. I’m talking about knowing all your secrets. Hopes and dreams and all that shit. And frustrations: they know what makes you rage-y, which is just as important as hopes and dreams and all that shit. I’ve been lucky in this department.

But then you have your writing friends. They’re in their own category. You meet them because you’re both writing. You might have nothing else in common, but the thing that you both get is that even though you have nothing in common, you have everything in common. Because your writing friends? You might as well slice open your stomach and literally spill your guts. They get to see what you write before it’s ready for anyone else’s eyes. They see it while it’s still half-baked, ill-formed. You trust them enough to say, “Here’s this thing I made. Now tell me what’s wrong with it.” The best of them see what you meant, rather than what you wrote, and I’m telling you, you can’t pay for that shit. (Also there’s the part where they will happily talk about comma splices for twenty minutes at a time.)

And even more than all this, your writing friends are the first people with whom you practice being who you want to be. Because you’ve already put your vulnerable, quivering innards on display, it goes without saying that these people understand that what you’re saying is: “I want to be a writer.”

I might be a party of one here, but saying that was a big deal for me. It meant saying, “I think I can write something good enough—eventually.” It went against my ingrained Midwestern self-deprecation. It meant saying, “Here is what I’m trying to do. It might not be good enough, but I’m showing it to you anyway.”

Oh, I’m speaking in  abstracts here, and what’s more boring than that? Let’s get real. I have two writing BFFs and I want to talk about them a little bit. I’m gonna go chronologically.

One, named May (who isn’t published yet, but it’s only a matter of time), I met because we were match-made by a friend in common who somehow knew we were both romance novel readers with vague ideas of maybe-someday-writing-one. I have been trying to figure out when we first stared corresponding, but since I have the worst memory in the world, all I can say is 2007? 2008? I don’t know? But weekly email updates have been exchanged for MANY years. Bribes have been enforced. (I may or may not have pledged to give $200 to the George W. Bush presidential library fund if I didn’t finish manuscript X by date Y.)

The other, Sandra Owens, I met in a funny way. I can’t talk about it (or I’d have to kill you), but suffice it to say that we met because we were both complaining about a situation we found ourselves in. I don’t think Sandy would disagree with me when I say that on paper, we don’t have a lot in common. Stage of life, geography, even subgenre: not the same! But it doesn’t matter because she’s seen my innards. I will say that when we met in person at RWA in Atlanta last year it was a huge relief that we clicked in “real life.”

So last weekend the three of us, who have doing weekly email check-ins/cheerleading sessions for years, rented a house on Lake Erie.

It was my second meeting with Sandy, my first ever (!) with May.

Oh, my God. The house was huge and gorgeous. The beach was gorgeous. The sunsets were gorgeous.

The view. You know, no big,
The view. You know, no big,

The company was the gorgeous-est of all Everyone was working on different stuff. Everyone was also juggling various real life demands, but as pledged, everyone put those aside (except for that one time May decided to do her Latin homework “for fun” over lunch).

We got up every morning, and by unspoken agreement, we wrote. Sometimes we peeled off individually for walks on the beach, naps, and so on, but we all  had our noses to the grindstone pretty much all day.

Then came wine o’clock, which meant readings. And by “readings,” I mean reading out loud from works in progress. Dang, I’d rather be on a roller coaster. But Prosecco helps.

Look at Sandy reading from a book y'all don't het to read for MONTHS.
Look at Sandy reading from a book y’all don’t het to read for MONTHS.

Then we talked about what we read. Then we drank more wine. And ate cupcakes. Then we went to bed.

Then we did it all again the next day.

My outdoor office. Which is kind of a lie. It was really more like a still life that I arranged and photographed and then it was too cold so I went back inside. But still.
My outdoor office. Which is kind of a lie. It was really more like a still life that I arranged and photographed, and then it was too cold so I went back inside. But still.

So I’m having a little trouble with reentry. Because I want to live in that place, that lovely zone where you meet the people who see your guts all year long, and they say, “I understand. You’re doing a good job. Here’s a cupcake and a glass of wine. Don’t worry, your innards are safe with me.”

 

In which I turn 40 + one day, and I get a book deal.

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BOOK.
BOOK.

 

DEAL.
DEAL. (Yeah, I’m good with the clip art.)

 

Well, yeah, so there’s this thing where I signed a book deal. (Some of you are going, “Wait? What?” and some of you are going, “FINALLY.”)

If you don’t know about my not-so-secret life as a romance novelist, you can go here to catch up.

How did I get this book deal? It went like this:

Me: I like to read romance novels. I am a writer. Maybe one of the things I write should be a romance novel. HOW HARD CAN IT BE?

Universe: Um, actually super hard, you asshole.

[Insert laughably bad first manuscript here. Point of view? What’s that?]

[Insert years of rejection here.]

[Insert that one time when I thought I would go on maternity leave and finish my book and get an agent and get a book deal…oh, and care for an infant here.] [In my defense, I do live in Canada, Land of the One Year Mat Leave.]

[Now you should go fix a snack in order to simulate time passing. Eat it and watch a TV show, then get back to me.]

Well then, my friends, I got me an agent. I got me a kick-ass agent. That had always been goal number one. Like, to the extent that I actually avoided having my work seen by editors, which made for a few pathetically-comic situations in which editors wanted to see said work. (More on this in another post. Maybe.) There is more to say here, for sure. I can make entire speeches on the following topics: Why do you need an agent in the current publishing climate? Why do you need an agent when many publishers accept unagented manuscripts? Couldn’t you make 80 bazillion more dollars self-publishing? But I shan’t make them now (the arguments, not the dollars). (More on this in another post. Maybe.)

The relevant point is that said agent called me the day after my 40th birthday to tell me there was interest in my books.

Picture this, if you will: you just turned 40. It was fun. You got a massage and then you went to dinner sans child. However, now you are 40 + one day. And your very-early-January birthday always lines up with the first week back to work after the holidays. And you always extend your holiday overconsumption to your birthday because, come on, when your birthday is this close to New Year’s you might as well round up. So when it is one day past your birthday, the fun is over on SO MANY FRONTS. Holidays over. Time for kale. Back to work. You are 40 and there is NOTHING TO LOOK FORWARD TO EVER AGAIN.

I was, in fact, having a monologue on this very topic to my friend Lulu whilst washing dishes when my agent called. (ON THE OTHER PHONE. Sometimes I want to go back to my 1985 self and be like, you are NOT GOING TO BELIEVE THIS SHIT.) Then a complicated chain of emails and voicemails and calling back commenced, because my 1985 self is basically still in charge of my life.

So there was some to-ing and fro-ing (not in my heart, just about the contract details) and, lo, a couple months later I have signed a three-book deal with Entangled Publishing. Regencies! Like, it’s 1813 and shit! Maybe you will want to read them! (Probably you should just go back and re-watch Colin Firth in Pride and Prejudice but you can only do that for six hours every day, so what the hell else are you going to do with all those other hours?)

So, in summation: Being 40 kind of sucked. Being 40 + one day kind of rocked.

www.boyswhoreadnovels.com

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So my new entrepreneurial fantasy is to start a web site that specializes in matchmaking boys who read novels and girls (and boys) who would like to date boys who read novels. If you read the very smart comments posted to my entry about how boys apparently don’t read fiction any more, you will see why this is such an opportunity. [Update: Sadly, none of the comments survived the transition to the new platform.]

My original plan was to buy the domain www.boyswhoreadnovels.com. But when you look at that the world “whore” just jumps out at you, doesn’t it? And that’s just not the vibe I’m going for. The obvious alternative is www.boysthatreadnovels.com but that’s not grammatically correct and we can’t have that. Then there’s www.novelreadingboys.com, but it just doesn’t have the same zing.

The other problem is what to do about, as the Beach Boys said, the “two girls for every boy” problem. If you believe the statistics, boys who read novels are rare, which is of course why the girls I know want to date them. But maybe if you’re just upfront about the skewed fishpond to begin with, that’s honest enough, isn’t it?

I can see the entries now. Vital stats, instead of being height, weight, blah, blah, are: the last book you read, the last book you abandoned, the book that’s been sitting on your bedside table for a year. Photos not allowed unless boy is pictured with book.

Lily used to make fun of me because I used to have a special fondness for boys who read books while walking down the street. It was like they couldn’t be bothered to stop reading while getting from point A to point B, which, come on, is very appealing. Members of this sub-group, however, are usually not reading novels. They’re usually reading Marx. And that’s just not attractive.

You walk around the world with a great gaping deficit in your soul if you eschew fiction

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Check out this interesting essay, Why Hemingway is Chick-Lit about the alleged gender gap in fiction-reading. I shouldn’t say alleged because it seems to be a fact that women read fiction and men don’t. Women make up 88 per cent of readers of general interest fiction and top men, though not so dramatically, in genres like science fiction and mysteries. The question, of course, is why this is so, and what it means for fiction writing. I was surprised by these figures, though they are certainly borne out in my immediate family. The girls read fiction and the boys read non-fiction. The essay surveys lots of explanatory theories, but I think what’s more important is not what this means for gender relations or even what it means for fiction reading/writing/marketing, but what it means for boys. Not reading fiction surely must stunt you somehow. I’m not being coy; I really think you walk around the world with a great gaping deficit in your soul if you eschew fiction.

In a rut much?

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So I’ve lately been afraid that I’m in a rut, fiction-wise. I always fret about this as I pick up the latest urban-fiction-written-by 30-something-Canadian-girl, but my latest flare-up started because I got into this thing with a clerk at Book City. I was buying a book of short stories (The Dolphins of Sainte-Marie by Sandra Sabatini, which is the best book of the year and I simply cannot rave about it enough), and he started to take me around the store to “show” me some of his favorite short story collections and I was like, no, no, no thanks, tried it. He started with Alice Munro and Carol Shields and I was like, first of all, do you think I was born yesterday? and second of all, are you kidding me? I was recently forced to read an Alice Munro story and it was about a middle age woman dying of cancer in a small town. She went to visit someone who lived on a farm (why exactly is a little fuzzy) and she got lost in the rows of corn and it was like, a metaphor for her illness and her life. Later, trying to be open-minded, I started Friendship, Courtship, Hateship, or whatever it is called (and you have to admit it’s a brilliant title, even though I can’t get it right) and the opening scene was this spunky early-century woman at the train station inquiring about shipping furniture to Regina or something. And she has to give her address and it’s noted that the houses in town had only recently been numbered. And what is it with Carol Shields and this whole “dropped threads” my-sewing-project-is-doomed metapor for womanhood? Thanks but no thanks.

So I try to say to the guy, I like stories by Barbara Gowdy (because that’s respectable, right?). I also like stories by Russell Smith and this great recent collection by Heather Birrell, who no one has ever heard of. The god of short stories is T.M. McNally. You want to weep from the trueness and perfection of it all when you read him, and, and…

He’s like, who?

This problem also extends to novels. And sometimes I think it’s not really a problem because usually I think, you like what you like, right? The world is too full of too many good books to waste time with anything you don’t love, right? So it’s totally okay to discard out of hands books about: 1) boys, 2) other centuries, 3) economic hardship, and 4) war.

Right?

I don’t know Chicklets. In school they made me read things like The Grapes of Wrath and A Tale of Two Cities, and I loved them. No one is making me do that now. My beef is basically that you have to wade through so many ailing women in corn fields to get to the out-of-your-comfort-zone good stuff that it’s tempting to just not ever branch out.

I was a little alarmed this evening when I was talking to Mr. Mock about What I Was Reading These Days and I pulled out of my bag two books I currently have on the go. They were called:

1. The Girls
2. Dead Girls

In a rut much?

 

This Book Will Save Your Life by A.M. Homes

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So remember A.M. Homes? The clever one? The one who writes books about suburban alienation and the millions of modern existential mini-crises that comprise a life? In Music for Torching, the protagonists torch their house one day, wordlessly letting a summer evening barbeque become an inferno, for no apparent reason other than that the ennui was becoming too terrible. There’s a story in the Safety of Objects collection in which the mother keeps her comatose son in bed in his room, pretending that everything is fine, because the alternative is just too terrible. Just too terrible…

Well, Mock Chicken is heartily recommending her latest, This Book Will Save Your Life. One the one hand, it’s what we love from A.M. Homes: spot-on cultural criticism that makes you laugh out loud from the sheer true-ness of it, set in a surreal city-on-overdrive fantasy world where landscapes float past you in their cheerful toxicity.

Except this one’s about becoming happy. The main character, Richard, who’s a soulless day trader living alone in a hermetically sealed mansion-box in the hills above Los Angeles, has a panic-attack sort of medical crisis that is never really explained. This is followed by the sudden appearance of a gigantic sink hole in his yard. He’s scared and so he starts to change things in his life, reaching out to the people he meets as well as the people he already knows and kind of gradually becoming happy. It’s about looking at something that is just too terrible…and fixing it.

Sounds like a self-help book, I know, and the title obviously plays on that notion, but it’s a page-tuner, honest! It’s sly that way. I started wondering if maybe this book had a secret Buddhist agenda, because it’s really about changing the way you look at the world, rather than actually changing the world that you’re looking at. So I asked Lulu (mistress of the 12 Steps to Enlightenment program, you will recall), who read it on the beach on her recent Caribbean vacation, to comment.

It’s about the struggle for inner peace and freedom, about learning to be happy focusing on inner peace and allowing yourself to try different things, not getting set in your ways, and being surprised by the effects of opening up to letting new people into your world.

I loved the ending with him in the middle of the ocean floating on the door—a metaphor for going with the flow and accepting the lessons he had learned over the last few months in his life: no need to stress over things we have no control over. It’s better to live life than hide in our own routine of what’s comfortable. No matter how healthy and careful you are, life is not full hiding from yourself.

He was so free in the end just floating and living. He had created this family of unique individuals who all had brought elements into his world that he was always so afraid of and didn’t even know why he was so afraid of.

As the books moves forward it almost seems like he chose to remember his life, childhood, marriage and relationships a certain way. Once he starts living a little more and letting go of his routine and selfish environment he starts to see things the way the really are and were.

This is lovely, sneaky book, Chcklets.

What if this is actually a superpower that Lulu possesses?

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The other day lulu and I were walking down the street talking about books when the author of the book she was reading walked past us! Lulu recognized her because she’d bought the book at a film the author was introducing. But can you imagine our good luck? And what if this is actually a superpower that Lulu possesses (you know, besides her astonishing ability to conduct massive amounts of static electricity)? What if she can conjure authors you’re reading? I’m in the midst of a run of thirtysomething Canadian women writers (stop me before I branch out too much!) so it’s not impossible to imagine. There’s Heather Birrell! And she’s walking down the street with Elizabeth Ruth!

I actually just finished—and must highly recommend, but I digress—This Book Will Save Your Life (which is a novel) by A.M. Homes, an author I have always liked. I love how she’s “A.M.,” instead of you know, Amy Marie or whatever it is. The initials-only people are so often have ambiguous genders and you assume that they’re doing it because they’re total recluses and can’t bear the idea of their adoring fans actually knowing their names. But not our A.M. She’s pictured on the back flap in all her X-chromosome glory.

But anyway, what if I ran into her on the street? I’d be all, yo, A.M.! I can’t see it. But isn’t it a lovely fantasy? I wouldn’t even need to say anything to my conjured authors, just savor the delicious irony of physical proximity, of having them manifest so near to the emotional space they’ve been so busy filling inside my head.

A friend in school melted a Barbie as a visual aid in a presentation on medieval torture methods

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By now you’ve probably heard that Barbie and Ken have gotten back together. What? You didn’t know they’d broken up? Hello! Barbie dumped Ken a couple years ago in favour of Blaine, a fun-loving surfer dude. Ken was too organized, too predictable. Carefree Blaine offered excitement, something Barbie really needed after all those decades cooped up in the Dream House. Plus he looked really good in his swim trunks. (Barbie was disappointed, though, to find out that like Ken, Blaine didn’t have any genitalia.)

Blaine, it turns out, was Barbie’s lost weekend. “Ken, I still love you,” said the headlines. He took her back. He’s trying to be more spontaneous. He has a new hairdo, which involves actual hair, not just a plastic hair-shaped helmet.

Of course the correct response to all this is cynicism. Just think of all the Blaines we went out and bought. Think of all the new and improved Kens we shall have to go out and buy now. It’s shameless. But what I want to know is how does a girl get a job at Mattel writing fictional press releases and not have to be bound with something so oppressive as reality?

Seriously, why is Barbie so enduringly fascinating with her permanent smile and permanent high-heel ready feet? Did you know that a recent study at the University of Bath showed that most young girls mutilate their Barbies? This confirms what I have suspected all along, that Barbie is pretty much a blank slate for all kinds of creativity and mischief among the under-10 set.

My sister and I weren’t allowed Barbies but the ones brought over by our babysitter were grandfathered in. We built a Buckingham palace out of cardboard boxes with the tops torn off to create a kind of aerial view and furnished it beds made out of Velveeta boxes and hand-coloured wallpaper. Our babysitter, riding the end of the punk years, explained to us the difference between royalty and commoners. The commoners we differentiated by dying their hair with Kool-Aid and giving them Mohawks.

A friend in school melted a Barbie as a visual aid in a presentation on medieval torture methods. He boiled her in oil in a fondue pot.

Another person I know cut erasers off the ends of pencils and pasted them on the Ken dolls’ crotches.

The list goes on. Start asking people about Barbie and you’ll uncover all kinds of childhood torture stories. The impulse seems to be universal; it’s the details of Barbie’s degradation that are so compelling. I guess it’s kind of an universal kid impulse to destroy things, but I wonder if we can’t also interpret it as a tiny little backlash against what Barbie stands for. Or maybe it’s just the juxtaposition that’s so satisfying: such a stereotypically pretty and proper lady being subject to such gross humiliations is just so damn funny.

My dream is a lush coffee table book on the topic. Huge, glossy photos of Barbie and Ken in compromising positions accompanied by essays and profiles of the tormenters.

 

She Got Up Off the Couch by Haven Kimmel

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You know how sometimes you read a book and you start turning down the corners of pages because you’re on the subway and you want to jot down a particularly clever/sad/insightful passage when you’re next able? And you know how sometimes you get to the end of a book and you look at the mangled mess you’ve made of it – every tenth page turned down – and you realize how totally and utterly in love with this book you are?

Well, may I recommend She Got Up Off the Couch by Haven Kimmel? Love her already. Love everything she’s written except maybeSomething Rising (Light and Swift) which was kind of a misfire, but only because we have such high standards for our Haven. If you’re just joining us, run out and read The Solace of Leaving Early, Chicklets.

She Got Up Off the Couch is a memoir and it’s a sequel to A Girl Named Zippy. Both chronicle Zippy’s childhood in a small Indiana town, and both will break your heart with how funny-sad they are. The indelible moment from Zippy that’s burned into my soul is crazy little Zippy (the family’s nickname for their youngest daughter) sitting at the foot of her mom, who’s remote and depressed and lies on the couch all the time. Mom reaches down and lays her hand on the side of Zippy’s face. Zippy leans in a little. That’s it. That’s all that happens, but Zippy craves affection so terribly, and this gesture is so out of character for Mom that it takes your breath away.

Well, in Zippy.2, Mom literally gets up off the couch. She has her own little feminist revolution and sheds 100 pounds while she learns to drive and goes to university. You cheer for Mom, but mostly you cheer for Zippy, who’s now a preteen. The neighbours have to feed her and give her baths because Dad, who loves her, can’t seem to summon the inspiration to carry out the drudgeries that accompany loving a child and Mom goes from depressed on the couch to never-around-because-she’s-at-school. Zippy/Kimmel’s voice is so spot-on and manic and unwavering that it makes you think maybe you’ll die from the trueness of it all. And I guess that’s really Kimmel’s accomplishment: she manages to make Zippy ring true as a kid at the same time that she slyly infuses the book with a perspective on the events that can only come from the passing of time/much therapy/attending seminary (which Kimmel did–the seminary part I mean).

Here’s Zippy on miniaturization, a revelation she has at the Laundromat:

You could buy individual boxes of detergent and fabric softener, even bleach, and there was nothing that made me grind my teeth down with pleasure more than a real thing shrunken down small. The first time my dad showed me a toothache kit from a box of equipment from the Korean War and I saw the tiny cotton balls (the size of very small ball bearings), I nearly swooned. “Let me hold one of those,” I said, almost mad at him. He gave it to me with a tiny pair of tweezers. I let it float in my palm for a moment and then made him take it back. Miniaturization was a gift from God, no doubt about it, and there it was, right in a vending machine in the place we used to do our laundry in New Castle, Indiana.

While her parents drift, Zippy is raised by her friends and their parents and she’s fiercely loyal without realizing it. The book has a chapter called ‘Gold’ in which Zippy expounds on her friends. She hits on something about the difference between your oldest friends, the ones you make because they are there, and the friends you make later because they suit you. Unlike Zippy, I make it sound like the latter is better than the former, and I don’t mean to. Your oldest friends will always be your oldest friends, won’t they? They’re like family; it’s almost as if you didn’t choose them at all, they just happened. But you’d still throw yourself in front of oncoming traffic for them, wouldn’t you? Here’s Zippy on one of these sorts:

Julie was like family and we owned each other permanently, but oh lord the girl ran me ragged. As if the farm weren’t enough, she was becoming an athlete of epic proportions and it was a flat punishment for me. There we’d be at school and the girl was like a piece of my own self and not only that but we were and had always been true to each other – true in a way that everyone could see and I knew it was rare. But in gym class I held my breath and said little prayers to a fluctuating cast of Jesuses that our gym teacher didn’t make Julie the student leader because it meant my certain suffering.

And then there’s the ones where it’s friends at first sight. Like Lulu and Lily, Chicklets! The girls you stumble upon, the girls that make you say, “Oh, I guess I was expecting you. Yes, you are indeed part of the pantheon, so let me just clear a place here on the sofa. Take a load off and sit awhile, and can I get you anything to drink?” You’d jump into oncoming traffic for these friends, too, but it’s less of a mystery why.

Jeanne Ann was new but she didn’t seem to be; she was the easiest friend I’d ever had, and at thirteen, I loved her fiercely. The fierceness and ease were tied up together, somehow…She was a joy to me, she was a new way of being…Night after night she let me go through every single thing she owned, every item in the room she’d lived in all her life, and ask her about it. Where did this come from? I’d ask, and she’d say, I got that in Florida when we went there on vacation, I was seven, I have pictures of myself feeding seagulls, do you want to see them? I did want to see them. Nothing was off-limits to me, either; she never once asked me not to look at something, not to open a box or a letter or a journal. We did that for hours and then we fried bologna and took it in the living room where Jeanne Ann practiced gymnastics while we watched horror movies and teenagers dancing on TV…There was nothing to it; it was as easy as falling off a bridge…the trick to such a friendship isn’t a trick at all—you just have to have the same goal, and we did: to make each other happy…We were thirteen, and lit up like stars.

The thing I wonder about Haven Kimmel is does she have to have a day job? Or can she just sit at her computer and mainline our truest thoughts? Let’s hope for the latter, and just to be on the safe side, let’s all run out and buy her back catalogue.

We see the world through that residue

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The readers among us will want to check out Salman Rushdie’s recent lecture at the Westminster Town Hall Forum in Minneapolis (scroll down a bit and click on “Author Salman Rushdie speaks..” to get the file).

He starts by asking if maybe we have too utilitarian a view of art. Maybe, he says, it’s possible that the arts are for nothing at all. What is theuse of Alice in Wonderland, he asks? You can’t clean your car with it. And here you’d think a novelist with a fatwa on his head wouldn’t be so glib about the uses of art, but he has a refreshing and kind of liberatingly blasphemous take on the whole thing.

He delights his audience, which, according to the moderator, was heavily slanted toward school-aged kids, by saying that when he tried to read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, he found it so boring he wanted to throw up. He’d tucked into it because it was one of the few books that have supposedly really changed the world, in a literal changing-hearts- and-minds kind of way. In fact, he says, very few books have a direct effect on a society.

The books we love, though, he says, change us. Interestingly he says we usually only love a handful of books in a lifetime (he doesn’t say what his are, though he does profess to at least like The Great Gatsby, which he’d reread in anticipation of his visit to Fitzgerald’s hometown. Better than Uncle Tom’s Cabin, anyway).

“The books we love change us. What they leave in us is a little residue. And we see the world through that residue. That is how they change the world.”

Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro

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Yes, this was on the Booker shortlist. It didn’t win but Ishiguro is a past winner for The Remains of the Day. And this one won the Booker-Idol award, which is not really what it’s called but people got to vote online for their faves. Not having read any of the other contenders and having only just finished this one, I am not qualified to pass judgment. But I shan’t let that stop me.

This book is slightly cold and very spare, given its emotional-minefield subject matter, which is not a bad thing per se. It’s like a Hitchcock movie, all taut and restrained, but maybe (oh, it pains me to say it) ever-so-slightly boring for those among us who are less auteur and more amateur.

That said, it’s a page turner. And the whole premise, which is hinted at from the beginning, so I’m not really ruining anything, is tres creepy in a compelling sort of way. They’re these kids who live at this bucolic boarding school type place in the English countryside and don’t have any firsthand experience of the outside world. But lo! They’re really being bred as organ donors for people living in the read world, and you get the sense that we’re in some abstract future. And where it gets extra-crunchy is when we learn that they donate several times over until they “complete,” i.e., die.

It’s a fascinating premise, but the book is really about the relationships among them and their views on their roles in the world, and here’s where it falls short. Ruth and Tommy are in love. No, wait, it’s actually Tommy and Kathy! The switcheroo seems unlikely given the clinical detachment with which the story is told. But who knows? The challenge here was to make us believe in them accepting their fates and to make us believe in their attachment to each other, and this is where I have to say that maybe this book needs to get voted off the island.

On the frontier

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Chicklets, today I visited the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto and I must recommend this experience in the strongest possible terms. Long, long ago, in a past life, I was a graduate student at the University of Toronto for about a gazillion years, and not once did I darken the door of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library. I suppose my research was simply not rare enough to warrant it, me being tragically and inevitably attracted to the pedestrian and the mundane.

Well, my dears, the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library contains, natch, rare books. Tall leather-bound volumes that one imagines being requisitioned as props for the next Harry Potter movie or secreted away by monks bent on preserving Classical civilization against the onslaught of the Dark Ages. Delicious enough, but it is the presentation that thrills the heart of a postmodern bibliophile. The building is one of those concrete monstrosities that the hipsters among us like to hold up as a pristine example of Brutalism. The students call it Fortress Book, and really, a concept so unpleasant as brutality mixed with the adamancy and rigidity implied by any sort of “ism” just doesn’t add up to a spot that inspires a girl to curl up with a good book. But I digress.

Thomas Fisher Rare Book LIbrary at the University of Toronto.
The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library. Or, you know, a spaceship where Johnny Depp delivers your books. Photo: bookchen, flickr.

The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library is a triangle, three walls around an open central atrium . It has three walls and they go up, up, up and are lined with books as far as a girl can see. It is dark, lit with a dim red lights that one imagines preserve the manuscripts in some fashion. One feels tiny standing at the bottom; certainly one feels the predictable emotions of being dwarfed by centuries of human progress, humbled by the insatiable impulse to attain and record knowledge, blah, blah, blah. Yes, it’s predictable, but genuinely felt.

But, Chicklets—and here is where is gets interesting—one also feels as if one in a spaceship. The small central space, the walls with breaks in them for walkways, the dim red lights, the hush. And the people walking around solemnly with white gloves! My goodness, are they scrutinizing a poster from the Spanish Civil War or are they updating the specs on the power converter? One expects Captain Jean-Luc Picard’s voice to come piping in over an intercom, announce that the Borg have spotted us, and demand that all power be directed to the warp engines immediately—make it so!

Or perhaps one has been set loose in outer space, in a probe of sorts. Perhaps one has only just awakened from a deep sleep and one dimly remembers the imminent destruction of Earth, a frantic race to preserve the best of its culture. Perhaps one has won a lottery, lucky girl, and so one is here, drifting though the void with Aristotle and Robespierre and the Ming Dynasty, eating freeze-dried chicken and waiting for rescue by benevolent higher beings. (Although this scenario must also imply that one has duties in the inevitable repopulation/preservation of the human race that one imagines necessarily accompanies the destruction of the earth, mustn’t it? This is unpleasant to contemplate. An exception might be made should one discover that one of the white-gloved cataloguers is, in fact, Johnny Depp. But I digress.)

The delicious thrill of the unlikely juxtaposition of books and spaceships shall not be soon forgotten. And really, it’s rather appropriate, don’t you think, Chicklets? This is the heavy-handed part, where I say that these old old books are frontiers, just as outer space is a frontier. Questing, it’s all the same really, and it’s all terribly noble. Terribly, terribly noble. Make it so.

Posted by Jenny at 6:22 PM | Comments (1)

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