September 26, 2016

Writing workshop

After completing my No. Calif. Book events, I spent a few days at my sister’s home in Sacramento. As it happened, Thursday evening is when her writing group meets. Ann Bancroft, a local journalist, facilitates the group by giving the women a prompt to start them writing, at which time each participant, including Ann, writes for anywhere from 5-20 minutes. Then everyone reads their story aloud in turn, and after each one the group offers comments. But not just any comments. We were limited to: What you liked about it, what was strong about it, and something you’ll remember. Of course after these, other positive critiques were welcomed.

My sister’s practice is to write her stories as memoirs, and over the last several months she’d shared some of her stories with me--those that brought back memories of family experiences. These prompts included Forgiving Enemies, The Moment After Which Everything was Different, and Going through Someone’s Pockets [she wrote about going through our Dad’s after his death].

As luck would have it, the only attendees on this particular Thursday were the leader, my sister, and me. This was a relief, since I didn’t want my writing to be judged by strangers against a higher standard since I was a published novelist. Having already outlined my next historical novel, I decided to try to use the prompts to write scenes for it. Our three prompts were: Somebody Offers Advice You Don’t Want, The Most Annoying Person You Know Gives you a Gift, and “Have You Forgotten Me?” To my surprise and gratification, I easily thought of 3 scenes to illustrate these ideas. However in the 20 minutes allowed, I only got the bare bones down. But I can now say that I’ve started writing what I hope/expect will be my next book.

Posted by maggie at 01:46 PM | Comments (0)

September 18, 2016

new printing coming

Again I’ve gotten behind in my blog posts. It’s partly my husband’s fault, or rather the fault of his retiring last month and abruptly being home all day. Not that he bothers me; mostly he is in his office practicing shofar blowing, Torah chanting, and choir music for the upcoming High Holy Days. Or arranging music and practicing for the klezmer band he’s in. But when he stops to take a walk, I like to join him, both for the company and the exercise.

OK – it’s not really his fault. The major reason is that as summer wanes, my book biz is heating up. I have no idea why, but for the entire month of August, Amazon discounted the print version of Fifty Shades of Talmud almost 60% to $3. Unsurprisingly, sales went up, with the result that the distributor asked for another 1000 copies just as the supply in my garage was also running out. With a big East Coast book tour looming in six weeks, it was apparent that we needed a new printing.

But instead of just reprinting the original, we had time to make some minor changes - those that didn’t involve repaging. There was one piece of Talmud that I’d wanted to use in the first edition, but I couldn’t find the reference in time. Of course I found that just when it was too late to make changes, but now I had the opportunity to include it on a page that had some empty space at the bottom. Also we now had some media reviews that we could put in at the beginning along with the blurbs we’d started with.

So I dropped everything to furiously write the new text, choose which reviews to insert, and then edit these to ensure they’d fit in the available space. A new printing takes five weeks, leaving me less than two weeks to get the new interior in shape. But I OKed the page proofs on Thursday, just in time to head off on a weeklong book tour to northern California. More on that later.

Posted by maggie at 07:34 PM | Comments (0)

September 06, 2016

Sinners and the Sea review

Sinners and the Sea: The Untold Story of Noah's WifeSinners and the Sea: The Untold Story of Noah's Wife by Rebecca Kanner




It's my own fault that I cannot rate "Sinners and the Sea" any stars. Yes the prose is excellent, yes it focuses on the unknown women behind the Bible story of Noah's Ark, and yes it ultimately has a, if not a happy ending, at least a hopeful one. But there was no way an author of any integrity could write this historical novel without dedicating a majority of the scenes to the evil acts and degradations of the sinners that Noah failed to save. For these could not be merely ordinary sins. No they had to be so terrible that God would send humanity to a watery grave.

Since a novelist must show, not tell, we get depictions of rapes, child abuse, torture, and murder along with detailed descriptions of the terrified people clinging to rafts, tree branches, etc. until waves upend them and they drown. I confess that the higher the page number the more quickly I skimmed through them. I also confess that I knew very well what Book of Noah entails, yet I read this novel anyway. My only valid complaint is that [spoiler alert] the name our heroine receives at the end is not Naamah, the name the Talmud gives her - a name the author would have found had she done a simple google search.



View all my reviews

Posted by maggie at 10:37 AM | Comments (0)

September 05, 2016

two more Jewish novels

Continuing my reports on Jewish fiction, I recently read Amy Gottlieb's The Beautiful Possible and Dara Horn's The World to Come back to back. I didn't know that these novels shared the similarity that both books range in time/place from early-mid 1900's Europe to 1950's and contemporary New York. I just knew about the main similarity in that both are considered "Jewish" fiction. I don’t feel comfortable writing about The Beautiful Possible, other than that I read it in one day, because Amy is a friend of mine. Here are the two descriptions:

The Beautiful Possible tells the braided love story of three characters. Walter Westhaus is a German Jew who spent the war years at Tagore’s ashram in India, before arriving at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City. There he meets Sol Kerem, a promising rabbinical student, and Sol’s free-spirited fiancée Rosalie. Walter and Rosalie begin a transcendent love affair that is shattered when Walter moves to Berkeley and Rosalie and Sol move to to lead a congregation in the suburbs. A chance meeting years later reconnects Walter, Sol, and Rosalie—catching the three in a web of desire, heartbreak, and redemption.

In A World to Come, a million-dollar Chagall is stolen from a museum during a singles' cocktail hour. The unlikely thief, former child prodigy Benjamin Ziskind, is convinced that the painting once hung in his parents' living room. This work of art opens a door through which we discover his family's startling history--from an orphanage in Soviet Russia where Chagall taught to suburban New Jersey and the jungles of Vietnam.

But here is what I thought of The World to Come. I found this novel fascinating, beautifully written, and wonderfully creative - especially the final chapter. I appreciated all the Jewish references and how Horn resurrected so many forgotten Yiddish writers. So why only 4 stars instead of 5? Because the characters' stories were so darn sad, so much death and despair. Also because I found myself unable to identify with any of the protagonists; none of them seemed like real people. Eventually I didn't want to care about them after realizing they were pretty much all on their way to a dismal end.

Posted by maggie at 03:21 PM | Comments (0)