Goodreads and the Other Priya

So, somewhere out there there is an author who must really not like me.

One of the perks of having an unusual name--a name that you have to initially repeat three times and then subtly drop into conversation in order to remind people as you know they cannot remember it--is that you get a gmail account with your name on it. Nope.  Did not happen.

And yet people really close to me, family included, send email to priyaparmar@gmail and this is not me.  Whoever that Priya is, she has received attached documents up to 600 pages (my book included as well as my doctorate), emails about the dentist, the beach, the Honda, the birthday party, the bonfire at the beach, my friend Tora's haircut, the centipede in my brother's room, a broken toe and every other type of email that you really do not want other people to see.  I do not blame my family and friends for doing it as I have done it myself.  The funny thing about email?  You cannot get it back.

There is also an author called Priya Parmar.  She teaches at Brooklyn College and writes books about troubled urban youth.  I have a horrible creeping suspicion that the Priya of the gmail and the Priya of the youth in revolt are the same Priya.  In which case that Priya must really not like me as Goodreads has now conflated our profiles.  I am listed as having written four books--three with ferocious looking teenagers on the covers and one with Nell in a lovely Restoration dress.  I have also been rated with three stars on a book that no one has read yet.

I love Goodreads!  I love the very fact that Goodreads exists let alone the wonderful Seussian book smorgasbord feast that it actually is.  And yet this morning I had to write them a tiny note asking if they could disentangle the dual Priyas.   I felt terrible!

Wonderful People

Some people are just lovely.  The wonderful Book Quoter, who has a brilliant blog, A Thousand Books With Quotes, has highlighted Exit the Actress today.  It was a generous, kind, extraordinary thing to do.  Throughout this process wonderful people have stepped forward to help.  On the Facebook page, forty two people have gone out of their way to be sweet to Nell.

Since I have been back in London, my dear, dear friends have been universally thrilled, exuberant, supportive and encouraging about the book.  Tim, an old family friend here in London, literally whooped in the street and made my day.  In New York, my about to be sister in law (a brilliant writer--check out Kelly Cutrone's book, If You Have to Cry, Go Outside, And Other Things Your Mother Never Told You), just finished reading it and has been unendingly sweet about Nell.  Keep in mind that she read it while working full time as an editor, writing two books and planning a wedding.

Wonderful blog friends show up here and make me so happy by leaving kind, helpful comments.  It has all made this whole journey wonderful.  It makes it communal.  It makes me so happy.  Really, really, thank you.

Networking

It is an awful spidery, webby, Machiavellian word.  It implies grease uncomfortable shoes and sweaty palms and all sorts of other unlovely prospects.  And yet, I am finding I was wrong.  I was just sent the information from Simon and Schuster about social networking media (Facebook, Twitter and Goodreads mostly) and promoting the book (now that it is less than four months away!).  I decidd to tackle Facebook first.  It is the name that threw me.  "Fan" page.  And we are back to feeling of the painful shoes and spider webs.

But I found it was nothing like that.  I dove in and set it up.  Put up a photo of the book and the trailer I love and said nothing about it to anyone.  Twenty eight lovely people came along and pushed a button to say that they liked it.  It was lovely!  It made my day!  So here it is:  Exit the Actress!

Walking

Fantastic research today!  It is amazing, after spending so  long in the 17th century to be writing about the 20th.  It feels a bit disloyal somehow and I miss the lost in the mists of time fogginess about the Restoration.  The First World War is compelling in its own strange, fantastic hat sort of way but I do miss the bizarre health remedies, superstitions and the sheer, raucous libertarianism of the Restoration.  It is funny but the morals of the Restoration were far looser than the Edwardian period.

It is a heavenly treat to wander over to the square where the people I am writing about actually lived.  Same trees are growing in the same square, same glass in the same windows, same numbers on the same doors.  Marvelous.  And the sun nearly came out for a minute today.  My mother asked me if I have direct morning light in the flat and I honestly couldn't answer her.  I miss blue.

I am walking everywhere.  Even in New York I do not walk this much.  I love it.  But then, there is a tube strike on and so everyone is walking.  I am really odd in that I love the pulled togetherness of national inconvenience.  It is like when the bridge closes for rain in Hawaii and you are stuck in Hanalei.   Inconvenient but communal.  I like that.

London!

Wow, Hawaii to London is a long way.  I love it but I had forgotten exactly how cold, wet and big it is.  The small bright, breezy convenience of Hawaii and the sprawling, beachy cup cake colors of Los Angeles feel far away.  But it is lovely to be back in the country where I lived for so long and to see my dear, dear friends.

Today was the first day that clicked into place.  You know the day where you suddenly collect yourself into one time zone, one city, one life?  Things make sense and you look up and expect to be where you are?  It feels much better.  Now, I can breathe and get started on the mountain of research I have to do for the Second Book.  Yikes...  More tomorrow!

Her Fearful Symmetry

First of all--great title.  I suppose credit must go to Blake but still, great title.  This book was interesting in an utterly atmospheric but oddly plotted sort of way.  You could see events coming down the pike from a long way off.  What fascinated were the images/themes of doubled selves, fractured identity and repeated history.  Every element of this novel was introduced and then revised and reinvented.  That fun house mirror quality, and Niffenegger's matter of fact approach to ghosts is what compelled me rather than the significant plot points of the story.

And then there is the cemetery.  Highgate Cemetery is spooky.  I lasted four minutes before I had to leave, George Eliot or no George Eliot.  It was winter, in my first term at Oxford (a university that has its fair share of spooky), and I was going down to London for the night with a friend.  She kept going, I waited outside the Western Gate.

It isn't cemeteries in general.  I can wander happily in Père Lachaise in Paris.  There is a rightness to Jim Morrison, Collette, Chopin, Edith Piaf, Balzac and Oscar Wilde hanging out together for eternity.  I love that it is customary to kiss Wilde's tomb only when wearing lipstick.  But Highgate Cemetery is different.  The clammy, grey damp and shady green overgrown quality sent me running for the road.  Her Fearful Symmetry captures just this decaying, grey green splendor and then slowly paints each of the characters from this murky palette.  The one character who grows brighter is the one I least expected to bloom.  It was a lovely counterpoint but the feeling of gloomy, ghosty, misty sadness still pervades the story.

A lovely book but never ever before bed.

The Real Thing

It arrived!  The book!  The real one!  Touchstone did an early print run to get it out to bookstores and reviewers.  And it is beautiful!  The cover is sumptuous and matte and rich and lovely.  It wraps all the way around in a ruby red curtain sort of way.  It is my favorite red.

Touchstone made the inside so lovely.  The text is so pretty.  Every letter looks like a letter.  The recipes look like recipes.  The snozberries taste like snozberries.  And my tiny photo is on the back.  How bizarre.

In other news, I have moved from the low country of South Carolina to the grey damp of Highgate Cemetery.  I put down Pat Conroy for a minute (as I want to save the next one for the plane) and picked up Her Fearful Symmetry.  It is a book that must be read in full sunlight and never before going to bed.  It is that spooky.

Blog Birthday

I totally zipped passed it and forgot!  I started the Plum Bean on August 11, 2009.  Happy Extremely Belated Birthday!

I began writing having no idea how to write a blog.  How personal?  How truthful?  How much do I say about the book?  About my agent?  About my publisher?  About my life?  It was a gently roaming watermark.  And then, how to find other bloggers?  Do I just pop in and introduce myself with a comment? Is that presumptuous?  Do I leave a comment with no introduction?  Is that rude?  Do I invite them back to the Plum Bean for coffee and sandwiches?  No idea.  So, I lurked.  And lurked.

And then I gave up.  I stopped writing for weeks at a time.  I couldn't see the point.  It felt like marching outside and hurling random information at an uninterested night sky.  And so I decided to give it two more weeks and then call it quits.  And something happened.  That waiting finish line left me feeling like I could just pop by other blogs and say hello.  What did it matter if I got it wrong, as I had decided to leave the party anyway.

And I made a huge discovery: The natives were friendly!  The bloggers were sweet and welcoming and helpful and truthful and encouraging and fun and I was so very very happy to find them.  The watermark bloomed into a circle.  A sense of community grew.  

I want to say thank you: To the bloggers who are truly involved in my book and do stay for coffee and sandwiches--I hope they they know exactly who they are--and the more explosive sprite variety, the one stop shop sort of bloggers who pop in, charm, chat, and then go on their way.  Both are tremendously valued.  You have made this so much fun.  Thank you.

The Outsiders

So, my wonderful eleven year old student is reading S.E. Hinton's, The Outsiders.  This is my second recent go round with this novel as one of my wonderful students last year also read it.  Ponyboy Curtis.  What a name.  Brother of Sodapop Curtis.  The three brothers are orphaned when novel opens but these names tell us so much about the kind of parents they had.  It is a genius stroke of doing so much with so little.

I remember reading it the first time as a seventh grader and totally revising the list of names I wanted to name my future pets and children.  You know how we keep those lists of names we like?  For me it has expanded to pets, children and characters.  I read The Outsiders and wanted wonderfully quirky names on the list.  I am not sure that sense ever left me as I still have truly quirky names on the list.  

Rereading it, it is a far more spare book than I remember from middle school.  The language is just enough and the balance never tips.  The reader wants to know these people.  The story is utterly compelling but secondary to these brilliant characters.  It is a deceptively difficult way to write.  To conjure complicated, likable people out of empty air using very few words is a tricky business.  And she was sixteen when she wrote it!  Wonderful.

The Catalogue and South of Broad

At first I resented South of Broad for not being Beach Music.  I missed the town, the time, and the characters in all their peculiar, finely drawn specifics.  But then I surrendered.  I find I have to do that when I really fall for an author and want to read everything he or she has written.  I have to let go of one storied trajectory and put my faith in another.

Sometimes it does not work and the magic of one book is too binding to allow transgression into another written in a near but not congruent voice.  Sometimes the reader/author love affair requires a long break so that the soft focus process of erosion can set in.  In this case it was a leap from lily pad to lily pad and the resentment was fierce.  But then I tasted South of Broad's own brand of homemade magic elixir.  It is majestic: marvelous and whole and consuming.  It asks question of friendship and how your history is held in public trust by those who were there and who love you.  It explores the completeness of lots thrown in together when you are very young.

In other news: bang, it arrived on my doorstep.  Touchstone (now just Touchstone with a lovely new angel winged, reaching firefly sort of insignia and no longer Touchstone Fireside) Spring 2011 Catalogue.  I opened the first page first page is for the Black Eyed Peas singer.  The one with the name I can never remember.  The second page is for Exit the Actress.  Nell landed up on page two!  I am thrilled.  It is getting realer and realer.