halloween fun - plus chocolate

You guys, I've got a little promotion going on this week to celebrate the blog tour for The Empress Chronicles, and to add to my collection of memorabilia.

You don't HAVE to have a copy of my book (though, I'd love it if you did). Only an imagination and the spirit of whimsy. Whimsy's good, right?

So here's the deal: take a halloweenish type of picture that is YOUR interpretation of #EmpressHalloween. If you're on any of the sites: Instragram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, tag me , or just use the hashtag #EmpressHalloween, or send me the pic to post socially.

I'm going to randomly choose a photo at 4:00 pm Friday, Oct. 31st, and the owner of that picture will win a spicy array of confections from Alma Chocolates. (I have to keep this contest to U.S., unfortunately, because of the shipping regulations.)

Love to you all, and get me your pics! Any and all!
p.s. - I'm also checking the blog post comments sections every day, as well, so if you leave an exceptional comment on one of the blogs, I'll see that too and put it in the running.

making it up

In case you missed it on the Manifestation Blog yesterday, here's my Empress "origin" story. Plus, more pictures from my initial Sisi research trip. #Homesick

ta-da!

THE EMPRESS CHRONICLES is all set to launch one month from today, and if you’ve been

following this blog lo these many years, you know what a long-in-coming milestone this is for me.

TEC isn’t officially my debut, but it sort of is. I wrote the novel (many times!) a couple of years before THE MOMENT BEFORE – which came gushing out of me like a flood. In contrast, TEC feels like a pregnancy that went on way past term – coming into the world as a toddler rather than an infant. It walks, talks, and drags me around behind it, offering bold suggestions and defying my attempts to shape it.

Even though MOMENT rushed out of me, during its launch it wasn’t very demanding. I was feeling out this whole debut author thing step-by-step, and I puttered, and muttered, and scratched my head. That first book, I could leave it alone in its high chair, and it would just smile and wait for me to offer the next thing. (Come to think of it, my first child, Sam, was sort of that way too.)

This child? Not so much. (Ah! A theme here, Maggie, my second child, was much more, whoa Nelly!)

So. Today begins the official launch-before-the-launch known as the Cover Reveal (here’s a link to the hoopla party). I didn’t get a CR for MOMENT (another way in which that book was less of a diva), so this’ll be new territory. I feel a little like a movie-of-the-week character. You know, like those undercover muckrakers who set out to write scathing articles about beauty pageants, and while gathering data, fall in love with the process? Well, I’m smitten. My cover is drop dead gorgeous, don’t you think? (I can say that, because I had nothing to do with its creation.) But even better, the cover truly, truly reflects the tone, themes and energy of the book.

Whereas MOMENT came out at the beginning of the year, TEC is launching at the “real” beginning of the year – when school starts up again. And not only that, but it’s conveniently making its way into the world at the dawn of Oktoberfest, and since you already know how precocious the book is, you won’t be surprised if its swilling the beers in a couple of months and I'm already planning the party!

So, speaking of party, you want to help an author out and keep TEC the sassy little thing she is? Click on this e-book pre-order page. But if you want to wait for the physical book links, I hear ya! Especially if you live in Warwick, NY or Portland. OR, because I’ll be doing readings in those towns and I will totally keep y’all in the loop.

erna

Tomorrow my grandmother would have celebrated her 102^nd birthday. She missed it by three days, having passed away in her sleep on July 1^st.

Even though “Oma” has been subdued and sweet these past few years, I will always think of her as our psychically powerful matriarch – able to bend strong wills with a slight glance, or a sharp word.

And she did have more than a few sharp words in her lifetime. And opinions.

She was an artist, Erna was. In every sense. She demanded aesthetic compliance – once I brought her a geranium in a garish hue and she made me return it for a subtler shade, one more muted and deserving of her carefully tended wine barrel planter.

When a person brought her a gift, she’d carefully unwrap it, salvaging the paper and storing it in a pile in her attic where, the following year, she would wrap a new gift for the person in the very paper. She didn’t need to label it. She knew who gave her what.

Erna Freisinger was known locally for her paintings. Palette-knife oils, originally. Landscapes, still lifes. She moved onto acrylics in her sixties. Watercolors in her seventies. One of her painting hung in a bank. Another was the cover of the Warwick phone book. The one pictured below is one of my faves – it hangs just outside my office. If she’d ever seen my display of her paintings, she’d have had a word or two. Once, I remember her bustling into our house, hammer in hand, to adjust the display of her work throughout our rooms and hallways.

My Oma was Viennese through and through. I think she never got over having to abruptly leave her homeland in 1939, my one-year-old father in tow. The Anschluss – the Nazis. My grandfather and his partially Jewish blood. Opa had managed to flee to America right after my father was born, and when Nazi occupation became inevitable, Oma and my dad slipped out on the very last boat from Italy. Oma never liked being unsettled. Her life revolved around family, duty, loyalty, pride. Art.

And yet, she had a whimsical side.

Once, we convinced her to scale the chain link fence of the country club pool for an illegal midnight swim. She often escaped to open fields and forests to collect things that she would later weave into wreaths. She was a “lefty,” busying herself with handwork projects involving yarn, fabric, textures. She made hundreds and hundreds of cookies every Christmas, and Opa would grab my sister and me to deliver tins of them to nurses and patients.

The one time she hit me, it was because I spilled milk in her kitchen. A moment of clumsiness, and boom, broken glass. A mess. She slapped me across the face. And then lamented it the rest of the day. Apologizing over and over for her loss of temper. 

To say that my Oma was a role model would be overstating it. Would sound like an elegiac move: she’s dead, let’s praise her. She wasn’t who I aspired to be, but she demonstrated a unique will – fierce, enormous. And for that, I am grateful. For the shining example of spending half her life – the last half – the 50+ half – being known for her art. Being known as an artist. 

Especially with my second book coming out in September. A book that draws a lot from the life of a misunderstood Austrian figure. Imagining Empress Elisabeth as a carefree girl before circumstance and duty morphed her into a legendary mad woman has expanded my consciousness, along with my understanding of proud women generally.

So, Oma, happy 102^nd birthday. Born on the 4^th of July was a legacy you never wanted, but endured for more than a century.

the empress moment

My book has been out for a little more than a month. If we were to equate this to motherhood, my baby is just starting to sleep through the night. I can sometimes even go eight hours without checking to see if she's still breathing.

Do you know what I mean?

As with my first actual child, I celebrated this milestone by getting knocked up again. My second book, THE EMPRESS CHRONICLES, is officially in the queue for publication, and the "due date" for now sits at July 29th, 2014. In other words, I'm starting to show. Getting cravings, gaining weight, wondering about eye color, etc...

Some of you know this, but if you don't, I actually wrote TEC before THE MOMENT BEFORE. Built around my obsession for Empress Elisabeth, I concocted a fairy tale where I imagined "Sisi" as a young teen, before being sold off to the Habsburgs where she became, in short order, a controversial cult figure.

I've paired my version of Sisi with a contemporary heroine, Liz. Unlike many fanciful time travel stories, there is no actual "meeting" of these two girls, but there is magic. In TMB, Sabine is present through the narrator's memories and imaginings. In TEC, Elisabeth and Liz are embroiled in their own stories, but find a way to blur edges (and possibly, history) through a diary and a locket.

I suppose I enjoy exploring this idea of extra-sensory communication. A sprinkle of magical realism. A bit of whimsy. Hopefully, grounded in humanity.

Through March, I'll still be mainly concentrating on promoting TMB (potty training? weaning? what other half-baked metaphors can we rustle up?), but come spring proper, you will see much more of the petticoats and pomp associated with the last Habsburg Empress. I hope you'll be with me when I give birth. The second time goes much quicker, yes?

How many books do you want to write before you die?

spring cleaning

My kitchen on life support.    

Still in the green room with my manuscript (THE EMPRESS CHRONICLES) patiently waiting on editor response, and sinking my teeth into my next project because, that's what you have to do, right? And because I truly want to approach the Empress freshly when next I pop in (hopefully after an editor has fallen in love enough to bite, and sends me editorial notes OR, less hopefully, if the editors pass and I go back in for major overhaul), this new project is quite different than the fantastical historical retelling I've been writing over the past year-and-a-half. I shall leave it at that, for the moment, but suffice it to say, I'm quite engaged with a couple of new characters and am venturing into the world of, dare I say it, High Concept.

A novel that can be boiled down to a compelling sentence. A potboiler, if you will.

In concert with my new project enthusiasm is emergency kitchen surgery. We had a slowly leaking dishwasher which quietly squirted water under the floor which, over time, resulted in a swollen mess. My kitchen has spent the last two days in ICU, and this morning was prepped for asbestos abatement. The floor is being wrenched from the house as I type, and placed in a tube, piece by piece, by a brave crew bedecked in Hazmat couture.

The patient is ready...

If you feel a metaphor coming, you're ding, ding, ding, right! Like my kitchen, I'm aesthetically between one state and another. Ridding myself of vintage bits, in preparation for the latest in market appeal. Think of my next project in terms of sustainable. LEED-cert, even. Travertine tile, bamboo cabinets. Energy wise appliances. New and spare and exciting.

But, unlike my kitchen, I'm not tossing my last project into a toxic waste dumpster. Far from it. No, if anything, when next I return to the Empress, she will be upcycled and glorious. Destined for new life. And I'll be re-engaging with her sitting at a granite counter top, gazing out at the late spring flowers, through tempered accordion glass.

happy nanowrimo

here's to castles in the air

Today is that very auspicious 11/1/11 day. It is also the opening bell of this year's NaNoWriMo. I just wanted to give a shout out to all my buddies who have pledged to write their hearts out this month--and I am visualizing the fantastic stories that are not yet written, but will be in 30 days. It really is an amazing thing, the idea of writing a novel in a month, and I continue to be humbled by those who strap on the boots and the "just do it" attitude.

It's been a couple of years since I participated, and the 23K words I churned out never did not really qualify as "a novel," but the resulting vision and intention and discipline (not to mention the sore ass and shoulders) all contributed to the scaffolding needed to propel me ever-forward in my efforts as a writer.

Last year at this time I finished the first draft of "The Empress Chronicles." Since then, it's been revised three times, and I am now nearly finished with yet another revision (this one based on some fantastic insights by editors). With each version, the book has become cleaner, stronger and more alive inside of me. I don't regret any of the 150,000 words I've written, rewritten and, at last, have boiled down to 60,000.

The secret of NaNoWriMo is that when you're looking down the barrel of it: a blank slate, with nothing but faith and the muse to get you to the finish line, you don't allow December 1 to enter into the picture. First drafts are deliciously free (or they should be) from anything other than the next word. The magic happens when something you seemingly had nothing to do with crystalizes into its own thing.

So, all you WriMos out there, get your Advil ready. Drink plenty of fluids. World-build 'till your heart's content. I'm eager to hear your story.

the country mouse and the town mouse

Here are the two settings for THE EMPRESS CHRONICLES: the first photo is of the empress Sisi's summer home, Possenhofen. A charming little castle, don't you think? Somewhat shabby by the standards of Bavarian royalty, but beloved to my character (who is a fictionalized version of the actual Sisi of Austria).

This is where Sisi frolicked and misbehaved, chasing her rabbits and dogs and siblings. Cooking up schemes to undermine her governess's agenda of civilizing the wild, spirited girl.

Here's a short passage from my book, illustrating this:

I could not wait to return to the comfortable worn splendor of our farm-castle, “Possi,” where my two ponies, Psyche and Cupid, were allowed to wander among the roses at will. Where my dogs roamed freely inside the house and out. Where my days began as the sun warmed the tops of the trees and ended when I decided it was time to return indoors.

This other house is where my contemporary character, Liz lives during the summer the novel takes place. It's a farmhouse I lived in for three years in the early 90's. Like Liz, I had a hard time adjusting to country life. The whole, 'cooking on a stove from the 1930's' thing (seriously, it was hooked up to a five-gallon propane tank like a Coleman, and I lived in fear of it running out every evening as I cooked up the soup).

Here's a little bit of Liz, toiling with her new digs, after an abrupt move from the posh lofts of Portland's upscale Pearl district:

The windowless staircase was illuminated by a single antique sconce, which tossed its anemic light at a bent-over sunflower painted directly onto the wood paneling. At the top of the stairs Pops grunted and yanked my suitcases around a corner and continued down a long hall. I followed. We walked past a screened porch. Two wasps with spindly legs tangled with each other in the opening to the porch, and beyond them a different cat than the one that had rubbed against me downstairs sat coiled in a yoga pretzel licking its anus.

Now, oddly, the top picture looks fancier, but nevertheless, it was considered a shack by the Bavarian Royal Family. Sisi loves the country. Liz adores a penthouse view. Identical cousins, they are not. Plus, they were born a hundred and fifty years apart. So, dear readers, my question to you is: are you more like Sisi, or more like Liz? Is you a country mouse, or a town mouse?