Interview & Giveaway with Nichole Bernier, Author of The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D.

But that’s the funny thing about people who don’t fit into a box. They grow to infiltrate everything, and when they suddenly go missing, they are missing everywhere.
~ from The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D.

Without knowing why, or even how, it happens, a person can fill a void in our lives so quickly and settle into our being so fully that, surely, they must know us as well as we know ourselves. Even better. I have such a friend, who can tell at first glance (or at first long-distance “hello” over the phone) if I’m lying or telling the truth when I answer the question, “How are you?” Yet, even through such deep connections, I bet there are things unknown between us. How well can we really know another person?

This question ripples throughout Nichole Bernier’s debut novel, The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D., as one woman is bequeathed the journals of her deceased friend.

In reading Elizabeth Martin’s most personal thoughts, Kate discovers a side to her friend she hadn’t known or expected. The truth of Elizabeth’s marriage, her friendship with Kate, and her life ambitions unfolds, and, with that truth, so does Kate’s own pain and understanding of her relationships and dreams. In those discoveries, Kate finds strength to face her fears and embrace what’s genuine. This book speaks to the anxiety we so often hold about the future and to the relief we feel in finally letting go.

I’m honored to host Nichole Bernier today as she talks about her book, about life, and writing. I’m offering a giveaway, as well, with three ways to enter: tweet about the post (tag it with @Christi_Craig), post about the interview on Facebook (message me here so I count your entry), or – the most simple route – just leave your name in the comments. Come Tuesday, August 14th, you could be the winner of a copy of Nichole’s wonderful novel.

And now…welcome, Nichole!

CC: In your novel, Elizabeth’s journals act as a conduit of self-reflection for the protagonist, Kate, as Elizabeth reveals her own angst and struggles with motherhood, work, and relationships. Some of what Kate learns about herself is unexpected, and painful (and, boy, can I relate to what she discovers and how she feels). Have you ever had that experience, seeing yourself through someone else’s eyes?

NB: I was about to answer no, but then I remembered an email I received a few months ago. It was from a woman who’d been in my graduating class at journalism school, and had heard I was about to publish a novel I’d written while I was in the thick of the child-raising years. She contacted me because she was starting to write one, herself, and had just had her second child. We exchanged memories about school, and she recalled — ha ha! — how at a graduation party she had told me she was taking an unpaid internship. Apparently I said, You can do better.

I’d like to think she’s remembering a little incorrectly, and that I actually said something along the lines of, WE can do better. Because heaven knows I made poverty-level wages that year after school. Or that I said it in an emphatic, affirming way — You can do better! Someday, we all will!

But I don’t know what I said, or exactly what I meant. I don’t even remember the blur of graduation week very well, capping a rabid year working toward a degree that was not technically necessary for our field. All of us, subliminally haunted by the pressure to prove it had been worth it. I only know that that’s what her perception was, and that’s what matters in the end, really. But that thankfully, she didn’t take it badly enough that it kept her from reaching out 20 years later to a fellow mom who’s still just trying to do better.

CC: In the acknowledgements, you mention an island cottage that inspired the one in the novel, where Kate reads Elizabeth’s journals. Were you able to sneak away for a writing retreat at that cottage while working on book? And, where do you do most of your writing now?

NB: Oh, I was sneaking away whenever I could. Well, if you can call it sneaking when you kiss five kids goodbye a million times each — whether you’re going away for two hours or two days — and you sneak off after a very orchestrated hand-off to a generous husband who you’ll probably text with five minutes after you leave. Not very stealthy.

But no, I wasn’t able to steal away to that cottage. It’s someone’s primary home except for two weeks in the summer. And it doesn’t actually have that attic loft, sadly. That was an embellishment of my imagination. Though it sure would be nice if they added it, and then let us rent again someday.

As far as my writing space at home is concerned, I sort of wish I had a writing room, some serene window-walled space with a massive antique desk. But even if I did, I probably wouldn’t write there. Our house is never really quiet because we have five kids, and though I don’t need quiet to write, I need the noise to be sounds I’m not emotionally invested in.

So I’ve become that cliché of the coffeeshop writer. I love the impersonal bustle that’s a bit like being part of an office, the juicy bits of conversation you overhear, and yes, the constant flow of coffee and inability to hop up and tweeze your eyebrows. When I need real quiet, I go to the library.

CC: I love what you say in this post on your blog, how writing a novel can sometimes be a cathartic experience. I know that feeling, when a story rushes out and brings with it every inch of pain that’s been held in by grief. You also say that you never imagined yourself “as someone with a novel inside her, but now [you] can’t imagine [yourself] without it.” Do you have another novel in the works?

NB: There are two things I’m obsessed with these days. One is a disturbing premise set in the former Soviet Union. The other takes place on an eerie forbidden island I visited with the Park Service a few months ago, a real-life fascinating and creepy place that spans three distinct phases of history. Once my book tour quiets down I’ll be going to town on one of these stories, whichever one is keeping me up at night the most.

CC: What are you reading these days?

NB: I just finished Gone Girl — which had such exciting use of voice and tension created by unreliable narrators — and Salvage the Bones, a Katrina story about four motherless siblings that knocked me flat. Right now I’m in that hang-time between books, and since I’m on book tour, am traveling with a combination of things to pick up during flights – a hardcover, a galley, and my iPad. The ability to sample first chapters electronically is like a literary buffet, a moveable feast (at least until your battery wears out).

CC: What advice do you have for writers on the rise?

NB: You have to make your writing the absolute best it can be, and find folks who will help you get it there. Find a handful of like-minded writers who will be supportive and honest. Then revise, revise, revise.

When you’re ready to send it out into the world, do your homework. It’s so easy now to learn about agents and editors and the query process with all the resources online. On Twitter, for example, you’re hearing query preferences and pet peeves right from the horse’s mouth.

Network on social media. Write essays, articles, blogs, clever email, anything that’s a limbering-up exercise to keep your thinking process sharp and your creativity going and your voice out there. Then get thick skin and be persistent and find a way to keep up your stamina through the rejections. You’re not rejected until you’re rejected a LOT. There are as many reasons for rejection as there are Eskimo names for snow. You just have to find that one agent and editor with whom your story resonates, and who can bring it out to the world.

Nichole Bernier is author of the novel THE UNFINISHED WORK OF ELIZABETH D, and has written for magazines including Elle, Self, Health, and Men’s Journal. A Contributing Editor for Conde Nast Traveler for 14 years, she was previously on staff as the magazine’s golf and ski editor, columnist, and television spokesperson. She is a founder of the literary blog Beyond the Margins, and lives outside of Boston with her husband and five children. She can be found online at nicholebernier.com and on Twitter @nicholebernier.

Don’t forget to enter the giveaway, through a comment, Twitter, Facebook (or all three). Look for the announcement of the winner on Tuesday, August 14th.

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Welcome Dave Thome, author of the romance novel, Fast Lane

“Don’t let anybody write your story for you. Say what needs to be said. Write your own story.” ~ Taequanda, in Fast Lane

Often in life, we approach a situation or a goal (or a relationship), letting outside assumptions and expectations fuel our vision, only to discover that the truth of the matter is not at all what we anticipate. The same can be said for Lara Dixon, the protagonist in Dave Thome’s debut novel, Fast Lane. In the quote above, Taequanda is talking to Lara, who is on a hunt for the inside story of Clay Creighton and his man-centered, womanizing business, Fast Lane Enterprises. What Lara discovers once inside Fast Lane’s inner circle, more so when she gets to know Taequanda, is that everyone harbors a secret and no one fits their facade. Lara is torn between writing truth or fiction.

In a post on Babbles from Scott Eagan ( of Greyhause Literary Agency), Eagan empasizes a few “musts” in category romance novels: not “to see [characters] in bed and having a full on romance after the first meeting” but “to really get to know who these people are AS people. Emotion, motivation, depth.” Dave Thome’s novel gives readers exactly that, a satisfying romance with well-developed characters. I’m honored to host Dave today, where he talks about his writing journey and the discoveries he made along the way.

CC: When you started out writing, did you imagine you’d embark on the journey of a romance novel? I’d love to hear more about your background and how you came to be a Man Writing a Romance.

DT: Way back. Way, way back, I always assumed I’d write novels. But I also liked writing articles and columns for my high school paper, so I became a newspaper reporter. I loved being a newspaper reporter. Every day I got to meet new people and write about different things. Literally. When you’re just out of college and work for a small-town paper, you’re writing about a new math program at the high school in the morning, the last local survivor of World War I in the afternoon, and a stampede of dairy cows circling a house near downtown the next morning. (Seriously, I once wrote an article about how cows got spooked on a dairy farm in the middle of the night, broke down a fence, ran along the highway into Watertown, Wis., turned onto a side street, randomly circled one house, left—and returned a few minutes later to circle the house again. In the opposite direction.)

Anyway, newspaper stories are kind of like mini novels. Really mini novels. Like 400 words instead of 55,400 words. But you have to hook people right away. The story has to flow. You work in dialog (quotes) and narration and use description to help readers visualize things. You don’t really build to a climax, but there’s usually some element of tension in a newspaper story. Lots of news involves tension. A good reporter also has to know something about human nature. You have to get to know people quickly and assess their veracity and character. That translates into writing fiction, too.

I started a couple of novels over the years but never got anywhere. They seemed too big and complex. Then I discovered screenplays, and they seemed like a good idea because not only are they a lot shorter than novels (18,000 words), they also have a structure you have to follow. Certain things have to happen by the end of page 1, 3, 10, 28 and so on. And you have to finish by page 120—max. For comedy, finishing by page 90 or 95 is even better. Having those goals in mind helped me focus on elements of story and character that had to be developed. My mindset is exactly the same when I write novels, only now it’s a matter of rhythm instead of a matter of having an absolute page number to hit.

I ended up writing twenty screenplays in about twenty years. I wrote comedies and thrillers and sweeping science fiction action stories. The first four weren’t very good, but something clicked on the fifth. I was in a writing group and I brought in the first seven pages of what I was working on and one guy tore me a new one, making big red circles on my pages to make sure to dramatize how much he hated my dialog. He did this in front of the whole group, eight guys, I think. And then he said the lines his way—and he was absolutely right. I went home and started at the beginning and rewrote all the dialog to sound more natural—shorter sentences, dropped words, things like that—and the script just came together. When the dialog became more organic, so did the characters and the story.

That script, TERMINAL SEX, is about a woman in her late thirties who was recently divorced, hated her job and was having problems with her snotty sixteen-year-old daughter, so she follows a friend’s advice and logs into an Internet cybersex website. I made up everything that happened online because it was 1994, and I had never seen the Internet, but I made the cyberspace sequences into scenes with the characters in fantastical settings. Sex and murder ensue, and TERMINAL SEX won a writing award and got me an agent at a fairly high-profile agency in Hollywood. The script got read by some cool people—actors, producers and directors—but no one opened their wallet. Then some writer friends who were hot after having a big TV movie success tried to sell it to a network. Everyone there loved it except the last guy. The guy who had all the power.

After that, METAL MOM, a comedy about a woman who continues her heavy metal singing career when her kids are in high school almost got made twice. Another comedy, THE UNUSUAL SUSPECTS, was next up on a company’s docket until they had a movie tank so badly they lost their financing. And yet another script, FRANKIE BIG LEAGUES, about a gangster who coaches his thirteen-year-old daughter’s softball team, got optioned for money but went nowhere.

At that point, I’d had enough of screenplays, so I wrote a novel, CHICK FLICK, during Nano in 2006 and worked on it for the next two years. It’s the opposite of a screenplay, with lots of the action going on inside the main character’s head. People in my writing group liked it very much, but it’s a really dark romantic comedy with a male lead. In some ways it’s “literary,” in others it’s like a romance novel, so it’s hard to imagine a traditional publishing market for it. I will eventually self-publish it.

Fast Lane came about because the writing business my wife, Mary Jo, and I have run since 1999 had its worst quarter ever at the end of 2009. She knew a woman who published erotic romances online, so she thought that might be something to do while business was down. I thought that if she was willing to do that, I should, too. But neither of us ended up writing an erotic romance. Fast Lane began as an idea for a screenplay that I started but never finished twenty-five years ago. I tried to write it in the erotic romance style, but I couldn’t stop myself from cracking up like a sixth-grader. Not a good thing. But the story was much better after having steeped in my subconscious for a quarter of a century, so I decided to make it a contemporary romance instead.

CC: In FAST LANE, your minor characters add such depth to the story — from Taequanda, one of the women in the rotation, to Morgan Hopkins, Clay’s security guard (one of my favorites, by the way). Did you spend a lot of time initially on character development? Or, did the characters fully come to life during rewrites?

DT: I don’t develop anything initially. I’m the epitome of a pantser. The side characters, believe it or not, always come to me when I need them.

Continue reading “Welcome Dave Thome, author of the romance novel, Fast Lane

Welcome Siobhan Fallon, Author of You Know When the Men Are Gone

She turned to descend the stair, her heart in tumult. Had she better keep her distance and question him, her husband? Should she run up to him, take his hands, kiss him now?

…And she, for a long time, sat deathly still in wonderment–for sometimes as she gazed she found him–yes, clearly–like her husband, but sometimes blood and rags were all she saw.
–Penelope upon recognizing Odysseus, The Odyssey

The quote above is the epigram to Siobhan Fallon’s amazing collection of short stories, You Know When the Men Are Gone, and this vision of Penelope, hesitating but desperate to rediscover the man – her husband – behind the clothes of a warrior, prepares the reader perfectly for the kinds of experiences the characters in her book endure. So often, we hear of military life, whether in war or in deployment, from the perspective of the soldiers. Siobhan Fallon gives us a taste of those stories and more, taking us into the hearts and minds of the families left behind. Because, nothing we do in life affects us in isolation.

I’m honored to host Siobhan Fallon here to talk about her book, life, and writing. As a bonus and a gift, she has donated a copy of her book (recently released in paperback!) for one lucky reader. At the end of her interview, drop your name in the comments. The winner will be drawn on Tuesday, January 31st, at noon.

~

CC: In two of my favorite stories, “The Last Stand” and “The Gold Star”, Specialist Kit Murphy makes a powerful impact. Through his experience and his interactions with the other characters, readers are given a profound, heartfelt, and panoramic view into the minds of a soldier, a wife left behind, and a wife widowed. Was there a specific character or story that impressed you the most while you were writing this book?

SF: I have to admit that I have some favorites, though it is hard to narrow it down to only one. I feel a certain affinity for Meg, of the title story, “You Know When the Men Are Gone.” She is my closest doppelganger, and I often found myself thinking her thoughts during my husband’s deployments (like staring at a grocery store’s packaged meat, the exposed bone and blood held together in saran wrap, and thinking of a soldier’s wounds). And I too I have a soft spot for Kit Murphy. I’d say that I worked on his story, “The Last Stand,” longer and harder than any other. Even after it was published in Salamander Magazine, I felt compelled to keep rewriting it, to infuse it with as much genuine experience as possible. Kit is the penultimate soldier in my eyes, the sort I unfortunately saw an awful lot of during my husband’s company command at Fort Hood, a young man just out of teenage-hood trying to do what he thinks is right, often unable to articulate how he feels, left wounded and untethered in some way when he returns from his deployment.

The final story, “Gold Star,” also gets me every time I read it. That story is my worst nightmare, the worst nightmare of every military spouse with a deployed soldier, but I also like to think that there is an element of hope and healing in the ending, when Josie and Kit are able to offer each other a moment of understanding.

CC: In this post on Quivering Pen, you make a excellent argument for the short story as the structure best fit for revealing the lives of the characters in your book, saying “the surge of electricity of a [short story’s] beginning, the disorientation dealt to readers as they suddenly find themselves with a new cast of characters, a new setting, and a new dilemma. . . . [mirrors] the military life.” Was it easy to accept that this book would be a collection of stories? Or did you struggle in the beginning to mold it into a novel?

SF: The stories came to me as just that: stories. When I started writing them, I wasn’t even sure if I would have a collection that would fit together cohesively. I wrote the title story first, about Meg listening to the seemingly glamorous life of Natalya. I had an image of a woman pressing her ear against her wall, desperately eavesdropping on her neighbor as a way to keep from worrying about her own deployed husband. The next story that came to me, “Camp Liberty,” had almost nothing in common with the first. “Camp Liberty” is about Moge, a US Army sergeant in Iraq who forms a tricky friendship with his female Iraqi interpreter. For that story, I had two themes in mind. One, I was struck with the way soldiers, even soldiers who were trying to get out of the Army, talked about their wartime exploits as if they were the most incredible and vivid adventures of their lives. Two, I wanted to write about the local national interpreters who are intrinsic to the lives of our troops, and whose stories often go untold.

Initially I had played around with the idea of writing stories all set in the housing complex where Meg lives and listens against the wall, but so often you just can’t write the things you want to write. Other things pop into your mind and seize your imagination, an overheard conversation at the mall, broken kid toys strewn across a lawn, a soldier crossing the street on crutches. People keep asking me why I didn’t writer certain stories, like a story from a female soldier’s point of view, or from the parents of a deployed soldier. All I can say is that the stories in the collection are the ones that filled me up, had me awake at night thinking about the sound of a character’s voice or his choice of childhood friends, these were the stories that excited me as a writer, these were the characters whose stories I wanted most to know.

CC: How has the publication of your book changed your experience as a writer, and/or your experience as a military wife?

SF: As a writer, there is something magical about having your words finally filling up the pages of a book and seeing that book on your shelf. I finished my MFA in 2000 (which is when I started to seriously write and submit my work). I’ve had plenty of rejections, most of the stories in YKWTMAG have been rejected by literary magazines, not to mention my often rejected story collection/MFA thesis and the two novel drafts taking up space in my home office. So having my book published is, of course, awesome, and makes the decade plus of dashed hopes worth it. But it also doesn’t get any easier. When you are slaving away, desperately hoping someone will say “yes” to your work, you imagine that once you are in a bookstore, you will only hear “yes” from then on. Not true. I finished a new story a couple of months ago and sent it off to my literary agent with the rarely felt euphoria of having written something great. But everyone he has shopped it around to turned it down. Then I was asked to write an essay for NPR’s Morning Edition. It took seven or eight ideas, pitched over a couple of weeks, before the producer found something she liked enough to put on the air. So there are still plenty of rejections. If anything, I feel like I have to work harder now, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

How has my book changed my experience as a military spouse… wow, that’s a tricky question. When I talk to civilian readers, I have to be careful that I don’t speak with too much authority. I am a fiction writer, my stories are not fact, and the things that occur in my book don’t happen to every military family in America. Those stories are from a very specific point of view, about life on a military base that had an extremely high deployment rate, during the height of the US involvement in the Middle East.

When I speak with military readers, I also walk a fine line. Sometimes mil spouse readers are disappointed that I didn’t give readers the rosy picture that an Army wife ought to show the world. But most often military spouses thank me for my honesty, for letting people see a side of our lives that we too often try to keep under wraps.

CC: What are you reading these days?

SF: Oooh, fun question. I just finished Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety. A poet friend of mine, Shara Lessley, recommended this novel, and it seemed like the perfect read for me at this point in my life. My family and I just moved from Amman, Jordan, to Falls Church, Virginia. Moving around is part of the Army lifestyle, and since 2004, when I married my husband, we have moved seven times. This transition from Jordan to Virginia was an especially hard one; we really loved the families who make up the Amman US embassy community, and leaving them made me gnash my teeth at the difficulties of sustaining connections when you move so often. Crossing to Safety is a story of marriage and lifelong friendship, and particularly resonated with me.

Other books I have read recently are Valerie Trueblood’s Marry or Burn and Shann Ray’s American Masculine, two short story collections. Reading them back to back was not intentional but they make a remarkable pair. Trueblood’s tales sometimes start with shocking hooks, a woman shooting her abusive police officer husband, or a woman attacking a bear with an ax, but the actual drama is much quieter, more about the intimacies women try to create and all too often irrevocably break. Trueblood’s stories spin out and envelope the reader, creating a kind of rapture. This is a book I will read again and again. Ray’s stories, as the title implies, deal with the other side of that gender coin, the shifting roles of men in today’s society, the idea of ‘masculine,’ the weight of expectations that can crush sons and fathers and husbands. But woven into these somewhat violent tales of the West is a current of redemption and possibility. Both books are masterful and I highly recommend them.

CC: Do you have any advice for writers on the rise?

SF: If you want it enough, don’t give up. Everyone dreams of writing a book and everyone has a story to tell (and will tell it to you, especially when they find out you are a writer)— but writers actually need to write. In the end, that’s what separates us from everyone else: the written page (and maybe those three or four discarded story collections or novel drafts under your bed).

It’s a long, long road to publication. You are going to spend a lot of time feeling like a failure and doubting every word you write. But having strangers in bookstores talk to you about the characters you created, well, that’s one of the most fantastic feelings in the world.

Siobhan Fallon’s debut collection of stories, You Know When the Men Are Gone, was listed as a Best Book of 2011 by The San Francisco Chronicle and Janet Maslin of The New York Times, has been called “the explosive sort of literary triumph that appears only every few years” by New York Journal of Books,a terrific and terrifically illuminating book” by The Washington Post,and a “searing collection” by Entertainment Weekly.
Her stories and essays have appeared in , Women’s Day, Good Housekeeping, New Letters, Publishers’ Weekly, among others, and she is writing a fiction series for Military Spouse Magazine. More can be found at her website www.siobhanfallon.com.

To Siobhan, thank you so much. And to readers, don’t forget to leave your name in the comments for a chance to win a copy of You Know When the Men Are Gone.