Sunday, May 16, 2010

Club Fun

Hobbyist-novelist like me write because they must. There’s an urge to write that’s a lot like the urge to knit or the urge to clean or the urge to run (not that I’ve ever felt that last one). The urge to write comes from some visceral need to exorcise or imagine.

This has nothing to do with the desire to be published. The desire to be published comes from the need to have people read what you wrote. You did the work: you want to show it off. This doesn’t sound very noble, I know. And neither is it. However, it’s perfectly natural and is true across the board of hobbyists and artists: dancers want to do it publicly, painters want their products hung, composers want your butt in the seat and your ears open. Even those Amish ladies who make those fantastic quilts with the required defect (because only God is perfect) want those quilts to be seen, even if it’s only by a bunch of cheesy tourists.

I admit: I recall my musings on how life would be if I were ever lucky enough to have a book published, pre Wet Nurse. I’ve always been a realist and thus I knew that my life would be pretty much as it always was: that there’d still be the laundry, the dinner to be cooked, the bookstore to be run, the kids to, um, urge on. I also know that the first book isn’t the thing: it’s the second book that’s the thing. (And then, the third, right?) But I did think about bookstore readings (about which I know a thing or two, having been in the biz for 30 years). And I thought about the reviews: how would I handle a bad one?

What I didn’t know about so much were the book clubs. My bookstore is not a book-club friendly bookstore. Parking sucks, people on campus already have their own hugely packed agendas: they go off campus for the leisure of the book club.

But the book clubs have been wonderful.

At one club meeting, held at 9:00 on a Friday morning, we drank ale and ate meat pies, (just as my Susan Rose would have done!) and talked about how nursing has changed. Another, which took place in Pennsylvania, was done over Facebook: it’s fun to make jokes not face-to-face. At a huge club, one of the members told me that while she liked my book, she was upset by the ending. (I have the power to upset someone with the words I write! Amazement, as my husband would say.) At one, I was expected to hold forth on the (fairly massive) research I had done for the book, which I loved talking about. At another, my role seemed to be to listen to the members describe what they thought was going to happen to the wet nurse at each turn of the tale—this was wonderful too. At another, we mostly laughed.

Wet Nurse is coming in paper in August. Paperbacks are the meat pies of the book group, of course, so it’s a fond wish of mine that I get to do more book clubs. Here are the readers! Here are the book lovers! It gives a hobbyist-novelist like me hope and inspiration to get to what’s really important: the next book.

3 comments:

  1. I was delighted to meet you and hear about how you do what you do. You've got a special gift and understanding. Thank you!

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  2. My book club rocks. It's all reading teachers who love to read anything. Now mostly retired, we share books in all categories -- and food to match the book.

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  3. Book clubs rule! I met with one local group who read one of my books, and only after they read it did they discover that I live in their town. They were so excited that they could just call me up and I would come and talk to them. What a delight for me!

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