24 Days to Christmas!

I love Christmas and Christmas traditions! This is the 11th year I've posted an advent calendar of vintage Christmas cards here on Rose City Reader.

Enjoy! And Merry Christmas to my fellow Christmas merrymakers! 

Book Beginning: A Year of Living Kindly: Choices That Will Change Your Life and the World Around You by Donna Cameron

BOOK BEGINNINGS ON FRIDAYS
THANKS FOR JOINING ME ON FRIDAYS FOR BOOK BEGINNING FUN!

MY BOOK BEGINNING

Stories of kindness are everywhere . . . if we look for them.

-- from Chapter 1, "Being Nice Isn't the Same as Being Kind," in A Year of Living Kindly: Choices That Will Change Your Life and the World Around You by Donna Cameron.

I loved the idea of this book as soon as it caught my eye. I can't wait to dive in and the title of the first chapter intrigues me. What does this mean, being nice isn't the same as being kind?

Please join me every Friday to share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading, along with your initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires. Please remember to include the title of the book and the author’s name.

EARLY BIRDS & SLOWPOKES: This weekly post goes up Thursday evening for those who like to get their posts up and linked early on. But feel free to add a link all week.

FACEBOOK: Rose City Reader has a Facebook page where I post about new and favorite books, book events, and other bookish tidbits, as well as link to blog posts. I'd love a "Like" on the page! You can go to the page here to Like it. I am happy to Like you back if you have a blog or professional Facebook page, so please leave a comment with a link and I will find you.

TWITTER, ETC: If you are on Twitter, Instagram, Google+, or other social media, please post using the hash tag #BookBeginnings. I try to follow all Book  Beginnings participants on whatever interweb sites you are on, so please let me know if I have missed any and I will catch up.

TIE IN: The Friday 56 hosted by Freda's Voice is a natural tie in with this event and there is a lot of cross over, so many people combine the two. The idea is to post a teaser from page 56 of the book you are reading and share a link to your post. Find details and the Linky for your Friday 56 post on Freda’s Voice.

YOUR BOOK BEGINNING

Teaser Tuesday: Pay to Play: Sexual Harassment American Style by Tootie Smith

But let's consider the more hidden forms of sexism, which I believe are more prevalent in their influence in our workplaces and in our play-places and are most always ignored. For lack of a better term, I'll call it locker room talk. 

-- Pay to Play: Sexual Harassment American Style by Tootie Smith. Smith is a public speaker and consultant whose timely book offers a lively explanation of sexual harassment as well as common sense solutions.

Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by The Purple Booker, where you can find the official rules for this weekly event.

Mailbox Monday: Essays Everywhere!

I picked up three books of essays last week. What books came into your house?



The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: My Encounters with Extraordinary People by Susan Orlean. I saw the movie adaptation of The Orchid Thief, but have never read her books. Now I will.



Havanas in Camelot: Personal Essays by William Styron. Sophie's Choice is a gobsmacker of a book. I've never read his nonfiction.



A Hymnal: The Controversial Arts by William F. Buckley. I've been reading, and enjoying, Buckley's fiction and nonfiction since I was in high school. It's rare I find one of his books I don't already own, so I was excited to find this one.

Thanks for joining me for Mailbox Monday, a weekly "show & tell" blog event where participants share the books they acquired the week before. Visit the Mailbox Monday website to find links to all the participants' posts and read more about Books that Caught our Eye.

Mailbox Monday is graciously hosted by Leslie of Under My Apple Tree, Serena of Savvy Verse & Wit, and Martha of Reviews by Martha's Bookshelf.

Author Interview: Stevan Allred

Stevan Allred is one of the most imaginative writers around. His new novel, The Alehouse at the End of the World, follows the hero on a quest to find his beloved on the Isle of the Dead. It's the latest title from Forest Avenue Press, with another eye-popping cover from Gigi Little.

Stevan recently talked with Rose City Reader about his new book, his inspiration, and what's up with the title: 

The Alehouse at the End of the World takes place in the sixteenth century, sort of, in a world filled with myth, lore, bird gods, adventures, and a very sexy goddess. What inspired such an imaginative story?

I stumbled my way into this novel without a plan or an outline. I wanted to write something untethered by the constraints of the everyday world. Inspiration came from books I have loved for decades, books from my childhood (The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, Winnie-the Pooh), books from my youth (Frank Herbert’s Dune, C. S. Lewis’s Narnia stories, J. R. R. Tolkein’s Middle Earth novels), books from my adulthood (Ursula LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Jan Morris’s Last Letters from Hav, Christopher Moore’s Lamb: the Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal). I put some brushstrokes of what might be called magical realism into my first book, A Simplified Map of the Real World. I hoped I was ready to go full bore into something fantastic, something I came to think of as mythical realism.

What is your professional and personal background and how did it lead to writing fiction?

Professionally I am a property manager, which is a people business, and affords me the chance to get to know lots of different kinds of people whom I might never meet otherwise. Sometimes I find moments of revelation in my day job that work their way into characters on the page.

I absorbed a love of books and writing from my mother, who valued a life of the mind while doing yeowoman’s work as a stay-at-home mom. I wasn’t an athlete, growing up, though I dearly wished I were, even though I lacked the coordination and strength to compete with my peers. But I was a very good student, academically speaking, and books were my companions, especially books that told a good story. My mother was interested in everything – science, religion, history, the natural world – and I grew up with her broad curiosity informing the casual conversation of our home life.

How did you come up with the title?

The title eluded me for a very long time, all the way through two complete drafts. Usually I would know the title of a work by then, but for three years this novel was known on my computer as Great Fish, a phrase I borrowed from the story of Jonah in the King James Version of the Bible.

Early on in the third draft the title came to me in the manner that Annie Dillard has famously described:

One line of a poem, the poet said – only one line, but thank God for that one line – drops from the ceiling. Thornton Wilder cited this unnamed writer of sonnets: one line of a sonnet falls from the ceiling, and you tap in the others around it with a jeweler's hammer. Nobody whispers it in your ear. It is like something you memorized once and forgot. Now it comes back and rips away your breath.

It was a couple of weeks before I realized that the title of my first book, A Simplified Map of the Real World, landed on the same word as the title of this novel. It was another six months before someone pointed out to me that I had unconsciously echoed the title of a Douglas Adams novel, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Douglas Adams and I are very different writers on the page, but our worldviews are not so far apart.

Did you know at the beginning how you were going to end the story, or did it come to you as you wrote the book?

In the beginning I had the fisherman, an incident with a whale, a quest that would lead the fisherman to the Isle of the Dead, and not much more. The rest I made up as I went along.

I like to discover the story as I write it. I like to let the characters and their language drive the writing forward. Had I planned the whole thing from the outset I don’t think I would have finished it. For me, the joy of writing a story is all in the discovery.

What did you learn from writing your book – either about the subject of the book or the writing process – that most surprised you?

I took great delight in stretching my imagination. The more I used my imagination, I discovered, the more I could use my imagination. It was like going into training for a marathon, building up the stamina and the range that would allow me to solve all of the problems my crazy version of the afterlife presented.

What kind of books do you like to read? What are you reading now?

I read a lot, mostly fiction, and my tastes are pretty broad. I love speculative fiction, and I love reality-bound fiction. I read YA novels from time to time, like Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus – so good I read it twice, back-to-back. I also read history occasionally, mostly with an eye toward the often astonishing accomplishments of our forebears, and the unintended consequences of those accomplishments. In that vein I am much enamored of Charles C. Mann’s two works, 1491 and 1493.

Right now I am reading Paul Souder’s excellent Arctic Solitaire, which is Souder’s account of going after the perfect polar bear photograph in the northern reaches of Hudson’s Bay. Before that Stranger in the Pen, Mohamed Asem’s memoir about being detained by immigration as he re-entered the UK after a trip abroad – my highly recommended, must-read for these troubled times. I’ve recently finished three exemplary novels, all of which are well worth the time: Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Tayari Jones’ An American Marriage, and Eva Hornung’s Dog Boy. I love books that take me somewhere I’ve never been and make that world come alive.

What is the most valuable advice you’ve been given as an author?

It is far easier to make a bad sentence better than it is to try to write the perfect sentence in the first place. Writing is rewriting. You have to learn to live with your own bad writing until you figure out how to make it better. If you can learn to do that, and you get your butt in the chair on a regular basis, you’ll be okay.

Do you have any events coming up to read from or promote your book?

I have many, and you can go to my Stevan Allred website to keep up.

THANKS, STEVAN!

THE ALEHOUSE AT THE END OF THE WORLD IS AVAILABLE ONLINE, OR ASK YOUR LOCAL BOOK SELLER TO ORDER IT. IT WOULD MAKE A GREAT HOLIDAY GIFT FOR ANY READER WHO LIKES A GOOD YARN!