Riding the rails with Pip Tattnall: no. 1

The first piece of my one-and-many interview for the March 30th book launch of A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage is up at Hannah Stephenson's grand blog, The Storialist. The interview will be strewn, like a dismantled Osiris, around the world, and to see and read all one has to travel and pick up the pieces. Why? Because it's a traveling book set in the Depression, and protagonist Pip Tattnall is fleeing the tragedy at the heart of his childhood and growing up as a road kid, riding the rails into manhood.

And whether you shop at your local indie (mine are The Book Nook and Augur's in Cooperstown, both a portion of larger stores, and The Green Toad in Oneonta) or at a chain shop or online, I hope you will want A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage for your very own. It's close to my heart, this book, and uses landscapes and facts close to my family history.

Thanks to Hannah for her interesting question and the time she spent making a post about the book! Comments off; please comment at The Storialist.

Very High Romance

You know, I just tumbled into a site where I read the most dreadful, laughable bit of a novel--all full of grammar mistakes and European counts and barons and crazy syntax and misspellings and lovely young girls and jewels and passionate flingings-about. Then I read a statement by the author, all about her joy in making stories and the stored-up treasure in her heart, and I was so, so touched somehow that this royal nonsense, poorly-worded and poorly-punctuated and packed with rubbishy dreams, came flowing from her heart, so that she thanked God for the goodness of the world and for her precious gift.

Still in pre-order.
The Ferrol Sams Award for Fiction

La! I was abashed.

All the same, if you have to choose between that one and mine, I do advise--forgive me!--that you send for mine. There are no counts and barons and jewels (except for a bit of jet bead that some boys pretend is a jewel), and though there is love, it is often unspoken or refused. No Cinderella-worthy carriages fetch a baron home; no, just a train to go steaming by, if only the traveler can catch hold without paying with a leg or life. I trust there are no mistakes on hand, no bizarre commas or lack thereof, no grammatical contortions.

But the joy of telling stories: evidently that is the same.