Moments: an end-of-year quote

One of the best books I read this year was Wanting, by the Australian novelist Richard Flanagan. The story has three historical threads, and one of them features a fictional Charles Dickens. In this passage, Flanagan's Dickens is speaking to Ellen Ternan.

"We have in our lives only a few moments. A moment of joy and wonder with another. Some might say beauty or transcendence. Or all those things. Then you reach an age, Miss Ternan, and you realize that moment, or, if you are very lucky, a handful of those moments, was your life. That those moments are all, and that they are everything. And yet we persist in thinking that such moments will only have worth if we can make them go on forever. We should live for moments, yet we are so fraught with pursuing everything else, with the future, with the anchors that pull us down, so busy that we sometimes don't even see the moments for what they are."

Signed copies available!

Contact me to order Arusha. Please provide your shipping address and how you would like the book signed. Thanks!

What kind of writer?

Nicola Griffith says: "In an AOL author chat many years ago, the moderator asked me, 'What kind of writer are you?' I said, 'A good one.' No doubt he meant, What genre do you work in?, but that's a question I've never been interested in answering. I write good novels. I aim to write great novels. Sometimes the publisher calls these novels science fiction, or lesbian fiction, or crime fiction, or historical fiction. I call them good books."

Pictures from book tour

Reading in P'town, Women's Week


Thanks for the photos, Watty (above) and Wayne (below).

Book launch in Toronto

Here is how ARUSHA is featured by Glad Day Bookshop: "Thoughtful, compelling story of a married-with-kids couple in '80s Tennessee--he's a homo and she's a dyke, and it all comes crashing down. The novel follows Edith (the wife) as she escapes the scorn of her small town and her family, and follows her lover to Arusha, an African town, to witness the Rwanda peace talks. It's been amazingly reviewed and the launch was wildly successful."

Mary Travers

Blessed is her memory.

Click here for a gorgeous rendition of a song by Laura Nyro--who herself died of cancer, in her forties.

And the winner is...

It's official: a reader (that I know of) has received an actual, printed copy of Arusha. While some sites are still staying "pre-order" even though today is the 25th of August, the original Amazon bookstore managed to get a book from Minneapolis, where it is located, to New York City yesterday!

That's True Colors Bookstore, folks. Fastest draw in the Midwest. Or anywhere, apparently.