Anne Lovett's Blog
April 11, 2018
The Greatest Adventure
We were nine years old, my cousin and I, and on a sunny June day in middle Georgia we perched on the cool marble steps of the Carnegie Library, books stacked beside us, waiting for my mother to come for us. We had joined the Summer Reading Club and wanted to fill our lists.
My cousin gazed back into the peaceful interior where the librarian presided at her high desk. “I’d like to become a librarian when I grow up,” she said.
“Not me.” I jumped up and dusted off my shorts as I saw my mother’s car approach. “I’d rather have adventures.”
Though adventure books were my reading of choice, real-life adventures were not easy to come by in rural Georgia. What else could I do? I scribbled my adventures on Blue Horse notebook paper. My heroines explored jungles, flew to outer space, found cures for diseases, or solved mysteries like Nancy Drew.
Small-town life flowed like the sluggish Oconee River as I grew into my teens. Adventures? Well, there was the occasional family trip to Florida to see the alligators or the mermaids at Weeki Watchee, or to North Carolina’s ruby mines to sift through handfuls of mud for gems—a far cry from King Solomon’s Mines.
On the home front, a chicken-wire Santa took different poses on our front lawn every year, and the Livestock Festival brought horse shows to town. Sometimes, even the circus came and pitched tents out in a nearby field.
When my parents’ friends came over to play bridge or have a cook-out, I passed tea and cookies and melted into the background, a fly on the wall. I heard all about a suspicious death, an unacknowledged child, bitter enmities, and political wheeling and dealing. At school, the talk was about fights, who liked who, hot-rodders who hadn’t made it around the curve on the Soperton Road.
Still, this was hometown life, not adventure. In middle school I wrote plays about swashbuckling pirates, of knights and ladies, and devoured books of faraway lands. In high school, I discovered I liked making people laugh, and wrote a humor column for the school paper. Still I yearned for adventures, or lacking that, writing about them.
I was encouraged only by my English teacher and I strove for high grades in that subject. I discovered e.e.cummings and declared my intention to become a poet, or at least a writer.
“Writers are a dime a dozen,” my father said. “Find a good husband,” said my mother. “With your ability you should become a doctor,” said my parents’ friends, “or maybe an architect.” Advice came from everywhere, none of it encouraging.
I got the idea maybe I could be a doctor and a writer, too. I enrolled in Emory, only to find half my class intent on pursuing the medical calling. After a year of intense competition for grades, I decided that I would not be the one to find a cure for cancer. From time to time I would write something, and then I would put it away.
All my college friends who wanted to write were hippies, and I was still too much a good Methodist girl to follow their lead. But still I yearned to rebel. I refused pot but learned Russian. I wrote secret poems.
Then I fell in love, and that was all the adventure I needed for a time. My ambition to write went underground as I went to graduate school, married, worked, and had children.
My cousin didn’t finished college. She left to get married. Then one day years later, after her children were in school, my cousin told me she was going back to college to finish her degree so that she could at last become a librarian.
That touched a chord in me, by then a stressed-out, overcommitted mother of three, with one special-needs child. I bought a pack of typing paper and dragged out my old Smith-Corona that skipped a key now and then.
Some time later, I had ninety pages of a bad novel, a few unstructured but sincere short stories, and the realization I needed both a computer and some instruction in craft.
By the time I’d pecked out that work, my cousin had already become a librarian in our home town library. It wasn’t the same Carnegie building with the marble steps where the librarian presided at her high desk those years ago, but a larger regional library.
I signed up for an evening class at Emory, bought my first computer from Radio Shack, and the next year was admitted to the Sewanee Writer’s Conference. My adventures had begun.
Now, years after I dragged out that Smith-Corona, I’ve had more adventures than I could have dreamed of there on the library steps, and I’m still having them.
Atlanta has been full of surprises for many years. I’ve met wonderful, creative people, I’ve found joy in work, and I’ve gone to places I’d never have gone otherwise.
I’ve had essays, book reviews, poems, and short stories published, and my novels are getting out there.
What do I write about? Mostly, my material is drawn from what I learned growing up in that town I thought was so dull—the people, the places, the quotidian things that make living both scary and worthwhile. Middle Georgia. Teens who got pregnant. Lunchroom fights. Mysterious deaths. Florida. North Carolina. Reptiles. Rubies.
And together, they add up to the biggest adventure of all—the one that takes place in the human heart.
My cousin gazed back into the peaceful interior where the librarian presided at her high desk. “I’d like to become a librarian when I grow up,” she said.
“Not me.” I jumped up and dusted off my shorts as I saw my mother’s car approach. “I’d rather have adventures.”
Though adventure books were my reading of choice, real-life adventures were not easy to come by in rural Georgia. What else could I do? I scribbled my adventures on Blue Horse notebook paper. My heroines explored jungles, flew to outer space, found cures for diseases, or solved mysteries like Nancy Drew.
Small-town life flowed like the sluggish Oconee River as I grew into my teens. Adventures? Well, there was the occasional family trip to Florida to see the alligators or the mermaids at Weeki Watchee, or to North Carolina’s ruby mines to sift through handfuls of mud for gems—a far cry from King Solomon’s Mines.
On the home front, a chicken-wire Santa took different poses on our front lawn every year, and the Livestock Festival brought horse shows to town. Sometimes, even the circus came and pitched tents out in a nearby field.
When my parents’ friends came over to play bridge or have a cook-out, I passed tea and cookies and melted into the background, a fly on the wall. I heard all about a suspicious death, an unacknowledged child, bitter enmities, and political wheeling and dealing. At school, the talk was about fights, who liked who, hot-rodders who hadn’t made it around the curve on the Soperton Road.
Still, this was hometown life, not adventure. In middle school I wrote plays about swashbuckling pirates, of knights and ladies, and devoured books of faraway lands. In high school, I discovered I liked making people laugh, and wrote a humor column for the school paper. Still I yearned for adventures, or lacking that, writing about them.
I was encouraged only by my English teacher and I strove for high grades in that subject. I discovered e.e.cummings and declared my intention to become a poet, or at least a writer.
“Writers are a dime a dozen,” my father said. “Find a good husband,” said my mother. “With your ability you should become a doctor,” said my parents’ friends, “or maybe an architect.” Advice came from everywhere, none of it encouraging.
I got the idea maybe I could be a doctor and a writer, too. I enrolled in Emory, only to find half my class intent on pursuing the medical calling. After a year of intense competition for grades, I decided that I would not be the one to find a cure for cancer. From time to time I would write something, and then I would put it away.
All my college friends who wanted to write were hippies, and I was still too much a good Methodist girl to follow their lead. But still I yearned to rebel. I refused pot but learned Russian. I wrote secret poems.
Then I fell in love, and that was all the adventure I needed for a time. My ambition to write went underground as I went to graduate school, married, worked, and had children.
My cousin didn’t finished college. She left to get married. Then one day years later, after her children were in school, my cousin told me she was going back to college to finish her degree so that she could at last become a librarian.
That touched a chord in me, by then a stressed-out, overcommitted mother of three, with one special-needs child. I bought a pack of typing paper and dragged out my old Smith-Corona that skipped a key now and then.
Some time later, I had ninety pages of a bad novel, a few unstructured but sincere short stories, and the realization I needed both a computer and some instruction in craft.
By the time I’d pecked out that work, my cousin had already become a librarian in our home town library. It wasn’t the same Carnegie building with the marble steps where the librarian presided at her high desk those years ago, but a larger regional library.
I signed up for an evening class at Emory, bought my first computer from Radio Shack, and the next year was admitted to the Sewanee Writer’s Conference. My adventures had begun.
Now, years after I dragged out that Smith-Corona, I’ve had more adventures than I could have dreamed of there on the library steps, and I’m still having them.
Atlanta has been full of surprises for many years. I’ve met wonderful, creative people, I’ve found joy in work, and I’ve gone to places I’d never have gone otherwise.
I’ve had essays, book reviews, poems, and short stories published, and my novels are getting out there.
What do I write about? Mostly, my material is drawn from what I learned growing up in that town I thought was so dull—the people, the places, the quotidian things that make living both scary and worthwhile. Middle Georgia. Teens who got pregnant. Lunchroom fights. Mysterious deaths. Florida. North Carolina. Reptiles. Rubies.
And together, they add up to the biggest adventure of all—the one that takes place in the human heart.
August 7, 2017
The Aviator's Wife: A Mystery Solved
I can still hear my mother saying “I would never read anything written by that woman!”
As a child I was a precocious reader, and people were talking about a book called Gift from the Sea. So many praised its beauty and its poetic thoughts about love and life. So I asked my mother, who liked to spend evenings in her favorite chair with a book, whether she had read it.
That’s when my mild-mannered mother delivered her blistering comment. The disgust on her face discouraged me from asking her what was wrong with the book or the author, and even if I had, I’m sure she would have told me I was too young to understand.
That was true. At some point, of course, I went to the Carnegie Library and paged through the book, not daring to bring it home. It seemed to me like a book of devotionals of the sort Mother read regularly in the Methodist booklet The Upper Room. I didn’t see anything objectionable.
The mystery persisted. In time I found that the author was the wife of Charles Lindbergh, the famous aviator. He had once been my mother’s hero, and Amelia Earhart her heroine. Maybe she thought they should have gotten together, and that woman interfered.
Very far off base.
My mother had named me “Ann” on my birth certificate. When I asked if I’d been named after anyone, she said family names didn’t work for one reason or another, and she’d always liked the name of one of her college friends.
I later found out the friend spelled her name “Anne.” I began to suspect that Mother didn’t want anyone thinking she’d named me after "that woman" and lopped off the “e.” I felt cheated, because there was now a princess who spelled it “Anne.” I added the “e” in high school and never looked back.
In time, I read A. Scott Berg’s excellent biography about LindberghLindbergh, and found that the hero had become tarnished because of his opposition to entering World War II and admiration for Hitler’s Germany. Aha, I thought, that’s the reason. She was "that woman" because they were appeasers. My father had served in the war and some of their friends were still in the military. Still, it didn’t quite explain the vehemence.
Finally, in The Aviator's Wife, I read excerpts of the essay Anne Morrow Lindbergh had written supporting her husband’s position. I was appalled. I was sickened. Like my mother must have been when she’d read those words in 1941. I finally understood, after all these years, her reaction to my innocent question. Even Smith College didn’t want Anne Lindbergh to tell people she was an alumna after she’d written that pamphlet.
The understanding was made doubly difficult because in reading The Aviator’s Wife, I’d been walking in the shoes of a woman who didn’t quite understand what she was getting into when she married Lindbergh, didn’t understand the choices she’d be called on to make. Didn’t know she’d be required to repudiate values she’d been taught by her father. Didn’t know how her heart would be broken.
I hope what I read was close to the truth.
As a child I was a precocious reader, and people were talking about a book called Gift from the Sea. So many praised its beauty and its poetic thoughts about love and life. So I asked my mother, who liked to spend evenings in her favorite chair with a book, whether she had read it.
That’s when my mild-mannered mother delivered her blistering comment. The disgust on her face discouraged me from asking her what was wrong with the book or the author, and even if I had, I’m sure she would have told me I was too young to understand.
That was true. At some point, of course, I went to the Carnegie Library and paged through the book, not daring to bring it home. It seemed to me like a book of devotionals of the sort Mother read regularly in the Methodist booklet The Upper Room. I didn’t see anything objectionable.
The mystery persisted. In time I found that the author was the wife of Charles Lindbergh, the famous aviator. He had once been my mother’s hero, and Amelia Earhart her heroine. Maybe she thought they should have gotten together, and that woman interfered.
Very far off base.
My mother had named me “Ann” on my birth certificate. When I asked if I’d been named after anyone, she said family names didn’t work for one reason or another, and she’d always liked the name of one of her college friends.
I later found out the friend spelled her name “Anne.” I began to suspect that Mother didn’t want anyone thinking she’d named me after "that woman" and lopped off the “e.” I felt cheated, because there was now a princess who spelled it “Anne.” I added the “e” in high school and never looked back.
In time, I read A. Scott Berg’s excellent biography about LindberghLindbergh, and found that the hero had become tarnished because of his opposition to entering World War II and admiration for Hitler’s Germany. Aha, I thought, that’s the reason. She was "that woman" because they were appeasers. My father had served in the war and some of their friends were still in the military. Still, it didn’t quite explain the vehemence.
Finally, in The Aviator's Wife, I read excerpts of the essay Anne Morrow Lindbergh had written supporting her husband’s position. I was appalled. I was sickened. Like my mother must have been when she’d read those words in 1941. I finally understood, after all these years, her reaction to my innocent question. Even Smith College didn’t want Anne Lindbergh to tell people she was an alumna after she’d written that pamphlet.
The understanding was made doubly difficult because in reading The Aviator’s Wife, I’d been walking in the shoes of a woman who didn’t quite understand what she was getting into when she married Lindbergh, didn’t understand the choices she’d be called on to make. Didn’t know she’d be required to repudiate values she’d been taught by her father. Didn’t know how her heart would be broken.
I hope what I read was close to the truth.
July 19, 2017
The Forgotten Jungle War
I have a guest post on the blog Relevant History on the website of Suzanne Adair, author of mysteries set during the Revolutionary War period. Her blog explores little-known facts authors have found while writing their books.
Entitled The Forgotten Jungle War, It's about the research I did for Rubies in Burma, and why I made the choices I did.
Here's the link!
http://www.suzanneadair.net/blog/
Entitled The Forgotten Jungle War, It's about the research I did for Rubies in Burma, and why I made the choices I did.
Here's the link!
http://www.suzanneadair.net/blog/
May 20, 2017
What's Next?
Rubies is off and running with a good review from Kirkus and steady sales! I’m deep into production with my next book, which is to be released in the late summer, in time for the Decatur Book Festival. I’ll be appearing there in the “Sisters in Crime” booth signing both books with my awesome sisters (and brothers)
Saving Miss Lillian is a light summer read, a mystery and romance set in Atlanta and the Georgia coast. I would call it a “romantic suspense,” except that name now seems to mean something with whap-bam-boom action. Well, Miss Lillian has plenty of action, but not with Navy Seals or Special Ops.
Summary: In elegant old Atlanta neighborhood Buckhead, nurse Sunny Iles must keep her patient, an elderly grande dame, alive by preventing a greedy relative from killing her. A plot is afoot to gain control of the lady's unspoiled island off the coast of Georgia in order to build a resort for billionaires.
If you liked the Dowager Duchess, you’ll love Miss Lillian...
The artist did a great job with the cover, and I’ll do a “cover reveal” sometime this summer. Please look for a Goodreads giveaway in advance this summer!
And what's in progress? A few people have asked me if I’m going to write a sequel to Rubies. Well, I just might, and I have a few ideas. I love those folks. Later. Right I’m about to complete my BIG book.
It’s another historical novel set in middle Georgia, in a town much like Macon. The time period will be 1924-1928, and will feature a country girl and a city girl whose lives become linked by a charming con man in a way they could never imagine.
Stay tuned.
Saving Miss Lillian is a light summer read, a mystery and romance set in Atlanta and the Georgia coast. I would call it a “romantic suspense,” except that name now seems to mean something with whap-bam-boom action. Well, Miss Lillian has plenty of action, but not with Navy Seals or Special Ops.
Summary: In elegant old Atlanta neighborhood Buckhead, nurse Sunny Iles must keep her patient, an elderly grande dame, alive by preventing a greedy relative from killing her. A plot is afoot to gain control of the lady's unspoiled island off the coast of Georgia in order to build a resort for billionaires.
If you liked the Dowager Duchess, you’ll love Miss Lillian...
The artist did a great job with the cover, and I’ll do a “cover reveal” sometime this summer. Please look for a Goodreads giveaway in advance this summer!
And what's in progress? A few people have asked me if I’m going to write a sequel to Rubies. Well, I just might, and I have a few ideas. I love those folks. Later. Right I’m about to complete my BIG book.
It’s another historical novel set in middle Georgia, in a town much like Macon. The time period will be 1924-1928, and will feature a country girl and a city girl whose lives become linked by a charming con man in a way they could never imagine.
Stay tuned.
January 30, 2017
Bad Books and Carolyn See
When I’d finished my first novel and was seeking advice from all comers, a journalist friend recommended that I read Making a Literary Life: Advice for Writers and Other Dreamers by Carolyn See, author, longtime book commentator for The Washington Post, and mother of best-selling novelist Lisa See (Snow Flower and the Secret Fan).
I dutifully bought the book, not sure what to expect, and I was gobsmacked. That book, along with Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing and Stephen King’s On Writing, are must-reads for anyone who feels compelled to write.
With irreverent wit, she gives practical advice on how to use your experiences to create fiction, as well as hints on plot and getting your work out there. The book’s a little dated now, for it was written before the role of social media and electronic submissions in marketing and before indie publishing became acceptable.
Still, she makes the point that the author needs to form connections, and she recommends sending one “charming note” per day, five days week, to an author, editor, or agent whose work you admire. Even those who turn you down. I took her at her word and wrote her a “charming note” by email telling her how much I liked her book, and how much I agreed with her about a certain book to which she’d given a negative review.
She wrote me back a most charming reply. Rest in Peace, Carolyn. She left us July 2016.
So what makes a reviewer give a book a bad review?
Perhaps the main sin is to spoil a reader’s expectations.
When you write a book and a reader opens its pages, you’ve formed a contract with the reader. That reader expects to be informed, entertained, challenged, or whatever you’ve promised in the opening pages. If she feels you have broken that contract, she is going to slam the book shut, throw it at the wall, or never pick up one of your books again. And that’s the last thing a writer wants!
Bad books are made of bad writing and bad grammar, bad spelling and too many commas, excessive density and anachronisms, falsehoods and sloppy research, faulty construction and nasty attacks. But there’s more, even with the most carefully edited and New York-published editions.
For instance: It’s confusing. Important scenes are left out or saved until the end. The beginning is strong, the ending is weak. The bad guy gets the girl. The hero does penance for bad deeds and gets killed anyhow. The romance doesn’t happen. The mystery is not solved. It’s phoned in by a best-selling writer. These books get out there, folks.
Maybe you don’t agree, but I also don’t care for books that riff on famous classics. The exception is Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, and it could have stood on its own. What makes a bad book for you?
Making a Literary Life: Advice for Writers and Other Dreamers
Wide Sargasso Sea
Zen in the Art of Writing
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
I dutifully bought the book, not sure what to expect, and I was gobsmacked. That book, along with Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing and Stephen King’s On Writing, are must-reads for anyone who feels compelled to write.
With irreverent wit, she gives practical advice on how to use your experiences to create fiction, as well as hints on plot and getting your work out there. The book’s a little dated now, for it was written before the role of social media and electronic submissions in marketing and before indie publishing became acceptable.
Still, she makes the point that the author needs to form connections, and she recommends sending one “charming note” per day, five days week, to an author, editor, or agent whose work you admire. Even those who turn you down. I took her at her word and wrote her a “charming note” by email telling her how much I liked her book, and how much I agreed with her about a certain book to which she’d given a negative review.
She wrote me back a most charming reply. Rest in Peace, Carolyn. She left us July 2016.
So what makes a reviewer give a book a bad review?
Perhaps the main sin is to spoil a reader’s expectations.
When you write a book and a reader opens its pages, you’ve formed a contract with the reader. That reader expects to be informed, entertained, challenged, or whatever you’ve promised in the opening pages. If she feels you have broken that contract, she is going to slam the book shut, throw it at the wall, or never pick up one of your books again. And that’s the last thing a writer wants!
Bad books are made of bad writing and bad grammar, bad spelling and too many commas, excessive density and anachronisms, falsehoods and sloppy research, faulty construction and nasty attacks. But there’s more, even with the most carefully edited and New York-published editions.
For instance: It’s confusing. Important scenes are left out or saved until the end. The beginning is strong, the ending is weak. The bad guy gets the girl. The hero does penance for bad deeds and gets killed anyhow. The romance doesn’t happen. The mystery is not solved. It’s phoned in by a best-selling writer. These books get out there, folks.
Maybe you don’t agree, but I also don’t care for books that riff on famous classics. The exception is Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, and it could have stood on its own. What makes a bad book for you?
Making a Literary Life: Advice for Writers and Other Dreamers
Wide Sargasso Sea
Zen in the Art of Writing
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
January 26, 2017
Is it Autobiographical?
People wonder all the time about how much of an author’s life makes its way into his/her fiction. Some novelists, like Pat Conroy, have a career that is one long autobiography and freely admits it. The first thing new writers hear is “write what you know.” Well, when you’re writing science fiction or paranormal, maybe not so much.
I heard the best answer, I think, from William Diehl, a Georgia-based best-selling writer who wrote thrillers, reinventing himself as an author at age 50. (Sharky’s Machine, Primal Fear) He said, “Don’t write what you physically know. I’ve never been deep-sea diving or gone to Thailand. You can research. Write the emotions you know.” And having been a ball-turret gunner in World War II, I think he'd experienced emotions he could tap in his thrillers.
I’ve taken his words to heart.
But yes, once upon a time I did fly off a jumping horse, and that experience made its way into Rubies from Burma. And I was saved in the way that Mae Lee was saved, except I had no Duke to pick me up. Alas! I had to limp back to the barn. And boy, I knew how she felt.
Did I have a relative that served in Burma and told his experiences? No. That all came from research. Tons of research. The first order of business was to watch both of the mini-series “Winds of War” and “War and Remembrance”(24 episodes) to get the progress of WWII straight in my mind. Then it was time to concentrate on Burma. When I started, I didn’t even know why Duke had been sent there, and I had to figure out in what outfit he would serve. I read the memoir of “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell and several books on the war in Burma and memoirs, and the answer revealed itself.
The Winds of War
War and Remembrance
The Stilwell Papers
Is anyone interested in my complete reading list? Let me know and I’ll post it.
I heard the best answer, I think, from William Diehl, a Georgia-based best-selling writer who wrote thrillers, reinventing himself as an author at age 50. (Sharky’s Machine, Primal Fear) He said, “Don’t write what you physically know. I’ve never been deep-sea diving or gone to Thailand. You can research. Write the emotions you know.” And having been a ball-turret gunner in World War II, I think he'd experienced emotions he could tap in his thrillers.
I’ve taken his words to heart.
But yes, once upon a time I did fly off a jumping horse, and that experience made its way into Rubies from Burma. And I was saved in the way that Mae Lee was saved, except I had no Duke to pick me up. Alas! I had to limp back to the barn. And boy, I knew how she felt.
Did I have a relative that served in Burma and told his experiences? No. That all came from research. Tons of research. The first order of business was to watch both of the mini-series “Winds of War” and “War and Remembrance”(24 episodes) to get the progress of WWII straight in my mind. Then it was time to concentrate on Burma. When I started, I didn’t even know why Duke had been sent there, and I had to figure out in what outfit he would serve. I read the memoir of “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell and several books on the war in Burma and memoirs, and the answer revealed itself.
The Winds of War
War and Remembrance
The Stilwell Papers
Is anyone interested in my complete reading list? Let me know and I’ll post it.
