I have moved away from Lordship, on Long Island Sound, and though it will be immortalized as the inspiration for Arden-on-the-Sound in my new cozy mystery series (the Salt & Pepper series, which will be released in the fall), I will only be a visitor from now on.

I have moved about an hour north, to the West Hartford area (where I lived for 23 years before relocating to Fairfield County) and have a great house on a lake.  I’ve founded an electronic publishing company — eFitzgerald.  And I’ve published my first novel, electronically.  Check it out and download a sample here.  Or go ahead and invest the entire $4.99 for the whole book!  You can read it on Kindle, iPhone, iPad, Androids, your Mac or PC.

And in honor of that, I’m starting a new blog.  I’ll link it here once I get it up and running.  (Get it?  RUNNING?)

Thanks to all of you for reading me for these two years!

She has half-blonde hair, a lot of lipstick, black sequins on her scarf, and turquoise chandelier earrings.  I wonder what the story is.  She doesn’t know what kind of car she has?

I take off and cruise the parking lot for about 10 minutes, without seeing anything that I think could be her car.  I finally give up, because I too need to get back home and finish my holiday preparations.  And I have so little to go on.  I drive back to her, where she seems calmer now.  I’m so sorry, I say, I can’t find it at all.  Maybe you should go back inside and get someone at the store to watch your cart, and I’m sure they can drive you around until you recognize it….  ”Thank you,” she says.  ”I’ll figure it out.  My mother died today.”

That took my breath away.  I couldn’t find her car, but I was glad that I had tried.  A small thing to do for another human being.  On a day when she needed it.

A few years ago, when my Dad was old, he couldn’t find his car after shopping.  A kind man drove him around in the dark, and when they had to give up, the man drove him home.  The next day, in the sunshine, he found it parked around the corner from the store.  He felt very sheepish.  But I was so glad to hear that someone had helped him get home.  A kind stranger doing a mitzvah.  So yesterday I paid it forward.

One of my friends is going through domestic turmoil at the moment.  She is moving out of her house, and trying to get herself safely situated before she tackles the bigger questions… like, what is she going to do for the rest of her life?  She was driving home from Christmas Eve dinner at her sister’s in the next state, and as she pulled up to a tollbooth, the moneyman waved her through.  ”The lady up ahead paid for you.  She said to tell you Merry Christmas, and God loves you.”  Passing it on…

And last night, which was the fifth anniversary of the day I pinpoint as the date on which I fell in love with Richard, I was singing with him at the glorious, candle-lit, Christmas Eve service at our church.  Right in the middle of “O Come All You Faithful,” when he had quietly stepped away from the bass section of the choir, I heard the ringing sound of his trumpet on the descant in harmony with the voices and the organ.  As the peels of that bright sound came down all around the church, bringing memories of my Dad, also a trumpet player, and all the Christmases of years past, I felt the amazing miracle of our love.  That I found him; that he found me; that we love each other and get the chance to make a life together which continues to get sweeter every year.

And last night, just before we fell asleep, I listened again to the voicemail message he left me five years ago (!) on my cell.  That Christmas Eve, we had seen each other for dinner, then stood and watched the sun go down over the water in Southport.  That’s the moment I think I catapulted into love.  But we had to leave each other after dinner to sing at our respective Christmas Eve services.

In the voicemail message, left late that night five years ago, he said that he had thought of me “just as they were lighting the candles at the very end of the service.  I was thinking that tonight was so perfect, and I couldn’t think of anything that could have made it more perfect.  And then finally I did think of something that would make it even more perfect… and that would be, if I could be singing with you.”

Miracles do happen.

Merry Holidays.  Share the love.

In fact, I thought I had read it, years ago.  It was a shock to me to realize that I must have stopped somewhere along the way.  Actually, I can remember brother Rob (3 years older) having that book lying around when he was in maybe 10th grade.  Which would have made me a 7th grader.  And I know that I picked it up then, being both precocious and a slightly obnoxious little sister… I was always reading his texts.  But it was too old for me at the time, and I didn’t really get it.

And then I got into 10th or 11th grade, and started reading it when the kids in the other English class did, and loved it.  But apparently I never finished it! Which I discovered to my great surprise when I got to the end this morning.  And it’s not as though it takes a lot of time to read!

In fact, I was describing the part I remembered to my husband this morning… from reading it in high school, which I clearly did not… and the part I “remembered” doesn’t even show up in Catcher in the Rye.  I’m wondering if I remember it from Portnoy’s Complaint… another tale of adolescent angst.  (I recollected a nonexistent scene where our young man protagonist takes pity on a plump waitress and asks her out, only to discover that she’s married.  My hubby remembered an actual scene where one of Holden Caulfield’s dates puts on a short skating skirt and shakes her cute little ass — Holden’s words, not my husband’s — in front of the narrator.)  Points to Richard.

More than that, I remember landing not once but twice in one of those “go to your daughter’s class” days at MPS where they were discussing Catcher, and I learned that Holden had lost a sibling, and wondered how I could possibly have forgotten that.  Because I guess I never knew it, though it’s described really early in the book.  It boggles the mind.

But Catcher in the Rye isn’t the only book that I, a proud reader, writer, and English major, have mistakenly thought I read.  The other major tome was The Great Gatsby!  By my namesake (no relation).  I read part of it in high school, but apparently never finished it.  I picked it up again about 10 years ago — oh this old thing, everyone’s read that, old boy — and discovered to my amazement that I didn’t even know the plot!

Okay, the great thing about this is that you get to read some spectacular books that you’ve been hearing about for years and find out what they’re really all about — and both these novels have cool happenings as well as great writing, and so are very neat to read as an adult and discover for the first time.  The bad thing is that it’s kinda embarrassing.

But every other great book out there that we all should read that I remember I’ve read I have actually read.

I think.

Pssssst!  Over here!  (Just keep your head down, eyes on the screen, and act like you’re working.  Like when you’re updating fb or checking out a game of strip Tic Tac Toe.)

I got your standard form rejection, which you and I both know you had to send on the orders of your Scrooge-like literary agent boss.  Yeah, I recognize that you’ve got a quota – at least 50 “we regret to say, other agents may feel differently, subjective business, blah blah blah” notes every day.

But now that you’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s be honest.  I know you recognize the worth of my manuscript.  It’s hard to decide if my publishing arc will look more like that of Stieg Larsson or Stephenie Meyer, but I’ll be satisfied either way.

So I’ll make you a deal.  We both know it’s gotten old, this kowtowing to the bigwigs in your office.  This… “run and get me a latte, there’s a good intern,” or “you don’t mind staying late to burn the slush pile in the working fireplace on Friday night, do you, hon?  We sure can’t afford to heat this big office with oil, what with all those Kindles out there!”

Here’s my proposition.  You ditch that dead end job, start up your own literary agency next week, and I’ll be your first – and biggest – client.  We’ll take on the industry together!  We’ll teach them a thing or two!  All platforms… print, electronic, and intergalactic.  We’ll make a bundle – you and me together, babe.

You know where to reach me.  I think this could be the start of a beautiful friendship!

Sincerely,

Humble (soon-to-be-bestselling) Author

I’m back at last.

This summer we took part in a CSA — Community Supported Agriculture — venture.  We paid a chunk of cash up front to help support a local farm (about 25 minutes from us) and every week we trot up there to get our “half share” of the farm’s bounty.  It’s been both interesting and a bit challenging.

I have to confess that a lot of the more exotic greens (skapes, anyone?) went to waste.  We could have done a more diligent job at searching out information about the items we were unfamiliar with, and learning how to prepare them.  We were, however, faithful in using more common foods like corn (delicious and fresh), eggs (seemingly richer and more “hearty” than the ones from the supermarket), and local chicken (notably smaller, but more flavorful and, we think, much safer).

All in all both an educational experience and one that has helped me to connect my food to the place it comes from and the people who produce it.  I’ve just ordered our Thanksgiving turkey from the farm, and am looking forward to seeing how it tastes in comparison to your standard Butterball.

I feel good knowing that we gave some financial support to this farming family — they earned it — and we got better food in return.

She started by saying she’d always expected to be famous.  So this is what I said:

I always thought I would be famous, if not necessarily rich and. I’m still waiting — it might happen this year, or next.

I thought I would be a writer. Or, actually, I thought I would be a writer until I hit puberty, and then figured I wasn’t smart enough, and I was a girl, and the good books were written by boys. I read a lot of good books, but didn’t know that Harper Lee was a woman, and S.E. Hinton was a woman, and George Eliot was a woman.

I think maybe I’ll just be “famous” in the way one gets famous in high school — most kids know who you are, but it’s not a big deal. Because it’s only high school. Isn’t life like that?

I didn’t expect to be a lawyer. I didn’t expect to go back to school at 50 and become a professional singer. One career was okay, and the other is fantastic. Guess which?

I didn’t really expect to be a wife, but I think I wanted to be. Since I didn’t expect to be a wife, I didn’t expect to be a mom, but I loved it.

I didn’t expect to be married twice!

Maybe I’ll write a book about all that and get rich and famous.

I’m hard at work rewriting RUNNING, my political thriller that was in a drawer for a few years.  A bold new plot point involving a third-party right-wing candidate is bringing it into the current era, so that protag Catherine has some competition.

Here’s the current query letter.  Tell all your agent friends!

Vice President Catherine Young has just been anointed the Democratic nominee for president when her past comes roaring back to haunt her, in the form of a gorgeous Brazilian woman who claims to be her illegitimate daughter.

This political bombshell blows the race wide open and leaves Young vulnerable to the darling of the far right, surging third-party candidate Jerusha Graham.  When Catherine is called back to the White House as the President undergoes an emergency appendectomy, she’s officially in charge – the first woman in history to act as President of the United States.  What follows includes the murder of an F.B.I. agent, a cocaine-fueled chase across the nation’s capital, and media both old and new foaming at the mouth to uncover the candidate’s “secret black love child.”

RUNNING is a political thriller, complete at 85,000 words.

My background includes stints with the Federal government in the security office of the State Department, 15 years as an attorney, and 15 years of writing professionally.

Words fail.

I’ve been distracted with many things musical and otherwise, but I am back at last.

I have hardly touched my book since the end of last year.  Part of that was purposeful; to give myself some perspective.  Part of it was procrastination.  I am strong in the procrastination areas!  (So proud.)  And part of it was because when I actually picked it up, and began to read the first chapter (remember the weeper who saw angels?) I was oh-so-weary of rethinking those same pages.  Naturally, the first chapter is the one I’ve thought about, shared, and rewritten about 52 times, as opposed to the last chapters, which I’ve looked at maybe twice.  In fact, there are parts of the book in which I barely know what I wrote!

Since no agents have called at my door (yet) begging to be allowed to publish my soon-to-be bestselling memoir cum self-help book [cum means "with" in Latin, and it's a perfectly acceptable academic word, you pervy weirdos who search sketchy terms on the intertubes], I am taking a hard look [okay, now I'm getting paranoid about even innocent words appearing in a sentence together] at the ms. again and considering which of the following forms I want to go with:

1) memoir, which has the advantage of letting me be me, and gives me the ability to promote my book as being about me myself, but apparently agents etc. are sick of memoirs… but they haven’t yet read mine!

2) self-help, which is rarer (and has its own bestseller lists… just in case) and folks are less sick thereof, but said form requires me to indicate or fake some sort of expertise, and all I really have — or claim to be expert in — is my own experience.  I mean, I’d be happy to write about other people down the road, in bestselling superwise advice books no. 2 and 3, but this book is full enough with just my own adventures.  Or…

3) novel, which lets me embroider at will, and solves the problem of feeling so exposed and having other folks all up in my bidness (and if a girl is too worried about this, she better forget about writing a memoir), but also makes it all sound fake, after I’ve gone to the trouble of making it all the sterling truth — because the truth is pretty funny – plus it means that when Oprah renews her talk show contract in 2011 and starts up a new book club because of the brilliance, humor, and gosh-darn-it wisdom of my book and how it forced her out of retirement to bring this glorious tome to the world, I can’t admit that it’s all about me!

Anyway, I’m going to sit down and read it over the next couple of days, see what I’ve got, and make a decision.  I so want to get this message out to other folks, about finding love and learning about self and having a fun time along the way.  So Ima do it!  Someway somehow.

And in the meantime I’ve been having a blast writing wickedly surprising short stories and sharing them with my excellent, supportive, and fun critique group.  Thanks, guys!

There is hope, fellow writers!