Writing can be lonely business. No one can write your book for you (unless you’re a celebrity or pseudo-celebrity and can hire a ghost writer). Nope, it’s just you. You have to wage your own battle with words and ideas…and wrestle them all to the ground.
What a great ride the book tour for Blood Work was…nearly 3 months on the road. Lots of adventures, lots of stories to tell, and I met so many great new friends along the way.
I’m returning with great memories of book signings, NPR interviews, CSPAN Book TV, and lots of great print reviews for the book (The Economist, Boston Globe, starred review Publisher’s Weekly, etc).
But honestly, it feels so good to be home.
I’m getting a chance to catch up on errands, long dinners with friends and family, and the myriad other tasks that I left undone while I was away.
But still, as they say, you’re only as good as your next book. And so I dive headlong into the process. And strangely, I feel gleeful about it. Probably because I understand the process better than I did last time around. And most definitely because I know I can do it now.
I have a guest post up on Her Circle Ezine currently. In it, I talk about the balancing act of juggling work, writing, and parenting. Here’s the full post, and an excerpt is below.
Blood Work: A Tale of Medicine and Murder in the Scientific Revolution is a nonfiction murder mystery set in seventeenth-century France and England. The story centers around a court case related to the first blood transfusions which were animal-to-human. These early transfusions were performed 150 years before anesthesia and antisepsis – and a full 200 years before the discovery of blood types. (Seriously, this is nonfiction! I couldn’t begin to make this story up.)
The first challenge of parenting while writing a book like this is that my young daughter learned to cringe when walking into my study. Books and photocopies were always strewn across my desk: images of centuries-old surgical tools and illustrations of anatomical drawings. I often could not flip the documents over fast enough to hide them from her, which means she is either going to grow up to be a doctor or that I’ll be paying for therapy bills for a very long time.
A second challenge was finding a way to find the time and space to write this book – to reach my goals – while also making sure that there was plenty of time for my daughter. I was heartbroken at one point in the process when she asked earnestly: “Mommy, do you love me as much as you love your book?”
Reading the reviews of your book can be a little scary. At least at the beginning. The first review of Blood Work that came out was from Publishers Weekly, which is read pretty much by anyone who is anyone in the publishing business. It was a starred review – which is the equivalent of a huge double thumbs up. To say I was happy and relieved would be an understatement.
But there’s always the fear that maybe the first good review is a fluke. Maybe the reviewer was confused and thought they were reviewing a different book. Maybe they were in an unusually good mood when they wrote up the review. Or, hey, maybe they were just drunk…
Other reviews have come out since PW, and they have also been great. That helps take the sting out of one review in a small regional paper that called the book “mostly engaging.” For some reason, that “mostly” kept ringing loudly in my ears like in a story by Edgar Allen Poe…until a friend told me to cease and desist. She started quoting other bits of the review that were very praiseworthy. Authors can sure create their own special type of neurotic hell.
And then, there are some reviews that are just beautiful – not just because it’s a delight to know that another person enjoyed your book, but because the reviews themselves are just beautifully written.
Blood Work officially released on March 21.
You may have already picked up a copy online or at your local bookstore. But the official release date also means the Kindle and Nook versions of the book will land on your e-readers.
And it means the reviews will start coming in. A few have already hit. And they are GOOD! Good like, happy dance, good!
The Economist
The Boston Globe
Amazon Reader Reviews (add yours!)
Like many readers several years ago, I was enthralled with Erik Larsen’s The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America
When I finished the book, I thought a lot about why I loved it so much. I’m a professor, after all! We’re supposed to take everything apart.
I found my answer on page 25.
I realized that the book appealed to me at a number of levels. The story, of course. It’s gruesome, fascinating, and compelling. But I was also intrigued by the architecture of the story-telling too. Larsen’s attention to the details of the story’s construction leap from the page. But, there, on page 25, it all came together:
“[Root] envisioned digging down to the first reasonably firm layer of clay, known as hard-pan, and there spreading a pad of concrete nearly two feet think. On top of this works would set down a layer of steel rails stretching from one end of the pad to the other, and over this a second layer at right angles. Succeeding layers would be arranged the same way. Once complete, this grillage of steel would be filled an discovered with Portland cement to produce a broad, rigid raft that Root called a floating foundation.”
There was reason to celebrate here yesterday. I sent my book manuscript to my amazing editor at Norton.
15 months of writing, 3 years of research before that…4 years total. And with one swift tap on the “Send” key, there it went.
I can tell you that my writerly friend, Sandra Gulland (Josephine B series and Mistress of the Sun) is completely right when she says the last stage of writing is like entering a wind tunnel.
I’ve been very disciplined as I worked on this book. 2 hours a day+word count quota on teaching days; 4 hours a day+bigger word count quota on non-teaching days. That is the only way that I know how to write well.
Putting aside all modesty, let me scream and shout to you my excitement about my latest feature article in New Scientist, one of my favorite magazines.
I uncovered this story several years ago as I was writing a book on early pregnancy and childbirth. I tried and tried to find a way to include Pierre Dionis’s detective story in my chapter on “Uterine Legends,” but could never find a way to fit it in.
The question of “fetus in fetu” and the links to testicular pregnancies were too much of a detour from my main point, so I had to let it drop. (Yes, there were claims that a man carried a fetus in his testicles!)
Tales about decades-long pregnancies are actually very common in 16th- and 17th-century medical treatises. I tracked variants of one specific legend from the late 16th century through to late 18th century. In each, a woman went into labor and then the labor stalled – leaving her “pregnant” for decades.
