Win-an-Autographed-Book Contest

This is your opportunity to win an autographed copy of the absolutely delightful Edge of Ruin by Irene Fleming, also known as Kate Gallison, my friend and blogmate on this blog.  “Delightful,” is not just my word; it is also what Publisher’s Weekly called the book.  And you can have your own copy inscribed to you by Irene/Kate herself.  All you have to do is be the first to say the name of the city where this photo was taken:

My family and I have taken MANY joke photographs of statues over the years.  This is one of my daughter pretending to kiss a statue of a very famous man.  Over the  coming months, I will post other similar contests.  For now, tell me, either by commenting here, or by emailing me through my website www.annamariaalfieri.com. Where were we when I took this picture?

Recalled to Life

The recent summer weather, although typical for the Delaware Valley, was a fat sweaty giant with its foot on my head. To work under those circumstances was but a distant dream. This morning I woke at six to a new day that was cool and not excessively humid. I'm starting to feel like my old self again. Maybe better.

Got up, had some coffee and grits, booted the computer. Faced the day. Faced the next couple of months. Felt a stirring under my ribs that could even be called energy. Great heavens! Next Tuesday my new book comes out! The Brink of Fame by Irene Fleming.

Must buy two glass sangria pitchers for the upcoming launch party, 7 - 9 PM at the Lambertville Free Public Library. (You're invited, by the way.) What else shall I do for this book? I've done so little, scheduled no signings, prepared no readings. It was hot. My neck hurt. Last winter I made a trailer:

I was supposed to email it to everybody I knew and ask them to pass it on. But that's so pushy. Today I opened my email to find a newsletter from Jennifer Fusco called Market or Die, and another from Diana Pemberton-Sikes of The Clothing Chronicles on improving my life through wardrobe choices, a gospel I have always believed in. Ms. Fusco wants me to have a QR code. I made one of those some time ago, too, although I have no clue what to do with it. Here it is:

Point your smartphone at it, if any, to see my web site, www.kategallison.com.

The sad fact is I'm no good at marketing. I guess I'll have to die. Or not; as I was saying, I'm feeling quite energetic this morning. At any moment I may jump up and do something other than writing on my WIP, where I'm trying to advance librarian protagonist Mallory Fry's love affair with the charming janitor while saving her from the designs of a small town serial killer. I may, I don't know, clean my closet, sort my makeup, or phone a bookstore and see whether they would like me to stop in and sign.

Must think about self-presentation.

Someone might even be watching.

Kate Gallison

Perhaps you're thinking, "She's gone mad"

Those of you who have been following my personal blog (kategallison.blogspot.com) for the past couple of weeks have doubtless noticed that I have embarked on a long rant about the War of 1812, the one we fought for two years against Britain. Perhaps you're asking yourselves, "What is she thinking? Here she has a new book coming out scarcely six weeks from now under the name of Irene Fleming, The Brink of Fame. It's about early twentieth-century Hollywood, not the War of 1812."

This is true. It's also true that under the name of Kate Gallison I'm hard at work writing a suspense novel, set in the present day, which has nothing to do with the War of 1812 either.

And yet. The story of Bucker Dudley, the girl who dressed as a boy and went to sea on a merchant ship, only to find herself pressed to serve on board the British frigate HMS Macedonian, is still rattling around in my head. I think it's worth pulling together. This is the tale I was telling my friend Donna Murray some years ago as she drove us to Pittsburgh to the Festival of Mystery. At a certain point in the story she became so enthralled that she nearly ran the car off the Pennsylvania Turnpike. So it has a certain narrative force.

And I'm still fascinated with that war, the last armed conflict we had with the British.

I tuned in to BBC news the other day and saw two talking heads discussing economic conditions in California, which they said were not good and prefigured the general ruin of the United States. I thought I saw one of them smirk, like a spiteful cousin at the Thanksgiving table who hears that you've just lost your job. Yes, we fought them, two hundred years ago, a war between cousins. Some of it was glorious, most of it was kind of pathetic. I know a lot of stories about it, and I want to tell some of them, even though there are forty things I'm supposed to be doing instead, including publicizing Irene Fleming and The Brink of Fame. I just want to.

Or it may be that I've gone mad. Bwahaha.

Kate Gallison

The Lupines are Blooming on Deer Isle

Last week we visited friends on Deer Isle in Maine. Harold will presently write it up and attach lots of pictures, whereupon you can eyeball his page an be dazzled. Right now, though, I thought I'd sit down and give you a foretaste before we unpacked.

This weekend is the Lupine Festival, in case you're in the neighborhood of Mid-coast Maine. The lupines are a right treat. Spiky and blue, when they aren't white or pink, hey have a nice smell, subtle and spicy. Right now they are blooming all over the island and beyond. People will come pouring onto the island for the Lupine Festival, filling the restaurants, jamming the parking places, hiring seats in airplanes to buzz the local gardens and see the flowers from above. I'm glad not to be on Deer Isle for the festival, though it was good to see the flowers before everybody else and his brother got here. It sounds almost like Lambertville's Shad Festival, an annual event hated and cursed by the locals (but great fun for tourists).

They say the lupines are not native to the island, but were brought in from away, took off, and naturalized themselves. I guess we're all like that. It would be good if we could smell that good and look that pretty.

Kate Gallison

The Charming Appearance of the Surface of Things

Adam Weiss
(played by John Gilbert)

Those of you who have read The Edge of Ruin may have noticed that Emily Weiss's husband, Adam, is something of a rotter. I got an argument over that from Dr. Art, my chiropractor, who felt that Adam's consistent neglect of his wife was the sort of thing most men engaged in back then, one, and two, he was a hard-charging entrepreneur, and could hardly be faulted for putting all his energies into his nascent moving picture business. Don't you love it when one of your characters comes so completely to life that people feel compelled to gossip about him?

I, too, feel that Adam is a real person, although I hasten to add he is no person that I've ever known in life. Rather he is the personification of selfishness, or of the Selfish Man, a character well known to many women of my acquaintance. A whole book club full of women accepted Adam as a typical man the other day. "Yes," one of them said, "They're all like that."

I wouldn't go that far. I know lots of good men. Harold, for example, is a perfect sweetie. Dr. Art is the nicest fella you ever want to meet, even though he comes to Adam's defense. And I know many more excellent men, just in Lambertville alone. But you do have to wonder, or the women in the book club had to wonder, why Emily stayed with this man who treated her so inconsiderately.

Emily Daggett Weiss
(played by Billie Burke)

And stay with him she did, for another five years, until the opening of the next book in the series (The Brink of Fame, available in August of this year). Well, as I explained to the book club women, those were busy years. The couple were building their business, both of them working very hard. And it was, as I mentioned, the moving picture business. Physical beauty, the glossy surface of things, is what the movie industry concerns itself with, and being a movie person Emily loved physical beauty. She loved Adam for his beauty, not looking too deeply into his character or examining too closely the way he treated her.

This is what young women do. Women who are older, like the book club women, develop intelligence, or at least a sense of self-preservation, so that they will take a kind man with plain looks over a handsome rotter. So there you have it, children, my sermon of the week. Remain alert and marry late. And if you want to know what Emily did when the scales finally fell from her eyes, read The Brink of Fame. You can pre-order it from Amazon if you like.

Kate Gallison