Fanta of the Opera

Paperbacks everywhere…a different cover in Canada, the U.K., and the US!

Sometimes I think I’m wasted as a novelist: I could maybe do theme meals full-time. For small children. It’s sort of a niche market. But below is our dinner before going to see The Wizard of Oz at our local theater. We’ve got Tin Manwiches, Emerald veggies, potato tornados, Over the Rainbow Sherbet, Toto-Toast with Jelly, and Munchkins from Dunkin’ Donuts. (My son came up with those last two. I am training him well in the art of amusing food.)

I find that when I’m trying to finish up a manuscript–more on that later–blogging and social media in general seem to fall by the wayside. (Also on the fall-by-the-wayside list: Haircuts, dentist appointments, lunch dates with friends, all forms of house maintenance, including lightbulb replacement.) Well, I’ve finished up a draft and sent it off to my editor…so here I am.

So there are a lot of cool things that come from seeing your book published in different countries–different titles, different covers, different marketing–but these little guys from The Netherlands are at the top of the list.

Let me start with this: I’ve been burned by book clubs. This goes back more than a decade–alright, nearly two decades–when I tried my first (and only) book club and recommended Roddy Doyle’s The Snapper to a group of a dozen or so women. When we met back a month later, no one had thought the book was funny. Or moving. No one thought anything, really, except that the punctuation was weird.

Let me tell you the two most common questions I’ve heard in the three weeks since Fierce Kingdom was released: 1) What’s the deal with the movie? 2) What happens at the end of the story?

The book is finally here! Tomorrow, July 25th, Fierce Kingdom should be perched on a bookshelf near you, anxious to be bought and read. And while the book is lazing around doing nothing, I’ll be traveling from city to city doing readings and signings and, hopefully, sampling some local donuts.

I realize that in all the interviews I’ve done leading up to publication for Fierce Kingdom, no one has asked about the epigraph. So I’m going to talk about it anyway.

Here it is: “I just want to know if a sound can create a boy. Or, if a woman becomes a mother when she thinks she hears a baby crying for her.”

Second day of book tour in Canada, and there are all sorts of good things in Toronto. Soup dumplings at Lee Chen’s. Nanaimo bars. Summer weather that’s way better than Alabama.

But the first two things we always look for in a city are doughnuts and playgrounds. Toronto has loads of both. There’s this great playground near Corktown Commons under an overpass…