Finding Your Own Paradise; Taking a Cue From Margaret Atwood
I imagine all of you Margaret Atwood fans are on Cloud 9 about tomorrow’s release of her new novel, The Heart Goes Last—great title!
Reflecting on the book, Nancy Cambria writes in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: “Aren’t we all in some ways falling from paradise [in a Milton, Paradise Lost, sense], grasping to our subdivision amid a recession that has cast off millions?” Good question.
Nearing My Personal Paradise
Speaking of “paradise,” my editor and I have just completed our final review before publication of my debut novel, The Lies That Bind, and I’m excited as hell. Re-reading this darkly ironic tragicomedy, by Chapter Three I already had laughed and cried a number of times. Really, Lies is so different I think you won’t know what hit you.
In a sense, all the characters in The Lies That Bind are seeking their own “paradise,” struggling toward their own highest aspirations against an oppressive, hard and unforgiving world. Isn’t that life for too many still today?
For me, seeking paradise is having an amazing story spinning in your head, writing on weekends and after work for years, polishing and re-writing dozens of times, then finding a good agent, publisher, and editor who say, “Wow!”
Hope you’ll share in my paradise—and discover your own as well.