The Writer, She Talks
I spent this evening chatting with the lovely Mary Sasso on her internet radio show, Book Club Girl on Air, and you can listen to it right here. If you couldn’t make it out to one of my events…well, I think this is actually a lot like being at one. Except you don’t even have to put on pants. For me, that’s always a bonus.
Enjoy!
California Blessings
It's not heaven. It's the wild part of Southern California, and that's plenty good enough for me. Photo by Austin Baker. All rights reserved.
On weekends, I drive an hour out of the big, sprawling city and into a state park. I leave my car and hit the trail in running shoes with a bottle of water lashed around my waist. Most of the world is still asleep, and the sun hasn’t had time to burn off the marine layer that blows in from the Pacific like something between high fog and low clouds. The mule deer watch as I pound out the miles, getting further and further away from roads and traffic, commerce and commodities, away from city sounds and smells.
The trail leads into the mountains. Striated rock formations the size of office buildings jut out of the ground at awkward angles that I attribute, perhaps erroneously, to violent, prehistoric plate tectonics. Wild flowers grow low to the ground. Quail flush out of the brush when I pass. The sky is that cartoon blue unique to California.
As the morning heats up, I keep one ear open for the warning rattle of a snake caught unaware. Neither of us wants to meet the other. Read the rest of this entry »
Beginning Again
Photo by Seamus Holman. Used under Creative Commons License.
Monday, I’ll start work on my next book. It’s not the next book you’re likely to read, of course. Publishing is a long process – almost a year – and the follow-up (although not the sequel) to Losing Clementine has been finished for a couple of months. That book, which is currently titled The Short Yet Astounding Fall of Dell Cohen1, was terrifying to write. The “sophomore” book is always when folks stand around with their arms crossed over their chests, a pose their therapists would point out is extremely guarded, and say, sometimes aloud and sometimes to themselves, “Well, can she do it again?” Once is lucky. Twice is a career, it seems. But now I’m sitting down to write the third book, which has no title at all, and feeling much more confident. Read the rest of this entry »
Ashley Ream is an author and humorist frequently cited by critics as a "writer to watch." She just hopes you don't watch too closely. That could get weird. Just in case, she's closing her blinds.
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