A Great Summer Read – Thoughts

A Great Summer Read
Thoughts on having a novel in the world 

My novel, ‘The Sinking of the Leonardo da Vinci,’ is out in the world a year now. Happy birthday book. 

What has it meant? Have I changed? Holding to a dream, inspired by a dream.

Years ago I went through ‘The Artist’s Way’ twice. It helped me write my first published book, a memoir, ‘Pandora Learns to Sing.’ You’ve probably heard about morning pages, Julia Cameron made those famous, but do you recall the chapter on jealousy? On noticing what causes it as a map to what you still long for?

I just finished reading ‘Anything is Possible’ by Elizabeth Strout. I loved this: “What would she do with all the feelings that streamed down her like rivers?” I’ve cursed my art, my writing my singing, sworn to give it up. And then I do, for a minute or an hour or a long moody day, and soon I’m miserable––what will I do with all the feelings streaming through me like rivers, like oceans, like hurricanes. 

Strout writes about an actress, Annie…It wasn’t the sound of applause Annie liked––she often barely heard it––it was the moment onstage when she knew she had left the world and fully joined another. Not unlike the feelings of ecstasy she’d had in the woods as a child.

This character goes off into the worlds to feel her sense of God, of spirits and beauty and light. I loved her. I was once her, feeling the love of an invisible God when no one else was around, but often giving up that part of me. My inner critic works hard to protect me from the misery of shame, convincing me the only way is to give up the thing I love most in the world: my art and the chance to leave the world and go into that other place where other things can happen. We call it magic, or the true here and now. Either way, it’s far bigger than our worry and fear and shame.

My novel has had many lives before this one. 
A draft finished, a heap of rejections, then shoveled away. Again. My inner critic zooming in with the guise of taking care of me. Some years ago, I met a retired editor who’d move to Rome in 1976. Fallen in love with an Italian man there.

“You’ve lived my life,” I told her which easily segued into my abandoned novel, about my own big love from Italy, my own supposed move to Rome in 1976 that exploded before it happened. Never knowing what truly transpired, I had to write a novel about it.

“Send it to me,” she said. She loved it, thought we could make it better. And we did. I even sent it off to one more editor in New York, who went through it with an unusual color-coding. Each round, it got better. Another slew of agent queries, and a round to publishers here in Oslo, where I live. Out of the blue, a letter back from a Norwegian publishing house. An editor loved it (you only need one) wanted to work through the manuscript with me, then translate it to Norwegian and publish it. We finished the full edit. Then they pulled the rug. 

Back to square one. That almost wasn’t just disappointment. It was encouragement, too and fuel to fight that inner critic who wanted me to give up once and for all, to curl up on the couch in proud defeat. Here was someone smart in publishing who loved the book, loved its unusual twists, its quirky travels and characters. 

I didn’t want to self-publish. I like having someone else believe in it, to invest in it. So on the process went.

Two years ago I sent it on to a small publishing house. They saw the potential. I signed in 2024. Pub date: summer 2025. 

Then Trump become president, and I couldn’t (and didn’t) go to America. A book in English, set partly in New York and the Caribbean and Italy, may have sold well there. An intelligent escape story, as many readers would later write me. Well, if only. If only I were more famous, if only- But I was afraid to go with my activism and everything else, so a large part of that market wasn’t available to me, not yet. 

I do love giving readings, holding events. I’ve managed to be invited to several international book clubs in Norway and Spain, with hopefully more to come. (If you have any leads to book clubs, let me know. My novel seems a good fit for them.) 

Here’s what I did, imperfectly, but I did it:
With help, I redesigning my website. Started, finally, a quarterly newsletter to my website subscribers––different from this Substack family. Step by step, facing the fears, breathing into it, one small step into the discomfort, the unknown. Not quitting.

The first weeks, being a mostly unknown writer, I was terrified of how my early readers would react, or whether I’d have readers at all. The novel is a fast read, so the letters did start coming––positive and often surprising. 

It keeps coming back to the same thing: we write to communicate, and perhaps our words touch someone, help someone in their dusty corner of the world, on their lonely stretch of the road. So many of us don’t fit the so-called normal reactions. We might be sensitive or quirky or take the road less taken, or question our existence and choices. When a passage on a page voices something in us we hadn’t quite named or faced or owned, it’s more than liberating. 

I had a postcard made of my novel––cover, back blurb, a few endorsements, where to get it. I keep a few with me on every walkabout. If a conversation opens up naturally, I ask if they’re a reader. If the answer is an emphatic no, the postcard stays in my pocket. Most people, seem to still read, and they light up when I offer it. It’s a sweet pleasure to watch a stranger get excited to meet a writer. Nine times out of ten, there’s a little gasp. “Wow, are you the author!” 

Some travelers have bought the book right off me, at a concert or workshop or while camping. Two weeks ago, leading a morning workshop as part of a larger retreat, a woman saw the cover and held up a small painting she’d just done the day before. The colors matched and it struck her as a sign. “I have to have your book!” she shouted. “It’s confirming something deep in me.” I didn’t know what that deep confirmation was, and there wasn’t time to ask. But she knew. And she was very happy.

I’ve alternating between finishing two new books now, and I’m trying to meet that daunting feeling of sending these new books into the world with new learning: a book in the world keeps living after the launch. It travels on its own legs. 

If you’re sitting on a book, afraid to finish it, or send it out, reach out to me. I made plenty of mistakes with my two books in the world and did some things right. Would love to share what works. 

And seeing people read your book on the beach or by a pool, that’s a fun sensation.