Most of my books are inspired by things I read about in the newspaper. The inspiration for Sweet Salt Air was much more personal. I have three sons, all of whom have recently had children, and when each of those babies was born, its umbilical cord blood was harvested, frozen, and stored. The premise is that cutting edge medicine is starting to use the stem cells harvested from such blood, and the closer those stem cells match to the DNA of the recipient, the better.
Barbara Delinsky
The Official Site
March 23, 2013
To e-read or not
A totally funny thing happened to me yesterday. I was reading an actual, physical book, reached the end of a page, and tapped the right margin to turn to the next.
Have you ever done this? It wouldn’t happen, of course, if I read books in only one form. But I’m constantly switching between hardcover, paperback, iPad, and Kindle.
For me, each has a purpose. For instance, if I’m reading a serious something that I know I’ll want to add to my library, I prefer the hardcover. There’s something about its weight, about the ease of going back to reread something that confuses me, about the heft of the thing if the subject is, well, hefty.
January 23, 2013
Naming the characters in my next book
You’ve heard of Dennis Lehane, right? Since he’s a home town boy, my local press is all over him. So I wasn’t surprised to hear tv reports that his dog, Tessa (yup, that’s her pictured above), had disappeared on Christmas Eve and that he was offering to name a character in his next book after whoever gave him information leading to its return.
This isn’t a new concept. I’ve often auctioned off naming rights to the highest bidder at charity auctions. But that isn’t how I choose most of my names.
December 27, 2012
Why I’m not a book reviewer
I’m going to be very careful here not to slam those who do review books. I admire many of them. They read constantly and have a wide enough repertoire to give them a grand perspective on books.
But the contents of a book review is about more than reading. It’s about the reviewer’s personal history and how it relates to the story. It’s about her mood at the time of the reading. If the book review is an assignment she didn’t want, her review reflects it. Likewise, if the author of the book-to-be-reviewed is a good friend. And if the book reviewer is a writer herself and is reviewing the competition? Oh boy. There’s an invitation for partisanship.
December 19, 2012
LOW PRESSURE: a book recommendation
Sandra Brown and I go way back. We started in the field of romance together, actually met at the first ever Romance Writers of America conference. We raised our kids, saw them marry and have their own kids at roughly the same time. Both straying from the romance genre, I entered the field of women’s fiction, while Sandra made her mark writing thrillers. Her novels are beautifully written, exquisitely plotted, and deeply sensual.
Low Pressure, her latest book, is no exception. I had the pleasure of hunkering down this weekend to read it, and while you know that I don’t do book reviews but simply tell you what I like, I gotta say I like this one. Where to begin?
November 29, 2012
Dealing with the loss of my characters
Readers feel this. You’ve been engrossed in a book for however long it takes to read it and then, suddenly, the characters are gone. You write me asking what they’ll do now and whether they’ll ever be back. But if you miss them, think of what I’m feeling when I finish writing a book.
Take Sweet Salt Air. I’ve been living with Charlotte and Nicole and Leo and his dog Bear for a year and a half, so finishing the writing and having to let them go is bittersweet for me, too.
October 31, 2012
THE LIGHT BETWEEN OCEANS: a book recommendation
Judi, one of my readers, recommended this to me in a recent blog comment. I had already read several reviews of this book, but saw her recommendation at the moment when I needed something new.
What a good read!
The Light Between Oceans is set in the 1920’s, as was Rules of Civility, which I recently recommended to you, but these books are as different as night and day. While that one follows the lives of the wealthy in New York, this one is about totally down-home family folks in western Australia.
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