Questions and Answers -

From the blog of Rachelle Gardner, Literary Agent:

Here are your questions: (and here are my answers)

If you’re a writer, what do you write? Mostly fiction and essays. What do you do you do when you’re not writing? I read.

→Are you published? Agented? Hopeful? Stalking me? Published, not agented, and very hopeful. At times very discouraged. I’m not a stalker or an ax-murderer, though.

→What do you love about books? What drives you crazy about books? I love: Engrossing storytelling. I hate: redundancy that assumes readers aren’t intelligent.

→Starbucks, Peets, or Folger’s Crystals? Hot chocolate or peppermint tea

→The beach, the mountains, or completely lost and without a map? Beach and mountains and I’m always lost, hopeless with or without maps, but my new GPS does help. At least she talks to me in a calm, reassuring voice.

→Running, walking, working out at the gym, or lying on the couch with a bag of Cheetos? I would love to just walk. My ankle was remodeled the day after the election and I’m still on crutches. It has been humbling, especially the 6-week wheelchair phase. And when I’m off crutches I can go back to my Rusty Joints and Silver Sneakers exercise classes. Granted, I’m the youngest there, but the older folks are lovely and the classes meet my needs.

→Are you excited about the new seasons of “Lost” and “American Idol”? If not, what’s wrong with you? I am a huge "Lost" fan. I even got my Finnish daughter-in-law hooked on it. With the English subtitles she doesn’t miss a thing. They’re a season behind in Finland, so when she visits we always catch up with a “Lost” marathon and she goes home ahead of the other fans in Finland.

To be brutally honest, I haven’t caught the “American Idol” bug. There. I feel like I've just been to a 12-step meeting. What a relief!

→If you were a color, what color would you be . . .just kidding.
I am drawn to blue.

→Here’s a $25,000 advance. How will you spend it? (This is not a trick question. Don’t try to impress me. I’m off in the mountains right now, not even reading your answers.) I live in the foothills of the mountains, so I’m not trying to impress you . . . $5K to each of our three sons to assist them in completing their graduate studies (medicine, exercise physiology and electrical engineering), $5K for home improvements, and $5K for the trip of a lifetime for my husband and me. My charitable donations are already specified in my will (cancer research, humane society, services for abused women and children), so this $25K would be conscience-free money.

→Twitter: Fun social media tool or harbinger of the literary apocalypse? I haven’t started Twittering yet, but it’s on my to-do list.

→Kindle: Useful reading device or harbinger of the literary apocalypse? I have just ordered a Kindle and can’t wait. When I travel, just think of it - - one item in the carry-on (with limitless possibilities) in the place of all those books I always pack! Plus, my novel is in Kindle format, so that's cool.

→If a picture paints a thousand words, how many pictures do 80,000 words paint? Ideally, a picture in every scene.

→What book do you wish you had written? Why didn’t you? Last night I thought of an exciting premise for a book. I even had a title and a favorite poem that tied in beautifully. So - - - - just for the heck of it I do a Google Search and what do I find? A book with my title, which also uses the same poem! But all similarities end there. So I can be creative and still write this, but what a blow, initially!

Where do you live? I live in the Rocky Mountains. Think 2002 Olympics images to visualize how beautiful our mountains are.

Do sentences ending in prepositions bother you? Hmm. About prepositions, I’m a bit old school, so some sentences ending in prepositions do bother me (my best/worst example is colloquial: “Where are you at?”) Churchill’s words are always there to accuse me: “This is something up with which I cannot put!”

Favorite author? Edith Wharton, John Knowles, Ann Patchett, Anne Tyler, Charles Dickens, William Faulkner . . . to name a few.

If you had a reality show, what would its title be? “I Couldn’t Wait for Success, so I Went Ahead Without It” (quote from Jonathan Winters)> It would feature people who've beat the odds and succeeded in any and all fields. Everybody will get a rose. And nobody will get voted off the island. Everybody wins.