When I worked in publishing just after college, my fellow peons in the editorial department used to play a game where they'd walk into a random bookstore and see who could pull the most books off the shelf that thanked them in their acknowledgments. I never played the game, and I always suspected I would have killed at it. Ever since then, I have always turned to the acknowledgments first when beginning a book, just to see who I can see. And in turn, I've become a huge appreciator of the genre.

My all-time favorite acknowledgments are in one of the best nonfiction books I've ever read, Timothy Tyson's Blood Done Sign My Name. In order to understand the acknowledgments, you've got to understand the book. Tyson, then a professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wrote about the civil rights movement with a muscular, hard-hitting argument: violence, or the threat of violence, played a far more central role in desegregation than we generally would like to admit. But this is no distanced academic treatise. The book opens with a sentence that Tyson's childhood friend uttered to him one spring day when he was ten: "Daddy and Roger and 'em shot 'em a nigger." Tyson grew up in Oxford, North Carolina, where his father was a white Methodist preacher, and his history is also a deeply personal memoir of his family's experience of a racially motivated shooting and the riots and activism it prompted. To understand everything that happened, Tyson would go on to study history at Duke. He would write his masters' thesis on the events in his hometown, and he would eventually rewrite it all from a personal perspective of anguish, outrage, and pride. The making of Blood Done Sign My Name literally drew on every aspect of Tyson's soul, as a child, as a student, as a teacher, writer, and scholar. The acknowledgments burst with heart and passion. They run to eleven pages.

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I hope this post finds everyone well, and enjoying the start of their new year.

As a reader, I've always been interested in how authors come up with ideas for their novels. So, with that thought in mind, I'd like to offer a few thoughts on how my new novel, Dragon House, came to be, as the road to its creation was as circuitous as one could imagine.

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This holiday, in between shopping for presents, I began reading an amazing book, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World by Lewis Hyde. It is, in part, about the cultural meaning of gift exchange, and though my timing in reading it during Christmas was coincidental, the resonances were very welcome. By day, I would buy gifts and experience a familiar twinned pleasure and guilt at all the consumption. By night, I would read The Gift and find myself getting to the source of that dual emotion.

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For the last few years, when the vacation and holiday seasons come around and the news stories start to dry up, I've looked back in time to previous centuries to find something newsworthy. Today, please join me on a whistle stop tour 300 years back in time to the year 1709 ....

An usually cold weather front hit Northern Europe on January 6 (believed to be the coldest period for 500 years). The Great Freeze lasted three months but the effects were felt all year. The seas around the coast of Britain and Northern France froze over, crops failed and in Paris alone 24,000 died. In London, the Thames froze solid and markets took place on the ice. Some suggest that the freeze was caused by volcanic eruptions of Mount Fuji in Japan and, to a lesser extent, Santorini and Vesuvius in Europe.

Although it was a very cold winter it was not entirely out of character – 1709 was one of the 24 winters between 1408 and 1814 (a period broadly known as the "Little Ice Age") in which the Thames froze in London. Although the people at the time probably didn't think much of the weather, music lovers have reason to be grateful for the Little Ice Age as Antonio Stradivari created his finest instruments between 1698 and 1725 and it has been proposed that the particularly cold climate caused the wood used in his violins to be denser than in warmer periods, contributing to the tone of his instruments.

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About a year ago, I wrote a blog about ebook readers and my decision to purchase a Sony PRS-505. I have absolutely no regrets, and I still love my reader; I can no longer say, though, that I "wouldn't trade it for anything."

First, I'm thrilled, pleased and tickled to death that after decades of owning ebook readers I'm finally using a product that's likely to become part of the mainstream. I've got at least three obsolete devices sitting around for which I can no longer purchase books. I truly believe that ebooks are here to stay this time. You can't read an industry publication these days without seeing at least one article about the evolving ebook market. Ebooks are the only segment of the book industry whose sales have seen a dramatic increase during the recession, and I know at least half a dozen people who are asking for an e-reader for the holidays this year. (Not to mention the fact that I'm frequently seeing others with these devices on the bus; mine is no longer a novelty.)

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Not long ago I awoke in the middle of the night and realized immediately that it had arrived. The air, when I had gone to bed, was still faintly sultry, the air of evening that comes after a day of golden, soft sunshine. But when I woke in the dark I felt how the temperature had dropped, and the air smelled of autumn. It was like learning a secret, the rest of the city asleep around me, while I felt that I was the first to learn: autumn had come swiftly, quietly, to town. The moment was brief and delicious, and resonant with sudden memories and sensations that pulled me back into the comfort of sleep, and when I woke it was still there, the edge of the chill, but even more – the faint smell of this change in the seasons.

It made me want to read.

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