Shortly before my first novel was published, I walked through a bookstore with my son. "Once my book is published, I'm not going to be able to do this any more," I told him. Wander into a book store and pleasantly meander the aisles. It was hard to articulate, but suddenly I realized that the next time I walked into a bookstore -- and likely all the times thereafter -- I would be self-consciously focused on one thing: my own book. Did they have it? Where was it placed? Should I offer to sign it? (Was I presentable?)

And it was true ... Going in and out of bookstores became stressful, loaded with angst. I felt I'd been robbed.

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The dedication in Roses has inspired interest. It reads: For Janice Jenning Thomson . . . a friend for all seasons.  Readers ask: "Who is she and why a friend for all seasons?"

Without Janice--her encouragement, faith, and belief in the book from its inception--Roses might not have been completed. Our friendship is going on thirty-two years.  She is thirteen years my junior.  We met when our husbands were serving as pilots in the US Air Force.  Bonds were established immediately--I, a teacher, and she, an attorney.  The years brought many changes in her life, but never was I one of them. She once said, "Friends come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime."

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It's been snowing here since before Christmas. Not much for some parts of the world, admittedly (I sent a picture of my kids sledging to a friend in Canada and she emailed back 'nice frost') but, for us on the south coast of England, it's a totally new experience.

Things I like about the snow:

1. The quiet. No cars, no school run, just that all-enveloping white blanket. Comforting and scary at the same time.
2. The kids playing outside all day in a huge feral gang. This is what childhood should be like (this attitude gets me into trouble at parent/teacher evenings)
3. Not having to shop.
4. The beautifying effect. Our garden is full of rusty toys and dead plants – under the snow it looks like a winter wonderland.

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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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