My brother recently confronted me about details I used to describe a flailing consulting company. Was I talking about his company, he wanted to know. (Which, by the way, is NOT flailing but thriving because my brother is a genius and an awesome businessman).  Did I use details he shared with me about his industry, the ways in which those companies fail, the problems his company faced when times were hard? Well, naturally.  What he told me became part of my knowledge base, and I used it for what we writers call verisimilitude. Verisimilitude: the appearance of being true.  Fiction is not true.  But it’s damn important that it could be true, at least partially. Did what I wrote have anything to do with him or his company?  Well, no, not really.  I explain it in The Truth About Fiction, Part One.  Sorry, bro, one of the many hazards of being closely related to a writer.

How do I address these complaints?  Well, other than the quippy one-liners above, I honestly can’t.  What happens when my fingers dance across the keyboard, when I am living in that dream space between imagination and reality, between creativity and memory … well, I don’t have much access to it. Which is not to say that I don’t have a craft that I’ve spent the better part of my adult life honing and hopefully improving.  But there’s a magic to writing; it’s a subconscious and mystical journey.  The conscious me, the real person who eats a sandwich and picks her kid up from school and who is always, always, always watching, observing and taking in details whether she’s aware of it or not, has nothing to do with the me who writes novels. We don’t hang out.

My agent told me recently that she thinks the little girl in the novel I’m currently writing is Ocean, pitch perfect and word for word.  My mother said the same thing. (BTW, when your mother and your agent tell you the same thing independently of each other, it must be true.)  But I must admit, I was surprised. It wasn’t a conscious choice to mimic my daughter’s voice, her habits and quirks to bring this character to life. I never once said to myself, I’ll use Ocean as a model for this character.  And yet, there she is on the page — more or less. I see it now that it has been called to my attention.  But, then again, who else would the six year old in my novel be? How could she be anyone but the little person around whom my world revolves?

I have said it before: it doesn’t take a panel of shrinks to figure out how this all works.

I am thinking about this now as I am reading the final pass for HEARTBROKEN my 11th novel, which will release on June 26.  This is the point where I’m driving my editor and the production department (and myself) crazy with my constant tweaking  … just one more little thing!  Sorry!  Its also the point where I’m the most critical of the book, my last chance to make it the very best it can be.  During this final editing stage, the conscious-me, and the writer-me come face-to-face.  It’s not pretty.

Taking my final passes through the manuscript, I see how some people might be offended by certain thoughts and opinions my characters have.  One of the main characters, Kate, feels badly about herself for being “justamom” as she puts it.  Will some people think I am making comments about women who choose motherhood over a career path?  I hope not – but I wouldn’t be surprised to get mail about it.

One of my characters and her friends quickly shuck aside their “two seasons old coats” at a party, “like embarrassing relatives from Brooklyn.”  I have lots of relatives and friends from Brooklyn, many of them are my favorite people in the world –  my grandmother included.  Will they think I find them embarrassing?  I hope not.  But I wonder … do people know that I am not my characters?

Likewise I have some great friends who are realtors.  But Birdie Burke another of the three central women in HEARTBROKEN, who is a terrible snob, thinks that people who sell things for a living are “worse than a domestic.”  Do I share those feelings … either about realtors (or people who clean houses for a living?)  Certainly not – it’s preposterous.  But I don’t feel I can censor my characters – what they think, say or how they act — without sacrificing authenticity.  I want them to be who they are, no matter how offensive their ideas may be (even to me).

The act of writing a novel is not a thing everyone understands.  People make a lot of assumptions about writers and about the craft itself.  Lots of people want to write novels, or think they could “if they only had the time.”  But those very few of us who are writing a novel a year, and dwelling in a creative part of our minds almost every day are a rare breed.  Most people dabble in creative writing.  Or they may write in the pages of the journal.   The words they commit to paper are likely very personal, even painfully true and close to the bone.

The true writer is more of a medium.  I am channeling the people I write about, hearing their voices and creating a portrait of details.  I often feel as if they are speaking through me, but they’re using my voice, my body, my mind and memory to make themselves heard.  So while I am certainly inspired by my life, experiences and hopefully ever- growing knowledge base – these things just make me a better medium.  I have a greater understanding of people, more compassion for them – and so they feel free to share with me their authentic selves, warts and all.

The setting for HEARTBROKEN was inspired by two important places I visited in the year I began writing the book.  I visited an island owned by my aunt and uncle in Georgian Bay Canada.  And my family and I traveled to a stunning place called The Kachemak Bay Wilderness Lodge in Alaska.   Both places were magnificent, wild settings of complete isolation.  Both trips had challenging moments, and moments of awe-inspiring beauty. I was moved by the primordial silence, the way a natural setting connects you to your own inner voice, just as it disconnects you from the bustle of modern life. And how there’s something extremely creepy, something dark that seems to weave through a place of wild natural beauty.

But the island in my book is not either place, not really.  It’s not in a real lake, or in a real town.  It’s an island that exists only in my novel.  Certainly, shades of both places might be found in my descriptions.  But really Heart Island, is more than a place. In the novel, it  means something different to everyone.  To Birdie, it’s her one true home, the place where she feels grounded and secure.  To Emily, the third central woman in this novel, it’s a fantasy of what might have been.  A place she remembers only vaguely from some stolen time she spent there as a child, it’s a golden promise, a dream.  For Kate, it’s a tangle of wishes and obligations, longing and dread.

In many ways it’s an allegory for family – that perpetual disagreement between what we want and what is.  It’s a place we return to again and again for all sorts of reasons, not all of them wise or realistic.  It’s not real.  But if I’ve done my job well, it will seem real.  You’ll think you’ve been there yourself, or you might try to find your way there.  It will seem that solid, that possible.

There are shades of truth in every novel – verisimilitude.  But those truths are not necessarily my truths.  The thoughts and ideas, observations, come from minds of people who are often very different from me.  I don’t own them, and don’t feel that I can take responsibility for them.  I once had an angry letter from someone who felt that I’d (with one character description) portrayed an entire people in an ugly and racist light.  I still don’t see it.  I wonder … does that say something about me?  Or about my reader? That’s part of it, too.  What do my readers bring to the reading of my novels?   How does that effect their experience when reading?

My mind and heart are wide open to all my characters, even the awful ones.  And I love them all equally, even as a mother loves her misbehaved children. But ultimately, they are responsible for themselves in a very real way.  Yes, some of my truth, my inspiration, my observations, my memory, my research and earned knowledge are woven into the pages.  But the books I write are bigger than I am; they are more and different, sometimes other. And that’s the truth about fiction.

As readers, we are not buying physical books.  We are not buying paper and binding and ink on a page.  We are buying an experience.  We want that.  We want to be moved by prose, or entertained by plot.  We want to fall in love with characters and root for them.  We want to unravel a mystery, or involve ourselves in a love story, or learn something important about the world in which we live.  This is worth something – in any format.

It’s easy to forget about the writer.  We are the quiet ones.  We are in our offices, typing away, spinning story webs – while the corporations and the government fight like titans over what our work is worth to whom, over who should be selling it, in what form and for how much.  It’s easy for someone who has never written a novel to say it should be $12.99 or $9.99 or $.99.  However, there’s nothing easy about writing a novel.  Sure, it’s a labor of love, a tremendous gift and a blessing.  But it’s also an enterprise that consumes us heart and soul.  It’s an act of pure giving – to the page, to the reader.

I read because story has always enriched my life.  Every time I open a book, I learn something.   To me, that’s priceless.  I can’t imagine a life with out books – either reading or writing them.  I’m not sure it much matters whether story lives in cyberspace or on the printed page.  But it pains me that in all this chatter about pricing, about independent booksellers vs. chains, Nook vs. Kindle, e-books vs. printed books that no one ever talks about story.  About what it means to write and to read, the value that story has in our culture and in our individual lives.  When did we forget about that?

I don’t have any strong feelings about what a book should cost.  I know that people are struggling in this economy – and in any economy, really.  When aren’t at least some people struggling?  (PS – Writers are often among those people.) And I love the fact that libraries exist so that people can read, no matter what they have or don’t have.  That’s important, because a story is nothing without a reader.

Independent bookstores, too, occupy an important place in our communities.  And it’s sad that large corporations are muscling out small businesses that really care about what they’re doing.  But unfortunately this is happening across industries.  It has little to do with publishers or vendors.  It has to do to with much bigger factors – we have less time, less money.  We’re busy addicted.  We can’t wait for Saturday to roll around, where we stroll out to get a coffee and stop in the local bookshop, see what’s new.  We press a button to get what we want.  It comes in the mail, or is delivered instantly to our devices.  We want it now.  We want it as cheaply as possible.

But it’s important to remember that not everyone can write a book.  And fewer people still can write a good one.   And that skill, if we still love story and still want it as part of our lives, is worth something.   So, the next time you buy a book in any format, from any bookseller, remember that you’re not paying for the item in your cart, you’re paying for the experience of being told a story.  Hopefully, it’s a good one that will occupy your attention and imagination for days or longer, and one which you’ll carry with you for a good long time.   Remember to ask yourself:  Why do you read?   What is that experience worth to you?

For a really smart look at the subject of e-book pricing, read this terrific article

On one of the panels (If Only I Had Known) author and investigative reporter Hank Phillipi Ryan had some important questions about the business, and what it takes to get published and stay published.   Authors Lisa Black and Chris Grabenstien, two very talented writers who have been successfully publishing for quite a while, shared some terrific insight.  And Jamie Freveletti shared some great thoughts on her own experiences at conferences like Sleuthfest, prior to being published.   It was a rousing panel, full of passion, humor and good (I hope!) advice.

A few days before the event, I visited my daughter’s school and talked to a group of budding elementary school readers and writers.  And it occurred to me that the advice I offered to them is not so very different to the advice I offered the “grown-up” writers at Sleuthfest.  I think there’s value here, too, for even the most experienced working author.  Because I find that between the dizzying highs and crushing lows of the writing life, sometimes it’s easy to forget the basics.  Here is what I said at my daughter’s school:

Lots of people dream of publishing a novel.  When I was about your age, I had the very same dream.  Of course, there’s a lot of learning and hard work between dreaming and doing.  But that dream, that desire is the first and most important step on the long road to being an author.   Here are a few things to keep in mind as you move ahead on your journey from aspiring writer (someone who wants to write) to published author (someone who makes his or her living as a writer).

1. Read every day.  Every writer is a reader first.  The books other authors have written are where every writer first fell in love with stories.  So, read the work of great and important authors, the people who have done it best.  And learn from those people.  What makes their sentences so beautiful, or their characters so real, or their plots so exciting?
2. Write every day.  To be a writer, all you have to do is write.  Publishing comes later.  Writers don’t think about writing, they don’t talk about writing; they don’t make excuses for why they didn’t write.  They just write every day. It’s that simple to be a writer.
3. Try to get better every day.  I think the desire to write is something with which we are born.  Some of us just have stories in our hearts that want to find their way onto the page.  However, the craft of writing is something that we learn and practice.  Through reading great books, and writing every day, we can get better and better at what we do.  Getting better at something you love carries an intrinsic joy, meaning that just doing it is its own reward.  And the only way to get better at writing (or anything) is to practice.
4. Write for love. Lots of people dream about getting famous and selling lots of books and being on television.  But the truth is that those types of accolades (expressions of praise) are the result of very hard work; those are the rewards that come from reading, writing, and trying to get better every day.  You must write only because you love to write, bringing joy and passion to your work.  If you do, the rewards will come, and the hard work will be pure pleasure.
5. Write and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite.  Writers work in what we call drafts (an early version of a piece of writing).  The first draft, the second draft, the third, the fourth and so on.  When we put our initial visions onto the page, we know that there is still a long way to go before the story or article or poem or play is good enough to go into production. A working, published author has initial readers, an editor, a copy editor, a proofreader, and every one of those people is going to have ideas about how the work can be better.   But you can be your own editor, too.  Once you’ve finished your first draft of whatever it is you are writing, take a break and then go back to it.  Then rewrite it.  Every time you do, it will be better than it was before.

The dream of becoming a real published author, someone who makes his or living with the written word, is a big one.   It’s as difficult to get your book published by one of the big publishing companies as it is to get a record deal or become a movie actor. But if you have the talent, the determination, and a strong faith in yourself, you can do it.  Dream big. Work hard. But, above all else, write.

Enjoy and keep writing!

When an author sends me his or her galley, I know how hard it is.  It’s a difficult request to make, there’s some anxious waiting involved. I know because I’ve been in that place. So when a galley arrives at my house and finds its way into my pile, I feel a responsibility to that book and to the author who sent it.  If I can manage to read it and say a few kind words, I’m going to do that. So many great writers have been generous with me, how can I not do the same for others?

That said, my time is not always my own.  In the mommy writer balance, I am generally up by 5 AM to stay ahead of my pages, my deadlines, my personal goals, so that I can be fully present for my daughter when she’s not in school.  In the evenings, I often collapse into an exhausted heap.  So sometimes that stack of galleys grows beyond managing.  And I have to say the word I hate to say more than anything (chronic pleaser that I am): No.  Sometimes there simply are not enough hours in the day.

Here, a few words about the ones that got away from me in 2011:

Recently, I had dinner with editor extraordinaire Kate Miciak and her very talented author William Landay. It was a large group, and I didn’t get to chat with either of them as much as I would have liked.  Imagine my surprise when I got home and found a copy of Bill’s galley deep down in my pile, its blurb deadline long passed!  Imagine my even deeper dismay when I picked it up and realized it was AMAZING!  Luckily, I was able to fire off some words of praise – and apology.  Not that he needed it; everyone who read his book LOVED it.  His novel, DEFENDING JACOB, releases at the end of the month.  Do yourself a favor and read it, because it was truly one of the best books I read last year. More about this book: http://www.williamlanday.com

One of my favorite people, the delightful Sharon Potts sent me her manuscript THE DEVIL’S MADONNA a while back.  Okay … MONTHS ago (okay, six months ago.)  Because my recent past has been more harried and hectic than usual, I only recently — far past her deadline — started to read.  Of course, it’s terrific … a tightly written, suspenseful, thrill-ride with a completely shocking conclusion.  Doll that she is, Sharon mothered me through my apologies.  “Now, Lisa, I don’t want you to feel bad about this,” she wrote.  That Sharon.  She’s smart, funny, sweet and writes a heck of a thriller.  For more about Sharon: http://www.sharonpotts.com

I met Hank Phillippi Ryan at Bouchercon this past fall – and she’s fabulous.  I love her funny, wise voice as she tweets for @junglereds (a collection of seriously talented authors including Julia Spencer Fleming, Rhys Bowen, and Debra Crombie.) And when I met her in the real world, I immediately felt as if I’d known her forever.  I just recently came up for air and started the galley for Hank’s upcoming THE OTHER WOMAN. Just like Hank, heroine Jane Ryland is cool, plucky, and an ace investigative reporter.  (Hank won 27 Emmy Awards for her reporting for Boston’s NBC affiliate.)  And the book — with its brisk, tightly woven plot, and the smart, complicated woman at its center – is crackerjack.  Lisa Scottoline raved: “If you haven’t read Hank Phillippi Ryan yet, you should.”  I totally agree.  For more on Hank: www.HankPhillippiRyan.com

One of the things I love most about my profession is the way authors bolster and support each other.  Certainly, it’s a competitive business.  But I have found only encouragement and kindness from my fellow writers, and try to offer the same. My New Year’s resolution is to read faster and not let the pile get away from me. And if you send me your galley, and I can’t read it right away, don’t despair.  You might wind up in a blog like this.

Just to be clear:  I get it.  Christmas is a religious event, a celebration of the birth of Christ.  It’s a sacred day, one to be observed with gravity for those who hold certain beliefs.  I am not talking about that Christmas.  I am talking about Christmas as it has become in the secular world – giant, glimmering trees, department store Santas, the constant pressure to spend, the manic refrain of jazzy carols on loudspeakers, the glut of meaningless gifts, the buzz of rushing from one place to another to be sure that you’ve purchased absolutely everything you couldn’t possibly need.  That Christmas.

As crazy as it gets, I love the holiday season.  I love our tree, our years of collected ornaments, the lights in our palm trees and the moving polar bears on our lawn.  My daughter’s birthday is on Christmas Day (Please, don’t feel bad for her.  You have no idea.).  I love her excitement, the fact that she still believes in the magic of Santa, the joy on her face.  We all enjoy cooking and entertaining together.  We love to celebrate with our wonderful friends and family.  It is truly a joyous time for us.  But somehow, all that seems like a finish line, something that you get to after a mad and frenzied race.  I collapse into Christmas Day with exhaustion and relief.

Every year, I promise myself that it’s going to be different.  But as my life expands, so does my holiday checklist.  So, in order to center myself, I start each day with an hour-long meditation on gratitude.  No, not really!  I wish I were that Zen.  In fact, the minute I open my eyes I leap from bed and begin to run around like a crazy person.  My husband said to me the other day: “You know, honey, when things get really busy, and I feel like there’s too much to do, I find it’s best to just slow down.”  That did not seem like good advice to me.  I don’t think he’ll be offering it up again in the future.

But, secretly, I realized he was right – sort of (don’t tell him).  All this nuttiness. All this rushing around — we do it because we love our friends and families.  The impulse we all feel is the purest one, to give to the people we care about, to express our gratitude.  When we give a gift, we’re hoping that it carries an important message:  I love you and appreciate you.  And I thought really carefully about what might bring you a little joy this year.

My husband’s advice about slowing down might not be so insane after all (although, honey, someone still needs to do all this stuff).  Because when we take a moment, take a breath, and really think about what we’re doing at this time of year, it’s actually quite nice.  We’re taking time away from everything else we do to focus on other people and what we can give to them.  So even if the process, the stress, the endless checklists seem to have divorced us from the true meaning – well, the secular meaning — of Christmas, the spirit is alive and well within us.  Maybe when we’ve stopped caring about giving that we should worry that we’ve lost everything wonderful about the holidays.

So, here’s my holiday wish for you and yours.  I wish that every gift you give and receive perfectly expresses a sentiment of love.  I wish you guilt-free treats, and boisterous times with family and friends.  I wish that when you feel that mounting panic, you pause a second and realize how lucky you are to have too much to do and too many people to love.  And I wish that on Christmas night, after the gifts are opened, the meal is eaten, the dishes are cleaned, and the kids are asleep, that you take a seat and a good long … breath (you thought I was going to say drink, didn’t you?) and count your many blessings. That’s what I’ll be doing.

And just so you know, my readers, my friends, you are one of my greatest blessings.  Thank you for friendship, and your support.  And thank you, as always, for reading.

Happy Holidays,

Lisa Unger

Naturally, I’m thrilled that FRAGILE has been selected for what promises to be a series of fantastic crime fiction films.  TNT is a home for quality television (including the brilliant Tess Gerritsen’s “Rizzoli and Isles”).  And the lineup of actors for the first few movies is stellar, including Bill Pullman, Marcia Gay Harden, Al Molina, and Anne Heche.  I can’t wait to keep you posted as things shape up for FRAGILE.  But in the meantime, I’m over the moon that it has been optioned as part of this exciting television event.

I know you’ll want to tune in on November 29^th for Scott Turow’s Innocent.  I personally can’t wait!  I’ll be posting my thoughts on each of the movies as they air over the next few weeks. And feel free to chime in with your thoughts, too, on my Facebook page.

But let’s start with this: Who would you like to see in the movie version of FRAGILE?

After the plane was in the air, I opened my pen case to retrieve one of my favorite Marvy Le Pens, planning to take advantage of a very quiet two hours on the plane. But I found all my luscious black inky pens gone, replaced with about twenty well-used crayons.

If you ask my daughter what I do, she’ll tell you that I’m a mommy writer.  She’ll also tell you that she wants to be a mommy writer when she grows up (though she also wants to be a bee keeper, a snow shoe instructor, and plans to run a homeless shelter).  And I love the idea of that, the mommy writer.  She knows I’m her mom first, and everything else second.  And I’m doing it all happily enough that she wants to do it, too.

But the mommy writer balance is not an easy one.  If you want to do either well, each enterprise requires creativity, a heart full of love, boundless energy, and a serious dedication of time.  Before my daughter was born, nothing else ever rivaled my desire to write.  When she arrived on the scene, she quickly became the center of my universe, everything else revolving around her.  Finding a way to be the best mommy I can, and to be the best writer I can is a day-to-day balancing act.

Of course, every working mother knows the difficulty of straddling two worlds that exclude each other.  We make choices on a daily basis, and some of those choices are painful.  I have it easier than most.  My work is demanding, but my time is flexible.  And, once upon a time, I wrote while working another full time job.  So I’m no prima donna; I can write anywhere, any time, under any conditions. It’s a skill that comes in handy for the mommy writer.

I couldn’t stop being a writer when I became a mother. But now, I am a mother before everything else.  And what that means is that when I’m on the road, my girl is usually with me.

When I sit down to write (if she’s not in school) she might be coloring beside me.  If she’s sick or if she has something special going on at school, or it’s my day to be lunch mom, I write after she goes to bed or before she gets up. And if I find myself on a plane with nothing but crayons, I guess I can write in Jazzberry pink as well as in any other color.  ‘Cuz, mommy writers, that’s how we roll.

I’d love to hear about the creative ways you balance work and parenting.  Comment here or on my Facebook page!

What I’m reading:  A Clash of Kings by George R.R. Martin

What I’m reading to Ocean:  Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl

What I’m listening to:  Nothing new or especially interesting.  Any suggestions?

No, it’s not a real place in New York. But, then again, neither is The Hollows.  The Hollows is a fictional town, a construct of my imagination.  It’s some hybrid of the place I grew up in and a kind of ideal location that I find myself fantasizing about occasionally.  And, beyond that, it is a place that has taken on a life of its own.  It has its own spirit and personality, much in the same way as my characters.

Because I have created it, I have to fill it with streets and businesses, and give it a geography that readers can visualize.  I have to give it a history, as well as a community vibe.  By this I mean: What’s it like to live in The Hollows? What do its residents have in common? What holds them together as a group? What tears them apart? How do they respond to tragedy?

So when it comes to naming places, like Pop’s Pizza or The Hollows Brew, or Grillmarks for instance, where is that coming from?  The best way I can explain it is this: The writer’s brain is like a stew, for lack of a more delicate analogy.  And everything I experience, see, hear, feel and imagine is an ingredient.  When I sit down at my keyboard, I am serving from that pot.

There was a Grillmarks near my home, and I have been there more than once. I think it has closed down.  It was a perfectly fine place to have a meal and gather with friends.  But it made no special impression on me other than that.  When I wrote it into The Hollows, it wasn’t that place exactly.  Nor, at the time, did I even remember that there was such a place.  In fact, I never thought about it at all, until Erin, my blogger pal brought it up this past weekend on Twitter.   It was a just a restaurant that Jones and Maggie had visited, and that was its name. Fictional people, in a fictional town, eating in a fictional restaurant.  But it’s all as real to me as anything in the actual world – maybe more so sometimes.  The Grillmarks in my book is more real to me than the actual Grillmarks.

It is not the first time this has happened.  In BEAUTIFUL LIES, Ridley had a dentist with certain qualities and traits.  He also had a name.  Coincidentally, it was also the name of a dentist I had visited locally.  And the character description wasn’t, apparently, very flattering.  I happened to meet his ex-wife at a book event, and she — with a good deal of glee — asked me if I had been describing the real dentist. It was absolutely not my intention.  I had changed dentists, and completely blanked out the other doctor’s existence.  He was a character in a book and nothing more; he belonged to me.  But there is no way whatsoever to explain that – not in polite conversation, or in 140 characters. Obviously.

All novels, at least for me, are a delicate balancing act between the real and the fictional.  I often write about real places, but because they are filtered through my imagination the telling of those places is not always completely factual. (Although I do strive for accuracy, especially in New York City, which is my heart’s hometown). I may want it to rain when it doesn’t rain often, or the sun to set at a particular time, or for a usually busy street to be deserted.  The real Angel Fire, NM is much further from Santa Fe than it is in ANGEL FIRE my first novel.  I liked the name of the town; I wanted it in my book.  So I moved it closer.

My fiction is informed and inspired by truth.  And my books are mosaics of the real and imagined.  Everything is autobiographical and nothing is.  In DARKNESS, MY OLD FRIEND teenager Willow Graves is a bit of storyteller.  Okay, she lies.  She reflects on this tendency: “The best lies contained a little bit of truth.  Some details but not too many.  More than that, though, you had to believe the lie yourself.  You had to be the lie.”  It’s really not so different in fiction.

(Thanks Erin for asking the question that made me think about this and put it down on the page!  If you’d like to read her blog, click here.)

On August 9th (the on-sale date for DARKNESS, MY OLD FRIEND), the first of four books I wrote as Lisa Miscione will become available in trade paperback and electronic editions.  A new book will be released every three months over the next year.

I am thrilled that these early books will have a place on bookshelves again, and that all my novels have a happy and loving home at Crown/ Broadway.  In some ways, these titles are very different from the Lisa Unger books (after all I was a different person back then … but weren’t we all?).  But I hope you’ll enjoy reading them as much I enjoyed writing them.  I wanted to share with you the preface that will appear in the new, old books:

Preface

I was nineteen years old when I first met Lydia Strong.  I was living in the East Village, dating a New York City police officer and attending Eugene Lang College, the undergraduate school of the New School for Social Research.  I was sitting in a car, under the elevated section of the “1” line in the Bronx, waiting – for what I can’t remember.   But in my mind that day, I kept seeing this woman running past a church.  She was in New Mexico.  And all I knew about her was that she was a damaged person, someone in great pain.  Running, for her, was salve, religion, and drug.  That was Lydia.

I pulled a napkin and a pen from the glove compartment and started writing the book that would become ANGEL FIRE.   It took me ten years to write that novel, mostly because the years between age nineteen and twenty-nine were, for me, years of hard work and tumultuous change.  But also because during that time, I let my dreams of becoming a writer languish a bit. Lydia was faithful; she waited.

In spite of a first-rate education, a career in publishing, and a strong desire to write fiction, I didn’t know much of anything when I was writing my first novel. I don’t think you can really know anything about writing a novel until you’ve actually written one.  (And then you go to school again when you sit down to write your second, and your third, and so on.)  All I knew during that time was that I was truly fascinated by this woman occupying a place in my imagination, and I was deeply intrigued by her very dark appetites.  I was enthralled by her past, by the mysteries in her present, and why she wouldn’t let herself love the man who loved her.  There were lots of questions about Lydia Strong, and I was never happier over those ten years then when I was trying to answer them.

I was fortunate that the first novel I ever wrote was accepted by my (wonderful, brilliant) agent Elaine Markson, and that she fairly quickly brokered a deal for Angel Fire and my second, then unwritten, novel The Darkness Gathers.  I spent the next few years with Lydia Strong and the very colorful cast of characters that populate her life.  And I enjoyed every dark, harrowing, and complicated moment with them as I went on to write Twice, and then Smoke.

I followed Lydia from New Mexico, to New York City, to Albania, to Miami and back.  We trekked through the abandoned subway tunnels under Manhattan, to a compound in the backwoods of Florida, to a mysterious church in the Bronx, to a fictional town called Haunted.  It was a total thrill ride, and I wrote like my fingers were on fire.

I am delighted that these early novels, which I published under my maiden name, Lisa Miscione, have found a new life on the shelves and a new home with the stellar team at Broadway Books.  And, of course, I am thrilled that they’ve found their way into your hands.  I know a lot of authors wish their early books would just disappear, because they’ve come so far as writers since they first began their careers.  And I understand that, because we would all go back and rewrite everything if we could.

But I have a special place in my heart for these flawed, sometimes funny, complicated characters and their wild, action-packed stories.  I still think about them, and feel tremendous tenderness for even the most twisted and deranged among them. The writing of each book was pure pleasure.  I hope that you enjoy your time with them as much as I have.  And, thanks, as always, for reading.

Read an excerpt of the upcoming DARKNESS, MY OLD FRIEND!

Pre-order ANGEL FIRE ( Lisa Unger writing as Lisa Miscione ) at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders or Indiebound!

My job kept getting bigger and bigger, and I spent less time on my writing.  But I had the idea that I would try to write for a local newspaper.  So I queried them – again, and again, and again.  I sent letters, pitched articles, and followed up with phone calls.

Finally, I think they got tired of the girl who kept calling, looking for work.  “I’ll write about anything,” I said.  And I meant it.  Maybe it was my tenacity, my charm, or just my obvious desperation, but I got my first assignment.  I was asked to attend and to write about the first Seder dinner for a group of Russian Jewish immigrants finally free to practice their religion upon arriving the United States. I was so nervous and excited that I threw up in the bathroom before leaving my apartment.

I didn’t hear anything from my editor after I turned my article in, and I didn’t dare call.  What if he hated it?  What if it got cut because I did such an awful job?  Then he phoned to tell me the piece was going to run the following Monday.  On my way to the office (my real job) that day, I raced to the newsstand.  And there it was — The Riverdale Press, and on page three, the article I had written.  I carried that paper down the sidewalk, staring at my name, my first byline in an actual paper.  I floated through that day.

I think they paid me $25.00.  I would have done it for free.  I wanted to write that badly.  And that moment — standing on street looking at my name in print — was the shift between dreaming and doing.  It was a small step, to be sure.  It was one article in a tiny neighborhood paper.  But it changed the way I saw myself, and how I saw the possibilities of my life.  It was the first moment that I felt like a real writer.

Of course, there have been other magnificently thrilling moments in my career – when I was signed on by agent, my first book contract, the first time (and every time) I held a newly minted bound book with my name on the jacket, the day I hit the New York Times bestseller list. And each of those moments occupies a special place in my heart.  But none so much as that first byline. Because the sight of my name typeset on the page made me believe, for the first time, that I wouldn’t be a secret writer forever.