What I am Reading – Everything!
I am on vacation! I have gone to Maine to eat lobsters and read!
I will be back in two weeks. See you then.
07/26/13
Category: Bailey Island
07/19/13
What I am Reading – The Irresistible Blueberry Bakeshop & Cafe
“Romance is everything.” – Gertrude Stein
I am sitting here on Bailey Island, Maine writing this recommendation. Emails from friends at home tell me the temperature hit a hundred degrees today in New Hampshire. Here on the island, we have an ocean breeze and I would call it pleasant. I can see the hammock overlooking Mackerel Cove from my writing room window. It is only natural that the book I am recommending for you is set in a place called Beacon, Maine.
The Irresistible Blueberry Bakeshop & Café by Mary Simses is the perfect read for a hot summer day. Successful corporate lawyer, Ellen Branford, arrives in Beacon to fulfill a promise to her recently deceased grandmother. She is there to locate an old boyfriend of her grandmother, Chet Cummings, and deliver a letter as she had promised.
The Irresistible Blueberry Bakeshop & Café is Simses’s debut novel and she follows the writing standard of making something happen early in the story, by having Ellen fall through the rotted boards of an old pier into the frigid Maine ocean waters in the first paragraph. She is saved from drowning by a sexy carpenter who leaps into the water to rescue her.
The story unfolds to reveal all is not as it first appears, not Ellen’s grandmother, Ellen’s savior, or Ellen, herself. To say too much more, would spoil it for you. It is fun to watch Ellen, now known as “The Swimmer” in Beacon, slowly shed her uptight Manhattan attorney outer skin and evolve into someone quite different from the young women who almost drowns in the first two pages.
The Irresistible Blueberry Bakeshop & Café is a fun novel. Mary Simses does a great job with her supporting cast including Ellen’s fiancé, Hayden, her mother, and Roy, the man who rescues her. This is Maine at its best, right down to those blueberries. I hope you enjoy it.
07/1/13
Beginning the New Normal
“The only sense that is common in the long run, is the sense of change – and we all instinctively avoid it.” – E.B. White
I am in Maine experiencing the first day of what I am calling the new normal. It is the new normal because the plan is for us to spend equal or more of our time this summer here in Maine and my husband will be enjoying his first summer of working from where we are in forty-five years.
I have owned a home on Bailey Island since 1988 and I have been coming to the island since 1981. Bailey Island is the third in a string of three small islands connected by bridges accessed from Brunswick, Maine, U.S.A. Because you don’t have to take a boat to the mainland, you do not feel completely away but you are still fifteen miles from anywhere like civilization (in the interest of full-disclosure there is a small general store here on the island and a handful of restaurants.)
Our house doesn’t have a television. I can honestly say we have never missed it – although this may not have been true of the friends and relatives who have passed through over the years. We have relied on books, games, one another, and more books to entertain ourselves. This year because of my need to use the Internet we figured out how to connect to that and with it: Facebook, Twitter, and email.
Our day began with what we plan on being a daily walk from our house to the bridge, a four mile round trip march. The plan this summer is for me to write, write, write and finish Francesca’s Foundlings. In so many ways this is the ideal spot to do that. There are few interruptions and time to plot and carry on conversations with people only I can see.
I do have an outline for Francesca’s Foundlings. An outline that both my characters and I rebel against – perhaps it’s because I spent the seventh grade rebelling against the nun, Sister Daniel Joseph, who taught me how to outline. Intensely frustrated, I complained about this to my fellow writer, Mike Robertson, when I saw him in April. “Just write the scenes,” he said. “Worry about where they fit when they’re all finished.” It was as if a shadow lifted. This was exactly the way I had written MacCullough’s Women. I actually wrote chapter five of that book first. Some writers strictly adhere to an outline and some, like me, do not. I was back in the writing business.
Last week I read through all the chapters I have already written and I was delighted to discover I really liked the book. There are some new characters along with the ones you have already met in MacCullough’s Women. It is going to be a busy summer here on Bailey Island.