Dean Robertson's Blog, page 15

An Interview for Lydia: Norfolk Perspectives

On Wednesday afternoon at 1:00, I walked into the headquarters of WHRO in Norfolk, Virginia, to tape a segment of a popular local show, called Norfolk Perspectives.  I was there to talk about my book, Looking for Lydia; Looking for God and to publicize the event that the Slover Library is sponsoring for me on September 12.

The host of Norfolk Perspectives is Bob Batcher who, it turns out, is both good-looking and charming.  He is an ideal interviewer, putting his guests at ease with a few informal questions before taping begins, and he is possessed of that essential–and rare–quality: he is attentive; he pays attention; he is mindful of the person sitting in front of him.

The schedule for taping a segment of the show is that everyone set to appear arrives at about the same time and is assigned a position in the short line (I was the third of four people interviewed and the only one to appear solo.  It was cold in the studio but warm under the lights.  Watching the process unfold for the two before me had a calming effect; it was clear that Mr. Batcher’s main goal was to help his guests do well.  And they did.  It was fascinating to watch the camera operators at work, and to see both the interviews and the graphics on screen during breaks.  By the time it was my turn, I was actually relaxed.

Any experience of this kind teaches us all about: what we could have said; what we shouldn’t have said; how important it is to sit up straight and not fidget.  I came home and made a list.

It was altogether a lot of fun.  I think I pulled it off a bit more smoothly than “Lydia’s Bloopers.”

 

Featured on Snowflakes in a Blizzard

Looking for Lydia; Looking for God was recently featured on the blog Snowflakes in a Blizzard.   Snowflakes was started by a man who has devoted a tremendous amount of time and energy not just to building this website but to maintaining it every week. He’s not just the chief cook and bottle-washer; for a long time, he was the only cook and bottle-washer.  He is doing this with one motive: to help those independent authors who either have not found publishers or whose books need a boost in the rough world that is marketing in this day and age.

This is a blog designed to create a community of writers supporting each other.  And the Guiding Spirit of this terrific place, Darrell Laurant, a respected journalist with many years in the field and with more than his share of family responsibilities, also writes a regular “Weather Report” in which he offers the benefit of his own experience and frequently posts articles from experts in various areas of writing, publishing, and marketing.

The best thing you can do for Snowflakes, for writers and readers in general, and for yourself, is to read this page on my book and then start looking through all the other pages.  It’s a darned good way to make your reading list!  Be sure to find the comments icon at the bottom of each book’s page and let Darrell know you’ve been there.

https://snowflakesarise.wordpress.com/2015/08/28/1-looking-for-lydia-looking-for-god/

 

“Are You Margaret Sullavan’s Brother?”

Classic Movie Review by Ellen Bunton
(and her eager assistant, Meatball)

                                     

A Regular Monthly Feature
The Classic Movie Review
  The first Wednesday of the month.
For all you keepers of calendars, that means you can read about a classic movie, or a classic movie star, on these Wednesdays:
October 7                 November 4                December 2
Today’s post is about Margaret Sullavan and also about an adventure on which our intrepid reviewer embarked.
Read on

Are You Margaret Sullavan’s Brother?

Margaret Sullavan.  No, not Maureen O’Sullivan, who was Jane to Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan and Mia Farrow’s mother.  No, not Maureen O’Hara, who was the fiesty redhead opposite John Wayne in “McLintock.”

I’m speaking of another attractive and talented actress, a strawberry blonde with a throaty voice that combines the best of Tallulah Bankhead and Kim Novak—that attractive and talented actress, who only made a few movies.  Her preference was the stage.  Her most famous film was “The Shop Around the Corner” opposite a young Jimmy Stewart in 1940.  It was a romantic comedy, based on a French play, “Parfumerie,”  that was remade in 1947 as the musical comedy, “In the Good Old Summertime,” starring Judy Garland, and as  “You’ve Got Mail” with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in 1998.

I first saw Margaret Sullavan one night on the late-night movie, long before cable, and asked my momma “Who’s that?”  She told me and mentioned she was born in Norfolk.  Further research told me she was the daughter of C. H. (Cornelius Hancock) Sullavan.  Even though Ms. Sullavan was deceased, I looked in the white pages of the phone book, hoping to locate a relative.  With the unusual spelling of her last name, I was hopeful.  Sure enough, there was a C. H. Sullavan.  I knew it couldn’t be her father but it might be a brother.

Now the sticky part: Margaret Sullavan died on New Years Day, 1960, at the age of 50.  The cause of death was a barbituate overdose, some say a suicide because she was losing her hearing and couldn’t hear her cues on stage.  I was hesitant to make a call under those circumstances so I wrote  him a letter and included my phone number.

A few weeks later Momma told me there was an older man on the phone and when I answered, he said “I’m C.H.Sullavan”.

I asked “Are you Margaret Sullavan’s brother?”  and he replied “Yes, I am.”

I was thrilled and just couldn’t stop talking about how much I adored his sister. I wanted to ask him about the details of her death, but I didn’t dare.

After I hung up, I realized that, while I couldn’t connect with Margaret,  I had actually spoken with her brother!  A few years ago I went to her grave in Lancaster, Virginia, and my friend said “You must like dead people” (I have visited a lot of cemeteries), and I replied “I don’t like dead people, it’s just that a lot of the people I like are dead!”  There IS a difference.

 

Charleston and Roanoke: “We have met the enemy”

 

And into my mind, from a very long time ago, arrived a memory of a now-famous Pogo cartoon in which the possum says,
“We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
This week I received an email from a good friend, commenting on the shooting of two reporters in Roanoke, Virginia.  It contained the type of descriptive phrase I have come to expect;  this particular shooter was “another crazed angry person with a gun.”

During the period of media frenzy in response to the shootings in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 17th of this year, Facebook—and, I’m sure, all the national media—provided example after example of this same reaction. I was fairly active on FB at that point and found I just could not read one more report about the event and especially one more thread of comments, most of which boiled down to “another crazed angry person with a gun,” or “how can this sort of thing happen??”

And into my mind, from a very long time ago, arrived a memory of a now-famous Pogo cartoon in which the possum says, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

On Facebook, I immediately deleted every report with all comments. I eventually did my own brand of ranting about the terrible thing that happened in Charleston, until I realized I was repeating myself and getting nowhere. It was as if I were speaking a different language—and not just different, but unique; I was apparently the only person in the world who spoke that language.  And that language, for me, expresses only two imperative thoughts:  As the actual violence, or at least the media coverage, have intensified over the last few decades, we seem to have two predictable responses-neither of which I understand:

We react to each shooting, each death, each mass murder, as if it is the very first, has never happened before, and is utterly foreign and incomprehensible.  We are shocked every time, horrified, caught off guard.  We are appalled and outraged and we just cannot believe “something like this” could happen–in spite of the fact that it happens pretty often.
We immediately identify the perpetrator as someone who is, at the simplest, just plain crazy.  An aberration. Someone who is perhaps seriously mentally ill and not taking medications, probably the victim of a violent childhood and the emptying of mental institutions.  A loner.  Someone who harmed small animals or set fires.  Someone, like the act itself, who is foreign and incomprehensible.

From a wide variety of publications in the wake of the Roanoke shootings:

“What is wrong with people??”

“Murder goes hand in hand with mental illness”

“It’s very sick and disgusting”

And on the day of the shootings in Charleston, the city’s police chief is reported as saying,”It is unfathomable that somebody in today’s society would walk into a church while they are having a prayer meeting and take their lives.”

South Carolina’s Governor was sure that “we’ll never understand what motivates anyone to enter one of our places of worship and take the life of another.”

On The Daily Show the day after the killing in Charleston, Jon Stewart pointed out that the “society” in which these apparently inexplicable shootings took place is a society in which the Confederate flag flies over the State House and the roads on which these slain citizens drove every day are named for Confederate “heroes.”

When I watched the video of Jon Stewart’s show,  I felt not so alone. Pretty hopeless and discouraged, but not the only one.

Stewart, speaking of “already hearing the nuanced language of lack of effort,” also said:

“We have to peer into the abyss of depraved violence that we do to each other in the nexus of a gaping racial wound that will not heal. . .and we still won’t do jack shit.  That’s us”

“Nine people shot in a church.  What are you gonna do? Crazy is crazy.”

“One guy lost his mind.”

“We are steeped in this culture.  We’re bringing it on ourselves.”

                              We have met the enemy, and he is us

In, “Sentimental Journeys,”her 1991 article in The New York Review of Books,  essayist Joan Didion–incidentally, an important influence on my own writing and on my teaching of writing–wrote about the brutal beating of a young female jogger in Central Park, ““Stories in which terrible crimes are inflicted on innocent victims have long performed as the city’s endorphins, a built-in source of natural morphine working to blur the edges of real and to a great extent insoluble problems.”

“Another crazed angry person”

“Some guy lost his mind”

In last week’s New Yorker, Louis Menand wrote in “The Critics: Out of Bethlehem,” that “Didion thinks that this is why the press latches on to stories like the Jogger’s.  It’s not because those stories tell us who we are.  It’s because they don’t”

 

It is an old tradition, going back at least as far as ancient Israel when the chief priest would symbolically load up the sins of the community on the back of an unblemished “escape goat,” and send it off into the desert, carrying the sins away for another year (Leviticus 16).

        WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY, AND HE IS US
                            Pogo, Earth Day, 1971

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Guest Blogger #3: Movies, Reality, and Going to the Bathroom

Greetings from the Sunday Blog.  I would like to introduce a dear friend, Ellen Bunton, who knows more about classic movies than anyone I’ve ever met,  and is Mother to an exceptional cat, Jacob (who does, by the way, go to the bathroom).  Jacob is not in the movies; I just wanted to use this photo.

I asked Ellen if she would write a post for my blog; she hesitated, but when I told her “the topic of your choice,” she-of course-decided on The Movies.  When I requested that she narrow that topic a bit and give it some focus, little did I imagine that focus would be going to the bathroom.  But here we are.  AND heeeeeereeeeesss Ellen!!

I LIKED THE MOVIES WHERE THEY NEVER WENT TO THE BATHROOM

Reality, I think is overrated.  I mean all the things we humans do daily like wake up, shower, burn the toast, fight the traffic, whether going to work or Wal-Mart, deal with the boss or the kids, return home, burn the dinner, and then go to bed just to get up and do it all over again the next day.  Before we retire , some of us water the grass so it will grow,  then on the weekend we can cut that same grass because it grew!

Now, let’s talk about the “reality” I DO like.  It can be found in some of my favorite films of the classic era.  In the romances there might be some slight bumps along the way, but never on the leading lady’s face, and the lovers always get back together within two hours, usually with musical accompaniment.

 

 

The action-adventure  movies take me to places I’ve never been because I wasn’t born yet.  I can time travel to the old west where the Doc never asks to see any insurance cards before he removes the bullet and the recovery time is remarkable.  I can be transported to famous battles in historic wars in far away places without ever being in any danger, and they’re over pretty quick too.  Even with the  tearjerkers where the hero/heroine dies they do it so eloquently , usually with full makeup, no ventilators or catheters anywhere.

 

 

The mysteries and crime dramas are dealt with and solved sans the need for graphic autopsies or horrid details and when some of the films try to get “tougher” it mostly means the detectives just don’t smile as much.

 

 

The monsters and science fiction creatures are really monsters and creatures and not some psychopathic loner without access to mental health care.

 

Let’s not leave out the musicals, those wonderful moments when people break out into song and dance in perfect key with full choreography.  It’s amazing no matter how small the apartment or restaurant is, there is always room for the high kicking dancers with their costumes as well as some invisible orchestra playing in the background.  When is the last time that happened, and karaoke bars don’t count.

The real beauty of this whole thing, and something that I am most grateful for, is that while today’s movies are definitely more realistic,  I can still enjoy those classics from the Golden Age where “they never went to the bathroom”.

John’s New Watch: Special Mid-Week Guest Blogger

This just in from serious author, publisher, counselor and support for all things book and all writers everywhere.  Please welcome our surprise guest for this Thursday in August in the Year of Our Lord 2015:

So I got an Apple Watch…

I held off for a long time (well it SEEMED forever). I didn’t want to make a

choice based purely on the coolness factor (he’s lying). I wanted to do the

smart thing like a smart businessman (Dick Tracy).

The big question was WOULD IT MAKE MY LIFE BETTER (would it impress

my friends). And let’s don’t forget that it IS a watch. For the past decade my

iPhone has become my pocket watch. What time is it? Pull out your phone

and look. But now with the Apple watch I just turn my wrist. Easier right?

Almost like having a “real” watch.” So why not just buy a watch?

Good question young Jedi. Now sit and be still.

One of the reasons I gave in to the inevitable is that my eldest daughter Kimmi

Koehler has a FitBit that she uses to keep track of her steps, her time,

calories, etc. She’s been having fun challenging friends and all that. My Apple

watch has all that and more, which I remind her of all the time. She has a little

teeny weeny itsy bitsy B&W screen and I have a ginormous color screen. She

blows me away every day with more steps (I’m not suggesting her tiny little

steps allow her to cheat), but my watch is more cool. Game over dude. Game

over. Dad wins!

My colleague Kellie just says, “I’d rather be blissfully unaware of how lazy I

am.” Not me Kellie. I’d rather have some digital device TELL me how lazy I

am. That’s what we like to call FREEDOM, right nation?

Another cool thing is I just lift my watch and say “Hey Siri” and then give her a

command, like “call Patty.” No pushing buttons as with the iPhone. Siri has

become my “other woman.” Patty Saile Koehler knows and is just fine with my

digital date.

And for business the watch is off-the-chart cool.We’re talking Dick Tracy here,

people. I do a voice command in front of a client and I can definitely charge

them more. They will throw money at me! So from that standpoint, my Apple

watch is a rainmaker, a deal maker, a client baker (get out the hip waders).

I can remotely take photos with my watch, I can accept and take calls, I can

send a text using my voice, I can measure my heart rate, check my calendar,

send an email, get directions, play music, look at photos, stocks, the weather,

use Uber and have my bank drop a large pile of cash in my driveway.

Okay the last bit was a fit of wishful thinking.

So I got an Apple Watch and it IS pretty cool and tons of fun and yes, I think

that even from that standpoint alone, it has made my life better. Everything else is mashed potatoes and gravy.

And so, for today, we say goodnight, sleep well, knowing that there’s a new watch out there somewhere waiting for you.  Meanwhile, this one seems to have enough functions to watch over us all.  

Thank you, Guest Blogger.  

 

A World Ago: Dreams

I drafted this post for a guest blogger spot on a lovely website.

http://www.sswriter.com/blog/

My “assignment” read “So far when I’ve had guest blogs on my site, I’ve had people write about their dreams, how they almost missed them, what it’s finally like to achieve them–Any angle you want to take on that would be appropriate.  Consider that your writing assignment if you’d like to take it!!”

I’m a schoolteacher; I love assignments.  So, sprawled out on my big bed last night with my four-month old grandson and my cat, I wrote.  Then I got up this morning, flipped open my laptop, and saw the news about Julian Bond.  The result is this slightly revised blog.

Thank you, Sydney Scrogham, for letting me use this on my own site today.  I find I am too exhausted from writing, and too exhausted from unexpectedly intense grieving, to think of anything else.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This morning I opened my laptop to my home page, The New York Times online, and saw the front page story, with a photograph, Julian Bond 1940-2015, “A Charismatic Leader of the Civil Rights Movement.” I was seventeen years old and a Freshman at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, when I first heard Julian Bond speak in his soft voice that captured a room, first saw the beautiful young man of twenty-three, first experienced the fire of those heady years.

This morning, I read back over what I wrote last night for Sydney’s blog on dreams.

I remember with a rush of adrenaline and sorrow the exact flavor of the dream that Julian Bond embodied for me.

I am nearly seventy years old and that’s a long road to look down to find those early dreams. Like most of us, I chased more than a few mistaken dreams down too many hard roads.  And somewhere after 50, but well before 60, I came to understand that I was happiest alone, happiest working, happiest with the love of child, cousins, aunts, friends, colleagues, happiest with books and animals—Faulkner, Dickens, Austen, Shakespeare; cats, bees, llamas.

 

I recall a poem by William Carlos Williams, called “Dance Russe,” which describes his dancing naked before a mirror when his wife and child are sleeping and “singing softly to myself:/ ‘I am lonely, lonely./I was born to be lonely,/I am best so!” Clearly the poet is well grounded in home and wife and child and the dancing alone, while an important dream, is not his life. I always ignored the wife and baby and felt in my bones that joy of loneliness. There is a kind of delicious luxury is those feelings in the midst of married life, but few would choose that loneliness as the life itself. Perhaps the cloistered religious.

I also recall, from some years later in my own dream journey, weekends I spent at a convent in Kentucky and the stop I always made on my way home at Gethsemane to listen to the mesmerizing sounds of Gregorian chants. For me, the silence, the chants that only deepened it, the quiet men perfectly still as they sang, were pure and absolute joy. I went on retreats of silence and fasting; I never wanted to come back. I chased the intensity of the mountaintop experience. For decades that was my dream, that high moment lived in a time outside time.

I supposed that my dream of intense solitude never was realized—I have always had a few close friends; I taught for over thirty years, surrounded by a community of colleagues and students-and I loved it; I have a flock of cousins with whom I am closely in touch; I am in touch, in the past year, with several students from 30 years ago, and I delight in these renewed relationships; I have this wonderful new grandson with whom I have chosen to spend two long days a week. My telephone, which I used to approach with trepidation, rings constantly and I talk for hours a day. I recently said to a friend that I didn’t know if it was good news or very bad news, but “I am happier than I have ever been in my life.”

Was this a dream of mine—to be 70 years old, retired, spending 20+ hours a week with an infant, working to master computer skills, active on the “social media,” writing and publishing a book? Not one of those things ever occurred to me. And yet at their core they are exactly what I might have dreamed. Like Williams, I am grounded in family, and in my writing I have found the wonderful loneliness I have chased. Like T.S. Eliot I “arrive where [I] started/ And know the place for the first time.”

I am happier than I have ever been in my life.

A friend of mine, a Baptist preacher, came up with the title for my book, Looking for Lydia; Looking for God, which I describe in the book’s Epilogue:

The preacher told me that, “Looking for Lydia is like looking for God, and you’re doing both. We are all looking for Lydia. We are all looking for that something we may or may not find, but the search for which defines our lives. In the course of that search we find frustration, disappointment, loss, and grief, but we also find much that we didn’t expect—work and love and relationships and joy.”

As I read the long obituary for Julian Bond, it came to me that the dreams that young girl nurtured more than fifty years ago–dreams of passionate solitude and passionate community–are the dreams I am living today.

It really is only a matter of recognizing them.

 

Be a Guest Blogger onThe New Sunday Blog: Coming August 15

Good morning, supporters of Looking for Lydia and this website and blog.

Effective this coming Sunday, August 15th, I will be posting weekly on a variety of subjects relevant to both writers and readers.  I hope you will plan to start your week at pdrobertson.com to see what’s going on.

Please share the website and the blog

                                    Come Blog For Me–and bring your friends!!

I am currently advertising madly for guest bloggers.  Please consider it.  You don’t have to master the complexities of a website–which I, by the way, have NOT done.  You will email me your post; I will introduce you on the blog, then copy and paste your contribution in.  Take a look at my first two guest blogs, and you’ll see the basic format.

I would also welcome any good ideas for topics I might use when I’m blogging.  I am wide open to suggestions.  Please email me at pdroberts1@gmail.com if you have a subject you’d like me to tackle, if you are interested in being a guest blogger, or if you just have questions and would like to discuss the possibility.

                                     Come Blog for Me–and bring your friends!!

 

 

 

The Marketing Call: Everything I Always Wanted to Know

On Wednesday afternoon July 29 at 4:00 Eastern Standard Time, I took a scheduled conference call from John Koehler at Koehler Books and Shari Stauch, creator and CEO of the marketing website, http://writerswin.com, and a marketing consultant for Koehler Books.    This hour-long consultation, known as the Marketing Call, is a service Koehler provides for its authors.  It was helpful beyond belief.

Up to this point I had spent several months thinking up and attempting to implement various marketing ideas, some of which actually worked, some of which were-shall we say–less than stunningly successful.  I was flying blind but in a veritable updraft of often pointless activity.  And then I “met” Shari.

I am pleased to report that she paid me the compliment of saying I had been doing pretty well. She liked the website, and both she and John had some very concrete suggestions for minor changes and improvements.  I am absolutely NOT savvy to the ways of websites and so am waiting for my WordPress Guru to return from vacation to talk me through some of the tasks.

Meanwhile, once I was off the phone on the 29th, I sat down and typed up my notes from Shari, and I realized immediately that she had done much more than offer me a list of concrete leads in the marketing game.  She had given me the sage advice–and the list to carry it out–to take the marketing of my book one step at a time, setting realistic goals for each day.  For example, as an overall goal-using whatever items from the list seem best suited at the time–setting a goal of number of people who will have become familiar with my name by the end of the day.  She suggested starting low, at maybe five people.  Then the task is to choose the avenue to take to reach those five people. This is revolutionary for me because I tend to tackle everything at once and, of course, become quickly overwhelmed and discouraged.

There are the ubiquitous social media (and she also had specific suggestions for using each of those–Facebook, LinkedIn, Goodreads, Twitter–more effectively); there is this blog which I can begin to place in categories rather than leaving “uncategorized,” to which I can continue to invite guest bloggers, for which I can choose broad topics like “Twenty Questions to Use for Discussion of Your Book,” then put in a sample with explanation, from the Discussions at the end of my own book.  And more grand ideas like that.

She pointed me in the direction-at a very reasonable yearly fee–of an offshoot of her website, The Winners Circle, which provides article after article on frequent issues in marketing and does amazing things like paring the million online book clubs down to a few that will seriously consider submissions in a particular genre.  I was already looking at these book clubs with despair having Googled “online book clubs” and viewed the overwhelming number.

In short, there is help out there for us novices in both publishing and marketing our own books.  And, finally, here are the notes I typed on the 29th of July–they are unedited but I believe self-explanatory.  I have completed the items that are **.

Conversation with Shari Stauch and John Koehler 7-29: KB Marketing Call

** Go to BISAC and pick three categories to send to John
** Sign up for WritersWin/bookmark from Shari: VIPW20 to save $20; they screen sites, like book clubs; I can go after reviews on my own? I need to go ahead and do this
Link website/blogs to FB Author Page, not just FB
Define categories (5-6) for blogs

Pull selected blogs from the past, put into categories, re-date—click on url of specific blog to bring it back up to republish
Twitter: look for writers in similar genres: follow their followers
From website—Discuss the Book: share questions in a blog to social media—Do things like “Twenty Questions You Hadn’t Thought to Ask” then pull 1-2 from Lydia Questions, e.g., Which of the ladies is your favorite; why
**Upload photo to Goodreads Author Page
**Set up a Google+ Author Page (turns out this is your profile page on Google, so I just adjusted content to reflect my status as an author)
Set myself a goal, e.g., five or ten people per day who will know my name (through marketing)

ONE DAY AT A TIME.

Cousins: Meet Jane Gentry, My Second Guest Blogger

Two Cousins for All Seasons
Dean:

In the Acknowledgements at the end of Looking for Lydia; Looking for God, I have written this about my cousin, Jane Gentry, of Mansfield, Texas:

“My first cousin, Jane Riley Gentry, has been everything but co-author.  Without her close reading and courageous criticisms it could not have been written.”

As I look back to the day I started this writing, I can’t retrieve the memory of when or how Jane became a second pair of eyes on the manuscript, a second mind–and that the mind of a serious reader–on those pages.  I believe it began with my asking her what I had asked a couple of friends to do: take a look at Chapters One and Two and just tell me what they thought.  I had gotten some discouraging responses.  One acquaintance said she felt as if she were reading the start of several different books; a new friend and fellow book clubber just shook her head and said she hoped I wasn’t seriously considering trying to publish anything.  A very old friend, a veteran teacher of writing, felt such pressure to proofread and correct line-by-line that our relationship suffered a near-fatal break that is only now beginning to heal.

Jane liked it but said I needed to include more detail about the women in the Bible study, that what she most wanted was to get to know them better.

At what point did my reticent, self-deprecating cousin become an acute and insightful editor, articulately and assertively insisting until I listened, considered, usually reframed a sentence or deleted whole paragraphs?  It must have happened gradually, but suddenly one day Jane was almost as involved with the book as I was.  We started many days at 8:00 in Virginia and 7:00 in the Lone Star State-and, with the pages in front of us on our respective computer screens, began reading aloud, taking turns, stopping when something didn’t sound quite right to one or both of us.  We repeated this process at least twice before I even considered submitting it for publication.  In fact, we repeated the process for the long book proposals I wrote.  After I signed a contract with Koehler Books, we repeated it through two edits.  When I was forced to make some major changes due to legal pressure, once again Jane and I got to work.

Dean and Jane:

As a matter of fact, during the writing of a-believe this or not-10,000 word book proposal, when I had run out of steam, Jane called to say she had read a book that she felt had important parallels with mine.  That section of the proposal was called, “Competitive Titles.”  I just didn’t have time to read it.  She sent her notes; I wrote; we edited and rewrote together.  Here is the review co-authored by Jane Gentry and Dean Robertson:

House of Outrageous Fortune: Fifteen Central Park West. Michael Gross

This is the story of two brothers, sons of immigrant parents, who become developers with a vision for a building in the heart of New York City. Like Looking for Lydia, this book explores and reveals a building from every possible angle. There is the history of the building itself—its financing, construction, and completion. There are the stories of the men who dreamed and built it and of the people who eventually live in it. We learn that what the brothers had in mind was an icon, a building like no other, a ticket to fame; so far it continues to be just that. The whole tale is brought home by carefully selected photographs of the building’s exterior and of the builders. Like the Lydia Roper Home, Fifteen Central Park West is unique; there just isn’t anything quite like either of them.

Unlike Looking for Lydia, this is the story of a building erected entirely for monetary gain; it has no social mission or impact. Also different is the fact that the residents of Fifteen Central Park West forge no relationships, have, in fact, nothing in common except the incredible wealth that has allowed them to purchase apartments there. This is perceptive reporting by a fine journalist, and it tells a fascinating tale. But at the end of the day, the reader is intrigued but has not become involved with any of the book’s characters. It is a book about very lonely people.

Looking for Lydia presents model after model of people and events in relation to each other: the women in the Bible Study to each other and to the author; the Roper Home in relation to its history; this generation of the Ropers in relation to their own family saga. It is, finally, a book about the bonds we forge that bring us, sometimes against our will, out of loneliness.

Jane:

Sometimes the most surprising and life changing experiences are wonderful and unexpected. This happened to me in March, 2014.  My cousin Dean decided to write a book; or I should say the “Holy Spirit” showed up. She asked me to help with a little editing by long distance, as I am in Texas and she is in Virginia. We started reading the manuscript. My daily mantra was “I am not a writer.”

We went through it chapter by chapter, and soon we were reading line by line. I wanted to know more about the ladies in the Bible Study, their personalities and what meeting every Wednesday morning talking about the Bible meant to each of them. An hour on the phone each day became the norm.

Since retiring from public libraries I had not been so challenged. In the investigation of Lydia’s family we talked more about our own, and we wished we had asked more history questions of previous generations before they were gone. My cousin encouraged me to speak out and voice my opinions. It was great to be listened to and taken seriously. I have not had much confidence in the past. The joke between us now is that perhaps I’ve gotten a little too confident. Dean even occasionally suggests I’m a little pushy. I wear that banner proudly.  A real bond has been reestablished between us that was missing for several years.

Looking for Lydia; Looking for God is now not only written but published and on the market.

Dean is already planning a sequel, which she has outlined in the last chapter of Looking for Lydia. When she is done with promotional travel for this book, she looks forward to continuing her research and writing about Lydia Roper. I intend to contribute my two cents worth on the next book, and am already reminding her of my indispensable skills as a research librarian and editor.