Beth Kephart's Blog, page 352

Nothing but Ghosts gets a PW Star

Yes, I just came from the gym. Back-to-back sessions of Body Pump and Zumba. That's why, driving home, I was allowing myself to dream of something sweet—something iced, sprinkled, and teeth deep in good tasting. I know I'm not supposed to reward my shaking triceps with sugar. But, like I said: the sessions were back-to-back.

Of course, I'm obsessive, so before hunting sweetness down in my tiny but supplied kitchen, I slid right into my old computer chair to read the latest round of emails.

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Do you know where you are going? I asked yesterday, and I loved the diversity of responses—the absolutely and the never, the somewhere in between.

I live my life lost, I said, and what I meant by that is this: When writing any story I am, from the very start, grounded in place. I am grounded in voice and in mood and in an elixired idea, and soon—perhaps thirty pages in—I have a general feel for structure.

And yet and nonetheless I feel strange, off kilter, lost because at first and for a very lo

Do You Know Where You Are Going?

A conversation held earlier today, at church:

"So you when decide to write a story, is the whole thing already there in your head? Is it, then, just about writing down all you've already dreamed up?"

"Oh, goodness. No."

"No?"

"I have no idea where I am going. I live my life lost."

Or maybe it's just that I feel that way now, with this new book, so unknown, so demanding. Every line a tangle and tussle. Every line that I actually keep the next day a miracle of strange proportions.

(For a leavened m

Nothing but Ghosts and Chanticleer Garden: The Transmutations of Fiction

Yesterday Lenore enabled me to return to Barcelona, the setting of key flashback scenes in Nothing but Ghosts. The majority of Ghosts, of course, is set in a fictionalized version of a garden not ten minutes from my home, a paradise called Chanticleer. Many of the photos that I post on my blog are of this place. The book trailer for Ghosts (posted in the left margin) was filmed, Blair Witch-style, at Chanticleer. My fifth book, Ghosts in the Garden, was a true account of the two years I spen

The Barcelona of Nothing but Ghosts, and a Bloggy Confession

Dear Lenore went to Barcelona last week for a wedding and visited a place so dear to me that I wrote it into Nothing but Ghosts. What a gift, then, that she has returned with photographs from her trip, and with memories that she shares with her lucky readers today. She's included, in her post, a Barcelona excerpt from Ghosts.

Another key Ghosts scene takes place here, at Ciutadella Park. A place I wish I would find myself strolling through again, and soon. Wings, anyone? Fantasies?

On anothe

A. Jolie in the Tub

It's a delightful thing, I discovered, to put on A. Jolie lips and shades and to sit among the purples in the garden. There's allure bound up with that, a silencing glamor.

But oh, goodness, how exhausting, too. How depleting just to appear among the minions and say nothing. So that after a day of sitting all puckery fine (see yesterday's post, if I have you confused), I needed at least two hours in my gardenia tub. My eyes are open, of course they are. I'm looking among the celestial for

I'm Thinking

... incognito. I'm thinking big shades, trench coat, forest of purple, a little A. Jolie around the lips. Won't have to know anything, ask anything, reveal a single thing. I'll just be sitting outside in this heartbreak blue weather, letting the sweetness roll in.

Return

One returns to the dance studio because one must, because quitting isn't really an option, not in this life. Because if, yesterday, you felt so cluttered and tangled with the smash stuff of yourself, today you could be calm, couldn't you? Be ordinary, self-contained.

You could also be happy, or I was, for there was Jean, being his funny-smart self, and there was this song, from the soundtrack of The Mask, that we've decided to dance at a September showcase, and there were those ridiculous words

White Sky

White sky.

Graffiti deep.

The day stops: Timeless.

Wanting Forgiveness

Today, at a dance lesson, I was reminded, again, of how complicated, spinning, unfinished, not-close-to-right I am.

How the skin of me in no way reflects all the surge within.

How most of the time, most of the days, I am housewife, mother, the owner of a firm, the nightly chef and the laundromat, the woman with the broom, but how, when I sneak the other me's into the day (the dance, the joy, the jilt of joy, the writer's heart and mind) I am someone else again.

How perhaps this wears on some.

I cri