Flavoring

First, letting you know there is a sale going on now through December 18 - so if you haven't read book 1 of the Beat Street Series yet, you can for 99 cents--(and I'm hoping that will send you to book two, Fool's Errand). You can find the sale at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, iTunes and Kobo.

When I started writing The Beat on Ruby's Street, I had no plans to create a series. Then, as things took shape and my first publisher (Booktrope) asked about it, I started to give the idea some thought.

Now, book two has arrived, and both books are published by Dragon Moon Press. What I wanted to do in book two was take my main character Ruby out of her small Greenwich Village world and broaden it. (And yes, New York City is considered to be one of our biggest cities, but Greenwich Village is really pretty small.)

Since one of Ruby's favorite poets is Jack Kerouac, it makes sense she would go out on the road, as he did--though for completely different reasons. I started thinking about how the places we grow up tend to influence us, in good and bad ways, and how I wanted Ruby to experience more than one kind of life.

I grew up mostly in a suburb of New York (across the river in New Jersey) and spent most of my tween and teen years wanting to be in the city, which of course was much cooler than anything I was experiencing. If I had to describe my tween and teen years in one word I would choose "longing" - to go across the bridge and find adventures, act in plays, sing in bands, walk the streets with friends, go to parties and take risks that would get me farther than I ever thought possible.

After graduating from college and spending two extra years in New England, I came back home and then managed to get an apartment in New York City. I got to do some of the things I always wanted to do, though it was much harder at times than I thought it would be. But the flavors, smells, madness and kindness of New Yorkers went a long way toward making me the person I am.

I think of the places we live as places where we are flavored ourselves, spiced up and turned and polished, and the world we see is the world our place wants us to see, no matter where we are or who is with us.

I left New York because my (first) husband got work in the Midwest, and it was wrenching and hard for me--I got homesick the minute I left. But now I'm really glad to have met people in Hammond Indiana, Chicago, the Twin Cities, Two Harbors, Springfield and other places. I've learned to appreciate a Midwestern spring at the end of a long winter and find artists from all different states and countries and have the time to write, which New York never seems to give you.

New York is a city of scenes and you fall into them, one after the other. The Midwest offers you space to pause, see, listen and dream.

I don't know what I would have been like if the reverse had happened--if I was born in, say, Chicago or St. Paul or Hammond and Indiana and then went to New York. But my son was born in St. Paul and then he DID move to New York, so maybe I'll have a chance to find out. That's the first thing I'm going to ask when I see him this spring.

I can't wait to see what he tells me.


Greenwich Village Street photo: samchills/


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