The Double Bind -- Finished at Last!

“I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.” – Vladimir Nabokov
I am now at the stage where I am (finally) done rewriting my next novel. Hence this entry on my blog.
Anything is better than wondering (yet again) whether a particular metaphor for the color of blood is sufficiently precise; whether an exchange between two of the characters is plausible; or whether the opening is powerful or the is ending is satisfying or why anyone who doesn’t share my last name would ever bother to read my new book.
I get this way whenever I finish a novel.
The truth is, I have never reread any of my books once they are between hard covers. It’s too painful.
The new book, “The Double Bind,” will be arriving at bookstores and libraries this coming winter.
It’s hard to imagine winter right now, even here in the Land of the Polar Tomato where I reside, (a hill town in central Vermont). I have crocuses and daffodils in my front yard. (Granted, like all Verrmont crocuses and daffodils, they have a death wish. They emerge from beneath piles of thawing, moldering leaves, only to be hammered by spring snowstorms.) But winter — and my new book — will be here before we know it.
The new book is about a 26-year-old female social worker, an elderly homeless photographer, and the photographs he leaves behind when he dies. The book will include 12 actual photographs, woven into the text, that were left behind by a homeless photographer whose work impressed the hell out of me.
The novel is also, I hope, a bit of a page-turner — not unlike Midwives. But I hope the characters are as authentic and real as the folks some of you met in Before You Know Kindness.
I’ll tell you more about the book in the coming weeks. In the meantime, thanks so much for reading my work. I am more grateful than I can tell you.

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