, which I am incredibly excited to delve into! I am particularly excited to share Ms. Carter's guest post, which pertains to cafes, and you know my love and passion for these delightful little cozy home away from homes! So please help me in welcoming Mary Carter!I am going to use ‘Café of Dreams’ as my inspiration for this blog. I love cafes, and coffee houses. I wish I lived in Paris in the age where having philosophical discussions over espresso with other writers and artists was all the rage. I would love to visit Italy and sip espresso at their coffee bars, standing up. I love writing in coffee shops. They bring to mind brick walls, soft seats, and laptop lugging patrons vying for outlets. Hopped up on caffeine, typing away, who knows what genius awaits? When you need a break, you can sit back and eavesdrop on any number of conversations around you.
I once tried to start up a coffee house of my own in Seattle. I found the perfect little space and spent weeks formulating a business plan, developing a name, a menu, the furniture, the signage, the whole nine-yards. I wanted a place where not only family and friends, but artists could gather. I imagined handsome men playing the guitar by candlelight, and poets, and writers, reading their works in progress. Maybe I would get a liquor license and serve wine. In the end, the owner wouldn’t rent me the space. I was disappointed, but then I decided to take all that creative energy I had generated dreaming about my coffee house, and put it into writing a novel instead. It’s amazing what you can accomplish if you’re excited by an idea.
Passion is the key to success no matter what you’re trying to accomplish. If you love something, it shows. In the end, it worked out for the best. I’m where I was meant to be. I still love the idea of owning a little bookstore, or a little coffee shop. I want a place where I can chat all day long with people, while sipping coffee and reading books. Of course there is a cat or a dog lounging about the place as well. It’s pure fantasy, but that’s me, I’m a dreamer. And I still love going to coffee houses, and cafes, I love getting out in the world, and getting out of the isolation that is inherent in the writing lifestyle. Cafes are a perfect place to relax, socialize, and do a little dreaming.
MARY CARTER is a freelance writer and novelist.
My Sister’s Voice is her fourth novel with Kensington. Her other works include: She’ll Take It, Accidentally Engaged, Sunnyside Blues, andThe Honeymoon House in the best selling anthology Almost Home. She is a graduate of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, which is part of the Rochester Institute of Technology. She has just completed A Very Maui Christmas, a new novella for Kensington that will be included in a Christmas of 2010 anthology. She is currently working on a new novel, The Pub Across the Pond, about an American woman who swears off all Irish men only to learn she’s won a pub in Ireland. Readers are welcome to visit her at marycarterbooks.com.
About My Sister's Voice:What do you do when you discover your whole life was a lie? In Mary Carter’s unforgettable new novel, one woman is about to find out. . .
At twenty-eight, Lacey Gears is exactly where she wants to be. An up-and-coming, proudly Deaf artist in Philadelphia, she’s in a relationship with a wonderful man and rarely thinks about her difficult childhood in a home for disabled orphans. That is, until Lacey receives a letter that begins, “You have a sister. A twin to be exact…”
Learning her identical, hearing twin, Monica, experienced the normal childhood she was denied resurrects all of Lacey’s grief, and she angrily sets out to find Monica and her biological parents. But the truth about Monica’s life, their brief shared past, and the reason for the twins’ separation is far from simple. And for every one of Lacey’s questions that’s answered, others are raised, more baffling and profound.
Complex, moving, and beautifully told, My Sister’s Voice is a novel about sisterhood, love of every shape, and the stories we cling to until real life comes crashing in…
1 comments:
Thanks for the review.
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