My Life in Books

For me it’s Writers and not Books.

William Shakespeare

I wish I could tell you I sit and read his plays. I do not. But I do read my Shakespeare Page-a-Day calendar every day. For years now, I’ve been studying the day’s page and then ruminating ever-after …wow … by choosing those words and marching them in this order, he means THAT? How could somebody, in just a few lines, capture everything under the sun?

Charles Dickens

What a Social Conscience! What furniture descriptions! His characters will live forever – Scrooge, Lady Dedlock, Fezziwig, Madame Defarge, and Jarndyce and Jarndyce. When I read Bleak House and saw how he used wit when writing about the legal profession, I knew I must, in my own small way, use whatever wit I possessed when I wrote about corporations and the pharmaceutical industry in Where the What If Roams and the Moon is Louis Armstrong.

Wilkie Collins || Dan Brown

The Victorian - Wilkie Collins / Current Day- Dan Brown. Masters of suspense. Brown’s writing, though erudite and meticulously researched, certainly doesn’t come near the lyricism and soulfulness of Dickens or Collins’; and neither Brown nor Collins have Dickens’ social conscience; but then Dickens doesn’t quite have their ability to make a reader rip through pages to find out what happens.

J.K. Rowling

From Harry Potter to the Strike Cormoran series to Casual Vacancy, I am in awe of her. I cried when Dobie died. She is a master of plot, language and dialect; and of making stuff up; and if there isn’t a word for it, she’ll invent one.

Lewis Carroll

I had the courage to create my What If character because of Lewis Carroll, the King of Creatures Mischievous and Fantastical.

Roald Dahl

‘Dumbsilly,’ ‘Vermicious Knid,’ ‘The first titchy bobsticle you meet’. Who has captured the mind and the delightful-word-mangling of a child more than Roald Dahl has?

Mark Twain

I thought I understood prejudice until I read Mark Twain’s depiction of Jim. I’ve never forgotten that honorable rascal, Huckleberry Finn, and Tom Sawyer, that brat in cherub’s clothing.

Harry Stephen Keeler

There he was on Neil Gaiman’s list of favorite bad writers. I had to get my hands on one of his books. I laughed til I cried. And vice versa. Such mouths on characters! And then I found out that Keeler’s mother committed him to a lunatic asylum when he was a child. Alas, nothing! Perhaps, the best bad writer in the whole world was born.

Ten Things You Didn’t Know About Me

1 • I take Singing Lessons.

2 • If I were Queen, I’d paint the Roses Turquoise.

3 • I walk around singing in my apartment. Or is it, I walk around my apartment singing? I should know that. (You do probably. Or is it, You probably do?)

4 • I don’t sing that great.

5 • I still sing.

6 • I can sew. I have two projects that I plan to tackle. Any day. Skirts. One skirt is on its way from the newly formed Selkie Patterns. They call it their London skirt. They designed the pattern and the fabric. The fabric has Big Ben and a church (I think) on it. I’m waiting. And the other skirt I saw in a window when I was walking to the 42nd Street Library to go write in their Reading Room. It stopped me in my tracks. I got the big idea I could copy it. We’ll see. For the overlay part of the skirt, I bought a tulle-y-lacey-netty-see-through-y-like fabric; for the underlay part, I bought a stretchy drapey fabric; then I bought two kinds of ribbon; both black: one lacey, one velvet; both for the ruffle-y trim. I think I can copy it. I don’t have a pattern. I’ll just do it. I’ll be a Nike.

7 • I take portrait drawing classes. Whatever you do, don’t draw your loved-ones. Draw strangers. And then don’t ever show it to them. I mean look what Lucian Freud did to The Queen. What could she say? That’s when you’re glad you’re not a fly on the wall. (There seems to be a Queen theme here. I don’t know why. We don’t have Queens where I come from.)

8 • I am the youngest of seven children. Some of my brothers and a sister and my Mother and my Father are in the Big Unknown. That makes me sad.

9 • I have a beautiful view. I am including a photograph of it. What you’re looking at is the tippy-tippy end of Northern Manhattan. That’s where, supposedly, the Indians got gypped and sold Mannahatta (not a typo) to some greedy people. That makes me sad. Every June, this Mohawk Chief comes to the park that you’re looking at and Blesses us anyway. He Blesses the River, and the Eagle, and the Wind, and the Rain, and the Earth, and the Trees, and the Clouds, too. It makes me so happy.

10 • Oh, by the way, my Uncle is the What If.

You think I’m kidding.

Think again.

Book Blog Tour

In November 2018, Where the What If Roams and the Moon is Louis Armstrong went on a trip. It was off to the Land of Dickens and Shakespeare for a Book Blog Tour. It was scared because, after all, how would such Rule-Britannia-Type readers, who surely have those geniuses in their libraries, feel about little-ole-it? But Oh My G!, And Wowie-Zowie, it made some friends in the United Kingdom.

You can read what its British friends had to say about it on this website’s Editorial Review page.

Many thanks to Anne Cater of Random Things Through My Letterbox who organized the Book Blog Tour.

Wherever will Where the What If Roams and the Moon is Louis Armstrong go next?