The Girls in the Basement by Maddie Dawson

 LUCY BURDETTE: I've read all of today's guest's books and I have the new one on my bedside table. It's exactly the kind of book that helped get me through the pandemic--and that unfortunately, the kind we still need! I'm happy to have her back to tell you how writing this book got her through the past year and a half as well. Welcome Maddie!

Maddie Dawson: Thank you so much for inviting me back to Jungle Red Writers. I always love to come hang out here.  

Oh my goodness! It’s been quite a year and a half, hasn’t it? Like many of you kindred spirits, I spent a lot of it in my pajamas—writing, writing, writing, peeking at the news, crying, writing more, changing to different pajamas, writing, watching news, crying, writing, baking bread, ordering new pajamas online, writing, declaring that writing can’t exist in such a world, baking more bread, writing, crying, writing, and then one day, to my own surprise, writing the words THE END on the thing I’d been writing.

Which was a novel called THE MAGIC OF FOUND OBJECTS. 

To be honest, the pandemic lockdown came for me at the perfect time: I had a mere four months before the first draft of the book was due to my editor, and in early March 2020, I was still in happy denial, still cavorting around telling myself the book would finish writing itself just as soon as it was in the mood, hahahaha. (I am guilty of magical thinking.) And then—bam! Pandemic time! Lockdown! Suddenly the good of America—maybe even the world—depended upon my staying home and doing my work.

I had thought the novel I was writing was a simple little romcom—the story of a New York woman who has to decide between two men. How fun this will be, I said. Piece of cake, I said. Throw in some fun banter, a sweet little pug named Mr. Swanky, and a Manhattan rent-controlled apartment—and this will be done in no time.

Ha. 

My friend, the fabulous author Barbara O’Neal, claims that our novels are really constructed by “the girls in the basement”—our subconscious mind sending up the real story while we prattle along, following our outlines, working on the surface.

And sure enough, while I’d been out eating lunch with friends and watching movies and doing yoga, the girls in the basement had been doing a deep dive into what love really means. Oh sure, they said, I could keep the dog and the Manhattan apartment, but this, they said, was a story about so much else. 

Slowly, throughout the pandemic, they sent up bulletins for me. Their preferred work time was two in the morning, when I’d wake up to hear them knocking around in my head, ready to tell me a new part of the story. Other times they fell silent while they excavated new details. They didn’t care so much about eating and sleeping. Or reading the news. They had a story to tell me, and they were determined to get it out there. 

And so they did.  

The Magic of Found Objects is about a woman, Phronise Linnelle, who was conceived at Woodstock in a serendipitous liaison between a free-spirited hippie and a farmer’s son—two people who probably should have never even met. After her parents split up and her father marries his former high school girlfriend—the woman he should have been with all along—Phronsie struggles to keep alive the magic and love she has for her real mom, who is beautiful and artistic and who believes the universe guides her every move. Phronsie lives with her father and stepmother and twin brother on the family’s struggling New Hampshire farm, where life is normal and structured, and she come to appreciate that life is so much easier when it’s rational and safe and not fraught with dreams of art and magic.

Now grown up and living in New York, divorced from a man she adored and sick of the forty-four internet dates she’s been on, and feeling once more betrayed by her mom, she can’t help but say yes when Judd, her best friend from childhood, suggests that they give up on romance and marry each other. So what that they’re not in love? Maybe that’s for the best. No hearts will get broken. 

In a diner at one a.m., with a twist-tie ring to seal the deal, Phronsie and Judd embark on a plan to show everyone that the best marriages come when people are genuine friends and that romantic passion is overrated.

But from there, the story took on a life of its own, as novels do when you’ve let the girls in the basement do the telling. They always know what’s right, and what has to happen next. They know better than you what the ending needs to be, and what has to happen to get there.

This book—seemingly just a story about “boy meets girl in kindergarten, then thirty-one years later, boy gets girl, and girl overthinks the whole situation”—turned out to be about magic and practicality; about mothers and daughter and stepmothers; about farm life and city life; about the way two mismatched people can fall instantly in love and change the trajectory of their whole lives and maybe not for the better; about growing up feeling you don’t belong, and then finding your calling, or what is possibly your calling if you even believe in callings, which you’re not sure about. And going on forty-four internet dates. And meeting a guy who carries some gnomes in his pocket. (The girls in the basement were really adamant about the gnomes.)

Aaaaand… it’s, of course, a book about Woodstock and the mud and the music and coming together of half a million people on a farm fifty-two years ago this week. Peace and love and all that. A place where people showed up and discovered they were all connected somehow. They all knew the same songs. Loved the same bands. Wanted the same things. 

There was a lot of nostalgia to wallow in as I sat enmeshed in pandemic life. It wasn’t lost on me that life had once been electrifying, and that strangers from all over could once meet, join together, sing, listen to the music, slide in the mud, and then fall into each other’s lives with such abandon and freedom. 

That’s the gift of fiction, isn’t it—the way it spirits us away, reminding us of what we’ve always known, but maybe have forgotten. Reassuring us that we are not alone, and that although our families are flawed and sometimes our lives are quite ridiculous, everybody else’s are too, pretty much. And sometimes just giving us a place to escape to where there’s mud and music and fun and magic. 

The girls in the basement are busy working on another book now. I get daily bulletins and alerts, for which I’m grateful. I’m no longer in pajamas full-time (and hoping I won’t have to be again), but I’m still quiet, and listening with all my heart. So far they’ve said nothing about any gnomes, but I’m ready for anything. 

LUCY: Love hearing about your process Maddie! I think I need to borrow those girls for my basement for a while...Readers, what book or books have gotten you through the worst times in the past two years?

About Maddie: Maddie Dawson, a transplanted Southerner living in the Northeast,  is the Washington Post bestselling author of nine novels. She specializes in humorous literary fiction, about people stumbling toward love, family, connection, and hope—and usually finding it in the most unlikely circumstances. Her books have been translated into fifteen languages.

Find Maddie at her website...or on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram

A Kernel of Truth @sharrisauthor

LUCY BURDETTE: Today the blog welcomes back longtime friend Sherry Harris with her new book. Don't forget to leave a comment to be entered into a drawing for a copy! 

SHERRY HARRIS: Thanks Lucy and Reds for having me back to celebrate the release of A Time to Swill, the second book in my Chloe Jackson Sea Glass Saloon series which is set in the panhandle of Florida. Authors get ideas for books from so many different places and the origin story for A Time to Swill is no different. 

I have visited Destin, Florida many times since 1988 and lived in nearby Shalimar for three years. One of my dear friends from there, Clare Boggs, helped me research for the series. We went to beach bars (such tough research!), drove by houses to find the perfect one for Chloe, picked out her car, and spent hours talking about what Chloe’s life would look like.  Sadly, Clare died unexpectedly in 2019. As I write this series (I’m now writing the fourth book) I think of Clare and call her the angel on my shoulder. 

Clare also gave me a file folder of articles she’d clipped from the local newspaper. She thought they might be helpful for story ideas. When I preparing to write A Time to Swill last year, I picked the folder back up and went through the articles. One was about an old house that was being moved from one location to another. Hmmm, that had a lot of possibilities. Another article was about a phantom ship that had washed up on the beach, washed back out, and then back onto the beach near the bar I ended up using as a model for the Sea Glass Saloon. 

That story caught my imagination. First, I discovered a phantom or ghost ships as they are called don’t have any paranormal activity occurring. They are abandoned ships or boats adrift at sea. Second, I did what all authors do in one form or another and thought, “what if?” What if Chloe got on the boat? What if while she was on it the boat went back out to sea? That was the kernel of the idea the opens the story. 

Chloe runs almost every morning. What if it’s foggy and she spots this sailboat bobbing at an odd angle near one of the sandbars that runs along the coast in Destin, Florida—the town near my fictional town of Emerald Cove. But why would she get on the boat? There must be some compelling reason. Ooohhh, I thought, what if she heard a baby cry and what if when she calls out, but no one answers. Chloe must take action—right after calling 911 to report the whole thing. 

The actual boat that ran aground in Destin was named The Phantom of the Aqua – isn’t that perfect? A man was sailing the boat from near St. Petersburg, Florida to the U.S. Virgin Islands. He got caught in a tropical storm, his sails ripped apart, and his engine died. He had to be rescued by the Coast Guard in a helicopter. The man assumed the sailboat sank, until he heard the news two months later that it turned up in Destin hundreds of nautical miles away from where he abandoned it.  Here’s a link to the news article. The photos of the sailboat are amazing. 

While Chloe is on the abandoned ship she finds a cat not a baby, but she also finds a skeleton. The remains connect back to her friend Ralph. His wife had disappeared twelve years earlier with three other people when they went out sailing. Ralph has always been a suspect in her disappearance. And now old wounds in Emerald Cove have been ripped back open. Chloe must figure out who is lying and who is telling the truth. 

Readers: Do you let your imagination run wild when you read an interesting story? I’ll give away a copy of A Time to Swill to someone who leaves a comment. 

Bio: 

Sherry Harris is the Agatha Award nominated author of the Sarah Winston Garage Sale mystery series and the Chloe Jackson Sea Glass Saloon mysteries. Sherry is a past president of Sisters in Crime, a member of the Chesapeake Chapter of Sisters in Crime, the New England Chapter of Sisters in Crime and Mystery Writers of America. Sherry loves books, beaches, bars, and Westies — not necessarily in that order. She is also a patent holding inventor.

Blog: https://wickedauthors.com/

Twitter: Sharrisauthor

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SherryHarrisauthor

Instagram: SherryHarrisAuthor

Website: https://sherryharrisauthor.com

This Time For Sure @HankPRyan

LUCY BURDETTE: Among the casualties of the current surge in Covid cases in Louisiana was the Bouchercon mystery conference. So many people work so hard to put on a conference of this size, and so many authors and readers had planned to attend--we all felt sad when it had to be cancelled. Our own Hank had been chosen as the editor of the official Bouchercon anthology of stories, with all proceeds from sales designated for the New Orleans library. She chose the theme of second chances. Naturally, most of the sales would have happened at the conference, so we felt really glum. But now the anthology is available and we asked a few of the stellar writers who appear in it to tell us something about how they took off on the second chances theme. I cannot wait to read all the stories! 

Gabriel Valjan on Burnt Ends: The 1987 film Angel Heart, which was an adaptation of William Hjortsberg’s 1978 novel Falling Angel, haunted me, so much so that when I had read Hank’s call and the theme of ‘second chances,’ I knew I wanted to write an atmospheric story that would leave the reader, I daresay, unsettled. I wanted to convey a New Orleans in high swelter, on the verge of a reckoning. “Burnt Ends” is a noirish tale about unfinished business. History is what comes between two men. First, there is a world war and then a pandemic. The HOW and WHY I hope readers enjoy with a Sazerac, NOLA’s official cocktail.

Charles Todd: One of the great things about Bouchercon is the anthology, which is always a fundraiser for a good cause. And this year's is awesome. Thanks to Hank and her team! We can say one thing about our own story--we had such fun writing it. Wait till you see some of the characters Rutledge meets--only in a short story could we get away with testing him like this. Does everyone deserve a second chance? Even a murderer? Hmmmmm. 

Elisabeth Elo on The Unappreciated Wife: As her husband lay dying, Polly Clancy finds herself on the verge of widowhood—and a second chance at happiness. After thirty-seven years playing dutiful second fiddle to an ambitious and demanding husband, she will finally be able to make her own choices and pursue her own interests. So it comes as a shock to find out, quite by accident, that her dream will actually not materialize, at least not in the way she imagined it. Now Polly must finally face herself. What does she really want, and what is she willing to do to get it? 

Alexia Gordon on Love’s Labor: I was living in Newport, Rhode Island when I wrote this story, “virtually in-residence” as a student at the US Naval War College. My classmates and I had all relocated to Newport, excited to study at this prestigious school, founded in 1884 as the staff college for the United States Navy, only to learn that our entire academic experience would be conducted via Zoom. We felt cheated. I wanted a do-over, a second chance to experience all that the Naval War College had to offer. My mood was often as dark as Aquidneck Island’s fog is thick. I’d wander around Newport, a city that dates to 1639, to cheer myself up. I spent a lot of time by the harbor, imagining what Newport must have looked like in its 18th century heyday as a major trade center, filled with ships and rum distilleries and enough people to make it the 9th largest Colonial city. One day, instead of imaginary ships, I saw real teenagers daring each other to jump from the causeway between Newport and Goat Island into the harbor. Their target was a narrow strip of water between the causeway and a pier. Being an old fuddy-duddy and not an invincible teen, my first thought was “Do your parents know what you’re up to? One of you kids is going to whack your head on the pier, and then what?” My next thought was, “And then what? What if a loved one died because of a stupid stunt and you carried that resentment around for years, what would you do?” Love’s Labor was the answer to that question.

Lucy Burdette on Married Seeking Married: About thirteen years ago, I was waiting for my latte in a local coffee shop and spotted this on the cork board nearby: Married Seeking Married. Attractive, safe man (and with honorable reasons!) looking for companion for friendship and intimacy. Oh my gosh, someday this was going to make a doozy of a story, I thought as I pocketed the card. When Hank mentioned the theme for this anthology, I knew the moment had come. Angry divorces, second chances, FantasyFest in Key West with a fairy tale theme--this was a blast to write!

And now a question for Hank: Tell us about the theme and what you were expecting, and how that compared to what turned up in your inbox.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: This is so exciting! And I cannot wait for you all to read this. Here’s the scoop. Last...April? I got a call from the powers that be at Bouchercon--and figured they were setting up a signing for HER PERFECT LIFE and I was delighted to agree. But that was not why they were calling! When they asked me to edit this year’s anthology, I almost fell off my chair, and then of course, with much delight said yes.

All you have to do, they said, is come up with the theme and title, invite authors to participate and get them to say yes and set a deadline for the stories and edit them and organize them and write an introduction and the cover copy and coordinate the promotion. 

Sure, I said. (Having no idea. :-))   

But a few inner workings. I wanted to make sure the collection encouraged and included all authors--so we decided to have a huge widespread call for submissions. We fervently encouraged writers in all stages of their writing lives to submit, and especially encouraged those who had never been in an anthology before. Bouchercon recruited six judges (who we are keeping anonymous) to read the hundreds--I mean hundreds!--of stories that came in. All the submissions were anonymized, so no one knew who had written them.

Meanwhile, all of the New Orleans guests of honor were invited to write a story, and I was also allowed to ask some people who I thought might write terrific stories. I can tell you--they are all amazing! Craig Johnson’s story will break your heart. David Heska Wanbli Weiden--so incredible. Karen Dionne reveals the untold history of the Marsh King’s Daughter. And Alexia Gordon writes a darkly hilarious podcast. And more. 

FInally, the judges--who are definitely saints!--sent me 30 or so still-anonymized stories. I read them, and chose 12.  Out of all those submissions! AndI had NO idea who wrote them. And one of the joys of my life was when I was told who the authors were. People I had never heard of, hurray! First time short-story writers, hurray! Friends--like Gabriel Valjan and Martha Reed and Clair Lamb--hurray! Oh, it brings tears to my eyes.  Can you imagine how much fun it was to see that?  

 It’s called This Time For Sure--which was initially because it was the second Bouchercon in New Orleans. But now, it’s turned out to be a much more ironic title than any of us had imagined.

All the profits go to the New Orleans public library.  They get help from us, you get a terrific book. Please do not miss this--it’s a limited edition, and soon to be a collector’s item. Until we run out, each book will have signed bookplates from some of the authors.  And when the books are gone, they’re gone.

We have one copy of THIS TIME FOR SURE to give away today, but grab your copy here before they're gone!