Oh, joy!

It’s a feeling like no other, this sense of accomplishment in completing a novel. It is, as a teacher once described it, like solving a puzzle of my own creation. During the last twenty years I’ve done it four times, but Knowing Marjorie Thane has been the most satisfying. It has certainly been the most fun. I’ve carried these characters with me, in my head and in my heart, for over fifteen years. I’ve seen them, felt them, helped them change and grow. Marjorie, George, Skye, Walter, Lorraine, Wendell and Davy, I have labored long and hard to bring you into the world. Live long and prosper, my friends. I will miss you all.

It won’t surprise you to learn that I’m a Baby Boomer. (There’s only so much one can, realistically, expect from an airbrush.) If you, too, are one of the 73 million Boomers, in just the U.S. alone, then this book is for you. It’s a love story and a ghost story, and a reflection on what might come next: a question without an answer, that is, nevertheless, in our thoughts from time to time; it’s spiritual only in the sense that the narrator, George Thane, is…well…a spirit.

I always enjoy choosing the perfect epigraph. This time I ping-ponged between a quote from Thornton Wilder:

Even memory is not necessary for love.
There is the land of the living and
the land of the dead and the bridge is love,
the only survival, the only meaning.

And this one from Albert Camus:

I would rather live my life as if there is a God
And die to find out there isn’t,
Than to live my life as if there isn’t,
And die to find out there is.

I chose the Camus.

Up next: Finding an agent. Oh, joy.