UPDATE April 19, 2006

Dear friends and readers –

I’ve always loved these lines from a poem:
 
“If, from thy lowly goods thou art bereft
And in thy store two loaves alone are left,
Sell one, and with the dole
Buy hyacinths to feed thy soul.”

“Back in the day,” as they say, when I was on welfare with five children to feed, those words always reminded me to find something of joy to focus on, rather than the empty cupboards.  I don’t know who wrote them, and it’s been awhile since then, so the quote may not be exact.  If anyone knows where it comes from I’d love to hear from you at meg@megobrien.com.

There are a lot of people these days who could use a few hyacinths to feed their souls.  Unfortunately, they don’t have two loaves, or even one to sell.  It’s a sad commentary on our world and how its poorest are (not) being taken care of.  I hope all my wonderful, generous readers will click on the “ONE” link at the bottom of my “HOME” page and take a look at what some good people are doing to try to alleviate poverty and hunger in the world.

Now, on to book business.  You’ll notice I have a brand new website, thanks to my wonderful son and webmaster, Greg.  He’s worked real hard on it the past few months, and I like it a whole lot better than the last one.  We’ll be adding things to it, I suspect, but right now it has all the information the old one had, and a bit more.

One thing missing is my old Guest Book, where readers could write their comments to me and I’d write back.  You may have noticed, though, that there were an abundance of dumb messages on the Guest Book in the past several months.  Most were advertising pharmaceuticals, sex, and other little oddities my GB was never designed for.  Most of them were written, I’m sure, by mindless juveniles who have fried their brains on the very pharmaceuticals they hope to sell.  To each his own.  I pay to keep a site for my own business, though, not theirs. 

Unfortunately, many other author’s websites have been deluged with these Guest Book entries as well.  Some just leave them on, but they irritate me.  I don’t want my readers to have to wade through all that junk to see what other readers have to say.  So the poor old GB is now defunct.  Greg’s set up another page, though, where all the messages that were on the old GB can be read.  It’s called “Reader Reviews.”  It just won’t be possible to write a message there anymore, so I’m asking all my friends and readers to just click on this email address:  meg@megobrien.com and send me messages that way.  You can also click on the EMAIL link in the column on the left side of each page of this website.  All emails sent will come directly to me, and I promise to answer every one.  If you would like your messages to be published on this site so that others can read them, we’ll see about setting up another page that they can be copied to.  Just let me know that I have your permission.

Finally, I’ve been telling my readers that I’d let them know when I signed a new contract!  Well, that happened a few weeks ago, but then I got caught up with work and a humungous move to the Houston area, so of course this Newsletter’s the last thing to get done.  But finally—for those who care—my new deal is with MIRA Books, who I’ve been with now for nine (9!) years.  I look at that number and wonder where the time has gone.  Surely not in writing six books!  Haven’t I had a life in there somewhere? 

“Hell, no”, the answer comes, swift and sure.  “There hasn’t been time for a life!”  But I’m fixin’ to change that.  Even though I’ve signed up for two new thrillers—and that means all the cruises and trips to Europe I planned when I first began to write a thousand years ago will have to wait, as usual—I intend to at least have fun.  The heart attack a year ago was a wake-up call, and maybe I’ll have “too much fun” and have another one—or maybe I won’t.  Maybe I’ll be hit by a truck, and maybe I won’t.  Maybe I’ll die from bird flu in five years, and maybe I won’t.  All I know is that my mother’s last words when she died of cancer at the young age of sixty-three were, “Don’t be a fool like me.  Have fun while you can.” 

Amazing!  For the first time in her life she didn’t say a thing about keeping my nose to the grindstone.  And believe me, if she’d thought it was important, that’s what my mother would have said as she lay there dying.  She always spoke her mind, and she always believed in “eight hours’ work for eight hours’ pay.”  One did not dawdle on the job, whether you worked as a waitress, a shoe salesman, or were head of a Fortune 500 company.  Unfortunately—or fortunately, at least for a career in writing—her child learned her lessons too well and turned out to be a Type A personality.  I haven’t had a real vacation in years. 

But as mentioned above, I’m embarking on a new adventure, in—of all places—the Lone Star state.  As I sit here writing this, I’m surrounded by packing boxes and a book to write.  It doesn’t help, either, that my new webmaster is a slave driver and keeps picking on me to get this Newsletter finished!  I may have also mentioned that he’s my son, though, and even if it seems we shouldn’t have reached that point where I have to do what he says instead of the other way around, he’s not charging me a cent, so I don’t dare fire him.   

My plans here in Houston are to play with my sweet grandbaby, Emily, and have grown-up fun with her even sweeter mommie, Kaiti.  I’m looking into salsa dance lessons and a place to swim and get fit after all the surgeries of the past four years.  It’s just too bad Emily’s very nice daddy travels a lot, so he doesn’t really know yet what a great mother-in-law I can be!  (And yes, I do come with references on that.) 

Speaking of which, the downside is leaving Washington and my daughter Robin and her husband Darrell and their family up there.  They all did so much for me in the six years I lived up there, and I’m really proud and grateful for them all.  As for my two great kids in California, Greg and Amy, I figure we’ll just be a tiny bit closer now.  And then there’s Kevin…who will always have a special place in my heart.  Kevin, whose principal, Sister Anne Marie, called me to come from work immediately one day because Kevin was being a “problem.”  It seems Kevin insisted on wearing his black gloves in class.  (This was long before the Goth era.)  We had just moved from sunny California to Rochester, New York, where we arrived in the midst of the worst blizzard (it seemed) in history.  Kevin loved his new black gloves, and he loved wearing them.  Southern California never had nuthin’ like that!

But wearing gloves in class?  “Do you think this is normal?” Sister Anne Marie asked grimly.

“Well, it’s normal for Kevin,” I said.  Whereupon I just stood up and left.

Kevin has always been sweet and funny, and one never knows what he’ll be up to next.  Speaking of which…hey, Kev, you never write, you never call… Call me, darn it!  I’ve lost your number in the move. 

So here I am in a lovely little part of Houston, all trees and water and good neighbors, and I guess I’ll stay here awhile.  Of course, one never knows.  One of my kids says I move so much, I must be running from the law.  But no—it’s just my mother’s ghost whispering in my ear, softly but incessantly, “Go, go, go!  Live while you can!”

My best wishes go out to all of you, and I hope you’ll remember the message at the beginning of this very long missive:  When things are going good, but especially when they’re bleak—buy hyacinths to feed thy soul.

And please write!  Ask me any questions you’d like, whether about writing or politics (just don’t mind if I lose my grip and go into a long spiel about how bad that all is).  And tell me how you like my new website!

***

UPDATE October 18, 2005

Hi, everyone! If you glance down at my last newsletter entry, you'll find that I wrote it on June 19. Not too bad, huh? Only took me four months to write another one. Oops, no. That was June 19, 2004. But so what if it's been a year and four months. I've had bigger fish to fry, as my Irish Gypsy mother used to say. Besides, I've got a really, really, good excuse for taking so long to get back to you this time. I had a friggin' heart attack!

It really was funny. I thought I had an allergy when it got hard to breathe sometimes. Then one dark and stormy night (really, the roads were frozen over!), I couldn't breathe at all. Imagine not being able to breathe and it taking forever for the paramedics to get there because (1) the wrong station was called by 911—a station in another town no less, instead of the one a block away from my house—and (2) the roads were a skating rink. When those guys finally walked through my door I wasn't about to complain, though. In fact, I heard a choir singing, I swear. A heavenly choir led by a couple of burly men in uniform, carrying instruments I would have run from any other time. The only thing I remember them saying is, "We're going to give you something to help you breathe." I thought, great! A pill! But nope, next thing I knew I had a tube down my throat, and then I was out. Didn't wake up till later that day, so I missed out on all the fun.

My daughter rode in the ambulance with me, and she told me about the fun, though. Like how they sliced my brand new nightgown right down the middle to get to. . .something. Never asked what, still don't know, since thank God, they didn't have to crack my chest. And of course I missed all the fun of slip-sliding along those icy streets to get to the hospital, and having tubes inserted just about everywhere when I got there, not to mention the restraints—did you know they tie your wrists to the bed so you can't accidentally pull your throat tube out when you wake up? They also give you something to paralyze you, so when you wake up and can't move you think you've had a damned stroke.

But not to worry. They also give you happy pills so you really don't give a darn whether you've had a stroke, and when you're told you've had a heart attack, you just shrug and go back to sleep.

The really funny thing is that I never felt a single pain. Not in the chest, the arm, nowhere. They say it happens like that with women, that women have different symptoms from men. So to be honest, for the first few weeks afterward, I didn't even believe I'd had a heart attack. In fact, I was back on the phone with my editor and agent two days after it happened. The docs had to show me the tests, and even then I didn't fully believe it. In fact, I've felt so well ever since, I still have moments when I think it was all some weird joke played upon me by a Universe that thought I was getting too big for my britches (literally) and needed to stop eating caramel pecan ice cream.

I won't say I felt like writing books right away—or doing much of anything else besides watching people buy, decorate, and sell houses on HGTV. And of course I didn't feel like updating this newsletter, but that's mostly because I always procrastinate about that, as you may remember from my last article, below. But it didn't take long to put my writing hat back on again, so here I am at midnight revising THE FINAL KILL, the publication of which my editor was nice enough to delay till next May.

THE FINAL KILL is a sequel, of sorts, to SACRED TRUST, which came out from MIRA Books in May 2000 and takes place in Carmel, California. THE FINAL KILL takes place mostly in Carmel, but Abby gets itchy feet and has to save a friend—not to mention the world—(from extinction, for heaven's sake, which my bored, restless mind came up with while lying in bed recovering from the Heart Attack Adventure). Anyway, in this book Abby winds up in Phoenix, Houston, and Galveston, but only for awhile. And the best part of it is, I got to go to Houston to finish up my research and visit my daughter, her husband, and my beautiful grandbaby Emily—just before Rita hit. They evacuated and I flew back home to the Pacific Northwest, so the last few months have just been one great big adventure after another.

But back to business. In THE FINAL KILL, Abby's been living in her own little apartment at the Prayer House in Carmel Valley for the past two years, helping out the nuns financially. She's also part of a secret underground railroad for abused women who are on the run. She feels like she's been hiding out in an "ivory tower," though, and needs to start living again after the terrible things that happened to her in SACRED TRUST. What happens in THE FINAL KILL turns her life around completely, and everything's up for grabs now—friends, her lover Ben (Carmel's police chief), and deciding what she really wants to do with the rest of her life.

SACRED TRUST sold especially well, and I got a lot of email from readers who said it was their favorite of all my books. I think Abby's the secret to that. She's tough yet vulnerable, strong yet fragile. She's been through a lot of things that women can identify with. And through it all she's actually kind of fun. I'm glad I've had this book to revise after the year I've had, and I hope readers will get lost in it and love it as much as I do.

Oh, and one more thing...I'll be back to tell you about my new contract with MIRA Books.  I'm just waiting for the fine details to be ironed out. So stay tuned!

Best wishes for a wonderful fall season. . .and please, feel free to email me at meg@megobrien.com . Let me know what's going on with you!

***

Dear Reader: Although THE FINAL KILL is a sequel to SACRED TRUST, it's not necessary to read SACRED TRUST first. But if you'd like to know about Abby's life before THE FINAL KILL—what happened to her two years ago, her relationship with Ben and with the Prayer House—you can go to the "BOOKS" page on this website, where you'll find links to independent bookstores, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and others for ordering any of my books online. SACRED TRUST can also be ordered from your neighborhood bookstore.

UPDATE June 19, 2004

Dear Readers...

Okay, so I didn't keep this newsletter up to date every month, as I said I would LAST SEPTEMBER. What you gotta understand is that writers lie about these things. It's our version of "the dog ate my homework." We don't really mean to lie, and our intentions are the best, but life has a way of moving in, taking over, gulping us up and then spitting us out. Ew....

But like a child who hasn't been minding its manners, we lie. After all, we want you to like us. That's the reason most writers write. We want you to like us.

So I could tell you that I moved, then I got a dog—a NEEDY dog—and then it was Thanksgiving and Christmas and book signings and conferences and then spring cleaning, and all the while there was the next book to write. All of which is true, but in a way it's still a lie. I really could have squeezed updating my Newsletter into that mix somewhere.

Which brings me to a writer's next problem—procrastination. We'll find anything to do rather than write, whether it's a book or a Newsletter. The closet I haven't touched for months really must be cleaned out. The kitchen floor needs a good scrubbing. I have to get groceries. And while I'm out I should go pick up some new curtains, dog food, and check out the sales at Circuit City. Not that I need anything at Circuit City. I just love to look at electronics. And then there's Wal-Mart and Target. I've promised myself I won't even try to buy clothes at either store again, because I've finally, at this late stage in life, learned that their clothes never fit my rather oddly shaped body. I could have written a book in the time it's taken me to buy clothes there and take them back. Or buy anything, anywhere, and take it back. It seems that's my life sometimes...taking things back.

Another problem—and a big one—is email. I could have written a whole other book last year with all the words I've sent out to friends via email. Truly. This is not a joke. Email has been both a boon and a curse to me. When I was on deadline recently, I had to stay unconnected to it and force myself to write all day before I was "allowed" to check my email. I even set up my laptop in the bedroom to work on, because it's never been connected to the internet, and never will be. It's my clean, lean, writing machine. Now, that's self-discipline!

And then there's the REALLY BIG ONE—paying bills. I keep getting threats that I'm about to be disconnected...from my telephone, my garbage pickup, my cell phone service.... I get annoyed when those threats come. After all, I just paid those bills, didn't I? A quick glance at my checkbook reassures me that I did—four months ago.

And so we come full circle in the writers lament. Since I can't get cut off from my phone service because I wouldn't be able to email and update my Newsletter, I must be off now to pay my bills. It's really a shame I won't have time to work on the book today.

Wishing you all a happy summer,

Meg loves to hear from readers. You can send an email to: meg@megobrien.com. All email will be answered as promptly as possible, especially if she's looking for something to do rather than work on her book.

Return to Top of Page

Web Designs by Greg Koenig
Email: webmaster@gregkoenig.com