Today is my 35th wedding anniversary. I hope you will indulge me as I use this forum to honor my husband.

Larry and I met in 1977 at Dowling College in Oakdale, NY. I had just turned 17, he was 19, and fate and my high school guidance counselor brought us together.

I planned on graduating high school early but my parents refused to give me permission. I was already a year ahead in school, and my parents didn’t want me leaving home that young. My senior year I had two classes, Driver’s Ed and gym. And Driver’s Ed was only one semester. So they acquiesced and let me graduate mid-year.  Because it was all so last minute, and my parents didn’t want me going too far, my guidance counselor, Pat Confrey, helped get me into Dowling College, a small, private college on Long Island. Mr. Confrey refereed lacrosse games there and had a good relationship with the school.

Larry and I hooked up a month later and have been together ever since. He played lacrosse (the team was undefeated that year) so I got to thank my old guidance counselor at one of the games.

I truly believe that Larry and I were destined to be together. There are all these weird coincidences that have run through our lives.

We both had planned on transferring to a school in Florida. I had to wait a year, per parental decree, so

approx. 1979

he waited for me. He went to the Florida Institute of Technology in Jensen Beach, and I headed for the University of Miami. We planned our schedules so that we never had classes on Friday. I didn’t have a car so he would drive down every Thursday night to pick me up and bring me back to Jensen Beach, where he shared a house with our closest friends from Dowling. Then on Sunday night he would drive me back to Miami. We are talking about a little more than 4 hours driving every Friday and again on Sunday. Every week.

Larry attended junior high school with my step-sister on my father’s side. He was a year ahead of Alan, my step-brother on my mother’s side, in high school, and had been to his house and had met my stepfather way before I ever did. They had mutual friends and still do to this day.

When I was in junior high, I used to hang out at Salisbury Park on Long Island. Larry worked there summers on the grounds crew. Did I ever see him? Who knows.

I grew up in Merrick, NY and my best friend’s parents owned a fabric store in Plainview.   Occasionally I went with her to the store. Larry grew up in Plainview and his mother was quite the seamstress, so she was often in that store and so was he. I can’t help but wonder if we were ever there at the same time.

There are more coincidences, but you get the idea.

Our wedding was beautiful but almost didn’t happen. Not because of us or our relationship, but because of my crazy father. you’ll have to wait for the book to get all the juicy details!

Larry has always supported and encouraged me in whatever I wanted to do. When I started my own website back in the Geocities days, he bought me my own domain. I was in my 40’s when I decided to go back and finish college and he was thrilled for me. When I decided to go to library school at age 50, he was there for me, picking up the slack at home, driving me across the state when I had an occasional class in Tampa. When I was invited to speak at various conferences around the country, he was driving me to the airport and even came along on some trips.

Larry has stood by me and given me strength when I needed it most. When our son was born 6 weeks premature and I was freaking out about bringing home a 4 lb. baby on a heart monitor, he calmed me down and made me feel like we would be just fine. And we were. And when I couldn’t get pregnant the second time, and would burst into tears whenever I spotted a baby, he comforted me. And when we needed to go through all those infertility tests, and our crappy insurance didn’t cover any of it, somehow we managed. Eventually we had a beautiful daughter and our family was complete.

Larry has always made me feel special, and beautiful, and loved. He’s surprisingly romantic, caring, thoughtful and understanding. He’s an awe-inspiring father, and an outstanding son. I couldn’t ask for a better husband. I can only wish for thirty-five more years with this man.

Happy National Poetry Month!

Billy Collins is one of my favorite poets. I adore his sense of humor and irony. I’d like to share a few favorites; this first is The Revenant. This is a video of Collins reading it at the Miami Book Fair a few years ago. Collins channels the spirit of a deceased dog and subverts the accepted relationship of man and his best friend. The poet somewhat playfully pokes fun at modern pet owners, and by extension modern people in general, by using the angry spirit of a dog to point out the various indulgent absurdities that they purchase.

This is another favorite, for obvious reasons.

Click to purchase

Books by Billy Collins

From the heart of this dark, evacuated campus
I can hear the library humming in the night,
a choir of authors murmuring inside their books
along the unlit, alphabetical shelves,
Giovanni Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son,
each one stitched into his own private coat,
together forming a low, gigantic chord of language.
I picture a figure in the act of reading,
shoes on a desk, head tilted into the wind of a book,
a man in two worlds, holding the rope of his tie
as the suicide of lovers saturates a page,
or lighting a cigarette in the middle of a theorem.
He moves from paragraph to paragraph
as if touring a house of endless, paneled rooms.
I hear the voice of my mother reading to me
from a chair facing the bed, books about horses and dogs,
and inside her voice lie other distant sounds,
the horrors of a stable ablaze in the night,
a bark that is moving toward the brink of speech.
I watch myself building bookshelves in college,
walls within walls, as rain soaks New England,
or standing in a bookstore in a trench coat.
I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves,
straining in circles of light to find more light
until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs
that we follow across a page of fresh snow; when evening is shadowing the forest
and small birds flutter down to consume the crumbs,
we have to listen hard to hear the voices
of the boy and his sister receding into the woods.

From the collection Sailing Alone Around the Room by Billy Collins

Finally, if you want to give your mother something really special for Mother’s Day, perhaps you can read her this poem:

The Lanyard by Billy Collins

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The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly-
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-clothes on my forehead,
and then led me out into the air light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift – not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-toned lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

I will be revisiting my history every now and then, courtesy of the Internet Archive, AKA the Wayback Machine. This is a post from February 12, 2001. Enjoy!

What’s New: Survived my first holiday season as a manager.  It was exhilarating, frustrating (at times), hectic, fun and over in a mad minute…or so it seemed.  No post holiday blues for this bitch though.  Not with fabulous new books out like La Cucina by Lily Prior!  I am enamored of this book and determined to make sure everyone I come in contact with hears about it.

I was very excited to receive an email from Time Warner books.  They are providing me with some additional content, including this fascinating article by Michael Connelly on my new Author Author page.  We are talking about possibly running some sort of contest, giving readers of this site the opportunity to win free books!

Looking into the Abyss
by Michael Connelly

Michael Connelly, 2001, Circle Books, Sarasota FL

A Darkness More Than Night is a title I have wanted to use for many years but waited until I had the right story. The title comes from Raymond Chandler, writer of several classic detective novels set in Los Angeles. Once while writing about what made his early hardboiled stories so popular he stated that among other things it was because in these stories the “streets were alive with a darkness that was more than night.” I read that a long time ago and it always stuck with me. It occurred to me while writing my tenth book that this was the story for which that title was made.

In this book my plan was to make the story an exploration of Harry Bosch’s character and the cost of his going into the darkness. By darkness, I mean the underworld of crime and moral corruption where he toils as a cop. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that when you look into the darkness of the abyss that the abyss looks into you. Probably no other line or thought more inspires or informs my work. By virtue of his job as a police detective Harry Bosch has spent most of his life looking into the abyss, into the darkness of the human soul. What has this cost him? What did going into the darkness do to him? These questions became the basis of this book. To me this book is a study of the price that is paid by those in our society who must go into the darkness to right wrongs and solve the crimes of the morally corrupt.

At one point a character in the book takes a basic law of physics-for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction-and adopts it to human or spiritual physics, concluding that you can’t go into the darkness without changing it and yourself. If that conclusion is correct, then Harry Bosch’s years of carrying a badge have had an unseen cost attached. Exactly what that is forms the exploration of A Darkness More Than Night.

Because all of the prior books about Harry Bosch have been constructed so that the world is seen through his eyes, my goal with this book was to change that a bit. There are many sections of the book where this is still the case. But the majority of the book is seen through another character’s eyes-Terry McCaleb, who I brought back from the novel Blood Work. In Darkness we get a view of Bosch and his world through McCaleb’s eyes. This allowed me to reveal things about him that would have been awkward or even impossible in the prior Bosch books. I think it allows the reader a different view of Harry. My hope is that the reader will be surprised by what they see from this new angle.

The other key part of the book, for me, at least, was the use of the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. Harry’s real name is Hieronymus Bosch. He is named for the 15th Century painter whose work is replete with depictions of the wages of sin. When I first created Harry Bosch and gave him the painter’s name, I did it with the idea that the name was metaphor. Bosch the painter created strange landscapes where good and bad actions are played out in chaotic scenes. Five centuries later Bosch the detective moves across a chaotic city where good and bad actions are played out before his-and therefore, the readers’-eyes. I wanted with this book to explore this correlation and therefore I made the paintings a pivotal part of the story.

A strange coincidence occurred to me while I was researching this part of the book. I was very familiar with the works of the painter Hieronymus Bosch. I had a collection of books featuring his works and writings about him. I had written several of my Harry Bosch novels in an office where prints of the paintings hung as well. But I was unfamiliar with the workings of an art museum, which would be important to describe in the novel. A friend set me up with a curator at the newly built Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Sitting atop a mountain like a foreboding post-modern castle, the museum itself was a perfect location to use in a crime novel. I told the curator my plan for the book was to have my character McCaleb come to the museum seeking an expert on the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. He would then be shown a Bosch painting and the fictional art expert would comment that the night sky in the painting showed “a darkness more than night,” thereby giving the title of the book life and metaphor all at once.

The catch was I knew that the Getty did not have a Bosch painting in its collection and that I would be creating fiction about a real Los Angeles place. Not to worry, the curator told me. He escorted me to the Getty’s restoration laboratory where coincidentally a Bosch expert was restoring a Bosch painting sent to the Getty from a museum in Brazil. I watched the restoration process for a long time and in the night sky of the painting I saw a darkness that was certainly more than night. It was a strange coincidence, a case of art imitating life imitating art. Or vice versa.

I think that what is also explored in the book is the difference in styles between Bosch and McCaleb. I wanted to show how clearly different these two men are. Both are very good investigators and both are bonded by an earlier case that is referenced in the book. But they operate on different levels of motivation. They are not fueled by the same pump.

Bosch has deep emotional conflicts from which he draws his fire. In a way, he is making up for wrongs done to him when he rights wrongs as a homicide detective. In a way, he is an avenging angel, as McCaleb himself notes in the book.

But McCaleb is different. He is less instinctual and more intellectual about putting the puzzles of crimes together. He is not an avenger. I think he is some one who is motivated by common decency and a desire to see that no bad deed go unpunished. He carries inside a transplanted heart, and with it the knowledge that someone had to die in order for him to live. It has given him a view of the world, and his place in it, unique from Bosch.

I think putting these two different men and different views of the world and different styles together makes for interesting conflict and story. This was not to be a “Butch and Sundance” story. I felt certain as I wrote this book that these two men could not share the same pages easily, that when Terry McCaleb looked into the darkness of Harry Bosch’s eyes that he would see something that haunted him. Perhaps, the cost of looking so long into the abyss.

–Michael Connelly, Los Angeles, January 2, 2001.  Printed with permission of www.twbookmark.com

When I was a kid, the year always felt like forever. I remember my mother telling me that the older you get, the faster the years fly by. I didn’t understand it then, but I sure do now.

Happy New Year! I wish you a year filled with good health, with joy, with love, and lots of good books.