Emerging authors: Four Seattle-area writers pen new novels

Sitting in the basement cafe of The Elliott Bay Book Co., four Seattle-area writers with new novels are getting acquainted and the conversation quickly turns to author common ground, what they have experienced on book tours across the country.

These publisher-paid trips to meet readers and media in distant cities had once seemed so enticing, a great perk. But that was before book-tour reality was confronted, with the dictatorial schedules, the uncertain turnouts of people, the requirement for a writer to emerge from solitude and be an upbeat extrovert at all hours.


	Rising local talents Bharti Kirchner, left, G.M. Ford, center, Kristin Hannah, front, and Trisha Thomas at The Elliott Bay Book Co. Mike Urban / Seattle Post-Intelligencer Click for larger photo

"Publishers don't plan book tours for humans," says Kristin Hannah. "Much of what you're supposed to do is simply impossible."

"Publishers don't understand any geography outside New York City," adds G.M. Ford. "They don't get that traveling 12 miles in L.A. often takes two hours."

"About the best you can say about book tours," concludes Trisha R. Thomas, "is that room service is sometimes OK."

There are nods of assent all around the table, which also includes one from Bharti Kirchner. They have all been there, these four novelists, and will likely be out there again on the book-tour grind.

Because these four rising talents, who have traveled much different routes, have all arrived at the same destination, that crossroads called the Cusp of Fame. They are being discovered these days in a big way, courted by publishers with multibook deals and national book tours, supported by increasing numbers of fans, winning breakthrough recognition in the press and on best-seller lists.

Hannah of Bainbridge Island last year scored a $1 million contract for two novels. Thomas of Tacoma, who was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award for Fiction, just signed a six-figure contract for her third novel and will see her first novel ("Nappily Ever After") brought to the screen in an upcoming film starring Oscar-winner Halle Berry.

Kirchner of Seattle has had foreign rights to her latest novel sold for editions in Germany and the Netherlands, which will join another edition in her native India where she had a previous best seller. Ford's new novel has recently been selected by People magazine as its "Beach Book of the Week," not exactly the Pulitzer Prize but just the sort of recognition that the veteran writer was seeking a couple years back when he made a calculated shift in tone and character to increase the popularity of his novels.

Commercial fiction today

These four novelists and their new novels chart the broad ocean of commercial fiction today, with its many strong currents and safe harbors, all supporting their own vibrant life. There is plenty of room out there for novels of suspense, of romance, of life changes of one kind or another; novels with reader appeal for women, for men, for African Americans, for those fascinated with the mystique of India.

Ford's "Black River" (William Morrow, 308 pages, $23.95) is another two-fisted shot from the hot-boiled school of crime fiction, but with a crucial difference. At its center is no cop, no private eye. This is Ford's second novel featuring Frank Corso, a disgraced reporter for The New York Times now resettled in Seattle. Corso, an edgy denizen of society's margins despite a huge financial settlement from his former employer, has reinvented himself as a best-selling book writer and that wins him entrance into the closed trial of a Russian Mafia boss charged with 63 counts of murder in the collapse of a poorly constructed hospital in California.

Ford demonstrates an adroit hand with roughhouse action and crackling dialogue and gonzo humor, although his narrative plotting and writing style are not as adept. But "Black River" zips along anyway with relentless drive, a Dodge Charger of a novel.

"I'm writing for somebody reading on a beach," says Ford, "who is looking for a novel where something happens."

Hannah's "Distant Shores" (Ballantine Books, 343 pages, $22.95) demonstrates her continued progression toward mainstream women's fiction from her roots in romance novels. "Distant Shores" is an engaging portrait of baby-boom marriage at midlife, when long-deferred dreams and long-established habits weigh heavy, as they do for Elizabeth and Jackson Shore. Then success suddenly calls the quarterback-turned-sportscaster from Oregon to New York City and the home-tending wife must face family grief without him.

Hannah crafts believable characters in real-life situations, with dialogue to match. There is some real sass and humor in her writing, too, which makes it a tad disappointing when she ends her 11th novel in the female genre land of happy endings and bromide life lessons, even if that is what her readers expect.

"I have a very deep-seated sense of hope and optimism and a strong connection to family, both in my work and in my life," Hannah says. "I also have a very commercial sensitivity and believe in a beginning, a middle and an ending to the story, a happy ending. There is a risk in letting readers down with something different, but if I felt that the material demanded an unhappy or bittersweet ending, I wouldn't shy away from it."

Gritty themes

Thomas' "Roadrunner" (Crown, 279 pages, $22.95) is an accomplished second novel with surprisingly gritty themes and much spice. It follows the troubled life of baseball superstar Dell Fletcher after a career-ending injury, his mysterious disappearance and his wife's desperate search to find him, while she is also becoming more attracted to the Latino officer assigned to the case. Thomas' novel juggles such weighty matters as drugs, lost pride, celebrity, marital drift, violence, police misdeeds, and yet it never loses its enticing aroma of romance simmering on the stove.

Thomas is a fine chronicler of black life in the middle and upper classes, creating real characters not shallow stereotypes and she does her research, as is shown by her depiction of the pro sports world. Thomas still feels the pull of happy endings, but her strong suit is engaging storytelling, which she always enlivens with a strong dose of suspense.

"I like commercial fiction and what it's about," Thomas says. "It's just a drama."

Kirchner's "Darjeeling" (St. Martin's Press, 302 pages, $24.95) concocts a rich curry of a novel with a tale of two sisters in love with the same man at various times in their lives, now required to return to India from their homes on different coasts of North America for a family celebration amid the enchanting landscape of the tea country highlands.

Kirchner has a flair for family dynamics and drama and enlivens her intriguing novel with a graceful pace and many delicious twists and turns in the plot. Atmosphere drips from every page, although Kirchner does have a tendency to lay on a pretty thick coat of adjectives and adverbs, so that they sometimes seem as if they have been applied with a trowel.

"One is either born as storyteller or not," says Kirchner. "And I'm not being arrogant when I say I think I am a storyteller. Stories are in me."

Telling stories may run in the blood of these four novelists, but three of the four turned to the craft of writing after success in other fields. Only the 57-year-old Ford came to writing via what is considered an expected course, work as a community-college English instructor.

Computers to cookbooks

Kirchner, 62, was a systems engineer for IBM who first ventured into publishing when her love and talent for cooking led her to write four cookbooks. Thomas, 38, was a marketing coordinator for Frito-Lay and Sunkist. Hannah, 42, was a general-practice lawyer.

The freedom of writing was one of its draws, as was the chance to work at home, especially for Hannah and Thomas who have children to raise. But all four novelists soon found that they loved the act of writing itself, the creation of characters and stories, the application of words onto blank paper or computer screen.

As Ford says simply, "I like to make sentences."

The sentences provide the satisfaction for these novelists, but other aspects of the writing life prove more problematic. None had to weather the sort of withering rejections that so many writers must face, from the agents who are not interested in representing their work to the publishers who find their book manuscript, product of so many months of labor, not worth any investment of money. These four novelists had the talent or the timing or the luck running their way, but doubts and setbacks were no strangers to their days or nights.

Hannah, with her recent milliondollar contract, has had more success than her three local compatriots, but she still stresses, "I think I've been very, very fortunate, but nobody can be in the trenches of the publishing machine for 12 years without a lot of ups and downs. I think the people who make it in this business, do so by how they survive in the hard times as much as how they succeed in the good times. Nobody gets through this without some pretty dark days."

Those often come with the realization that a writer cannot be just a writer anymore, sending books into the world from the solitude of a garret or at least a spare bedroom. A writer these days must be a businessperson, a promoter, an entertainer, an actor. A writer must be willing to hit the road with the "product," become yet another traveling salesperson with a ready smile and something to sell. All these roles do not come naturally to those attracted to a solitary pursuit.

As Thomas relates, "I'd like to say to my publisher, 'I wrote the book, you guys go sell it,' but it doesn't work that way. You write it, you push it. ... So I'm exhausted on a constant basis. That's because I'm not an extrovert and it requires a lot of me to be social at all times, doings signings and appearances. And there's so much competition with writing -- you really have to be part of your fans' lives. You need to be there and stand out more than the next author."

There is particular pressure that way for Thomas because the African American market is fiercely competitive. Publishers have suddenly discovered black readers in recent years and some black writers have enjoyed breakout success, including such perennial residents of the best-seller lists as Terry McMillan, E. Lynn Harris, Eric Jerome Dickey.

These recognized names may have blazed a welcome trail for fellow black writers, but they have also set difficult markers that other writers are now expected to meet, whether it's the sales of Harris' first novel or McMillan's fourth.

"It is annoying to be always measured against some other person," Thomas says. "They know it's going on, you know it's going on. It's like the rivalry of Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera; they didn't make that up, but it keeps going on. When we black writers meet, we are all happy to see each other. But we all complain about this same thing."

Ford has a different complaint. The old romance of writing was much of what drew him to the trade and he has tried hard to hold onto those notions. But late-night discussions into the wee hours with fellow writers occur far less frequently than worries about balance sheets and contracts and sales, especially in this era of conglomerate publishing. The romance of writing has been ground down by the business of writing, to Ford's chagrin.

"You soon discover that publishers are in the money business, not the book business," he emphasizes. "If they make money on you, they will play with you. If they don't, they won't. Personal things have nothing to do with it. I was picturing the Algonquin Round Table, talking about writing over martinis in that New York hotel. Instead, it's all e-mails."

Sense of momentum

What keeps these four writers going, amid the bumps and book tours, is the sense that momentum is now on their side. Their work is improving, their notice is increasing, their readership is growing. They are indeed arriving. And one of the real dividends when that happens in commercial fiction is that the payoffs can be so large, in readers and in dollars, and so different from what happens in the rare-air world of literary fiction.

"Literary fiction," Ford says with obvious scorn, "is fiction that nobody reads. Commercial fiction means you actually sell books."

Kirchner has her own glimpse of that when a standing-room crowd of 30 people came to a Barnes & Noble in Bellevue to hear her read on a gorgeous summer evening when the Northwest outdoors glistened and beckoned. The writer was struck not only by the turnout, but also by what was said.

One of the readers asked me, "How long do we have to wait until your next book?'" Kirchner recalls. "I told her that her that it would come out next year at this time and I thought she would think that was certainly soon enough. Instead she said, 'You mean I'm going to have to wait that long?'"