"The Rules of Love & Grammar"

Mary Simses grew up in Darien, Connecticut and began writing stories at the age of seven. In college, she majored in journalism because she didn’t believe she could ever make a living as a fiction writer. After working in magazine publishing for a few years, she went back to school to become a lawyer. While working as a corporate attorney, she enrolled in an evening fiction writing class at a university in Connecticut and began writing short stories “on the side.” Several of her stories were published in literary magazines. Simses finally took the advice of a friend and decided to try writing a novel. That manuscript ultimately became The Irresistible Blueberry Bakeshop & Café, a number one best-seller in Germany.

Simses applied the Page 69 Test to The Rules of Love & Grammar, her second novel, and reported the following:

On page 69 of The Rules of Love & Grammar, writer and wordsmith Grace Hammond, now 33, is at the Sugar Bowl, a luncheonette where she used to hang out as a teenager. Grace is back in her home town of Dorset, Connecticut, staying with her parents after encountering the trifecta of bad luck – she lost her job, her boyfriend dumped her, and part of the ceiling in her New York City apartment caved in because of a water leak. But coming home has always been a tumultuous experience for Grace, who has still not come to terms with the death of her older sister seventeen years earlier.

Grace, who has a penchant for taking out her Sharpie and correcting any grammatical mistakes she encounters, is sitting in one of the Sugar Bowl’s booths with her childhood friend, Cluny. Grace and Cluny discover that Grace’s high school boyfriend, Peter, is also there. Grace and Peter shared their first dance and kiss during their sophomore year of high school at an event called the Cinderella Ball. Peter, now a successful Hollywood director, is in town filming scenes from his new movie. As Grace and Peter speak to one another for the first time since high school, Grace realizes she’s still very attracted to Peter and makes it her goal to win him over again.

The Rules of Love & Grammar is a story about family relationships, love, and the need to accept the past – both the good and the bad. It’s also about the futility of striving for an error-free life.

Learn more about the book and author at Mary Simses's website and follow her on Facebook.

My Book, The Movie: The Irresistible Blueberry Bakeshop & Cafe.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Julia Vanishes"

Catherine Egan grew up in Vancouver, Canada – a beautiful city nobody in her right mind would ever leave, but leave she did, and you may draw the obvious conclusions about her mind. Since then, she has lived on a wee volcanic island in Japan (which erupted during her time there and sent her hurtling straight into the arms of her now-husband), Tokyo, Kyoto, Beijing, an oil rig in the middle of China’s Bohai Bay, New Jersey, and now Connecticut, where she writes books and defends the Eastern seaboard from invading dragon hordes alongside her intrepid warrior-children.

Egan applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Julia Vanishes, and reported the following:

From page 69:

When I get to the library with coffee for Frederick, wondering if it is more painful to sit there and pretend to read poorly or to clean the inside of the grandfather clock on the landing, he is wearing his coat and putting a piece of paper into the pocket.

“Oh,” I say, feigning disappointment. “Are we not reading today?”

He looks up as if I’ve startled him, but he always looks that way.

“I’m so sorry, Ella – I’ve got to run an errand for the professor,” he says. The way he says it, a little grudgingly, I smell an opportunity.

“Let me do it,” I say. “Heaven knows you have more than enough to do as it is.”

He grins. “That’s kind, Ella. But really, I must go. It’s a ways from here.”

“All the more reason you ought to let me go,” I press.

This scene, at the opening of chapter 5, shows Julia at work pretending to be an illiterate housemaid in Mrs. Och’s grand house, and trying to persuade a principled young scholar in the house to let her run an errand that will further her mission as a spy. It’s a fairly quiet moment building towards more dramatic revelations. Julia eventually figures out that she’s working for the wrong side, but by the time she knows her employer’s ultimate goal, it’s too late to back out. It’s not a high-drama point in the book but I hope a reader skimming this scene would want to follow the intrigue and see why Julia is so eager to run Frederick’s errands for him!

Visit Catherine Egan's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Infomocracy"

Malka Older is a writer, humanitarian worker, and PhD candidate at the Centre de Sociologie des Organisations studying governance and disasters. Named Senior Fellow for Technology and Risk at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs for 2015, she has more than eight years of experience in humanitarian aid and development, and has responded to complex emergencies and natural disasters in Uganda, Darfur, Indonesia, Japan, and Mali.

Older applied the Page 69 Test to Infomocracy, her first novel, and reported the following:

Page 69 is part of a section I often read from, because it is includes a chase scene and also offers a quick window into the world of the book. Page 69 takes place in Jakarta when one of the main characters, Ken, realizes he’s being followed. He’s already been alerted by his antennae, tiny filaments that twitch at the nape of his neck if their cameras pick up anything strange going on behind him. Now he’s able to confirm it by watching the video they project into a corner of his vision:

Just as he’s starting to think the antennae were overreacting, triggered by a random repeat passerby or innocent stares, he passes under a rare bank of solar-powered streetlights, and a few seconds later he sees something in the vid: the glimmer of the lights passing over the carapace of a vehicle, a large vehicle. That in itself is not strange; what is odd is that the behemoth is not nudging people, donkeys, motorcycles, three-wheelers, and Sunways out of the way to pass. Ken risks a glance over his shoulder, and the head- lights of the massive all-terrainer seem to wink at him. It is hanging back, maintaining a distance, inexplicable in this cutthroat traffic culture unless there is some other motive.

Ken is at a distinct disadvantage, because the government he works for, Policy1st, prefers low-impact vehicles like the solar-powered Sunway he’s riding. He tries to make the best of it.

When the slow pace of traffic gets him near enough to the corner, he swings the Sunway up on to the sidewalk, slides it around the corner onto a dark, almost-empty side street, and flips the auxiliary speed switch. The platform below him hums, then vibrates. He hears honking from the street behind him as the SUV tries to make it to the corner. Then his head jerks back in a gush of smoggy air as the Sunway takes off, bouncing along the imperfectly paved road.

The chase that follows illustrates the way different governments in this future world crowd as close together as neighborhoods, so that crossing a street can completely change the laws you are bound by and, therefore, the best approach to evading a pursuer. The section also captures the sense of semi-illicit political intrigue that drives much of the novel, as Ken and his colleagues and rivals try to sway the result of a global election.

Follow Malka Older on Twitter and visit her website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"All the Time in the World"

Caroline Angell grew up in Endwell, N.Y., the daughter of an electrical engineer and a public school music teacher. She has a B. A. in musical theater from American University and currently lives and works in Manhattan. As a playwright and director, she has had her work performed at regional theaters in New York City and in the Washington, D.C., area.

Angell applied the Page 69 Test to All the Time in the World, her first novel, and reported the following:

I wrote this novel from the first-person perspective of Charlotte, the twenty-nine-year-old babysitter of Matt and George, the children of Gretchen and Scotty McLean. Part of the story is told in flashback, and on page sixty-nine we are in the middle of a scene that occurred two years prior to the events of the present. Charlotte is recalling her first encounter with Uncle Patrick, Scotty’s brother. Patrick and Charlotte have an offhand, slightly charged chat while she is helping with the clean-up from Matt’s birthday party, and Patrick sits on the couch, not helping. By the end of the conversation, he isn’t sure he has the measure of Charlotte; for some reason, she isn’t responding to him in a way that he recognizes. He decides to test his boundaries to see if he can get a reaction. In the last line on page sixty-nine, Patrick asks Charlotte, “Did Gretchen ever tell you that we used to go out?” And it has the desired effect of catching her off guard.

Most of the novel, of course, centers around the family’s experience of an intense tragedy. As I wrote it, I was largely focused on the emotional complexity of a world that has been altered. Page sixty-nine marks the beginning of Charlotte and Patrick’s relationship. As the plot moves forward, they continue to engage in these sparky exchanges, feeling drawn to each other because they’re in the trenches together. The line between what’s circumstantial and what’s romantic becomes blurred. Charlotte says, “It’s surreal, the way life moves on, even if you feel like you’re not moving with it.” (That one’s not on page sixty-nine though. You’ll have to hunt for it.) What I wanted for her relationship with Patrick was to reflect this particular vitality; how life moves around grief. Joy and humor can exist side by side with despair. I wanted to examine the way we take care of each other, the way we find solace in routines and what we know, how we try to make ourselves safe and, ultimately, the way we have to make ourselves vulnerable in order to keep the things that are important and meaningful in our lives.

Visit Caroline Angell's website and Twitter perch.

My Book, The Movie: All the Time in the World.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Waking Fire"

Anthony Ryan is the author of the Raven’s Shadow novels, including Blood Song, Tower Lord and Queen of Fire.

He applied the Page 69 Test to The Waking Fire, the first novel in the Draconis Memoria series, and reported the following:

From page 69:

He was woken by the sound of a key working the lock on the heavy iron door. He didn’t rise from the bunk, turning onto his side and blinking his bleary eyes until they found focus on the brickwork. The voice that greeted him was familiar and expected, also deep with impatient resentment. “On your feet.”

Clay waited a good while before rolling onto his back, gazing up at the flaking plaster on the ceiling. His sleep had been fitful, richly populated by Derk’s and Joya’s faces, laughing sometimes, mocking at others. But mostly just burned and dead. And Keyvine. Keyvine had been there too.

“I said, get up!” the voice said with growling deliberation. “Lest you’re keen to spend the next year in here before the Protectorate decides whether to kill you or cut you open.”

Clay groaned and sat up. It was daylight now, somewhere past mid morn judging by the angle of the shadows. A tall man stood on the other side of the bars. He wore the green-leather duster and wide-brimmed hat typical of the Contractor fraternity, his hair hanging in thick braids down to his shoulders. It had been nearly two years since their last meeting but Clay still felt the same jarring disorientation when looking at his face. There were a few more lines on the forehead and the stubble on his chin was mostly grey, but the resemblance remained. They could have been twins.

“You gonna stare at me all day, boy?” the man demanded. “Off your backside, we got work.”

“Since when d’you have work for me?” Clay asked.

The man angled his head, eyes narrowing with the same angry judgement he had exhibited all those years ago when Clay shambled into his home with a recently emptied pistol in hand. “Since it turned out you were actually useful,” the man said, stepping back to jerk his head at a second man standing near the open door. Clay’s pulse quickened as he recognised him as the ununiformed Protectorate type who had shot Speeler.

“Killing the fat man was unnecessary,” Clay said.

Page 69 of The Waking Fire is the opening of a key scene in the story where one of our main protagonists, Claydon Torcreek, having woken up in gaol, meets his estranged Uncle Braddon for the first time in years. Their relationship is one of the more important aspects of the book, both in terms of character development and propelling the narrative. I’m always keen to ensure my characters change throughout the story and was very pleased with the way Clay and his Uncle came to terms with each other as the book progressed.

Visit Anthony Ryan's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Bourbon Thief"

Tiffany Reisz is the author of the internationally bestselling and award-winning Original Sinners series for Mira Books (Harlequin/Mills & Boon).

She applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Bourbon Thief, and reported the following:

From Page 69:

“I wish Momma would come back too,” Tamara said. But from the looks of the dark and the wet and the new rain coming down, it didn’t appear her mother was coming back anytime soon. She found her grandfather looking at her, studying her. He’d been doing that more lately, watching her. Sometimes it didn’t feel like his gaze was on her so much as his hands. She liked it when Levi looked at her. But not even he looked at her like this.

“Angel, I know it’s not easy being a Maddox. Sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to do. Your grandmother wanted to go to college instead of getting married. But her family had money trouble so she got married. You do what you have to do for your family. Like Jacob Maddox.”

“What about him?”

“My great-grandfather Jacob Maddox got married for money too. Married a lady named Henrietta Arden. That’s why this house is called Arden, because we wouldn’t have it but for her.”

In The Bourbon Thief, the weight of history bears down upon my characters, nearly crushing them. But while they are pressed, they are not crushed. History is a heavy burden, especially in the south. My leading lady Tamara Maddox is nearly a casualty of history and her grandfather’s obsession with bloodlines. The book is a tale of lust and love, revenge and redemption set in Kentucky and South Carolina in 1980. This page gives the tiniest hint of what is expected of Tamara and what she will be forced to do to save both herself and the soul of her family.

Visit Tiffany Reisz's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Clear to Lift"

Anne A. Wilson is the author of Hover and Clear to Lift. She was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, and graduated from the United States Naval Academy with a degree in ocean engineering. She served nine years active duty as a navy helicopter pilot, including three years flying search and rescue, where she specialized in high altitude, technical mountain rescue. Following her military service, she worked for four years in the semiconductor industry. Currently, she and her husband own a triathlon coaching company, Camelback Coaching. Wilson lives in Fountain Hills, Arizona, with her husband and two sons.

Wilson applied the Page 69 Test to Clear to Lift and reported the following:

From page 69:

Only once, in an unintended slip, did I learn something about my real father. I was eleven, and Mom was adding another row of larkspur—a new hybrid that would bloom lavender with a midnight-blue center. I sat next to her in the dirt, watching closely, idly floating through another stress-free summer vacation. She mumbled it, almost like she was talking to herself. “Your father would love this new color. It’s his favorite flower....”

Later, I asked Nick about it. “I didn’t know you liked larkspur.”

“What’s a larkspur?” he responded.

And so, I observed. When Mom seemed melancholy, she would invariably wander out to the backyard, sit on the rod-iron bench that overlooked her garden, pull up her knees, and wrap her arms around them. I would watch her breathe deeply and close her eyes. In my child mind, I thought she just enjoyed sitting among the flowers. But my adult mind realizes she was sitting with my father.

If you were skimming Clear to Lift and hit this page, you wouldn’t be aware of the action, the adventure, the blizzards and floods, and daring helicopter rescues you’d experience in this novel.

Instead, you’d find something quite the opposite. Something quiet and personal. A woman struggling to learn more about the father she never knew. The main protagonist, Alison, is trying to piece together clues about her real father and this is something she pursues throughout the book. Of course, at the same time, she’s doing some pretty heroic helicopter piloting!

Would someone read on? Gosh, I sure hope so. This page is just a rest stop in an otherwise fast-paced, action-packed book.

Visit Anne A. Wilson's website.

The Page 69 Test: Hover.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Tag, You’re Dead"

J.C. Lane is the author of the new thriller Tag, You’re Dead. She also writes mysteries as Judy Clemens, including the Stella Crown and Grim Reaper mysteries. She is a past president of Sisters in Crime, and loves hanging out on-line or in person with other people in the book industry, because they are awesome. She lives in Ohio, where she attends lots of soccer games, bakes as much as she can, and runs when she feels like it.

Lane applied the Page 69 Test to Tag, You’re Dead and reported the following:

Page 69 of Tag, You’re Dead details a conversation between Charles Akida, one of the “Its” in the Game of Tag, and the Referee, who is overseeing the whole thing. Charles is not happy with the way the Game is progressing, and informs the Ref that the problems need to be fixed or he will be taking back his player fee -- a huge sum of money – and ending the Game.

It is so interesting to me how this really does encapsulate what the book is about. The Its want something from the Ref they cannot receive any other way, and the Ref, while the creator of the Game and in charge of its mechanics, is beholden to make sure the Its are satisfied. Tag, You’re Dead is filled with angst, wishes being fulfilled (or not), opposing forces, and the question of who, exactly, decides a person’s fate. Do we create our own story, or do we allow others to dictate what happens to us? Do we allow anger and fear to channel our decisions, or do we use our unique skills and personality to fight against the obstacles put in front of us? Who do we become when faced with adversity? Six people in the book must decide the answers to these questions, which means there are six separate ways the questions are answered.

Visit J.C. Lane's website.

My Book, The Movie: Tag, You're Dead.

Writers Read: J.C. Lane.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Conrad & Eleanor"

Jane Rogers has published eight novels, written original television and radio drama, and adapted work for radio and TV. Her last book, The Testament of Jessie Lamb, was the 2012 winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction; it was also longlisted for the Booker Prize. She has won the Somerset Maugham Award, the Writers’ Guild Best Fiction Book, has been a finalist for the Guardian Fiction Prize, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is Professor of Writing at Sheffield Hallam University, and she lives in Banbury, England.

Rogers applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Conrad & Eleanor, and reported the following:

Page 69 follows a conversation between Conrad and his mother on the evening of his father’s suicide. Conrad is not close to his parents but his mother phoned him when she found her husband’s body. Now an ambulance has taken him away, and Conrad and his mother sit over the remains of their supper and Conrad attempts to uncover the motive for his father’s taking his own life. His mother is dry-eyed and sharp-tongued, and highly critical of Conrad and his sister:

‘There’s a lot you don’t know. He would have walked barefoot to China for you two.’

Con pours himself another whisky. His father has killed himself and it is his fault. ‘Did he talk to anyone about – his money troubles?’

‘Who would he talk to?’

Nobody. He was a friendless man – no social skills. ‘D’you think he was depressed?’

‘Of course he was depressed. What’d he got to look forward to? His own grandchildren don’t know him, the farm’s losing money, how long till we get turfed out and dumped in a home?’

‘His grandchildren do know him. Did know him.’

Con’s mother humphs. ‘They saw him twice a year. More interested in the lambs than him, more interested in shrieking and running amok.’

It is true that something gets into the kids when they visit the farm. Maybe it’s the space and the dilapidated state of the place, but they do tear about, their calling voices echoing across the yard. And of course they avoid his father; what child wouldn’t avoid a man who pinches your cheek too hard and bellows, ‘You need to get more pudding down you!’?

This is a book about marriage and parenthood, so of course this is representative; yet it is the only scene where Con’s mother appears, since the bulk of the book concerns the marriage of Conrad and Eleanor. The scene helps us to understand why Conrad has chosen to be such a hands-on father, himself – in reaction against his own father.

Visit Jane Rogers's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Judenstaat"

Simone Zelitch's novels include Louisa, which won the Goldberg Prize for Emerging Jewish Fiction. Her work has been featured on NPR and recent honors include a National Endowment for the Arts grant.

Zelitch applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Judenstaat, and reported the following:

My page 69 opens in the middle of a paragraph:

Nobody else’s father talked like that. She hadn’t been afraid, though. If Rudolph had let go of her hand, she would have followed those angry-looking men in their long black coats and high black hats across Stein Square to see where they were going.

A reader would wonder: What men? Why would she follow them?

The first full paragraph:

Now the bus pulled away from the center of Dresden. It filled with black-hats like a net fills with fish: jewelers carrying heavy cases, caftan-wearing men with low-crowned hat and broad, aggressive shoulders. There must have been one of their girls’ schools not far from Parliament because the middle doors swung open and the girls poured on—at least a dozen of them—bundled up in sweaters with their legs encased in thick brown stockings, all carrying identical cheap knapsacks, and angling seats next to their friends. They whispered girl-secrets in Yiddish. So they had taken over that neighborhood too.

The people on the bus are “black-hats,” Judenstaat’s ultra-Orthodox population. As they’re described, a reader may wonder why the tone is so aggressively hostile. Isn’t this supposed to be a book about a Jewish state?

Judenstaat is carved out of German Saxony in 1948 as an an answer to the Holocaust. The country is fiercely secular, but the rapidly growing black-hat minority has its own schools, its own laws, and essentially its own economy. Black-hats speak Yiddish rather than Judenstaat’s national language, German, and they consider the country an abomination. They’re supported by the state. If this seems improbable, ask an Israeli for an explanation.

Yet Judit—the archivist heroine—is drawn to the world of the black-hats. That’s why she’s on that bus. She’s haunted by the ghost of her dead husband, and as she’s investigating the mystery behind his murder, she’s compiling a documentary about her country’s founding. It’s in the black-hat neighborhoods that she finds reels of film or photographs that others have discarded, or that the state itself has confiscated from her archive long ago. Black-hats know things.

It could be that Judit’s fascination with the Orthodox community comes from a spiritual need: she’s still in mourning for her husband, and the social-democratic country of her childhood has become unrecognizable. In fact, Chabad, a Lubavich outreach organization—a real one— hopes to draw secular Jews into the religious life. Chabad exists in my imaginary country and on page 69.

They made it their mission to get all Jews to perform mitzvot and speed the coming of the Messiah. Judit herself had been accosted by a woman in a wig who tried to get her into a Mitzvah Tank. The woman spoke good German and promised her an audience with Rabbi Scheerson, who would receive her like his own child and give her a dollar—a real American dollar from the United States. Frankly, Judit was allergic to Chabad. The people who fell in with them always looked like they’d been hit on the head too many times and started to like it.

In many ways, the descriptions and references on page 69 are Jewish private jokes, potentially obscure to the uninitiated. Yet Judit’s contradictory responses to religious Jews are a key to her character, and raise issues at the heart of the book. She wants to cross a border between the rational and irrational world. That doesn’t mean she will be welcome there.

The page ends with this assessment:

“The men and women on the bus were not Chabad. They looked through her as confidently as Sammy Gluck had looked through the ghost of Hans Klemmer. They believed in ghosts, the spirit world: demons, angels, the raising of the dead. They did not believe in Judit.”

Visit Simone Zelitch's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Missing, Presumed"

Susie Steiner is a former Guardian journalist. She was a commissioning editor for that paper for eleven years and prior to that worked for The Times, The Daily Telegraph, and the Evening Standard. She lives in London with her husband and two children.

Steiner applied the Page 69 Test to Missing, Presumed, her second novel, and reported the following:

On page 69, Helena has come out of her police interview and is struggling to see as bright low winter sun hits her eyes and flashes off the car roofs like knives. In part, this description comes from my own experience of having terrible eyesight and of my vision being a confusion, rather than clear. But not 'seeing clearly' is a motif in the novel, to express characters acting blindly or evading the truth.

Visit Susie Steiner's website.

Writers Read: Susie Steiner.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Cure for the Common Universe"

Christian Heidicker is an awfully charming young author from Utah.

He applied the Page 69 Test to Cure for the Common Universe, his debut novel, and reported the following:

From page 69:

I followed the echo to a slimy mop trail, which led to the backside of a janitor hunched in the far corner. His mop was propped against an open grate, and he was peering inside a wall vent, which was large enough for him to t inside. Vapor from an e-cigarette coiled around his ponytail and ass crack as he mumbled. “They get points for doing a crap job cleaning up this place. Do I get a raise for cleaning up after them? No, I do not. Come on, you piece of...”

He pulled out what looked like a computer chip, slid it into a zip case, and then replaced it with another. He glanced up, saw me, quickly replaced the grate, and pushed his mop around the corner.

I walked up to the corner and squinted through the vent. Tiny green lights winked in the darkness.

What the hell? This was some serious Myst shit....

Whatever. I wasn’t there to solve mysteries. I was there to win.

Ugh. I was starting to sound like I was on a reality game show.

***
Back in the Nest, Fezzik placed a finger to his lips and pointed to a lump in one of the bunks. Zxzord was snoring.

“So is he on heroin, or not?” Meeki asked.

I actually don’t think this page is representative of my book at all! It involves a mystery that doesn’t actually end up going anywhere ... part of the real life is never as much like video games as one would like.

Those last few lines though... Them’s the goods.

Visit Christian McKay Heidicker's website.

--Marshal Zeringue