Carver Greene publishes debut novel!

Many, many congrats to Carver Greene on the release of her first novel, An Unlawful Order, a military conspiracy thriller with a female protagonist, Captain Chase Anderson.

Buy early here.

How far have we come?

By now, you've probably read that I've started a new blog to highlight the legacy of women Marines who, like me, were the first to become mothers. Remember, women used to be forced out of military service until the regulation change about 1977.

So, I've been profiling the stories of these "First Marine Moms" in Q & A format. When I received the most recent story from Mary-Julia Hill (pictured here with her son, Christopher, in the 1980s) about how she'd been treated, even ordered to complete a Physical Fitness Test at 8 months pregnant, another just 2 weeks after her delivery, I became outraged.

You can read Mary-Julia's full story here.

My first foray as an editor...

Today, my first foray as a nonfiction editor went live. I hope you'll check out the amazing, provocative nonfiction in issue 11 of Prime Number Magazine.

And be sure to check out the craft essay by the incomparable Michael Steinberg.

Dispatches from "The Camp": Meet our latest visitor

The other evening, the cows in the pasture behind our home were bellowing more than usual. I was worried about coyotes. Calves not much taller than Cash are plentiful back there this summer. I watch them romping across the fields, too far from their mothers, too far from safety.

That's when I spotted what looked like a wolf, instead. I didn't take this photo; I found it online when I searched for images of "black coyote." But our visitor looks exactly like this. Apparently, he's a wolf or a coyote/wolf hybrid.

He loped across the back pasture toward the cows that had gathered around the edge of the farmer's 2-acre pond. I heard gunfire from the direction of the barn. No sign of him afterward.

Until yesterday morning. You remember Wyatt, the neighbor's beloved Basset Hound that visits us every day? He spent the night here Friday, and when I let him out the next morning, he caught a whiff of something that compelled him to nearly hurl his weighty "fat boy" self down our porch steps and up the hill toward our backyard.

There he was, the wolf. In our backyard. Thank goodness, Cash and Molly were in the fenced area, though Cash, if he only believed, could easily clear the 4-foot fence.

The wolf easily outran Wyatt, who was baying with ancestral pride and giving chase. The white tip of his tail signaled his progress through the woods and across the pasture.

The wolf loped past our place, his head turned toward Cash, Molly, and me the entire way. Anticipating. Evaluating.

Intimidating.

Release date set for EYES RIGHT

The editor at Nebraska Press emailed today. We now have a release date for Eyes Right: Confessions from a Woman Marine.

April 1, and that's no April Fool's joke.

She explained that the books will be in the warehouse by March, and out for early reviews.

This suddenly feels more real than ever.

Two blogs?

I've started a new blog, First Marine Moms.

This blog will be devoted to the legacy left by the Marines who, like me, were the first to become moms. You see, just before I joined the Marines in 1977, if you became pregnant, you said goodbye to your military career. Well, you can read all about it at the new blog.

For those of you devoted readers still interested in following my musings about writing and about summer life here at the camp, thanks so much. I hope you'll continue to follow here.

What's YOUR definition of a book?

A few months ago, I was in the middle of a conversation with a small group of my husband's baseball friends when someone dropped the news that I had written a book.

"Really?" said one of the men, an attorney for the players. He seemed clearly unaffected, and I brushed it off. But a few minutes later, a wife asked how she could find my book. "Oh, it won't be released for another year," I said.

The attorney's face lifted in surprise. "You mean, you've written a real book?"

That's when it hit me. In today's world when it seems nearly anyone and everyone has self-published one to three or more books, When is a book really a book?

Shortly after this incident, I joined several writers' groups on the social networking site, Linkedin, and was immediately overwhelmed by the hundreds and hundreds of writers promoting their self-published books. I've written a book about the incest in my family, writes one woman. I've written a memoir about growing up in the Rockies, still another. Hundreds, probably thousands, of books.

For someone who's been through a rigorous MFA program, which included the arduous task of completing revision after revision of a manuscript, and who continued this process long after completion of the MFA, and who subjected herself to dozens and dozens of rejections from literary journal editors to agents to noteworthy publishers before finally signing with a publisher, I admit I'm coming down with a mild case of literary snobbery. I suppose, like the rest of the publishing world, I just need to get over myself.

Still, the rules of the publishing world may be changing, but they aren't changing yet for me. In my world of academia, self-publishing is (pardon the cliche) the kiss of death. Why? "Because publishing is supposed to be hard," said one grad school friend, who went on to explain that the traditional method of publishing is a weeding out process. "Imagine we're all in a bottle," she said, "and the goal is to swim up through the neck of the bottle and out to the world....only you've got to make it upstream against the tide of really, really good writing." In other words, the writing has to be deemed worthy by those highly placed in the publishing world, and by a process other than sheer vanity, hence vanity presses.

I don't know. Are those writers who refuse to play the bottle game just smarter than the rest of us? Time was when it meant something to say you'd written a book. People would gasp and praise, say things like, "I've always wanted to write a book," or even glibly add, "You know, I could write a book, too, if I just had the time." And we traditionally published writers would quietly think to ourselves, You have no idea how hard it is to write a book, let alone get one published....

But tell someone today you've written a book and you're more likely to hear, "Yeah? Well, I've written five," which is what I heard at a writer-friend's recent book signing. Or face, as I did with the attorney, a totally unaffected demeanor.

So again I ask, When is a book really a book?