Dirt By Amy Stewart

CBS Sunday Morning: Tune In

With any luck, it'll be Wicked Plants this weekend.  Here's the lineup for Sunday, barring breaking news.

Wicked Plants at BBG

Thanks to Flatbush Gardener for publishing these amazing photos of the event last Saturday.

Wicked Plant sighting in Madison Square Park

Wicked Lunch at BBG

View from the Highline

Beautiful grasses and rudbeckia along this newly-reopened stretch of elevated rail tracks on New York's west side.

Wicked Plants is a Pulpwood Queens Book Club Selection for December!

And I have the Official Seal to prove it.

If you don't know about the Pulpwood Queens, let me introduce you to Beauty and the Book, located about an hour from where my grandparents used to live in East Texas.  This is a part of the world that is very close to my heart.

And owner Kathy Patrick wrote this wonderful book called The Pulpwood Queen's Tiara-Wearing, Book-Sharing Guide to Life.  It's a hoot.

And now there are 239 Pulpwood Queen Book Club chapters all over the place.  Not just in Texas.  You probably need one in your town.  Find out more here.

I am going to try very hard to get to her Extravangza in January.  Working on it.

Call It a Side Project...

So last year I wrote a novel about my worst fear: the death of bookstores. The story came to me in a flash, in response to something that was happening around me at that very moment, but for a few months I fought against the idea of writing it. I'm a nonfiction writer, with four books on the shelf and fifth one in the works. Surely jumping into fiction would be a risky career move at this point.

But the fact is that when I'm not doing research for one of my own books, I read nothing but novels. I was that kid who always wanted to be a writer when she grew up, and it was not nonfiction that inspired me. It was fiction. So eventually I decided to quit fighting the impulse. I cleared my schedule and gave myself a little time to write a novel. I didn’t tell anyone—not my agent, not my editor. I didn’t write a book proposal or seek out a book contract. I didn’t worry about the marketing plan. I just wrote.

And it was glorious. Delicious and delirious and intoxicating. Here’s what I loved about it: when you write fiction, you get to make stuff up. For me, as a nonfiction writer wedded to facts and research, that felt risky and transgressive. I wrote for several hours every day, thinking all the while, "Can I really do this?" If I got bored with a character, I could drive him off a cliff. If I hated the house I'd constructed for one of my characters to live in, I could burn it down. Being a character in a novel-in-progress, I realized, is dangerous business: mine were subjected to sex changes, disastrous love affairs, and run-ins with the law, all because I wanted to test the limits of my new-found power.

Really, it was amazing. There was no fact-checking, no deadline, and no contract to fulfill. Just the sheer joy of telling a story that delighted the hell out of me. And because I was working in complete obscurity, I didn’t even worry about whether it was any good. I just wrote.

But now what?  Well, I've decided to undertake a little experiment.  I'm releasing it in digital form as a kind of beta test, a way to get feedback from readers. You can read all about it here.  And if you own a Kindle or an iPhone, you can download a copy.  If you own a Sony Reader or if you want to read it on your computer, you can do that, too.

What about a print version, you ask?  That may be coming soon.  Stay tuned.

Here, by the way, is a preview, courtesy of Scribd, the document-sharing site that is fast becoming the YouTube of text. 

The Last Bookstore in America

My Crazy Garden

Good to be home!