This was the style when I started writing the book. I'm slow.

I am THRILLED to announce that my latest novel will be published by St Martin’s Press with the brilliant Brenda Copeland as my editor.

If you’ve been reading my blog for awhile, you are probably aware that I have been working on a novel for a long time.  Years.  I took a break to write a proposal for a pet/animal memoir, but there were so many pet/animal memoir books coming out at that time, that my agent and I decided to scrap the plan and I returned to the novel.  I was very happy to return to the novel because I had quite fallen in love with the main character whose name is Hildy.  I recently came across an interview I gave in 2009 in which I said that I had just completed the novel, but, in fact, I had just completed the first of many drafts.  My agent, Maria Massie, of the Lippincott, Massie, McQuilkin Agency was very helpful and read each draft and gave wonderful notes and finally, this summer, we sent it to one editor, Brenda Copeland of St Martin’s Press.  We decided to send it to Brenda before sending it out to a large list of publishers, because I had met Brenda and loved her and really wanted to be at St. Martins.

Well, she read it and SHE BOUGHT IT!

What’s the novel called?  We don’t know yet.  We have been trying out many different title ideas and nothing seems just right. But we have plenty of time – the book won’t be out until early 2013.  It’s about a woman named Hildy Aldrich, who lives in a small town on Boston’s North Shore. By day, she’s a successful real-estate broker, good neighbor, mother and grandmother, but her nights are lonely, due in part to her daughters’ intrusive “intervention” and Hildy’s subsequent stint at a rehab for a drinking problem that she knows she doesn’t really have. So it is, in part, about a woman who feels lonely and unjustly persecuted by those who are dearest to her, but it’s also the story of the community in which she grew up – a craggy New England seacoast town that harbors many secrets from the past and the present.  There’s a scandal,  a love story, a bit of mysticism (Hildy’s ancestress was one of the witches hung in the witch trials in nearby Salem, and Hildy appears to have some intuitive gifts).  There are horses, dogs, ghosts, lovers, babies, lobsters, lobstermen, old houses and drinking – all things I love – and also scary stuff like blackouts, arrests, a missing child and  a woman who is becoming slightly unhinged by obsessive love.  But my favorite thing in the book is Hildy.  I can’t wait for you all to meet her.  She started out as a peripheral character  - the book was originally about a scandal involving a psychiatrist and his patient – but Hildy kept intruding with her own story.  I hate it when writers talk about their characters this way, but it’s really what happened.  This staunch character with a very dry wit and lots of knowledge kept butting in with her stories about her hometown and her childhood and all sorts of defensive explanations about her drinking,and wouldn’t stop until finally I made her the narrator and the story became more about her, though the scandal with the shrink and the patient is still there.

Well, that’s all I can say. Don’t want to spoil it.  But tomorrow I’ll post about my visit to my new publishers in the amazing Flatiron Building.

This morning it’s pouring rain outside and I’m all cozy in my new favorite workspace – an attic room that was once filled with clutter but which I have recently turned into a guest bedroom/office.  It’s great because there’s a bed-desk, of course, and it’s very quiet up here under the eaves of our old house.  Now there are leaves on the massive tree outside the window and it feels like I’m in a cozy treehouse.  I would show you a photo, but it’s a little messy right now, what with all the dogs, Sunday newspapers and foodstuffs. The photo above was taken one night last winter and will give you the general idea.  I know it’s very girlie.  I’ve never really had a girlie room, until now,  and I love it.

I haven’t been writing as much as I should – I’m working on a couple of different things but the weather has been so glorious that I keep staying outdoors and exhausting myself with pleasure and then am too tired to work in the evenings.  So this morning, I was thrilled with the rain.  I decided I would finish a chapter in this novel I’ve been working on forever.   But first I’d check my emails.  A friend had sent me a cute link to a story about her dog and I thought I’d post it on Facebook.  I logged onto Facebook, posted the link and decided that since I was already there, I might as well  see what all my friends were up to.  I followed a few links, answered a couple of messages and then, rather jolly from a lively banter with an old Facebook friend, I decided to wander on over to Twitter,  just for a quick glance before I settled down to do my work. Oh, but what gaiety there was to be found on Twitter this morning.  I really should know better than to go there in the morning.  It’s okay as a reward after an honest day’s work, but to start tweeting in the morning, well, for me anyway, it’s sometimes hard to know when to stop and I’ve wasted many, many precious hours there.  But there I was at 8:30 this morning, tweeting away, yucking it up with some very funny folks and though my intention was to get back to my work,  I was lured this way and that by tweeted links and eventually it was 11:30 and I had found my way to a series of videos of psychological tests.

Which brings me to The Marshmallow Test.  The Marshmallow Test was first conducted in the 1960s in order to determine whether people who can delay gratification are more successful in life later on.  The testers put a marshmallow in front of a small child and told the child that he or she could eat the marshmallow now and just have the one, or, if they don’t eat it until the adult returns, they may have two marshmallows.  Later, they tested the same subjects as adults and it turned out that those children who were able to put off the pleasure of ingesting the treat in order to have a larger reward in the end, were, in fact, much more successful adults.  This, I learned after four hours of instant gratification (online merrymaking) while putting off the thing that might offer me a far greater reward in the end (a completed and published novel).

The video is hysterical.  I am, and always have been, the girl with the yellow and orange bow.  Enjoy:

Leonardo DiCaprio in INCEPTION

I finally got to see the movie Inception last night.  I was very excited to see this movie because my kids had each seen it twice and  raved about it. My husband had raved about it. Many newspaper and magazine critics have raved about it. Everywhere I have gone this summer, people have been carrying on about this film, so last night I went to see it with my sister Meg and her family and there I endured three of the longest hours of my life.  I LOVE action films and psychological thrillers and somehow I had arrived at the mistaken assumption that this movie would be an action-packed thriller taking place in the fascinating realm of the subconscious human mind.  I thought that I would be riveted to the screen, especially because we watched it in an Imax theater. Instead I found myself leisurely responding to texts on my phone 2 hours into it. My teen-aged niece was reading emails. My brother-in-law had himself a much-needed nap.  My sister laughed at the supposedly serious parts, which made us all laugh, and so the time wasn’t completely wasted.

If you haven’t seen the movie, nothing I will say here is a spoiler.  You can’t really give away the plot of this movie because it’s so simplistic and and at the same time, filled with holes, that there’s not much to tell.  Quite a few people I know have told me they went back to see it again, to see if they “missed” something and came away satisfied that they hadn’t.  ”It makes total sense,” my daughter told me last night when I spoke to her about it.  ”You just didn’t get it.”

It’s not that it didn’t make sense to me, I just didn’t find it suspenseful enough to be a thriller. Chris Nolan’s cinematic dream world is pretty much limited to car chases and gunfights and exploding buildings, except for the erotic dreams which in this film, are infuriatingly G-rated.  Apparently when men dream about beautiful women, the dreams consist of walks on the beach and building sand castles.  I felt a mounting shame, last night,  as I mentally compared my erotic dreams with Caprio’s character (DUM? DOM? ).  A man so sinister that he steals people’s ideas from their heads, dreams of holding hands with his sweetie and kissing. His gorgeous wife is supposed to have given in to the dark side of her dreams (we’re told by Dom. Again and again).  Is that the dream where her childhood home is on a watery street?  That’s dark?

I think the problem is that I’m spoiled by my own dreams.  In my dreams I can fly and I can also walk around with my eyes closed and not bump into anything.  I often show up at parties with no clothes on and manage to keep people from noticing that fact by talking to them about how I came to be a sunflower.  My teeth fall out and it doesn’t hurt.  I discover that my horse Gabriel is my shrink (or husband, dog, mailman – Gabriel is a major player in my dreams.)  Sometimes there are wars and battles but when there are, the sky opens up and the seas swell and there are monsters and demons and angels….

Another problem for me is that Inception involves a plot that has to be explained through constant expository and contrived dialogue (rather than through images).  Instead of watching the action unfold, as you do in the wonderful Jason Bourne movies or any other number of recent action/fantasy films (Children of Men also comes to mind), you have baby-faced Leonardo DiCaprio as your Chatty Cathy protagonist, explaining everything to everyone in the film, and the film audience, over and over again.  He even decides to tell us what the word inception means, in case we didn’t know, so that we would understand why it is the title of the film.

So there you have it. My very first film review. What did you all think?  Of my blog, I mean. I know everybody loved the film.

Photo by Devin Leary

We have had a lovely fall weekend, despite the fact that Denis wasn’t here.  Dev and I went into the city to attend  the birthday party of our longtime friend Richard LaGravenese.  Richard and Denis went to college together and then Richard wrote the movie, The Ref, which Denis starred in with Kevin Spacey and Judy Davis.  Since The Ref, we have remained very good friends with Richard, his wife Ann, and their daughter Lily, who is the same general age as our kids..

Lily is now a beautiful college student, majoring in musical theater and she sang “Unforgettable” to her father, which made me cry.  So sweet.  But it was a late night and it seriously took me all day yesterday to recover from the excitement and lack of sleep.

Now, I’m back to work on the animal book proposal.  It’s easy to be inspired when surrounded by your subjects, as I am.

Photo by Devin Leary

I get lots of feedback.

Here, Snoopy is trying to slam the laptop shut onto my fingers.  He doesn’t think much of my writing and believes I should get a day job.

Mark likes anything that is written about him.

Photo by Devin Leary

Many thanks to Elise, who mentioned this interesting New York Times piece in a recent comment.  It was in today’s paper, and discusses the ways scientists are learning that dogs are useful, not just for the blind but for people with many disabilities.  It says, in part:

“…over the last several years a growing body of evidence, culled from small scientific studies of dogs’ abilities to do things like detect cancer or seizures, solve complex problems (complex for a dog, anyway), and learn language suggests that they may know more than we thought they did. Their apparent ability to tune in to the needs of psychiatric patients, turning on lights for trauma victims afraid of the dark, reminding their owners to take medication and interrupting behaviors like suicide attempts and self-mutilation, for example, has lately attracted the attention of researchers.”

Very interesting.

Photo by Devin Leary

Well, this one doesn’t have to turn on lights or palpate my breasts for lumps or talk me off of window ledges or any of the other amazing things these fancy therapy dogs can do, but she is a great shrink.

She’s just a good listener.  She doesn’t believe in telling you what to do, but, rather, she listens quietly while you wail and sob and whine and complain and she lets you come to your own resolution, in your own time.  She’s like a blank canvas – allowing her patient (she just has the one – me – but I’m a full-time job) to project all her anxieties and fears and sadness onto her, which she absorbs, and reflects nothing back but an unconditional and all-abiding love. She’s a great, great shrink, and her hourly rate can’t be beat.

Yes, indeed, I score EXTREMELY high on the self-monitoring scale, but as I answered the questions, an uneasiness came over me. There are 25 questions, but here are the first five, and my answers:

(T) (F) 1. I find it hard to imitate the behavior of other people. FALSE You’d swear it was my mother/daughter/Don Knotts in the flesh if you saw me do the impersonation.
(T) (F) 2. My behavior is usually an expression of my true inner feelings, attitudes, and beliefs. FALSE, seriously, I’d have no friends.
(T) (F) 3. At parties and social gatherings, I do not attempt to do or say things that others will like. FALSE. It’s not that I need people to like me. I need them to love me.
(T) (F) 4. I can only argue for ideas which I already believe. FALSE. Please.
(T) (F) 5. I can make impromptu speeches even on topics about which I have almost no information. TRUE! Finally a true! Yes, I am an expert on many things about which I have no information.
(T) (F) 6. I guess I put on a show to impress or entertain people. I guess I sort of do…
I think you’re getting the idea here. Being told you’re a “high self-monitor” is actually a nice way of saying that you’re a giant blowhard. An Ass. A social chameleon.

According to Wikipedia, Stanford University students scored much higher than psychiatric inpatients on the self-monitoring scale. Okay, well, it looks like I’m not a sociopath, but couldn’t they have used a less diverse control group than psychiatric inpatients? Where do I stand in relation to “normal” people. I must be like the normal people. Or, at least, be extremely well-liked by them.

It’s really hard work this constant self-monitoring. I think it’s why I live in the country. No need to make impromptu speeches to the dogs. I’m not saying I never do, there’s just no need.

Thanks to all of you who read, comment or email me each day. I had no intention of starting a blog last year. I only did it at the suggestion of my publisher. Now I love to blog and have come to think of many of my readers as friends Keep those comments coming. XO Ann

May 12

May 22


May 23

June 30

August 4

Also August

September 12

September 19

September 22

September 22

October 25

November 2

November 2

December 6

Finally, two great souls who are missed:

May 4

October 7

Okay, it all started around noon. Devin was in the horse barn, puttering around, doing some chores. Denis was sitting outside enjoying the fall day. I was lolling about on my bed, reading the Sunday paper thinking, today will be the first day I start exercising. If you’re new, I had surgery a month ago. So I thought I might just get up and go for a stroll this afternoon. I thought I might, but knew I probably wouldn’t. My leg muscles no longer exist. It’s like I’m walking around on bones covered with soft padding. I’m completely out of shape.

So, Denis was gazing out across the fields, enjoying his few hours in the country before going back to work, when he saw what he first thought was a very large, fat dog, but soon realized was a sheep ambling up the hill towards the horse field. He was amused. In his complete innocence, he thought sheep were amusing. Didn’t we all, once?

Devin, working in the barn, heard the horses suddenly tearing around in their paddock, so she went out and saw the sheep squeeze its big fat ass (I officially HATE sheep now – you’re about to find out why) through the fence into the horse paddock. Now, if you don’t have the joy of owning an animal that weighs 1200 pounds but has the reasoning skills of a worm, you might think that the horses would welcome a cute little sheep into their paddock. A sheep is a herd animal and clearly wanted the company of the horses. The sheep recognized that the horses were fellow herbivores and felt it would be safe amongst them. The horses saw no such kinship in the sheep. They, having never seen a sheep before, decided that it must be some type of lion, and, according to Denis, they did the whole cartoon sequence of freezing, bugging their eyes out of their heads, and then tearing off so fast that there was a trail of smoke behind them. They raced across the paddock and jumped the 4 foot fence – even old geriatric Gabriel jumped the fence, and then they disappeared into the woods.

Meanwhile, back at the house, I was reading the Styles section of the NY Times. I believe I was admiring a rather cunning little pair of shoes, when Devin came running in, screaming something about sheep and horses. I threw some sweats over my jammies and grabbed my camera (always thinking of you, dear blog) and ran up to the barn with Dev.

I kept saying, “Did you say sheep or sheet? Sheep?” Because, while it’s rather rural here and some of us keep a few horses or cows, it’s Connecticut, not Brokeback Mountain. You just don’t often run across sheep in these here parts. See, just having a sheep on your place for a few hours will make you start talkin’ cowboy talk. So we ran up to the barn and sure ’nuff, there was the fleecy critter just loafin’ around the corral like it hadn’t a worry in the world.

“Where are the horses?” I asked Dev. She told me that Gabriel was contained in a nearby field but that Sailor was up in the woods someplace and that his legs were bleeding. Here’s a photo of him looking like a wild mustang in the woods. That left front leg was covered with blood.

I decided that we needed to catch the sheep and remove it so that we could bring the panicked horses down to the barn.

This was easier said than done. Here’s Dev trying to corner it against the barn. We were actually trying to flip a horse halter over its head! What can I say, we’re not ranch folk.

The sheep seemed to enjoy allowing us to come just close enough so that we could almost touch it, and then it would dart away. We tried lassoing it. We tried herding it. If we had a rifle handy (and I was a better shot), I would have shot it. Now, I know a lot of you love cute animals, and this was a cute animal, but I was starting to see something sly and sinister in its maneuvering. It was toying with me. It was making a fool of me. I think I could have caught it by it’s hind legs, like in the movies, and wrestled it to the ground – in fact I was DYING to try, but I have this big new scar across my belly, so I was alternately shaking a bucket of grain and cooing, “here lambie, lambie, lambie,” and cursing and throwing the bucket at its butt. It kept trying to follow our bleeding Sailor deeper into the woods.

Enter Daphne. Daphne, hearing the commotion, decided to come up and see what all the ruckus was about and instantly, she started herding the sheep as if she had been herding sheep all her life. That dog is a genius, I’m telling you. She was in full predator mode and didn’t want the sheep to go in the woods because then it would be out of her underground fence territory (and she would no longer have the thrill of chasing it). So she brilliantly herded the sheep back towards the barn and away from the horses and I was singing her praises to the heavens, when the sheep managed to squeeze its big fat stupid lard ass into the field with Gabriel, who is a giant of a horse, standing at 17.2 hands. Gabriel thought about jumping the fence, then thought better of it and he went and stood in the far corner of the field, behind a woodpile, and shook violently, his eyes rolling around in his head like marbles.

I called off Daphne so she wouldn’t chase the sheep closer to Gabriel and we all took a deep breath – all except Gabriel that is – he was holding his breath and hoping he was blending in with the fall colors somehow. The sheep began delicately nibbling the grass. Daphne and I watched it and then, when it started towards Gabriel, I lost it and I chased that sheep out of that field and I chased it into the woods and I chased it clear into the next county I think. Every time it thought of slowing down or running back I threw something at it and yelled at it until finally it trotted off in search of some other giant livestock to menace. So today, I did have my first day of exercise after all!

Where was Denis in all this? Well, he was supervising the whole thing. He really was being the most sensible of us, knowing that there was probably a better way to outsmart a sheep than to run around throwing buckets at its butt, but I wouldn’t listen because I had a horse with BLEEDING LEGS in the woods.

We did manage to bring our trembling, jittery beasts back to the barn. Gabriel just had a few scratches but little Sailor had sliced his legs up a little on some brush, or wire or something and received numerous stitches. Here I am waiting for the vet – Sailor is stoned out of his gourd on horse crank. I am freezing and have a horse blanket wrapped around me.

But here’s the best part of the story! When the vet arrived, she said she had heard of a sheep that had been roaming the countryside for weeks. It had joined up with a herd of deer and was seen in several different towns in this area! If the deer reacted anything like my horses, I can see why it was all alone when it showed up here.

So, Little Bo Peep, if you’re still looking, your sheep was heading north towards the town of Washington, last we saw of her!

“Too Much Birthday” is a Berenstain Bears story that I used to read to my kids. It’s a complex narrative but I’ll summarize: One of the little Berenstain Bears is having a birthday. He has a party. All his friends come to the party. They give him presents. They pay lots of attention to him. He is given a cake and is sung to. Then, he has a complete meltdown and cries hysterically, puzzling his friends and family. This is because the Berenstain Bear is very, very young and has not yet learned to regulate his emotions. His heightened excitement reaches a fever-pitch and then he can’t cope.

Well, EXACTLY the same thing happened to me last night. I had a reading at the Tribeca Barnes & Noble. All my friends came. I went to a dinner party afterward. The people at the party paid tons of attention to me. Halfway through the party I realized that I was filled with despair. This was me:

Well, okay, I didn’t cry. And fortunately there wasn’t a “Search Inside” flag pointing at me (but there might as well be, with the amount of shrink hours I’ve logged over the years). But I whined at the dinner. I whined to my nice friends. Then I fretted when I got home – fretted and worried aloud to my nice husband and children. Because, I realize today, I am very, very emotionally immature and what is regular excitement for most adults, is just too much for me. So I had some quiet time today. Quiet time and soothing words from my friends, and now I feel better.

I started an Ann Index last week but keep forgetting to update it. Here’s today’s index.

THE ANN INDEX
Days since Outtakes From a Marriage arrived in bookstores: 7
Amazon Ranking: 1013
Number of Facebook Friends: 101
Number of real friends: more than I deserve (sob)
Days since we last saw our cat Sneakers: 10
Current shame level (1=total self-love, 10=total self-loathing): 8
Total number of amusing anecdotes accrued in my lifetime: 5
Number left untold after last week’s interviews: 0
Times this week that I have told my funny story about the time that Denis and I drove our own black Town Car to a red-carpet event: 39
Times anybody but me thought this was funny: 1

Scenes From a Marriage was recently re-released on DVD. It’s very long, as it was originally a series on Swedish Television. It’s shot like a documentary but it’s a drama. Like a Christopher Guest film – only not funny. And artfully shot. It’s beautifully shot (okay, it’s not like a Christopher Guest film at all.)

The film, Scenes From a Marriage was made in the 70’s, and my first thought, while watching it, was that the clothes and hairstyles reminded me of my parents and their friends during that time. As the drama unfolded, and this couple’s marriage was revealed as being hopelessly frayed, I became riveted. These people really were like my parents and their friends. And also, I realized, like Denis and me and our friends, and probably all married people, everywhere. I watched it all in one sitting, on a winter night in front of a dying fire. Denis fell asleep during the first 15 minutes and slept right through.

I borrowed something from the film. The Liv Ullman character, at one point, tells her husband of a love affair that she had with her psychiatrist and a shrink/love interest found his way into my novel soon after.

Anyway, Netflix it if you’re a 70s junkie like me. I love 70s films. I watch Klute every couple of months and delight in it anew each time. I watched Klute for the first time, years ago with my sister Meg, and to this day, when I see Meg’s name on the caller ID, I answer the phone, rasping “Bree Daniels,” in Jane Fonda’s sexy whore voice. Meg does the same thing when I call her and it shames me to have to tell you that we actually laugh until we can’t breathe every single time we do this. What can I say; we’re simple people. Anyway, I’ve seen Rosemary’s Baby countless times. For some reason, I find it soothing. I could recite The Godfathers I and II – every word. Our friends Richard LaGravenese and Ted Demme made a documentary called A Decade Under The Influence about 70s films. Netflix that too while you’re at it. Anyway, there’s something very comforting to me about the style of certain 70s era films, even the scary ones.

Okay, I have to list a few more: Bonnie and Clyde, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The Sting. Dog Day Afternoon, and my all-time favorite – Paper Moon, starring our friend Tatum O’Neal , who is now a star of Rescue Me.

Outtakes From a Marriage hits bookstores on June 3rd.

It’s a disease, they say on the morning news, on CNN, on CNBC – a disease that creates chaos for those around the hoarder. How did her life get so out of control? To find out, I’m told, tune into Oprah Winfrey later today. These news spots about hoarders used to be a wake-up call to me and I’d spend the next several days trying to unearth my office from years worth of old manuscripts, bills, Christmas wrapping paper, empty hampster cages, sports bras, Easter baskets, dog bones, waffle irons, saddle pads, and magazines. Oh, and catalogs. Hundreds and hundreds of catalogs. Now, I’m so far gone that when I see a fellow hoarder being carted off, my eyes dart from side to side and my heart races. Is that a car I hear pulling up outside? A news van? Oprah’s limousine? I envision myself being led outside to a waiting team of behavioral psychologists, while men in hazmat suits and gas masks bravely enter my home.

I’m really not as bad as the people who end up on Oprah, but I’m getting there. I have children and sometimes they have friends over. Sometimes these friends have parents who pick them up and stop in to chat. I can’t bear the shame of a filthy home so I do what any sensible person would do. When I learn that somebody is about to arrive at my house, I run around grabbing newspapers off the floors, cable bills out of the sink, dog bones off the sofa, socks and sports bras off the kitchen table, etc., and I toss them into the only downstairs room with a door – my office. Then I close the door. When the person arrives, they see a relatively tidy home. I’ll sort out my office later, I tell myself.

I have sought help. I’ve watched the Oprah episodes, I’ve even watched home-improvement shows devoted to cleaning your home and organizing your life, but the extent to which they try to simplify the whole problem is absurd. The solution, according to the experts, is to throw stuff out. Throw out all the catalogs, more are coming, said some house-organizing fanatic on one of these shows. Right, I think, and never find that set of barbecue tools with the industrial-sized tongs I saw in one of them. I know it was a 2006 catalog but I’m not sure if it was Hammacher Schlemmer or the one with all the gardening stuff. I must have those tongs! I’ll never find them if I throw away the old catalogs.

In two months, my daughter will be getting her driver’s license and in order to do so, she will need to show her birth certificate. Her birth certificate is in the office … someplace, and she’s been pestering me about finding it. So, after watching the morning news and processing the shame-by-association, I decided to just get it over with. I would clean the office. Now, five hours later, although I am not even halfway through, there are five contractor sized garbage bags filled with junk in my front hall, and I have learned the following:

A) I have ADD
B) The accumulated stuff was/is crazily organized by stratum. It’s like an archeological dig. The top layer was all stuff from this month, the next layer last month, dating back to the turn of this century. It occurred to me that I should leave everything just as it is. When I want to find the title for our pick-up truck, for example, I need only to figure out what month and year we bought it, and then I can instantly thumb through the pile until I reach that date, and there it will be.
C) I have really bad ADD.