Welcome to my virtual living room, where I’d offer you an English tea if I could. Failing that, I encourage you to stop for a moment and chat. My e-mail is maralys@cox.net. If nothing here looks familiar, it’s because my web site has changed. You know it’s time for an update when a) you’ve listed book tours to cities you can’t remember visiting, and b) your biography is out of date by three books and one national award.

In my corner of the woods, the book business has been gentled if not tamed. Late in October, 2007, Writer’s Digest e-mailed me that A Circus Without Elephants had won an Honorable Mention in its International Self-Published Books contest . . . especially exciting when I learned that my category included 302 entries, with only one winner and four honorable mentions.

Our local Tustin News ran a feature story on Thanksgiving day, and then, two days later, The Orange County Register surprised me with a bigger story. Beyond that, a small Cerritos newspaper called me a “renowned author.” Fortunately—or perhaps unfortunately--it’s too late for even the wildest adulation to go to my head. When Rob and I read it, we just laughed.

The year got even better. Carolyn Uber, senior editor for Stephens Press, decided to publish the sequel, A Clown in the Trunk, which came out in the spring of 2008. As a kind of frosting for all this good news, Stephens Press also published my writing book, Damn the Rejections,Full Speed Ahead, which came out in late 2008, and three weeks later won
First Place in its category from USA Book News.

As I sign off, let me share one of my favorite aphorisms: “The difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is that successful people lose more.” Only someone who has accumulated 2000 rejection slips on the way to publishing twelve books can see the truth behind such a crazy statement.

Here are the first two pages from A Clown in the Trunk:

THE LADIES’ ROAD TRIP

WITH ENOUGH CHOCOLATES, I swear, you can persuade anyone to do anything.

Which is how I induced my friend, Carol, to accompany me on a trip she should have avoided like a meerkat avoids a hawk. A few days before the trip, I’d laid a path of chocolates from her house to my car, and when she came out the front door there they were, soft-centered and chewy, snaking down the path and across the sidewalk, and stopping right at my passenger door. “Of course after that,” she said, “I had to come.” Carol is one of those women who would surrender her soul for the right two pieces of Sees candy.

But then, so would I.

The fact is, that fall of 1981, I needed Carol to travel with me to a neighboring state to sell my first published book, Manbirds: Hang Gliders and Hang Gliding. In spite of the excitement, the thrill of seeing my name on a jacket cover, the cracks an author could fall into were suddenly becoming evident. Quite casually, someone at Prentice-Hall mentioned a fissure big enough to swallow a whole new career. Mine. Just as I came aboard, the publisher found itself without a publicist—-their promoter of retail sales. If I didn’t become the book’s nursemaid, its chief advocate, its gung-ho salesman, who would?

Until then, I’d been a peanut butter mom and casual tennis player living with my husband, Rob, and the youngest two of our six kids, both in their twenties, on a half acre in Southern California. From the street our property looked normal enough: sun-faded shingles on a ranch-style house, and a row of overgrown junipers that held up obliging arms to shield Rob when he ventured out in his underwear.

But the backyard still sported trappings from a wondrous era: a double-decker bicycle propped against a tree (reminder of our first son, Bobby, no longer with us), and lengths of aluminum tubing once used to create hang gliders for Bobby and Chris, back when our two oldest boys were U.S. champions and swept us into that awe-inspiring sport. I remembered those days constantly—both the excitement and the terrible way they ended.

Please look for the rest of the book in Barnes & Noble starting in June. Or e-mail me for an advanced, authographed copy at a discounted rate.