Issue 90

Dear all,

I can hardly believe I’ve written 90 of these newsletters, and that you are still reading my monthly missives. Thank you! 10 more to go, and then I’ll do something else…

The original idea came from a sculptor friend who posted, long before I did, his “20th of the month” with photos of his recent work and work in progress in his studio. I chose 14th of the month because it’s my birth day and also, I was in France when I wrote the first one, on Bastille Day.

Now, I’m back in Key West in the steamy end of summer, where the air is thick and humid even as the days grow shorter, and it hardly gets cooler at night. This time of year was always a time for new beginnings: the school year (ugh) when we had to put on winter uniforms in spite of summer warmth, the university term, when all of life started up again, and in France, la rentrée, when Paris always felt uniquely hectic. It has stayed with me, this sense of a time to begin something new – even as Key West is littered with skeletons and pumpkins for Hallowe’en and the first people from ‘up north’ drift down here in search of Fantasy Fest, an event which many locals (me among them – sorry, I’m a killjoy here) dread and even hide from. Roll on All Saints’ Day.

One of my ‘new things’ is a beautiful new website at rosalindbrackenbury.com, designed by my friend Kim Narenkivicius, who also designs this newsletter and without whom my writing career and life in general would not be the same. It’s so all-inclusive that I felt when perusing it that I would hardly need to write a memoir – but, I am writing a memoir. It’s about my 30+ years in Key West and its working title is “A Thousand Helping Hands” as so many people have helped me in various ways on this island, since I first arrived here, knowing nobody. It’s a sort of thank-you to Key West as well as being about some of my adventures here, both in writing and in life. Memoir is scary for a novelist – you’re not supposed to make anything up. But as Pico Iyer once said, “All memoir is fiction.” He had a point, as we pick and choose what we tell, and memory is not always a faithful guide.

My other ‘new thing’ is the arrival of the ARC copy of my novel “Indigo Sky at Noon”, due out from Regal House Press on May 4, 2027. I like the cover, even if it looks a bit like sci-fi (my husband would approve) and I have liked working with RHP and Jaynie Royal, its originator and director. The novel is a murder mystery that mutates into a love story; I let the characters have their head, and they stopped thinking about the murdered man, and fell in love. It was more fun that way – and I haven’t been able to forget a short story of John Fowles in his collection “The Ebony Tower” in which a detective falls for a suspect and loses interest in the case. There, I’ve given the plot away. But the novel can be pre-ordered: click the cover below.

I’m hoping for ‘new things’ in our public life in the US, of course, before I write here again – but don’t let’s go there now…

Affectionately, Ros