I'm so excited to have author, Laura Florand pop by today for a visit. Laura, as you'll come to see, has led a most interesting  life and luckily for us, she has written all about it in her current book, Blame It On Paris.

ABOUT BLAME IT ON PARIS 

"Eleven o’clock on a Friday night.  The seamy, sex-obsessed center of Paris.  I balanced over a Turkish toilet in a tiny bistro, one stiletto heel propped against the wall to make some kind of writing table out of my knee, trying desperately not to touch anything around me as I wrote an invitation…. " Thus begins BLAME IT ON PARIS, Laura Florand’s hilarious and moving true story of a French-American romance between two people, two families, and two cultures. 

What does happen when you put a small-town Georgian in Paris and a handsome, sophisticated Parisian in small-town Georgia?  Especially when two huge families, one French and the other American, decide it’s up to them to further this romance.  The Parisian’s family wants Laura to learn how to prepare snails, while Laura’s family keeps serving Sébastien Mad Dog 20/20 as good wine.  How will true love survive?   
 Buy Blame It On Paris Now!

 Time For A Little Q & A With Laura

RR: Hey Laura. Welcome.  Let's get started with an easy one. When you're not writing, you're ___________.

LF: When I'm not writing, there's a good chance I'm cooking.  During the work day, if I get really stuck, I often cook for creative energy.  Of course, there’s also a good chance I’m out walking, playing with my baby, teaching, dancing…I’ve got a pretty full schedule.

RR: When did you know you wanted to be writer? And did anyone in particular encourage you along the way?

LF:  When I was nine years old, we were assigned a short story for a class.  I and my best friend and bitter rival for who could be the biggest teacher’s pet kept calling each other all evening to report how long ours were.  Hers kept getting longer than mine, which was a problem, because I’d had the big dénouement at page 4.  She kept calling back, and I kept having to try to tack on something to keep it going.  She won.  Hers was 12 pages and mine was only 9.  Not to mention that hers made sense.  I have never gotten over it and blame it on her big handwriting.

I have been writing pretty much daily since then.  Since all the writing magazines I began reading at nine said you had to submit, submit, submit, I have also been submitting my stories and poems to major magazines (Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, New Yorker) since I was nine years old.  I can only imagine what those editors must have thought.  I have a notebook with pages and pages filled with name of story/poem, date of submission, market, date of reply.  They also have columns for “Amount Paid” and “Payment Received” that are, strangely, all blank. 

I didn't’t actually get any positive feedback until age 16, when I won a poetry contest and $50 for what is truly the most awesome villanelle in the world, second only to Dylan Thomas’s.  However, it is so sappy I won’t share it.  I also wrote three or four books during my teenage years, or, as editors put it, “what I called books at the time.”  I actually wrote a “book” that was the story of an Eve (yes, that Eve) who participated in most major events throughout history AND pre-history.  I think it was about 80 pages long.  I still had that length problem, as you see.  Fortunately for my reputation, these and other endeavors were all on floppy discs that worked only on an Apple IIC, and they have been lost to posterity

The moral of this story is:  when people tell you to back up all your work and make hard copies, don’t necessarily listen.  Use your own best judgment.

RR:  Are you currently working on a new novel/project? And if so, can you tell us what it's about?

LF:  I just finished LA VIE EN ROSES, a novel set around Grasse, the centuries-old perfume capital of France.  An American woman named Jolie finds herself with a house and part of one of the last great French rose fields on her hands.  She falls in love with it, but she also finds that her ownership of it is being disputed by the great rose-producing Legrand clan.  And the eldest son and heir in that clan is quite cute, in his difficult way…

It’s a pure take-off on one of my favorite fairy tales, from her family, whose fortunes reversed in the tech crash, to her father’s gift to her of this house and rose field in order to get out of trouble, to the sibling rivalry with her two sisters.  I wanted to call it PRETTY AND THE BEAST, which is still quite my most favorite title of all time, but everyone else just looked at me funny when I suggested it.  I have that trouble with titles.

RR:   What's your favorite part of writing?  Starting something new? Revising what you've already got drafted? Developing characters? The plot?  Something else all together?

LF:  I like that daydreaming time, you know, when you’re falling asleep or driving and story ideas start coming to you and scenes generate.  Like any dream, it’s never as vivid and wonderful on paper as it is in your head, so that’s probably my favorite time.  But I also love it when everything just clicks in terms of writing that day, and I’m typing away at a great pace, things just flowing out.  And I love it when I re-read something, sometimes even something I didn’t think I was good as I was drafting, and I realize that it is in fact good, much better than I realized.  And I love writing dialogue so much that I usually have to go back and cut massive amounts of it in the revision process.
 
Of course, there are a lot of days when it’s like pulling those non-existent hen’s teeth to get something on paper and I realize something isn’t any good at all when I re-read it, so…let’s just concentrate on the positives, right?

Do you remember where you were and what you were doing when you got the call--I'm talking, the call--when you learned that you had sold your novel/project?

LF:  I was at my computer writing another book. 

RR: Central Casting: If they were to make a movie out of your book, who would you cast to play your main characters?

LF:  That’s always a tricky question, since my characters are real people and I have a hard time imagining anyone else in their shoes.  I would like to go back in time and have Lauren Bacall play me, though.  It’s a fantasy of mine to look and act like Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not or The Big Sleep.  I suspect the director would choose someone with a much ditzier persona, alas.  You just can’t see Lauren Bacall with those snails.  You just can’t.

RR:  What's the one book that you wish you'd read because everyone tells you should. This is the one book that you keep attempting to read, the one everyone praises, but alas the one you just can't get through.

LF:  Well.  While I don’t in any way wish to read these books, or I would do it, there are a few books that I wish I had read without somehow having to read them, so that I could discourse intelligently about them.  The standout there is Proust, which no self-respecting professor of French is supposed to have not read, but somehow I managed it.  I’ve read plenty of excerpts, though, if that counts for much.
 
It’s a bit like wishing I had climbed Mt. Everest so that I could say I had done it, without ever wishing to engage in any part of the mountain climbing experience—the cold, the shortage of oxygen, the hard work.  You get the picture.

Laura Florand is a native of the Deep South who began travelling the world when she was seventeen, backpacking solo through Greece.  She went on to win a Fulbright to Tahiti and then to study French literature at Duke University.  In addition to the year in Tahiti, she has lived in Madrid and Paris.  Now a senior lecturing fellow at Duke and a new mother of one, she divides her time between North Carolina, where she also leads a Tahitian dance group, and France.  For more information, please see her website: www.lauraflorand.com.  

Thanks to Laura and everyone else for stopping by.  It's up, up and away for me as a I catch a flight early tomorrow for Nashville and then from there, I'm off to Atlanta--But I'll be back soon with plenty of tales to tell!