QUESTION: Throughout all of the years you’ve been writing and promoting your novels, what have been the most rewarding and memorable experiences for you?
FERN MICHAELS: Oh my gosh, there are so many! I’m going to give you two, but they are sad. A lady’s daughter e-mailed me and said her mother was dying, literally dying, and had maybe a month to live if she was lucky. She had read the first two books in the Kentucky series and wanted to know how the third one ended because she wouldn’t be here when it came out. The third book was done and in production, but it was months to go before it would be in stores. I called my publisher, Kensington Publishing, and somehow they found a way to get the advance galleys to me to send to the daughter. The daughter e-mailed me later and said every day she read to her mother and they finished the book in time. The second incident was almost identical, but this lady was a friend of someone who had brain cancer and was in a hospice. She wanted the fourth Sisterhood book [The Jury] so her friend could read it to her. I sent it along with a roomful of flowers. You just can’t forget things like that, ever. And I never will. I like to think I make people’s lives a little happier with my storytelling. Now, if you want to go in the other direction, I was inducted into the New Jersey Literary Hall of Fame along with such notables as Mary Higgins Clark, Peter Benchley, Belva Plain, and many others (I lived in New Jersey at the time), and you better believe that was a thrill!
QUESTION: Now that the Sisterhood is still going strong and topping the bestseller lists with every book, what is the next thing you can tell readers that you’re excited about? What will 2010 and beyond bring?
FERN MICHAELS: I’m sure not ready as of this moment to put the Sisterhood series behind me, but I do have other things I’m excited about. Especially my brand-new series called the Godmothers. Again, some feisty ladies, led by eight-times-widowed Teresa “Toots” Amelia Louden-berry, getting their way in the world and having a lot of great times while they’re at it. I think these books are even more fun than the Sisterhood books, and I hope my readers find them just as entertaining. The first book is The Scoop, in September 2009, and then I have another non-Sisterhood novel called Return To Sender coming in the spring of 2010. So I’m working on all kinds of things, but in my off-hours, my brain is swirling with Sisterhood stories. I can multitask.
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Copyright © 2009 by Fern Michaels
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ISBN: 1-4201-1292-9
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