Alice Hoffman's Blog, page 2

Thank you so much to everyone who sent in comments to my new website. I so appreciate the kind words and thoughts and I'm delighted to hear so many people are looking forward to the arrival of The Third Angel.

Sometimes, when I'm at work on a book I forget anyone will ever read it. I've often wondered if that's what allows me the freedom to write - a detachment from the future of the book at the time I'm working on it. The idea of publishing and being public with what has been created in...

For me, a novel isn't autobiographical in "real time" - but my life is there, transfigured by fiction. I think of a novel the way analysts deconstruct a dream - the dreamer is every character in his or her dream, including the cat and the dog. Or, think of it this way:  Your life is a mirror. You throw it down on the ground. It shatters into thousands of pieces. You can never recreate the mirror as it was, but each piece is still a part of the mirror, a part of the writer's life.

For me...

My new book, The Third Angel, is about to be published and I've been thinking about the angels in my own life. In the novel, there is the Angel of Life, the Angel of Death, and the Third Angel, the one who walks among us, often unnoticed, and changes our lives in ways we would have never imagined. One of my first angels was the librarian in my school, Mrs. Inken -- the perfect name for a ...

Novels have inside stories and outside stories, sometimes more than one. There are stories that reveal themselves all at once, and others that are a puzzle. My new book The Third Angel is filled with secrets. Some characters keep secrets from the people they love best. Some keep them from themselves.

 Here is a clue to the identity of the Third Angel. Sign my guestbook and I'll send out other clues.

I heard something at my window. I thought it was snow falling, or birds calling, or branches...