Launch week continues…

One of the treats for me as a writer this time around — Town Father is very different for me, as you’ll see when you read it — was finding an approach to the material that would let me really immerse myself in it without getting pretentious or phony. You always have to be true to your own identity, but a great benefit of being a novelist is the ability to put on all kinds of costumes.

Here I assumed the role of a novelist of the 1880s. I would write my story of Hestia, California, as if I were telling it in that period, though, as I say, without getting all Victorian in my language and style. It is, after all, a story with contemporary themes. Feminism. Reproductive freedom. Social judgment. Relativism. Plain old morality.

But the tickling thing I understood right away was that no…