Cottage For Sale: Must Be Moved

For seven years of Sundays, I've been working on a novel. The book was somewhere in its second and-a-half draft when I decided-a couple of years ago-to move a cottage. At the time, I wasn't looking for another story to tell. I was only hoping to create a light-filled space where I might write.

Then the dreams began, teaching me that stories choose their tellers, and not the reverse. In the first, there are puppies. Two of them. I'm allergic to dogs. How could I care for them? And both at once? Maybe one. But not two! A week later , kittens appear—again two, again one too many for me to handle. Birds are next, and I begin to understand the metaphor. I always pay attention to dreams with wings. Ideas taking flight. Once more, my dream-self is unsure, afraid she cannot care for two baby birds. Two baby books, I realize when I wake. That's what this is about. I've been noticing the narrative all along, but out of loyalty to that novel, I have done my best to ignore the literary possibilities of my house-moving adventure.

It is the twins who finally break down my resistance. Two children, sex indeterminate, needing my care, needing my equal and undivided attention. I am overwhelmed, wondering how I will manage, but I do not shirk my responsibility. I don't know how I'll do it—juggle fiction with non-fiction, attend to the building project, and manage my consulting business at the same time, but I decide to listen to my wiser, dreaming self. I accept the inevitability of caring for two children at once.

If it is true that my dreams persuaded me to write this book, the project itself convinced me to listen to my dreams. I found rich material there. A boatload of interesting characters. A beautiful setting. A plot line that moves along, like the cottage itself, on meandering back roads, with an eye for the inner scenery. Cottage For Sale: Must be Moved connects the dots between heart and home, risk and reward. It is a story about what one woman can do, so long as she is willing to enlist the help of many, many others. It's a story packed with small town drama, lots of heavy equipment, one grizzly house-moving man, a whole lot of Cape Cod firefighters, two tiny houses with plans to marry, and one single woman with a large gray cat named Egypt.

Cottage For Sale, Must be Moved was published in May, 2004 by Commonwealth Editions. Independent booksellers gave the hardcover a boost by selecting it as the #2 Book Sense Pick that month. This May, Cottage for Sale will be released in paperback by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House.