Book Tour Reaching New Heights

(If you’ve missed my previous newsletters detailing my journey

through the release of HOTEL MOSCOW peek behind the scene by 

scrolling down, or clicking on the right bar by month.

And you may read the first chapter of HOTEL MOSCOW on 

my website or download a free sample digitally.)  

Readers’ frequent question: What has changed in Russia since 1993? 

   

In the new Russia, young people enjoy new business and career opportunities, while restaurants are now store-front (formerly hidden in basements or second floors and accessed only by a code knock.) Businesses cater to consumers' needs--an unheard of concept before 1991. Yet, dozens of industrial cities are as bleak and hopeless as before. Even in the beautiful St. Petersburg, millions of Russians still live in the iconic Soviet kommunalka, the communal apartment, where a family of three may occupy a room as small as 7 x10 ft.—and shares a toilet, bath and kitchen with five to ten other families. (Photo: Notice the bed hung under the ceiling.)

Professor Terry Walker

News!!!

 1) HOTEL MOSCOW is being taught at a university in Brazil, at an English-language business class. The professor explained his choice: “The novel covers both the cultural nuances of doing business

abroad while it gives a fresh view of a country going through the upheaval of transition from communism.”

2) Broward County  library, (FL) has selected HOTEL MOSCOW as its March reading at all its 7 branches! At each such meeting, a leader gives a talk about the background of the novel or reviews the book. When I Skype into the meeting, I am fascinated by their professional take and must remind myself that I had written this book they analyze and praise.

With organizers
and author David Greene,

3) I’ve had the honor of being the very first author at the very first literary event at the first year of the Collier County (FL) Jewish Book Festival. I’ve been to many similar events, and I must say that this one was so well organized it was hard to believe that they worked without a prior blueprint.  

4)  Two more blogger interviews were just published. In the changing world of publishing, the aggregate of bloggers have replaced mainstream book reviewers with their collective impact. Each gathers followers who share similar tastes, and the questions 

they pose in their interviews reflect the readers’ curiosity. Read Mercedes Fox and Sylvie Books & Film (and check for more Q & A on my website.)

My pleasure of meeting other authors

With Sonia Taitz

Where do authors hobnob? While most of my appearances are keynote speeches where I am alone on stage, I greatly enjoy events I share with other authors. Sometimes it’s consecutive presentations, other times we share a panel that focuses on specific topics. It’s my chance to connect with other authors.

Three such events are coming up—two panels in Tucson Book Festival, and a panel I will be moderating in Long Island, NY.  Don’t miss them.  

 

Book groups’ reactions to HOTEL MOSCOW:

o “What a meeting we had! The terrifying portrait of a nation in transition from Communism came to life in the novel of a world superpower undergoing a profound and violent change.”

o “We hadn’t imagined the misery of life under Soviet totalitarian regime. It was even harder to grasp the nightmare of waking up one day to a world where all laws have been obliterated.”

o “HOTEL MOSCOW taught us all lessons about humanity, about what we, as people, are capable of.”

Please contact me to join your meeting via phone or Skype.

  

My Personal corner:

Readers and interviewers often ask: What do you do besides writing? The answer is: A lot. Here are a couple of items:

1) Toastmasters:

Being a member of Toastmasters—the organization that teaches public speaking engages me through

the three separate clubs to which I belong. While I continue to perfect my speaking skills through specific assignments (there are various manuals to choose from, each focuses on different skills,) Toastmasters offers me an instant community wherever I travel—also  internationally. I am proud to say that I’ve just finished two manuals and achieved Advanced Bronze Communicator level.

I often listen to people in business or leadership deliver well enough, yet they are unaware how much they could still benefit from feedback. I suggest you search for your local clubs and come as a guest. You’ll be hooked. 

2) Study French:

In my youth I attended a French high school in Tel-Aviv and was fluent in the language—I even wrote French poetry. However, I gave myself a virtual lobotomy when I moved to the USA and immersed myself in English.

One day, though, Esther, the protagonist of JERUSALEM MAIDEN ran off to Paris, and I had to follow her. Unlike my many visits to Paris since my youth, this time I had to research libraries and interview historians. Now I make time to recoup my lost French through an online program, Frantastique, that is both humorous and effective. (Try it for a free trial month at any level.)

 

 Thank you again for sharing this publishing journey with me. I hope to see you in any of my upcoming dozens of events, or via Skype at your book group meeting.

Wishing you all a the best,

Talia Carner
www.TaliaCarner.com

P.S.  If you’ve read HOTEL MOSCOW, please post a review on  Amazon or GoodReads. (Even a line or two would suffice--unless, of course, you want to articulate more.)

P.S.S. If you haven't read the novel yet, here are links for both the trade paperback--about $11--or the digital format for under $10.       

"Who are you?" The author of HOTEL MOSCOW reveals

Talia in the IDF

"Who are you?"

Since I am yet to appear in any of my novels, my life and “adventures” often intrigue readers and you?” My background also fascinated Lucette Lagnado (author of the bestselling “The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit,” and a seasoned Wall Street Journal writer) whose probing interview appears in the back of HOTEL MOSCOW. I’ve also published personal essays, which you may read on my website. Each cracks open a window into my own history. (Photo: Talia as a soldier in Israel Defense Force.)

audiences, who ask, “Who are

The highlights of my career?

Chinese abandoned baby found in street

What were the high moments of my career? One event that stands out is my 2007 presentation at the UN on the subject of gendercide in China—the singling out of baby girls for death—the first time in UN history. Since then, unfortunately, my projections about the continued disappearance of girls in China have been proven correct even as China has just announced that it would allow two children per family. Only 1/3 Chinese families are expected to actually have a second child, and girls will still be the unwanted choice. (My UN PowerPoint presentation is available.)

 

NEWS!  

USA Book News announced the 2015 winners--and HOTEL MOSCOW took the prize in the Multicultural category. 

Indeed, the novel combines the harsh realities of Russia during transition from communism and an American woman's view as she visit there but must face her own family legacy.

Democracy or "Cleptocracy?"

We tend to have a romantic notion about the removal of an authoritarian regime, with our hopeful, utopian belief that a nation wakes up the next morning to democracy. How wrong! When laws are erased off the books, a nation wakes up to lawlessness, and the factions that are quick to fill in the void are the most greedy and violent gangs. That’s the backdrop of my novel HOTEL MOSCOW. (This four-minute book trailer shows rare footage of what happened in 1993.) 

My Paris was Attacked  

In my teens, I attended a French high school in Tel-Aviv and was fluent in the language. My Francophile side was abandoned upon my arrival in the USA and the focus on English—until Esther, the protagonist of my previous novel, JERUSALEM MAIDEN, ran off to Paris (supposedly in 1924) and I had to chase after her through the alleys of the Left Bank…. Since then, checking off my bucket list, I’ve spent longer time in Paris, with yet again a fresh view of the city that had once dominated my dreams. (Read my Paris blogs here in April-June 2013)

Great TV interviews:

The end of October has seen new airings of great TV interviews in which I discuss HOTEL MOSCOW, the background and the creative process of creating such a thriller. You may watch The Artists’ Forum here. (Click for additional TV interviews, including Sarder TV about my business life in the 1980s.)

"Talia Tells Tales" blogs are a hit!

   

Did you miss my previous monthly newsletters? If you are already here, scroll up and down and at

least glance at the photos. Judging by the number of hits this blog gets, readers enjoy the behind-the-scene peeks into book publishing.

Skype me!

Now that HOTEL MOSCOW has been out since June, book groups have been selecting it for lively, thought-provoking discussions. Yet, many groups do not realize that they can invite me to join their meeting via Skype. If you are not in a book group, please let your friends who belong to one know about this option. They will thank you.

My words on paper are only marching little ants. You, the reader, give them meaning. I continue to appreciate your great support!

Talia

www.TaliaCarner.com 

P.S.Florida here I come! 

This winter will find me in Florida, with a dozen speaking appearances. I do not do “a reading” (frankly, I find it boring,) but rather tell stories and anecdotes that have inspired my novels and my quest for social justice. Please check the schedule on my website and join me.

  

A Parisian Soirée

Jim Haynes with Author Talia Carner

          Tucked in a Parisian residential is an unkempt garden. Or rather, it is a pathway along the side of a building in which two-storey high windows allow peeks into artists’ ateliers. Just past a shed with boarded windows, one side of the path is planted with fruit trees. Take a few steps onto a narrow brick terrace, and you face the door to Jim’s world.

            Jim’s home is built upon a quirkily impressive history of literature and theater—and his love of people. The home has a kitchen that occupies one-third of the first-floor living area. In that kitchen, every Sunday evening for the past three decades, volunteers cook up a dinner for up to seventy strangers who’ve heard of Jim’s soirées.
             In our American standards—and perhaps in European standards, too—the living room is tiny for such an ambitious hosting. An upholstered bench runs along one wall, supplemented by a couple of chairs. Above them, a long shelf exhibits books by authors close to Jim’s heart.
             The real action of the evening, one soon discovers, is in the people who gather in that room, and by necessity, spill onto the terrace and the garden. A couple of ex-pats who’ve long settled Paris are helping around the party. The rest are either tourists from all corners of the globe seeking the flavor of old literary Paris, or temporary residents of Paris. It is easy to make introductions as one must squeeze close to a dozen people to fetch ice from the only commercial-size appliance in this otherwise modest dwelling that manages to whip up a meal for so many guests. The red and white wine, extracted from the spigots of cardboard pegs, help set the mood.
            I was first handed a bowl with three servings of three totally unidentified food. Each piece or mush challenged me with its different shape and texture, but I failed to guess what it was. Nevertheless, I trusted myself (and Jim) enough, and found the food to be quite tasty—yet still unidentified. Someone said this dish had Asian influence, and I was unable to argue one way or another. The main course was more familiar, though less edible, for the slab of meat that had never suffered the heat of fire or oven was to be consumed with only a fork. I recalled my visit to a French family back in the 1970s, where I was served my first raw meat, but it was eaten at the table, with the benefit of a knife.
            Even though we were all Jim’s guests, in his e-mail he suggested a 30 Euro donation (about $40) per person. He asked that the money be discretely placed in a recycled envelope, while Jim, sitting high on a stool at the back of the room, welcomed every person and ticked them off his list, noting the envelopes. One guest speculated that the octogenarian Jim landed a weekly income, cashing in on his long reputation and the media exposure his evenings had received. Totally legitimate in my mind—and well worth it. I found myself engaged in interesting conversations: An Australian duo of a mother-daughter visiting Paris; a Minnesota couple on a tour of Parisian most notable gardens (Jim’s is not on the list;) a mixed Caucasian and Black American couple that had inherited an apartment in Paris; a French web designer practicing his English; a retired architect with set views about the many countries in which he had worked.
            There is no secret to a successful Parisian evening: Put dozens of strangers who enjoy travel and meeting other people in a room with a garden, feed them, pour them wine, and let them start talking.
                       

More about Jim Haynes: http://www.jim-haynes.com/

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New-York-based novelist Talia Carner's explores the world's social issues. See www.TaliaCarner.com
           
            

The Allure Of A First Love

       

            What had attracted me, at age fourteen, to choose a long daily commute to a high school far from my home, when I could have attended a similarly high academic school merely two blocks away?
            French. Having mastered basic conversational English, I was ready for the challenge of taking a second foreign language. I also loved the new, spacious building of the new school in the outskirts of the city, so unlike the crammed classrooms in the center city of Tel-Aviv where I lived.
            We, the student body of Alliance Française, soon became Francophiles. We loved the language and the music of it. We staged plays in French, sang songs in French, and cursed each other in French. As a romantic teenager with three languages at my disposal, I wrote poetry in French.
            Fast forward, in my twenties, I moved to the United States and found myself immersed in the language and culture of my adoptive land. I soon entered the corporate world, where I never encountered Israelis or French, for that matter. In the early 1980s, it was a world of white American men, and I was a woman breaking the glass ceiling while raising a family in secrecy, because my boss told me, “We don’t hire women with children.”
            Many years later, in 2005, I was deep into a second career as a novelist, in English, when my protagonist took off from Jaffa to Paris. I had not planned that move as I was writing Jerusalem Maiden. What was she doing there? I had to follow her.
            In the two weeks between Esther’s fleeing to Paris and my arrival to discover her whereabouts, I bought a French dictionary. For the first time in decades, I knew, I had to use the language. I reflected on all my visits over thirty years to France with my American husband, where I acted like an American tourist, never using the language in which I had once been fluent. I never even asked a waiter, in French, for a glass of water….
            Now I followed Esther in Paris of 1924, and realized it had been the avant-garde era. What was Jewish life here between World War I and II? I found myself at libraries poring over tomes of material, in French. For the first time in decades, I actually spoke French with art mavens and historians. I was surprised at how much of the language I had retained, and disappointed at how much of it I had forgotten.
            This is when, seeing the city through the eyes of my protagonist, living there, that I made Paris my own.
            But there was no time to reflect on any of it. I had a novel to finish and a life to live in New York.
            In 2009, I reconnected via Facebook with a woman who had attended my French high school. Our lives had intersected many times, starting even before our births, when our respective grandfathers had been business partners. She still lived in Israel, but in recent years had purchased a magnificent apartment in Paris. I was delighted when she invited me to stop there on my way from Tel-Aviv to New York.
            The weekend I visited, I accompanied her to a day-long party at close friends’ castle. The family welcomed me warmly, and for the first time in so many years I actually had long, social conversations in my no-longer-good French.
            The following summer, while waiting for Jerusalem Maiden to be published, I decided to trace the history of a painting that had been in my family since the mid 1930s. It had belonged to the grandparents of a pair of cousins, a brother and a younger sister, each of whom I had met only once, in our youth. I found them both living in two areas in France, married to French-only speaking spouses.
            The bond was instantaneous, starting with the one hour and forty-five minute phone conversation with the sister, and followed by an hour-long conversation a week later with the brother, who then put his Swiss-French wife on the phone. Turned out that while they had not been on my radar screen all those years, they were up-to-date on my life.
            Since my husband had to be in Europe for a meeting in November 2010, we all decided to meet in Paris. The three couples spent four glorious days together, and although my husband speaks only English, he got along extremely well with the French-only speaking spouses. And I had to chat with them from morning to night, filling all the blanks of our lives. I managed well enough to speak, but was fully aware of how poor was my language level.
            In 2012, in the midst of an extensive two-year book tour for Jerusalem Maiden, I had a conversation with a young man in New York who was on remission from cancer.
            He asked me, “If you had one year to live, what would you do?”
            “I’d eat chocolate,” I said.
            He looked at me with astonishment. “That’s it? You’ve done everything, you’ve been everywhere?”
I gave a humble nod, “Yes.”
            Back home, I thought that my response had been pathetic. I no longer had dreams. Had there been something I ever wanted and simply suppressed?
            Yes.
            Back in high school, I had dreamed to one day take a semester at the Sorbonne in Civilization Française. But after a two-year service in the Israel Defense Force, I had to rush my university studies along.
Suddenly, this old dream began to bloom. Studying in Paris had been the only thing I had once desired strongly, yet never fulfilled.
            There were two issues with reviving this dream: First, I did not wish to uproot my life for a whole semester. The other was that the student body, which had so appealed to me when I was fifteen and sixteen, was still made of twenty-year-olds….
            I broached the subject with my husband and asked it as a birthday present—not the funding as the time off to do something he had no interest in sharing. I coached my request for only one month, and, thanks to the internet, was able to stitch together a full day program of language and culture immersion.
            April 2013 was my debut month, the first time ever to be on my own, (an experience that I chronicled in a series of blogs.) When Ron visited for a few days, a visit that cut on my language immersion, I asked him “to try to incorporate Paris into our life.”
            “I am not saying ‘No’” he replied.
            And so, today, a year later, we arrived in Paris for four weeks, this time with the idea of feeling the pulse of life here. My French is improved, and although I had not reached the level of my post high-school years, I will take only a few classes. I’ve been learning some slang; even though I will not use it, I must understand it.
            At dinner at a sidewalk café, we chatted with a couple from Bordeaux. The wife commented on my excellent vocabulary, and when I expressed astonishment, she said that all I needed was the proficiency of speed. Luckily, she hasn’t seen my writing samples.
            As Ron and I are settling in the apartment we’ve rented in the heart of the historic Saint Germaine area, I am feeling the return of that first blush, of first love, and I feel happy about somehow living a version of my youthful dream.
            Stay tuned.

 (To read previous Paris posts, please click  )

Diet Aids and Pickpockets

Full moon over Pont Neuf as viewed at a"Full Moon" party

 

            What is French women’s secret to maintaining their svelte figures? It must be that potion whose magic of melting fat happens from just two sips, or that body-shaper that evaporates fat. Or could it be that pill or chocolate bar that make a whole female population lose four dress sizes in seconds? Illustrations and testimonies accompany these claims galore made on TV. The French don’t seem to have heard about “truth in advertising”—and for that matter, neither is tort law noticeable here, as witnessed by rickety staircases, broken sidewalks and teetering window planters. One windy morning, my friend was hit on the head by concrete debris that flew from the top of St. Sulpice church, restored a couple of years ago. The stone left a bump, but luckily did not knock her out….

            If high-end style has made French famous, the focus is not consumer oriented as we know it in the States. This shift in focus, this off-perspective that celebrates the decrepit and keeps the new off stage, is what makes Paris. Whole blocks around my apartment, which is adjacent to the Sorbonne, are overflowing with book stores. New books, literary works, used paperbacks, old manuscripts, science and liturgy tomes remind me that not only the literary world is alive and pulsating with accumulated and new knowledge, (albeit in elusive French,) but that the digital age has not swallowed it all up into its carnivorous belly—or onto its endless open clouds. My Metro station, which serves the Sorbonne, is decorated with mosaic signatures of writers, philosophers, poets and scientists.

 

            The patina of Paris is not wearing off. But life begins to bleed into the surface when charm becomes routine, when the paths I take each morning to class are not viewed with the newness of first blush. Like old love, it is there, always present, permitting me bit by bit to take some of it for granted. But then there is the surprise of discovery: Friday afternoon, instead of a classroom French lesson, the teacher—a lovely and smart young Frenchwoman—took us on a stroll of the Latin Quarter. And right there, merely a few blocks behind my apartment, I found an exotic neighborhood, hidden plazas, and charming alleys whose ancient walls buckled outward over cobblestoned pavement.

            Last Saturday morning, when Ron was here, we witnessed three separate events of potential pickpocketing, two of which were directed toward me. In one such incident on the Metro, a pretty young couple began to fight, she claiming he’d pushed her, he denied. The French student in me listened to the quick language, as I often do when trying to decipher the locals’ fast-tongue exchanges. The novelist in me heard a stilted dialogue that made me perplexed rather than suspicious that the incident was actually a planned distraction while someone tried to put his hand in my handbag. (It was zippered, but had an open side-pocket.) A passenger noticed, yelled, and the man ferreted away. In a second case, Ron was the one to notice a small man following me closely to peek into the same handbag. In a third case, we approached an ATM when we saw the customer at the machine being accosted by two clean-shaven travelers with backpacks, men I would not have suspected and might have been the one to get accosted (which is why I never use outside ATM machines in the USA.)

            Yet this past weekend, perhaps because of my being oblivious, still deliriously drunk on the notion of being in Paris, nothing like this has taken place. Starting at the Bastille, I walked along the gentrified canal St. Martin in the eastern part of Paris, a part of the 130 km waterway system. With trees shadowing the water, foot bridges, walkways and small parks, this was a fascinating place to stop for a Sunday brunch at the historical Hotel du Nord which is to Paris what the American Hotel is to Sag Harbor—except that here history is measured in centuries, not decades.

            In another memorable evening last week, I was invited to a “Full Moon” party, at the Pont des Arts. (That’s a pedestrian bridge where thousands of lovers have place locks on the chain-link railing and threw the keys into the water.) As the moon rose over Pont Neuf across from us, we drank wine, nibbled at the assorted covered dishes brought by the group members—mostly expats and their visiting friends—and listened to the many guitars and singers among the other groups spread all over the bridge.

            And I thought of Ernest Hemingway’s words that “Paris is a moveable feast.”

 

 

           

           

Paris, here I come!

             In my four years at Alliance Française, a French-language high school in Tel-Aviv, we all became Francophiles. We belted out French songs, staged school plays in French—and cursed in French. A romantic teenager with three language at my disposal and a flare for writing, I penned poetry in French.

            The summer after our junior year, a selected group of students was sent to France on a month-long mission, which included almost three weeks in Paris. That memorable first trip turned up decades later as the seed of inspiration for my novel JERUSALEM MAIDEN.

            Somewhere along the journey into French language and culture, a dream sprouted: one day I would spend a semester at the famous Sorbonne university in Paris, where I would study Civilisation Française.

            Life, though, had its own agenda, and the dream never materialized. And while in the decades that followed I visited Paris numerous times, I put behind not only that youthful fantasy, but also the language I had once loved. In my twenties, I moved to New York, made English my daily language—and soon the language of my career, first in business, and then in the literary world. When my American husband and I traveled through France, I acted in restaurants and stores as an American tourist that did not even speak French. The Francophile part of my life was erased.

            And then, in 2005, while penning a novel set in Jerusalem, my protagonist surprised me and took off to Paris. Only after I packed my bags and chased her there did I realize that unbeknown to me, the author, her move had been motivated by my very first school trip in the 1960s. It was then that I had imagined my grandmother—the inspiration for JERUSALEM MAIDEN—as an artist there during the avant-garde era.

            What did I know about Paris at that historical time? In the two weeks prior to leaving home to follow my protagonist, I trained my oral muscles and grey cells with verb conjugations and nuanced pronunciation. My husband was amused when I walked around the house mouthing forgotten words and phrases. 

            In Paris, for the first time in decades, I spoke the language as I became a flaneuse, a wanderer, now exploring the city though the eyes of my protagonist in 1924, at a time when most houses had no running water, few had electricity or gas lines, and sanitation services were provided by the slop wagon into which residents emptied their chamber pots. I sat at dusty libraries and leafed through tomes of history—in French.

            In 2010, when JERUSALEM MAIDEN was preparing for publication by HarperCollins, I set out on another project, investigating the history of a painting that had been in my family. I grew up with this museum-size canvas and was so attached to it that after my sister inherited it I commissioned an artist to copy it. Now I contacted long lost cousins, a brother and a sister whom I had met only once forty years earlier, and whose grandparents had originally purchased this painting. Raised in Germany, the brother and sister—now with their respective spouses—lived in different parts of France. The first phone conversation with the sister turned into an almost two-hours long chat. A week later I spoke with her brother, and after forty delightful minutes, he put his French-speaking wife on the phone. Like the others, she was warm and delighted at the renewed contact.

            Three months later, my husband and I piggy-backed a trip to Europe with a get-together in Paris with these cousins. The three couples spent fabulous four days, where we bonded beautifully. Since both my cousins’ spouses spoke no English, I chatted in French from morning to night. My husband, who spoke only English showed the best of his bonhomie self. Although my grammar was far from perfect, it was clear that it was intuitively ingrained, as only someone who had once been fluent in the language could have mastered.

            A year ago, in the spring of 2012, Ron and I visited each of the cousins in their respective hometown, where again I spoke only French. Soon, I was flooded with memories of my high school years when the language and its cultural nuances had meant so much to me.

            This past Fall, at a conversation with a young man who was on remission from cancer, he brought up the question of a bucket list. “What would you do if you had only one year to live?” he asked.

            After some thought, I replied, “I’ll eat chocolate.”

            He burst out laughing. “That’s it? You’ve done and seen everything? I haven’t even been to California!”

            Later, I reflected on my pathetically short wish list. Had I really accomplished everything I could ever dream of? Or did I not dare dream outside the obvious, beyond what was available to me?

            My old desire to spend a semester in the Sorbonne popped in my head. At this time in my life, nothing held me back from making it happen: I had the financial means, my children were emancipated adults, my husband a busy independent man. Besides being French-challenged, he had always enjoyed Paris for just a few days at a time. On the other hand, he always supported my interests. With his unending encouragement, I had blossomed.

The first problem I encountered was that the student body at the Sorbonne that had once been so appealing, hadn't changed: they were still twenty year olds. And a semester was too long to tear myself from my life.  

I approached my husband with the request of a birthday gift of only one month in which I would tailor my own language and culture program. Sure enough, a quick Google search brought up language immersion classes for business executives, presumably in their 40s rather than in their 20s. I discovered groups of expat writers that conducted French conversations, and I signed up for lectures about art and theater along with architectural walks. I would take my exercise and dance classes in French and would even play Mah-Jongg in French.

There was a moment—turned into hours--in which I panicked.

In today’s world of Internet, I could view photographs of each furnished apartment from every possible angel. It would be my home for the month, a place to cocoon alone. But that’s when reality hit me. I had never been alone! Even in the solitude of writing, Ron had always been in the background. After thirty-five years together, I was accustomed to his ever-present care and friendship. Since he struggled with the same separation anxiety, I had to keep my bravado. I forged on with my plan--or my bucket list would once again be reduced to only one thing: chocolate….

I will be leaving for Paris in 8 days. Stay tuned.

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Novelist Talia Carner lives in New York. Her latest novel, JERUSALEM MAIDEN (HarperCollins, 2011) deals with the struggle between freedom and faith. (www.TaliaCarner.com)