you<\/em> kill the goose that laid the golden egg?<\/p>\n\u201cI know you\u2019ll be relieved that if I do write another book, he\u2019s not gonna die! Pretty soon, he\u2019s going to be older than I am, so I don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, you\u2019ve been asking me that for a long time, and I\u2019ve been really not knowing whether I\u2019m going to write another book.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo Be Where You Are<\/em> came out in 2017 and then Bathed in Prayer<\/em>. Bathed in Prayer<\/em> was pulled from a lot of other books, so it was not a big writing job to do that.<\/p>\n\u201cI lost my mother in 2016, my wonderful daughter in 2021, my brother in 2022. And I would just say that there was really nothing left in me to write with<\/em>. You know, you\u2019ve gotta have something to write with<\/em>. It\u2019s like the aquifer\u2026. The aquifer is the water supply that runs underground that we don\u2019t see and the little fresh springs pop up all along from that aquifer. So I had no aquifer.<\/p>\n\u201cI made myself start writing again. And it was not a Mitford book. It was an autobiography\u2014something that you all have asked me to do over and over again. And I was really trying, and I was making headway, but it didn\u2019t feel right. Something was missing and I didn\u2019t know what it was. Because if I\u2019m going to write, if I\u2019m going to sit down to a year and half, possibly two years of tedium as well as joy, then I want to have a good time! And yet I was not having a good time.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo I was scrolling through my computer one day through some old stuff that I had written, and one was a short story set in Mitford. 2008 was when I had started it, and I never could figure out what to do with it. This thing\u2014where does it go<\/em>? I couldn\u2019t find a plot line for it. I thought, well, you know, this other book is not working out. Maybe I\u2019ll do this as an exercise. I\u2019ll work on this story as an exercise, and that will sort of get me going again. So I started on that old story, and I realized I was having a good time.<\/p>\n<Note from Mary Jo: Alas, at this point I hit the wrong button on my phone and missed one of the most important things Jan said! However, it\u2019s engraved indelibly on my mind and my heart. She said, \u201cI was laughing, and I was crying, and I was at home in Mitford.\u201d><\/p>\n
\u201cYou know that\u2019s what you do<\/em> when you go to Mitford. So it just felt at home. I just felt like I\u2019m home. I have said three times now that I\u2019m not going to write another Mitford book, and yet, here I am\u2026doing this?<\/p>\n\u201cSo, just for you\u2014and for me, I am currently writing the 15th Mitford novel.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Devoted fans of Jan Karon\u2019s beloved Mitford series always wish for another book, but Jan has long insisted that she has said all she has to say about Mitford. For seven years it looked like To Be Where You Are, published in 2017, would be the end of the story. But on May 18, 2024, … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1170,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,1],"tags":[23,24,37],"class_list":["post-1159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mitford","category-uncategorized","tag-jan-karon","tag-mitford","tag-new-mitford-novel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1159"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1159\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eclectic-bibliophile.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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