Stephanie Cowell

I was just telling a friend that it is hard to believe it is less than two years ago that I started the final draft of CLAUDE & CAMILLE which sold six months later. Now almost everyday something else happens in the possibility of a reading or an online review. Everyone at CROWN is wonderful as is my blog tour manager Diane Saarinen. I was working on guest blogs the other night until late and said to my husband, "I want to do this now because I'll be very busy near pub date!" and he said, amazed, "You're GOING to be busy? You're not busy NOW?"

But the main thing for me is a tremendous excitement that I am finally going to get to share these characters, who were of course real people, with many readers. I felt Claude in his 20s so strongly, and his friends Frédéric Bazille and Auguste Renoir and the lovely Camille, and the cheap restaurants they ate in, and all their hopes that someone would one day want their painting. It was so fascinating to make them come alive when they did not know how the story would end for each of them, many years before Claude planted his first flowers in his new home in Giverny.

I am taking this evening to do things but mostly just to be happy.