It’s Music Weekend here at Novel Novice, a little subset of our National Poetry Month celebration. Yesterday we talked about how music and poetry can be one and the same. And we offered up a creative writing prompt inspired by music, or the lack thereof.
On to today’s topic…
Everyone knows who Adam Lambert is… he’s tough to miss, whether you watched him stun and impress on American Idol, saw him shock viewers with his performance at the American Music Awards, or saw him getting cozy with a snake on the cover of Rolling Stone. This man is a phenom – a talent and a star… and he knows it.
But that’s not the point of this post. This installment isn’t about Adam himself, but how this artist affects others… women in particular. And two fascinating women have put together a book about how this talented young man has put the spark back in their life. On the Meaning of Adam Lambert is a unique compilation of the blog posts and comments that have been featured on the blog of the same name.
You could go so far as to compare the fandom that has built up around Adam to the masses and hordes of people who have fallen in love with Twilight. There’s an undeniable appeal, an impossible-to-resist attraction.
Just what is it about Adam Lambert that makes him so appealing and inspiring to so many women? June Kinoshita (a Harvard-trained scientist who goes by the pseudonym Juneau) and Kath Hollingsworth (a public policy analyst who goes by Xena) do their best to define the undefinable in their book On the Meaning of Adam Lambert.
You might not expect two serious, mature, professional women to be blown away by the influence of one young man… but their shared fascination with this music icon brought them together online and transformed their lives (bet a few of you could say that about this man yourself… and say the same about fictional characters like Edward Cullen). June says:
Life has a way of stuffing you into boxes. I was happy and fulfilled with the roles I was playing, but this Adam experience made me break out of my mold and tap into a creativity and passion I’d kept on tap for years. Honestly, people are envious! We hope our book inspires readers to find their ‘inner-Adams’ and re-ignite their lives.
In On the Meaning of Adam Lambert, June and Kath offer up the chronicles of their obsession with insightful writings that are full of everything from humor to the ridiculous to honest confessions. It’s a tribute to the young muse who helped them find a new spark in their lives. They weren’t looking for anything… they weren’t hoping for anything special… but sometimes it’s the things you least expect that truly end up making all the difference in your life.
Reading On the Meaning of Adam Lambert is like being a fly on the wall in a conversation among impassioned, unfiltered women who share a common love. And that’s just delicious.
Want more? Stay tuned for a post about our latest contest to find out how you can win your own copy of On the Meaning of Adam Lambert!
We want to know, what (or who) is your spark? What/who gets you up in the morning? What/who keeps you going every day? What/who gives you those butterflies in your stomach?
Novel Novice 
Dear Novel Novice,
Thanks for posting about our book! We appreciate it very much! I would like to note that the web postings that the book is based on were made on the Women on the Web (wowOwow) web site, not on our own blog. These posts date from June – September 2009. We extracted the best of our writing from more than 8,000 posts at the time. There are over 22,000 posts on the wowOwow site now. It’s fun to read through them to hear the many voices of readers contributing to an astonishing series of conversations, but this requires more stamina and time than it would take to read all of War and Peace and Moby Dick. Our motivation for editing these posts into a book were to shape a narrative weaving Adam’s journey with our own personal journeys, and to delineate the personas we created online, while retaining the raw and urgent energy of a blog.
Our own blog, On the Meaning of Adam Lambert, was launched in late November, to provide us and our community of readers with a forum to continue thinking, writing and expressing a wide range of ideas inspired by our muse.
Again, thank you so much for letting your readers know about our work!
– Juneau