 |
I SIGNED MY CONTRACT!
Here’s photographic evidence. That’s me in my James and the Giant Peach Sweatshirt, and there is my contract. And, if you look very closely, you’ll see that the pen I’m using to sign the contract is a gorgeous carved wood creation given to me as a gift by my friends Jana, Colleen, Wendy, and Elly (otherwise known as the bombshellers, for reasons best left by the wayside) on the occasion of selling the book. It’s a gorgeous pen that I hope will be used to sign many contracts. Thanks again girls!
Well, it’s offical. Can’t take it back now, Mr. Applebaum! Mwahahahaha…. Just kidding.
Sorry for the delay, folks. Okay, more about my trip. There were five boats on the water in our group, one giant, red “sweep boat” used for all of our supplies, four smaller, green, “oar boats” in which the guests could sit and watch the scenery go by as attractive, muscled young men rowed them through the river (“Scenery? What scenery?” — more on that later) and one very small, yellow “paddle boat” which because of it’s diminuitive size and inexperienced paddlers (read: us) tended to take the rapids at a much more exciting clip. After the first day, when I realized I’d be getting wet (read: cold) anyway, I might as well be on the paddle boat, where at least I’d be moving and thus, warming myself up. In the picture, you can see me and my cookie-monster coat smiling third from the right (click on the picture for a bigger version.
Of course, that was before the rapids. Once you hit the rapids, all bets are off. The paddle boat is always manned by one of the aforementioned attractive young river guides (more on them later) who has a larger, rudder-like paddle, sits in the back, and spends most of his time yelling at the paddlers thusly: “All Forward! All Back! Right Forward, Left Back! All Back hard! Come on, guys, All back hard! Shit!” in a desperate, usually futile attempt to make us a) listen, b) work, and c) not tip over. On this day (which note, is a different day than the above picture) our boat was manned by Ty, the most recently-minted of the attractive young river guides (don’t give me grief, people, he was 18!) who unfortunately also had a cold, and was losing his voice, so often “All Back” just didn’t have the carry it needed to be heard over the rushing sound of whitewater. I don’t remember precisely what happened. I do know we got caught in a hydro (water rushing over rock) going backwards, and we were all paddling, but began to tip backwards. I saw feet rushing towards my face. I think they were my own…
Things happened pretty quickly after that. I do remember being in the water, holding onto the boat and the paddle for dear life, and trying to climb back in, but not being able to get any leverage or help getting back in because the person closest to me weighed about 60 pounds and no one could move him out of hte way to pull me back in. I was terrified of banging into a rock. My uncle describes the scene:
Your feet went up over your head and you did a backflip — but I’ll never forget, you grabbed onto the lifeline [the safety line surrounding the boat] before you even hit that water.
Obviously, my instincts were entirely focused on NOT getting wet. I don’t remember being mostly in the boat. I do remember my feet floating out behind me, so that can’t have entirely been right. However, the fact remains that when I finally did get back in the boat (with the assistance of a bariatric surgeon and a young poultry farmer who I landed on top of in a very romantic-comedy cute-meet fashion), I was only wet up to my waist. Cookie-monster was pretty dry.
Amazing, huh? I was however, slightly bruised (and still am! Do you think I should get an X-ray and see if I cracked a rib?)
My first concern as I packed for my trip down the Middle Fork of the Salmon River was how I was to remain warm. I packed fleece-lined pants, fleece, fleece tops, raingear, long underwear, gloves, hats, fleece socks, and a wetsuit. As you may recall, I was just getting over a really bad cold (read: I still had it) and the last thing in the world I wanted was to be cold and wet in a tent for a week straight,
Unfortunately, the first thing I discovered when I got off the plane in Boise was that, a lot of the time, people on white water rafting trips in June in Idaho are cold and wet in a tent for a week straight. During one group’s trip the week before, it had been snowing.
Crap. Crap crap crappity crap.
After a night in relatively temperate Boise, we drove out to Stanley, pop. 100, where the biggest claim to fame is the regular honor of being the national “low” — as in, the location of the lowest recorded temperature in the nation. Not upper Alaska. Idaho.
As soon as that big yellow sun went down, we knew it. Even in fleece, fleece lined fleece and fleece lined nylon space-age fleece, my mother and I began shivering. I grew up in Florida. When it comes to cold weather, I’m a wimp. I admit it. I’m a WIMP. (My mother grew up on a mountain in Pennsylvania. I don’t knwo what her excuse is, other than that her blood has thinned from so many years in the sunshine state). Anything below seventy is wool-sweater time for me. (Conversely, I’m wild about humid mid-nineties. Everyone is telling me I’m in for a wretched summer in D.C. I can’t wait.) Anyway, I hope I’ve established how much I did not want to be cold. I was raised hot. I was sick. I was going to do whatever was necessary to stay warm.
Even become a muppet.
As soon as we could excuse ourselves from the intro meeting with the rest of our group, my mother and I proceeded to raid one of Stanley’s (population 100, mind you) TWO outdoor stores. We bought more fleece, thicker fleece, more technologically advanced fleece, fleece that probably never remembered being a Dasani bottle, as it had since become so fluffy and wooly and thick that it probably had an implanted memory of being torn from the hide of a particularly poofy creation of Mr. Jim Henson.
Take for instance, the lovely number I’m wearing above. Is it form fitting? No. Skin bearing? uh-uh (I’ll leave that for the next photo). At all attractive? Not so much. But did it keep me warm? Hell yeah, it was windproof, too. Did it make me want to break out in “Cookie, cookie,” and start teaching little children the advantages of a well-balanced diet? I must admit it did.
Sorry, folks. But if a muppet must die so I do not relapse, I think children might have too much sugar in their diets as is.
I was *so* warm in that thing.
I am back from the Dread Virus, and back from the Wilds of Idaho, where I have spent the past week “floating” the Middle Fork of the Salmon River with my family. I have many pictures. Unfortunately, floating involves a lot of splashing water, thus most of my pictures are on the waterproof 35mm disposable. So I’ll have to get back to you later with those bad boys. I think this will be a week of photoblogging. For now, the first in the series, and possibly my favorite. It is from my first day in Boise, where they REALLY love books.
And they aren’t afraid to punctuate it.
I’m sick. And like most of you can probably guess about someone with my personality, I find this whole thing to be really annoying. Frankly, if we can put a man on the moon, we should be able to overcome some microscopic little bugs.
Of course, in this case it isn’t bugs (i.e. bacteria). I have discovered this through a very scientific method. I have ingested a particularly vigorous antibiotic for the past five days and no change. Ergo, it’s a virus.
I hate viruses. Viruses, to me are the epitome of “the uncanny” as defined by Freud:
When we proceed to review the things, persons, impressions, events and situations which are able to arouse in us a feeling of the uncanny in a particularly forcible and definite form, the first requirement is obviously to select a suitable example to start. Jentsch has taken as a very good instance ‘doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate’
As far as I’m concerned, if I can’t tell whether or not something is a living organism, I don’t want it anywhere near me. Viruses and ventriloquist dummies, that means you.
Because viruses are not “alive,” they cannot be “killed.” (no lectures on the veracity of my biology here, this is a rant, and besides, I was a Geology and Literature major). So what they do, the bastards, is proceed to take up unwelcome residence in your body, trash the place until they get tired, then politely (ha!) retire to some quiet corner of your system where they remain for the rest of your natural life. Like squatters who have found some loophole in the law, they just set up house and stay forever! Don’t talk to me about the good these inactive, inhospitable guests do, how they lend you antibodies to fight off other invaders. Those are the castrated ones, the vaccines, the flu shots. This one is making me feel like crapola, and there’s not a thing I can do, and after his reign of terror is concluded, he thinks he can just sit idly by forever and laugh at this week of pain he put me through, and I’m just going to take it because now he’s made me “immune” to the next silly cold that comes down the pike?
Fuck him!
Anyway, so I was feeling worse and worse all week, and beginning to suspect that I was not, in fact, suffering from strep throat, as I’d suspected. SO yesterday, I took off work and went tot he doctor, who took some blood and decided to do a mono test. Let me repeat that for those of you in the back. Mono. Test.
“But I can’t afford to have mono!” I explained in what I hoped sounded at least a moderately reasonable tone. “I’m a novelist and my first book is due in two months and I really need to be well to finish it.”
This hot young doctor in her bright pink sweater and white miniskirt gave me a look and said, “Who can afford to have mono?” Okay, touche, but I really, really, really can’t be sick right now.
The test isn’t back yet, but right now, she says I’ve got a virus. No shitzu, Sherlock. And that it could last ten days. Ten. Days. Ten days of hacking up mucus, of feeling like my head weighs fifty pounds, of not hearing well, or breathing well, or staying up past seven-thirty or being able to concentrate on anything for more than ten minutes at a time… ugh. I hate being sick!
Curse you, Virus! I hope you get some really crappy apartments in my lymph nodes. Like, some really, really cruddy ones left over from chicken pox or something. And whatever you might be telling yourself, you are NOT welcome here. Hmph.
She totally takes down Curtis Sittenfeld (author of Prep) for bagging on Melissa Banks in the New York Times.
Warning: Don’t drink anything while reading this. Holden Caufiled with blow jobs, indeed…
Once again, I’ll say it. I write chick lit. Still good.
Huh, I guess my jetsetting adventures (and dire illness) weren’t all that interesting after all. Or maybe everyone’s just caught up in the RWA shitstorm (which I’m not really commenting about because plenty of others have it covered, plus I still don’t understand it completely. However, I will posit this question: What about Ann Jacobs’ — a fellow TARA member and an acquaintance of mine — cover does not meet the standards? I don’t see either bare breasts or men’s hands covering bare breasts. Just me.)
Anyhoo, I saw this on Larissa’s blog and though I detest chain letter formats, I thought the actual question was kinda cool, so here it is:
Five Things I Miss From Childhood
1) Making forts out of bedding. When we moved into our new apartment we bought this huge king-sized duvet and I swear, the first thing I thought when I saw it was, “That would make a good roof.” Right now I’m having very vivid fantasies about the removable stiff cushions on my couch. Sailor Boy would probably kill me but I wanna fort.
2. Summers. Summers qua summers. Where they seem to go on forever and you almost can’t remember who you were in May but you weren’t this dark, didn’t have green hair, never thought of getting that scar, couldn’t remember how long you could hold your breath…right now, the summer has just started but all I can think about is August 31st and the thing that’s due on that day. Doesn’t seem so far away.
3. Really believing you could grow up and do anything. I still think I can do a damn lot, but I’m probably not ever going to be a doctor and an astronaut. (No, but you can play one in a book.)
4. Having people over to play. As a writer, I still get to do the whole “make believe” thing, so I’m lucky in that respect, but entertaining tends to be more grown up. They come over to watch a movie, have some drinks, have dinner, chat, maybe, if we’re really creative, play a board game or football. There no “come over and let’s play dress up” days (without the suspicion of weirdo sexual undertones). Kinda sad, really, because I’ve still got the costumes! When I was a kid, I roped my friends and brothers into go along with me. For hours. HOURS. My favorite thing to do as a kid was a) make up stories and b) explore the wilderness. Mostly, I can’t get away with inviting people over for (a) anymore, though (b) works out.
5. Having my mommy tuck me in. Lord, that’s nice. That’s really, really nice.
How about you?
I’m baaaaaaaack!
Okay kiddies, forgive the punch-drunk nature of this post. I’ve got this killer head cold and I’m hopped up on over-the-counters and antibiotics. These are the wages of jet-setting sins, I’m telling you!
Anyway, here’s my fave pic from the weekend (me on the left, my editor Kerri Buckley at right). Folks, you just can’t fake smiles like these. They are 100% pure — the kind of smiles you only see on the cusp of a grand new adventure when the parties involved have spent the afternoon eating tapas and drinking Spanish wine.
Only in New York…
The publisher’s lunch was so much fun! I met Deidre Knight and her fellow agent, Pamela Harty, uptown and we taxi-cabbed down to 17th and Irving, home of Casa Mono, our super-tiny, super-chic lunch spot. Anyone who watches the Food Network will recognize the restaurant’s owner, red-ponytailed Italian chef Mario Battali. We’d no sooner stepped out of the cab than we ran into the Bantam folks, Kerri Buckley and Tracy Devine. Kerri was wearing this fabulous pair of black stilettos that would probably have spelled certain doom for me, but she totally worked the look. Always get an editor with great taste in shoes, I say.
Oh, the food! I think my favorite of the dishes were the sharp-and-sweet goat cheese and punmpkin croquettes, though those of you who know of my love affair with mussels can probably guess I had a weakness for those as well (luckily, the other people at the table pretended not to notice how much I hogged them!). We also had soft-shelled crabs (does anyone else know how you go about eating those things?), artichoke hearts basted with dressing and grilled until almost crispy on the outside, and some lovely roasted duck breast slices with plum and grilled onions. I saved room for dessert, which was a tart lemon sorbet swimming in a sweet desert wine with fresh strawberries.
We talked about everything from plans for my book to the season finale of Lost (Charlie: No you din’nt!) to Deidre’s new shoe obsession. Picture Little Orphan Annie breaking into “I Think I’m Gonna Like It Here” and you’ll get a good idea of my take on the meal. (BTW, for those of you who don’t yet know that Diana’s brain is hardwired to a musical theater soundtrack, here’s your intro. You should have heard the inside of my head after the Maggie Awards. It was all My Fair Lady’s “I Could Have Danced All Night.”) Afterwards, Kerri took me back to Random House and showed me into the belly of the beast, and I left with my arms full of Bantam’s latest releases. Woo hoo! Free books!
I called a friend and agreed to meet her downtown for drinks. As I stepped on the subway, someone grabbed my arm in a crushing, clawlike grip. I was ready to pull my krav maga moves on this subterranean Manhattan mugger and whirled around, only to see this cute Asian girl staring at me with her mouth open. Now, this girl was maybe 100 pouinds (including her waist length hair) so I thought maybe she wasn’t trying to attack me as much as get my attention. Plus, after I blinked through the shock, I realized she was my brother’s girlfriend (hereafter X) of three years, and she was in the city for a summer internship. X didn’t know I was in town, and she was heading home from work to study for her LSATs (which she took today). So, like any kinda sorta almost sister not-really-in-law, I decided to take X out and get her boozed up. After all, if she can’t answer problem-solving questions by know, she’s never going to learn, right? Plus, my friend is a lawyer and I suspected would try to talk X out of heading down this dark path before it was too late and she started slaughtering younglings (I was right).
We had dinner. I felt that it was a perfect end to the evening, since X, who is a junior at an Ivy League U., served as my college girl fact-checker while I was writing my proposal, and my lawyer friend was my first fan and one of my most steadfast supporters.
Fast Forward to Tampa
A short itinerary for Saturday:
7-8 a.m.: rise, dress
8-9 a.m.: drive to TARA meeting
9 a.m.- 5 p.m.: Story Magic (very enlightening, and the TARA girls gave me a bottle of Godiva liqueur to congratulate my sale!)
5 p.m.-7 p.m.: Julie Leto’s launch party for Dirty Little Secrets, complete with cuban food, mojitos and booksignings. Man, this book is fab. Seriously folks, bookstore, now. Go. It’s just that good. Even Mrs. Giggles liked it.
7-8 p.m.: drinks and quickie brainstorming with CP Cheryl while waiting for dinner seating.
8-8:50 p.m.: Super-rushed dinner. Favorite quote (as Japanese chef was playing games with shrimp tails at the hibachi): “Look, if he doesn’t stop fooling around with the food and cook it, I’m leaving!”
8:50-9 p.m.: drove like a madwoman to Brandon.
9-11 p.m.: Secrets cover shoot with Hottie McHotHot curly, raven-haired cover model. With nipple ring. Sigh.
11 p.m.-1 a.m.: begin to realize that my “allergies” are not in fact “allergies,” but wretched debilitating disease that I’ve probably just given to Mr. McHotHot, and that if I want these author photos done, I’d better do them before my glands swell up and I look like a pumpkin. Photog promises to Photoshop the worst of it out.
1 a.m.-rest of trip: decide I want to die/cut out my sinuses with a penknife/buy stock in sudafed/die
And now I’m back, on the aforementioned antibiotics.
And the winner is…
Natalie, for making me snort Vitamin-C and Echinacia Wellness shake up my nose. Unfortuantely, the promo items will be not exactly ready until July, but if you’re patient, I’ll make it worth your while.
Now, about those graphical standards…
Anyone hear the old George Carlin bit about the seven words you can’t say on radio? Interesting that RWA is using a slightly different list than George’s, so that while you can say cock on the radio, you can’t in RWA, and while piss is verboten on the airwaves, splash it all over a romance novel cover.
And I can’t help but feel bad about my friend’s manuscript that takes place on a chicken stud farm. ::vbg:: Can’t wait for the AGM, personally! What a riothouse that place will be!
Off for the weekend to some exciting destinations!
First, I’m headed to my very first publisher’s lunch (woo hoo!) in New York City with my agent and editor.
Then, I’m jet-setting down to Sunny (oh please, oh please, oh please) Florida for a weekend of Story Magic with my TARA sisters (and brother), celebratory champers with my folks, Julie Leto’s Cuban-themed launch party for DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS, and two photo shoots.
I’ll be back with pictures and stories. (And then we can talk about my love/hate relationship with eHarlequin. Mostly love, I swear, Shannon!) In my absence, promise not to singe the corners of the blog with your flames  I’m kind of digging the new green color.
Oh, and I’ve decided to run a contest, to keep things interesting. The person who leaves the most entertaining comment here gets a to-be-determined prize. I’m thinking it will be something (Secret) Society Girl-esque. I feel I must now point out that if you post anonymously, how will I get in touch with you?
I’ll be back Monday. Stay Diverted, folks!
So I finally got my hands on a copy of the latest Romance Writer’s Report (The monthly industry publication put out by RWA), so I could see what all the huhbub was about Jennifer Crusie’s agent recommendations. ::shrug:: To each her own. I have a friend who was insistent upon getting a New York agent too, and now she regrets that she wasn’t more insistent upon getting an agent she actually likes. To each her own. I don’t agree with everything Jenny Crusie says by a long shot (she has a strange prejudice against prologues, epilogues and flashbacks), but she always presents her arguments in a well-researched, academic manner, and I can’t fault her for the fact that academically, we don’t always see eye-to-eye. So that’s fine. Don’t agree with it (my agent has offices in Georgia and L.A. and is doing quite well, thank you very much), but it’s fine.
Frankly, if I was going to be offended by something, it would probably be the interview with Superromance author K.N. Casper. That was, without a doubt, one of the silliest, most sexist, most pointless articles I’ve ever seen the RWR publish. I honestly believe it set the cause of gender equality back a good ten years. It jumped off from the patently false and ridiculous assumption that “it’s weird” for men to write romances and even went so far as to actually say that women are the keepers of emotions and emotional depth and that it must be so difficult for Mr. Casper to access that for his books.
WHAT THE F—?
A few weeks ago, at Romancing the Blog, a lone male writer (William LAmbert) poked his head out from under the covers to comment on this very topic:
Besides which, romances are widely and heartily promoted as books by women for women, along with the supplemental (and I’ve always thought denigrading) illusion that any woman, between diapers and cooking, if she just puts her mind to it, can write a romance. Any book by a man for women goes against those expensively hard-won and long-running promotional campaigns.
Man’s got a point there (and it’s the reason that, even though I’m against this whole “definition of romance” nonsense that RWA is after — um, hello? Romance is between a man and a woman? I know of plenty of romances that aren’t! — I’m also against hte idea of calling it “Women’s Fiction Writers of America” — we write in a genre, not for a gender-specific audience). In this business, he’s had to defend not only his right but also his ability to tell a love story. A love storyt hat, if you are to believe RWA, he always has a fifty percent role in making!
And this is not the first time I’ve seen this opinion expressed as if it was gospel truth. A scant few days ago, there was a conversation on the HQN thread of eHarlequin (always a popular gathering place for the prejudiced and clueless of the romance industry), where an aspiring male writer introduced himself with “Dear Editor, I know it’s weird to think a man could write romance…”
No! No it’s not! Stop saying shit like that! The more you say it, the more idiots like the interviewer of the RWR will believe it and think she can present it as the natural assumption which weary male romance authors will then have to defend themselves against. I can very easily compare this to the bodice-ripper paradigm. People said it so often and for so long that now people and the media think it’s ACCEPTABLE to say it. It’s acceptable to make fun of romance without the slightest reasoning. It’s acceptable to call books with no sign of a bodice, let alone a ripped one, “bodice rippers.” I wrote an artcile about a romance writer back in the day, and my editor put bodice-ripper in the text, because he argued that there was no other way for the standard reader to access what I was talking about. (Oddly enough, the premise of the article is that the just-launched Blaze series was sexier than any Harlequin series that had come before it, so saying that the books weren’t bodice rippers was a little weird.) My friend Kristen Billerbeck writes Christian chick lit set in Silicon Valley and an article about her used the phrase Bodice-ripper as a comparison. That’s about as valid a comparison as if they’d used supernatural horror novels.
So now the poor male romance writers have to first defend their ability to write said novels, then defend the value of the novel itself! DO you see what a horrible situation we’re setting up?
Why in the world would we think that men have any less of a natural ability to read and enjoy a love story? An excessively short (but it gets the job done) list of men who write and have written romance (whether they call it that or not):
The Tony part of Tori Carrington
James Patterson
Nicholas Sparks
William Frickin’ Shakespeare
Now, I will sit back and let you tell me how hard it was for Bill to access the depth of human emotion, since that’s women’s work. No, go ahead, I’ll wait.
Let’s get one thing straight here, one thing that’s way, way, WAY more important than debating whether or not an agent should live in Brooklyn and take the subway to Manhattan every day.
Men and women have equal capacity for artistic and intellectual achievement. Women and men can be rocket scientists and romance writers. Period.
Shame on you, RWR, for publishing sexist nonsense in your magazine as if it was our organization’s official position on the matter. Write on, K.N. Casper.
|
|
|
|
 |
