 |
You know what’s annoying? When you come back from a trip or an event or other occasion in which you take pictures and discover that the pictures that you took are not as good as you thought they were and that you should have taken more/better ones just to be sure.
So tonight I was at the costume party dessert at the New England Conference and everyone looked fab, and most of the pictures came out terribly. In fact, I’m not even going to post them, because I haven’t gotten permission of the people involved whom I, skillful photog that I am, apparently have a knack for capturing while they make the most awkward and unflattering facial expressions. And it’s too bad, because Marley’s Jaqueline Susann and Elizabeth Mahon’s Lady Macbeth were truly stunning. Jennifer O’Connell was there, dressed in a chef outfit as the pastry chef Lauren Gallagher from her book, Dress Rehearsal. Oh dear, my pics are bad. I will no longer be making fun of SB’s photography skills.
The only decent shot was this one: Mari Mancusi as Rayne, the Goth teen, from her book Stake That! (and Boys that Bite and Girls Who Growl) and me as Amy from SSG. Kristin Nelson took the picture, and convinced us to do it “in character” which I think saved the picture. I’m being secretive (the pomegranate martini is key here) and Marianne is doing a dead on adolescent petulant.
You can’t really see my pin, though, or get the full force of the “Bugaboo” t-shirt I’m wearing.
Like I said, how annoying. The party was great, though! So many people were dressed up! In medieval Turkish outfits and Victorian wedding gowns with bustles and regency heroes and vampire slayers and this amazing ghost of a strangled woman with a really well done bruise mark on her throat shaped like a hand. Shocking!
I’ll be back on Monday with a conference re-cap.
Harriet Hellbent is an unpublished writer. She has written her first novel and, having completed it, is trying to figure out how to market it. She has joined all the loops, read all the books, visited all the blogs, paid her dues in all the professional writers’ organizations. She has edited this book to within an inch of its life. She’s taken “perseverance” as her own personal motto. When you look at all the work Harriet has done on this book, you can’t help but be impressed. In her search for an agent, she was relentless, undaunted, hard-working. She exhaustively researched the agents, was not depressed at all when the rejections stacked up, kept going and going and going until 50 or 60 or 112 agent queries later, she finally signed with a well-respected agency. Her new agent starts sending out this first book of Harriet’s, and, being a good agent, she gets quick responses. Of course, they are all passes. They like Harriet’s voice, but the plot doesn’t work for them, or Harriet is writing in a tough genre, or they don’t know if this book would be competitive against similar books currently out. Harriet is frustrated, sure, but remains optimistic. She found an agent, didn’t she? The right publisher is out there for this book of hers. Eventually. It’s been more than two years since you met Harriet, and not once in all this time have you heard her mention another manuscript, or even the idea for another manuscript.
Abigail Aydeedee is an unpublished writer with a heap of industry savvy. She’s been swimming neck deep in this business for most of the last decade. She knows every editor, every agent, all of their tastes. She’s smart, quick on the uptake, and has a natural knack for capturing the vibe of whatever’s “in” at the moment. She can wield a high-concept hook like no other, her gripping query letters invariably lead to breathless requests from even the most hard-to-please agents, and most unpublished writers would kill for her to share the secret of her pitching strategies. Abigail has never written more than fifty pages of a book in her life.
Winifred Waffling is an agented, unpublished writer. She was thrilled to get her agent interested in an early manuscript, but, unfortunately, despite the manuscript’s merits and the agent’s dedicated shopping efforts, it wasn’t picked up. Now, Winifred has a new manuscript that she’s very excited about. The curious thing is that the agent doesn’t seem to share her opinion. It was like pulling teeth to get her agent to look at the work, and when he did, he responded that he didn’t think it was the right choice for her or for the current market. Attempts to get him to elucidate were less than successful. She’s gone on to other projects that he deemed more acceptable, but can’t help casting longing glances at her beloved manuscript.
Olivia Overcommitted is a published writer whom Harriet, Abigail, and Winifred ask for advice. What do you think Olivia should say to each of them?
 I start today with a question:
Why in the world do so many models in bridal magazines have what appears to be severe scoliosis? A typical example, at right. This is an extremely common pose in these magazines. Is it meant to show the back of the dress off? To simulate the bad posture of many young women? Are they in the midst of a dance move with which I am not familiar? Is her bouquet extremely heavy and she has forgotten that all-important lesson our middle-school P.E. teachers taught, “lift from the legs, not from the back?”
Remains a mystery.
Today I am flying to Boston for the New England Romance Writers yearly conference, where my agent, Deidre Knight, my critique partner Marley Gibson, and I will be giving a talk on Networking. (There’s a description of this workshop in the workshop section of my website.) There’s also going to be a costume party, where we are supposed to dress up as either our or our favorite literary figure. Theoretically, I have packed an Amy costume. I still don’t know if I’m going to wear it.
Speaking of my website, it’s been updated! Yay! Check it out: http://dianapeterfreund.com. Excerpt of Under the Rose to come.
I’m also spending the weekend grinding a secret project. Can’t say anything about it yet, but it’s very very cool.
Yesterday, because I’ve been out of town so much, Sailor Boy and I spent the day hanging out with one another, We went hiking, went to lunch, and just had a good time. The weather, for once, is beautiful here in DC. I’m kinda sad to be leaving.
(Because it sucks that we can’t make comments.)
Dear RITA Entrant,
I had heard so much about your book before I got it in my RITA package. Not all of it was good. (Those bloggers can be so harsh.) I actually really enjoyed the book. Your writing is fresh, your premise most imaginative and intriguing, though the plot had me very confused, and you have a a real flair for action sequences, whether we’re talking action or “action.” Seriously hot sex, chica. Believe me, not one of the points I took off had anything to do with me thinking eroticism doesn’t belong in romance. Instead, it was due to the lackluster dialogue and out of left field ending. Still, great job. I’m sorry you didn’t final, but I’ll keep a look out for your books in the future!
Dear RITA Entrant,
I’m so glad to see that you finalled. I really enjoyed your book, which surprised me, because that kind of story isn’t usually my cup of tea. And yet, you won me over with your strong characterizations and storytelling skills. There were a few clunky moments, and I don’t appreciate the use of stereotypes to delineate ethnicity, but overall, a very sweet tale. Best of luck in the finals!
Dear RITA Entrant,
I can’t for the life of me figure out why you did not final in the RITA awards this year. I am overcome with feelings of guilt, as if perhaps the one-tenth of a point I subtracted for your use of a disturbing cliche somehow knocked you out of finalist range. I surely hope not, since your book was one of the most powerful, well written, inventive, and original category romances I’ve read in years. So beautiful. It made me cry, and very few romances have made me cry. I loved it. You were robbed.
Over on the Bookends blog, Jessica Faust is discussing the topic of Resubmissions. This is not revising and resubmitting the same work, but being rejected by an agent or editor, writing a new book, and trying again with that same agent or editor. Jessica says:
a number of my clients were previously rejected, and because of that I know firsthand that a rejection means nothing. Unless I tell you that what you’re writing does not fit the type of books BookEnds represents, then there’s no reason you shouldn’t keep trying, just like there’s no reason I won’t keep trying to sell the work of my clients.
Nothing new to me here. As I have said before on this blog, I was rejected by my now-agent with another book.
What does surprise me, however, is the number of comments on the post suggesting that writers do not realize this is the case. Of the 16 comments not made by Jessica herself on the post, eight of them were from writers who didn’t realize that they could submit again. One writer even went so far as to say:
I am one of those who sees little point in submitting to an agent who has already rejected my work. To me, a rejection means my style is not compatible with what the agency represents.
Actually, it just means that the agent doesn’t think she can sell the book you sent her. I was really surprised to see this opinion coming from this particular writer, who I’ve seen around the blogosphere and who is a fellow columnist at Romancing the Blog. She usually seems so savvy. She went on to say that if the agent ever did hope to see another submission from the rejected writer, she should make sure to write a note about how much she liked the writer’s voice and is looking forward to seeing the next work.
Interesting. What happens if the agent doesn’t like the writer’s voice in that piece? What if it isn’t well-developed, or isn’t well-suited to the material at hand? What if the agent thinks it’s total crap, but the writer then gets it together, has a massive leap forward in craft, and writes something that knocks the agent’s socks off next time? If you go into a clothing store, but don’t see anything that you want to buy during that particular trip, do you avoid that clothing store for all eternity? Or are you back in a few weeks when their spring line comes in? Or do you make a point of going up to the clerk and saying that though you didn’t see anything you wanted to buy this time, you would be happy to come back at a later date because you see a lot of promise in that clothing store.
Come now.
It isn’t an agent’s job to encourage people who aren’t their clients. It isn’t an agent’s job to do anything on a rejection except say “no thanks.” Full disclosure: my rejection from my now-agent did in fact encourage me to send her something else I’d written, but if it hadn’t, I doubt I would have been deterred.
I never thought that a rejection was about me. How could it be? The people involved didn’t even know me. And it was unlikely they’d remember me or the book they rejected when I sent them my next book. Yes, if I sent them a dozen manuscripts and none even inspired cursory interest, I’d think that we probably weren’t a good fit. Or if their rejection letter detailed exactly why we’d never see eye-to-eye about the needs of story, I’d probably cross them off my list. But a “no thanks?” That’s them saying they don’t like that book/don’t think it will sell/don’t think they can sell it/etc. So what do you do? You write the next book.
I wonder if some of this reluctance to retry agents who rejected you is a wounded pride thing. They’ll never ask THAT girl to the prom again. But if I really want a job someplace, I’m going to apply every time a spot comes open.
I wonder if it’s a matter of not wanting to let go of a particular work. That if they eventually sign with an agent for work C, they’ll never be able to sell works A or B. When I signed with my agent, she told me that we could revisit one of my earlier books that she’d considered. It was me that said, “Nah, let’s move forward, not backward.” There are a lot of books that don’t make good first books, but can later be revisited and “fixed.” I have several multi-published friends who are currently writing or have rewritten unpublished novels from early in their career. And there are lots of writers like me, who with 20/20 hindsight, can look back on their earlier books and see why they are better left in the recesses of their hard drives.
But I know that this is basically a useless statement. Agent Kristin Nelson made a comment to this effect several weeks ago and the commenters on her blog said, basically, that if their X number book, on average, was the one that had selling potential, should they just rush through writing all the X-1 books so that they can get to the “selling” one? Ah, wouldn’t that be nice, huh?
When you are writing these books, you have to believe that this massive undertaking has a purpose. No one writes a book thinking “this is my practice book.” Each of the four books I wrote before SSG were books I thought would sell. I finished them, polished them, queried them, sent them out when they were requested, sniffled (and occasionally cried) over the rejections and then, after they’d had a good period of time to sink or swim, I chalked them up as a learning experience and moved on to the next book.
Another commenter on the Bookends blog wrote:
I just had that same experience with a publisher. They didn’t accept my revise and resubmit, but they invited me to send future work. I like them and I will…but is it too much to submit the rejected work somewhere else in the hope it’ll sell? Or just focus on my current WIP?
Well, personally, I wouldn’t give up after just one publisher. (Neither would I be submitting to publishers without an agent, but that’s a whole other issue.) And yet, the agent makes a very good point when she responds with: “if you feel your WIP is much, much stronger and when looking back on the first book truly believe you aren’t going to find someone for it, that it’s not as strong as it needs to be than feel free to put it aside.”
I know that feeling. I wasn’t very far into my second manuscript when I realized that the first one had some fatal flaws. I remember getting the rejection on the partial. I barely even shrugged. I was already onto book three.
Sometimes I hear writers say they know that X book is “The One.” I never had that feeling, or rather, I always had it. Every book was “The One.” I’m not the kind of girl who can devote a year of my life to something that I already know will be a waste of time. And in the end of course, it’s not a waste of time; I got better with every book I wrote.
And yet sometimes, this very thought process paralyzes writers. Writers who never finish or even start a book, determined to have that “perfect” sellable concept before they put in the time of coughing up 400 pages. Writers who query projects that don’t exist so that the subsequent requests will spur them on to write. All well and good if they actually do write the books. But what if they don’t?
This is the kind of behavior that gives rise to that wise old axiom: Writers write. Writers are the ones with manuscripts under their bed or on their hard drive, not the ones with ideas in their heads and query letters in their pockets. Writers write. They don’t necessarily sell.
Stephen King said in his fabulous book On Writing that you should write the rough draft of your book with the door closed. That means you don’t think about your audience, you don’t think about your market, you don’t think about how your mom is going to blush when she reads the scene on page 78 — you think about the story. What the story needs. And then, after it’s written, you revise it with the door open. You think about where the reader will get bored, where you get bored, what the market is going to freak out about, what the audience will expect. But the book has to exist, first.
Writing a book is hard. The first time I went from “Chapter 1″ to “The End” was one of the hardest things I’d ever done, and that was after I took a ridiculous amount of credits and wrote two theses my last semester at college. And now I’ve done it six times, and still every time I start, I wonder if this will be the time that breaks me. So it’s good to believe that it is all worth something. It’s important to believe that.
And it’s also important to understand that, no matter how much we believe that ourselves, no matter how important the book is to us, it’s just a story to someone else. It’s a story for an agent to reject with a form letter, or for a reader to bang against the wall.
When I get a rejection, I am spurred on to do better. Send them my next book with, “oh yeah? Reject this.” And maybe they won’t be able to.
8:00 AM: I (groggy) am dropped off by Sailor Boy (only vaguely less groggy, and thereby qualified to operate a motor vehicle) at the bus station. Pick up my tickets at the Will Call machine.
8:28 AM: Bus arrives. I get in line to board. Smarmy guy behind me points at my ticket and says, “I think you needed to get in the real line and get a boarding number.” Points at his own ticket, which resides in a fancy folder emblazoned with a giant number 23. I smile and say, “Oh, I got mine from Will Call.” Begin looking at other people’s tickets, which all reside in fancy folders with numbers on them. Have never once, in all the times I’ve taken a bus to NYC, gone to the “real line” to get a boarding number. Have never been asked for a boarding number. Begin to get nervous.
8:29 AM: Bus driver comes out and begins to take tickets. Smarmy guy behind me says, “Aren’t you going to board by boarding number?” Bus driver looks sheepish, and says sure he will, gives the people at the front of the line the tickets he already took, and starts out by calling #1. Smarmy guy smarms. I freak out until I notice that on my non-fancy computer printed Will Call machine ticket, it says, “Boarding #19.” Take that, smarm!
8:35 AM: Boarding is taking approximately ten times longer this way, especially given that there are obviously enough seats, and it’s not as if the seats are assigned anyway. At last my number is called, and I get one of the last empty rows.
8:40 AM: At last we are away. I have an empty seat beside me! Joy! I will get to stretch out and nap on the way to NYC! But first, I will finish this chapter I’m reading and eat my breakfast bar.
8:59 AM: As I finish my breakfast bar, this guy appears out of nowhere and asks if he can sit in my seat. I am wondering what seat he was sitting in for the last twenty minutes while the bus was in motion. He promptly plops down besides me and does that guy thing where he spreads his legs into a veritable split. Cramped, I try to make myself comfortable.
11:30 AM: I wake up, and try to divine from glimpses of the road signs where we are. The guy who made me uncomfortable the whole trip up is nowhere to be seen, leaving me to wonder if he was not, perhaps, a hallucination. We pass a sign for the Lincoln Tunnel. Wow, we’re going to be an hour early!
11:35 AM: Bumper-to-bumper traffic. Nix earlier observation.
12:35 PM: Arrive Port Authority. De-bus. Exit. Walk several blocks down 42nd Street, through Times Square, which just gets less enjoyable every time I have to do it, and emerge, victorious and unscathed on the other side near Bryant Park.
12:55 PM: At Bryant Park, two boys from a middle school in the Bronx are doing a video project asking passers-by about eating disorders. I participate.
1:15 PM: Arrive NYPL. Check coat and scarf, which later turns out to be a mistake. Head into bathroom to make myself presentable, which only mildly succeeds (evidence: photos, below, show hair that has clearly been on bus for four and a half hours)
1:17 PM: The glamorous part of the day begins. Yippee!! The Celeste Bartos Forum of the Humanities and Social Sciences Library is quite lovely, all gold marble and glass vaulted ceilings and tiny turn-of-the-century lights that reminded my friend Margaret of a carousel. Lots of people milling about. Our books are all on well-populated tables at the back. I am shelved in a section marked: The A-List: Adult Novels for Teens, along with Jodi Picoult, Marisha Pessl, Curtis Sittenfeld, and fellow Bantam Dell author Sandra Kring (The Book of Bright Ideas). I find my editor, and we find Secret Society Girl, and we gush and get our pictures taken holding the book.
1:30 ish PM: I see someone holding my book open to the back cover flap and pointing at me and then referring to the back cover flap again, so I go up and introduce myself. I am also wearing a name tag that reads: Diana Peterfreund / “Secret Society Girl” which cracks me up because it makes me sound like I am, in fact, a secret society girl. (Though I think I have it better than Patricia McCormick, whose name tag reads “Sold“.) The name tag helps. Anyway, turns out that the people holding my book are all NYPLibrarians who were trying to decide, based on my hair, if I was the girl in the photo. My hair is several inches longer now that it was in the photo, but apparently close enough.
 I get to meet Cara, the librarian who blogged about my book those many moons ago (hi, Cara!) and recommended my book for the list. Cara works at the St. George Staten Island branch of the library, and just opened a teen reading room. If you live in or near Staten Island, I recommend you check it out. I’ve never been in a library with a teen reading room, but the very idea fills the sixteen year old girl living inside me with actual spasms of delight. And, as you may imagine, Cara rocks. We spend a long time discussing YA books, Dartmouth, the audience I intended for my books (“anyone who likes to read about college?”), and how cool libraries are. I give her a pin. She introduces me to some other librarians. Chatting occurs. (Please note how fantastic Cara’s skirt is in the picture to the right. Please also note how very coordinated and brown we are. Aren’t we in sync?)
We interrupt this recap for a worthy aside: I never knew any librarians personally before my book came out, but I have met so many lovely ones in the past year, and yesterday’s events just drove home the point that librarian may be the profession that draws in all the cool kids. Hollywood totally has it wrong about the “librarian” image. More wrong than they do about the “author” image, if that’s possible. Maybe I just hang out with too many lawyers here in D.C., but yesterday I met about a dozen librarians and began to get depressed that I didn’t live in New York so we could exchange phone numbers and get drinks and be buddies.
1:45 ish PM: I meet Delia Sherman, who swears she recognizes me. Later, Scott Westerfeld will propose a theory about how “blog recognition” sometimes crosses over into real life, as Delia and I know each other “virtually” on Justine Larbalestier’s blog. Delia’s book, Changeling, is gorgeous. I need a copy for me and a copy for some lucky ten year old I know. Sandra Kring arrives with her daughter, Shannon Kring Biro, and we chat.
 1:55 PM: I see my friend Margaret, who looks rather fetching in a bright blue coat with her hair all red and not looking like it’s been on a bus for four hours. Margaret agrees to take a picture of me with Fortitude, the lion who has joined us for the festivities, as long as he doesn’t come too close to her. Yes, it was most definitely Fortitude, and not Patience. I know because I asked him. Margaret and I run into Libba Bray. Hi, Libba! Libba is there for moral support. Margaret claims she brought a foam #1 finger. Doesn’t Margaret take a lovely photo? I think I need more pictures of me with giant furry creatures.
2:00 PM: The festivities begin. Sandra Payne, the coordinator for Young Adult services at the NYPL, welcomes us all, and gives away prizes for a high school graphic design award. The runners-up and winner are incredibly talented and stylish young women who are so much more put together than I was at their age. I really wish I took a picture of their designs. The winner’s design is featured on the front cover of this year’s New York Public Library Books For The Teen Age List (this link currently goes to last year’s list).
We interrupt this recap for an amusing aside: After a few glasses of wine, the joke, “I’m on the New York zzzzzzzz List” is surprisingly funny. Without wine, it’s not even the least bit so.
All the authors are named and stand, or at least wave. (Sandra Payne pronounces my name perfectly on the very first try, a feat which always makes me fall just a little bit in love with the person in question.) All the publishers, etc. are asked to stand. All the librarians too. Everyone claps. I am humbled to be included on this list.
One librarian, Jack, introduces Alice Hoffman, who looks exactly like you think Alice Hoffman looks, and is even wearing this glorious flame-colored shawl. Alice Hoffman gives a beautiful, inspiring, and rousing speech about what is is like to write, and to write for Young Adults, and how she was inspired to write her List book Incantation (and tells a story about a taxi driver who may or may not have been there and reminds me of my bus experience that morning which did not, unfortunately, inspire me to write a book about the Spanish Inquistition) and how the most important books she can remember are the books she read as a teen, and everyone in the audience is nodding and it’s all quite fabulous. Unfortunately, I am totally consumed with envy for Alice Hoffman, because she was smart enough to be wearing her shawl, and I checked mine in the coat room, and I’m freezing. So while she is discussing Edward Eager and Wuthering Heights and this hilarious run-in she once had with Hilary Clinton re: Heathcliff, I am wondering if there is any way to a) steal out of the room, grab my shawl/coat and come back, b) steal Alice Hoffman’s shawl without anyone noticing. (There wasn’t, so I didn’t.)
3:45 PM: The formal part of the festivities are over, and we are once again mingling/chatting/etc. I meet Maureen Johnson (hi, Maureen!), whose book, Devilish, is a Faustian yarn, and is thus in the “Do-Over” section of the list reserved for classic tales retold, and some more librarians. I meet Anne from the Tompkins Square branch on the LES and she and I talk about SSG. She’s so funny! She has many theories about the trajectory of Amy’s love life. And, as I pointed out to my editor later, I have no poker face. I think if I were someone who wrote long, drawn-out mystery series, I’d have been made a long time ago.
Reiterate: love librarians.
4:00 PM: My editor, Sandra Kring, Shannon Kring Biro, and I try to find a place to get something to eat. Because it is before 5 PM, this is harder than it looks. Eventually, we stumble into a sort of Irish Pub/tapas bar on 40th St., where we drink wine and talk writing. The Krings are amazing. Shannon is an accomplished cookbook author, and she and her husband, a chef named Marcel Biro, have a chain of restaurants, run a cooking school, and have an award-winning cooking show on PBS. As if that’s not enough, she has a memoir coming out with her sister Natalie Kring next week called Sister Salty, Sister Sweet. (I really wish I had a link to Shannon’s webpage, which features a dancing Ken doll.) I had so much fun talking to them both! If you haven’t read Sandra Kring’s novel, The Book of Bright Ideas, I highly recommend it. It was a Target Book Club pick last year, and is making major waves.
5:30 PM: The Krings go off to live it up in New York. My editor goes to a dinner party. I go to meet Scott Westerfeld, Justine Larbalestier (whose book, Magic’s Child, is out now!), Maureen Johnson, and Cassandra Clare (whose debut, City of Bones, is out now!) at the Campbell Apartments in Grand Central Station. It’s dark and loud and apparently, half the party was not allowed in due to dress code restrictions. (Sorry, Margaret!) There are a lot of writers at that table, but I really only get a chance to chat with Eric Luper, whose first novel Big Slick, about a teen poker whiz, is out from FSG this fall. Hi, Eric!
Eric and Scott help me demonstrate how very dark it was in the Campbell Apts.
7:00 PM: Scott, Justine, Maureen, and I decide to have dinner. Justine has not brought a coat, and practically freezes as we make our way across town to this no-dairy organic place called Josie’s on Third Ave. I give her my shawl, which I did not steal from Alice Hoffman. At dinner, we talk about geekdom, YA books, writing, writing, and schtuff. Maureen and I are disappointed to discover that, despite clearly listing arugula juice as an option on the menu, we can’t actually get a glass of plain arugula juice, which we had made a pact to drink if we could. We must mix it with a more normal sounding juice, such as apple, pear, carrot, tomato, etc. So much for that. However, we do indulge in a five dollar glass of ice tea, which is made with hibiscus and cinnamon, and may in fact have been worth five dollars. I am consumed with envy for Justine and Scott and Maureen, who, from all accounts, seem to get to have dinners like this with other writers all the time. (And yes, I know I had lunch with Justine just last week, but it was the first time since, like, June.)
8:30 PM: I hop in a cab and go to Port Authority
8:48 PM: Cab is stopped in traffic in Times Square. I start to get nervous.
8:50 PM: I don’t get the etiquette of cabs. If I can walk quicker, should I just get out?
8:51 PM: Screw it. I get out, and walk to Port Authority.
8:52 PM: I buy a totally unnecessary magazine to read on the way back to D.C. It turns out that the bus driver doesn’t even turn on the personal booklights over each seat, so I couldn’t have read if I wanted to.
8:54 PM: I arrive at my gate, and am given a “you were almost late” look by the ticket taker. No one notices my boarding number. I get on the bus to discover that, joy of joys, the back seat (three across) is totally free. I proceed to spread out in hopes that no one will arrive after me and that this morning’s mysterious disappearing passenger won’t reappear. When the bus starts, I realize why that spot is open. There’s this huge bright blue emergency light over my seat. Also, the back of the bus is a good fifteen degrees colder than the front. I spend the next three and a half hours trying to find the most comfortable way to cover my entire body with my coat and my face with the shawl I didn’t steal from Alice Hoffman so as to block out the big blue light.
1:00 AM: Sailor Boy arrives in Nikita (who totally needs a wash, not to mention an oil change) to pick me up. Ah, SB, how I love thee. Ah, Nikita, you’re the coolest.
Except for librarians.
And I do mean whirlwind. Up, NYPL, maybe dinner with some peeps, and then back to D.C. tonight. Because that’s just how I roll.
And of course, just my luck, today is the one day of the week with no 8 a.m. bus to Manhattan, and crappy weather. Woo hoo! This is going to rock.
Actually, I’m quite sure it will rock, once I get to the NYPL. I’ll let you all know how it goes!
Justine, never one to shy away from the Big Questions in Life, asks:
If you could only choose one which would you choose: the publishing house with a wonderful editor who brings out the best in you, or the house with fabulous publicity, marketing and sales departments?
And then the opinions pour in. From editors, some of whom said “publicity,” having felt the sting of editing wonderful books that died on the vine; from writers who longed for that genius revision letter, and others.
Best quote in the discussion was from Doselle Young, who said:
If you want great publicity, just leave copies of your book at the scenes of violent crimes with your key passages of sex and violence underlined. That’ll pretty much always work.
As a conspiracy theorist by trade, I must say, I adore this idea. If only I weren’t so adverse to hanging out with serial killers (except for maybe Sylar. I don’t have special powers to entice him to eat my brains, and he’s so cute).
So, let’s play a game. Say you are going to leave a copy of Secret Society Girl at the scene of a crime. What kind of crime would you choose? What key passages would you underline as potential clues for the media to pounce upon?
I’m thinking a probably a museum heist of some sort. And probably the bit on page 133 about what kind of stuff Rose & Grave has hidden in their tombs.
Anyone else have an idea? Best entry wins a prize, TBD by Sailor Boy. Leave your comments here.
I heard something really disturbing yesterday. They want to cancel Veronica Mars. Either that, or fast forward it to four years in the future to when Veronica is at FBI school, with none of the cast members except for Veronica. Or maybe that last bit is just about the trailer.
Actually, maybe it isn’t so disturbing. After all, right now, VM is pretty much pointless. All of the things that made the first season so exquisitely Heathers-meets-Chinatown is gone now. Logan is toothless; the other secondaries are given silly scavenger hunts that have nothing to do with the story and doesn’t have any bearing on their lives in order to fill up their contractually obligated screentime. This part in her life has no angst or drama to it. Which you know, not so bad. She needs a little down time after the past three years of her life (including the one before the show started where her best friend was murdered and she was raped and her mom left her dad and her dad lost her job and was a national laughingstock but she stuck by him even though it meant total social ostracization). So maybe Rob Thomas has a good idea.
So here we are in the future. V is an up-and-coming FBI hopeful, when suddenly, she’s called back to Neptune because her dad, the sheriff… what? Is he murdered? That could be cool. And it wouldn’t be like Keith was getting less screentime. After all, Lilly started out the show murdered and she was in a ton of episodes (and stole every one of her flashback-lighted scenes). And maybe Logan could be a suspect. Talk about angst! Or maybe Logan marries Parker and then Parker is murdered and Logan is a grieving (or is he?) widower and Veronica’s father once again is the lone voice of reason in a world crying out for another Echolls’s head and Keith loses his job again and Veronica has to step in…
Yeah. That could be cool. Much cooler than anything going on now. Because while I will say that the first season of VM might be the best single season of television I’ve ever seen anywhere ever, the second was only decent, and this one basically sucks. Spinning wheels. They seem to have no idea what to do with themselves. I’m feeling none of the dramatic tension I got in the first season. I don’t think I’d be unhappy if it was canceled. After all, I have my DVD of Season 1, which I will watch over and over and over again.
So that’s my news. Oh, and that Heroes is apparently not necessarily picking up any of the same storylines from the first season for Season 2. that’s right, folks; I’m here for all of your television gossip.
Okay, I’ve been thinking a lot about the fashion discussion sparked in the last post, and I just wanted to clarify a few points.
True: If I find I tend to like a certain designer, I will seek out his/her clothes, and be happy/excited when a shop employee brings them to me. (Example: I recently bought a dress by David Meister. I bought it because it looked fantastic. I will, in the future, make a point of going to the David Meister rack in stores.)
True: If a shop employee (read: expert in the industry) finds out that I like the clothes by Designer A, and tells me that Designers B, C, and D have very similar styles, I will be very happy to seek out and be brought clothes by B, C, and D.
True: This also goes for friends whose fashion advice I trust.
False: I will be impressed by clothes I do not like simply because they are by Designer A.
True: If I tend to like the fashion worn by a particular celebrity, I will be inclined to seek out a designer favored by that celebrity.
True: If I tell a shop employee that I loved what a particular celebrity wore on a particular occasion, and she tells me it was by Designer A, I will be interested in trying on Designer A’s clothing.
False: I will be impressed by a designer simply because they are favored by a celebrity, any celebrity.
False: I will be impressed a designer because I am told that a celebrity’s trophy wife whom I have never seen likes that designer.
True: I will be impressed by a designer if I find his/her clothing to be beautiful, comfortable, well-made, and looks good on me.
And this really goes for everything — books, movies, restaurants, hotels, travel destinations, tattoo artists… not that I have a tattoo. I’m not going to like a book just because someone tells me it’s a bestseller, or that Posh Spice really liked it. Are you?
________________________________
|
|
|
|
 |
