PNBA Day Two & Day Three: From Book Heaven into Book Hell

October 16th, 2011

PNBA Day Two:

It was all about the trade show floor.  It seemed as though every publisher had young adult paranormal and science fiction out.  Not only am I a fan of this genre, but so is my sister and my bff Jenn.  (I’m home and have separated out their books into piles: “Jenn,” “Karyn,” & “Books I have to read before passing them on to Jenn & Karyn.”  I have two weeks to get through the four books in the latter catagory.)

The trade show floor was the beginning of my descent into Book Hell.  Whatever it was that I didn’t want to break in my brain, well, it broke.  I did stick to my general list, I had circled 54 books in the program and came home with 55, but I think it still might be too much.  I just know so many voracious readers.  That’s it!  I can blame you!  Jenn, Karyn, Mom, Dad.  It’s all YOUR fault I had to check two bags and lug around another carry on and strain my shoulders and over-extend my wrists.  (Get a fuckin’ TV whydontcha?)

Out of the fourteen books I kept for myself and nick, I’ve finished one: Glaciers by Alexis M. Smith.  (I also read several other books that I’m passing on.)  I really loved this book.  However, I have a problem.  I seem to always select books that are going to make me tear up on airplane rides.  Seriously, this book was beautiful.  The story of an unrequited love between a librarian and a soldier, paralleled to the protagonist’s memories of growing up in Alaska and moving outside.  It was a gorgeous story.  It comes out in January 2012.

Another of my favorites is a middle-grade read: Stealing Magic: a Sixty-Eight Rooms Adventure by Marianne Malone.  Much of it takes place in the Art Institute of Chicago’s Thorne Rooms, the miniature rooms.  (They’re one of my favorite exhibits.)  Ruthie and her friend Jack get shrunk down and have adventures and solve mysteries inside the rooms, which are gateways to the past.  When I was a kid I used to love the idea of exploring those tiny spaces and Ms. Malone has really captured this childhood dream of mine in a very special way.  I’m giving it to Karyn so that she can read it to Sammy.  It, like Glaciers, comes out in January 2012.

I was Vernor Vinge’s escort and helper for the Author Feast Friday night.  (As he would say: Vinge rhymes with ‘Stingy,’ just in case you were wondering how it’s ‘really’ pronounced.)  I got a personalized copy of Children of the Sky, the sequel to 1992’s Fire Upon the Deep.  I can’t wait to read it, but unfortuantely it is going to have to wait until I get through the books for Karyn and Jenn.

PNBA Day Three:

Truly in Book Hell.  I had to save room in my luggage for the children’s picture books on Saturday.  I can’t go home without some shwag for Sammy, and really, and the majority of the children’s authors were presenting at lunch.  So I got my books and hurried back to my room to rearrange my bags and check out.

Peggy, my MPS rep who is Awesome, gave me a large, messenger-style reusable bag on Saturday morning for all my books.  It didn’t have a closure, so I was going to use it as my carry-on.

It contained three books: Stealing Magic, Glaciers, and How Georgia Became O’Keefe (by Karen Karbo, November 2011, a small-ish book that I didn’t quite finish on the plane).  It also had my laptop and wallet and snaks.

Then there was my large messenger bag, stuffed full of books.  I forgot that it contained my ipod.  I checked it with the airline and forgot that it had my ipod in it.  I had to fly all the way home with no music & no movies.  Tragedy.

My red suitcase was filled to bursting with the rest of the books.  It was over-weight and They made me take out three heavy books and put them in my carry on.

Book Hell is lugging a fifty-eight-pound roller suitcase along with one thirty-pound messenger bag and another fifteen or twenty in a second messenger bag.  I got them home okay.  Only about a quarter of them are for me.  The other ones, currently in Book Pergatory are going back in to the suitcase to be brought to Chicago.  On second thought, lugging them a second time would just be a return to Book Hell.  I think I’ll mail them.

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PNBA Day 1

October 13th, 2011

The first day of the trade show was eventful. The presenter for the first morning session I attended failed to show up. Instead of leaving, the group of us that were there all sat around and talked.

I met Eowyn Ivey, another Alaskan bookseller whose new book Snow Child is coming out in February. It’s a retelling of a folktale in which a man and woman make a child out of snow and it comes to life. Her version takes place in the Alaskan wilderness. I can’t wait to get my hands on a copy, but I don’t have to wait too long, as she’s a presenter at the Feast of Authors tomorrow night.

I asked her about her query letter (queries & pitches are what have been on my mind since I’m so close to finishing Strange Essence). I’ve been wondering how much I should stress my bookseller experience in the industry. Lucky gal, she pitched her book face-to-face with an agent at a conference and didn’t have to go the query letter route! Hello, jealousy! I am thinking that I should check out the Kachemak Bay Writers Conference next year…

Also in the group was Kelly Jones, author of The Woman Who Heard Color. Her book is about a modern artist in pre-WWII Germany as Hitler is coming into power. It sounds fascinating. I’ll be grabbing a copy at tonight’s Nightcapper and then passing it on to my mom when I’m done reading it.

I went to an educational session on selling Google eBooks and I’ve got loads of information to share with David and Maria when I get back to the store. (Just to prove to them that sending me here continues to be beneficial to the store…)

I vowed to myself that I was not going to come home with 100 pounds of books again this year and have them sit, unread, on my bookshelves until the end of time. So, out of the ten titles offered at lunch, I only grabbed four! I am slowly getting over my book addiction. And of those four titles, only one of them, a gorgeous cookbook, is for me.

I spent some time in line gabbing with Hillary Homzie, a kids and tweens author. She is teaching a dystopian sf course at Hollins University next semester, so we had a lot to talk about. Her book, an upper mid-grade reader, The Hot List, is up for grabs tonight. I don’t have anyone in mind specifically for it, but I like her premise, it’s a reversed gender-roll My Fair Lady for middle school. How fun is that?

The true test of my willpower is the next event on today’s docket. The Nightcapper. Twenty-six authors will be giving away and signing their books. I’ve marked thirteen of them as must-haves, and only four of them are for me. I have several other people in mind for the other nine: Sammy, my sister, mom, dad, and some very lucky friends and coworkers.

That’s not saying that I won’t read several before I pass them on. But part of the requirement to get on my must-haves list is that I have to have a specific person in mind for the book. I want to be able to lift my bag and not strain my shoulders. Wish me luck!

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The Wall

October 12th, 2011

I love traveling. It’s so relaxing to just sit and be. I listened to the entire Pink Floyd album The Wall. I can’t remember the last time I just sat and listened to music, much less an entire album. (I left the knitting at home for this trip, so I didn’t even have that as a distraction.)

From the tremulous notes of When the Tigers Broke Free (borrowed from the Echoes album ’cause it’s not on my The Wall Live album, but it’s in the movie, so it must be heard) to the defiant cries of ‘tear down the wall!’ it brought back a lifetime of memories.

It was a hot summer day in the 80′s and I was at my cousin’s birthday party. He was (& still is) rather older than me. He and his friends were playing music around the pool I remember climbing out of the water and hearing the lyrics: We don’t need no education/We don’t need no thought control. My little eight-year-old brain was thinking ‘Hell yes, this is my kind of music!’

(And in case you’re thinking that as an eight-year-old I wouldn’t use the word ‘hell,’ when I was in second grade I left a note in Jonas Pelters’s school mailbox that said ‘fuck you’. Yeah. That’s right. I dropped the F-bomb. In second grade. What can I say, my relationship with profanity began early.)

And so, with ‘Another Brick in the Wall’ my love affair with Pink Floyd was born. Listening to the album on the plane made me wish I had the movie on my ipod. I’ll just have to wait until I get home to watch it.

They must have had such fun filming the scene for One of My Turns where he trashes the hotel room. We got a little turbulence during Run Like Hell, which is a rockin’ song anyway. The turbulence just amplified it. The album also has one of the best ever non-Hendrix guitar solos, the one in Comfortably Numb. I can say nothing more about it except that I always get a little creeped out when the rat makes its appearance in the movie.

But it’s not just the singles that make the album great. It tells an intriguing story and every song is unique. Goodbye Blue Sky transitioning into Empty Spaces and What Shall We Do Now is a great sequence. Nobody Home is a testament to ennui. And who can forget the judge’s threat of defecation in The Trial?

I was lucky and got to see Roger Waters during his In the Flesh tour in ’99 or ’00. (Can’t remember exactly when it was, killed too many brain cells, you understand?) I got my obligatory t-shirt, which I still own and haven’t worn in ages. The problem with concert t-shirts is that they never come in small sizes so I swim in them and end up using them as jammies.

So my clothes are too big and my music belongs to another generation, I suppose that’s just the beginning of my long list of quirks. The Wall is a timeless rock opera and if you young kiddies haven’t heard it, take the time, download it, and listen. Then see the movie.

(If there was a book, I’d say ‘read it’ but as far as I know, there isn’t. And that’s what brought me on to this topic, travel for free books. I’ll keep y’all posted on this year’s haul from the PNBA Fall Trade Show.)

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Still Alive & Kickin’

October 8th, 2011

Wow, I had no idea that my blog has been silent for almost two months. Summer ended and temperatures have been dipping down below freezing steadily for several nights now. The trees lost their leaves in an eye blink.

On the bookstore front, I’ve been working like hell to get the webstore up and running. It’s basically set now, just waiting on training the bookclerks and David and Maria’s go-ahead on advertising it. So, in respect of their wishes, I will not be posting a link to the site at the moment. It is exciting. I’ve already downloaded a couple of Google eBooks onto my iphone through the site. It took less than five minutes to start reading. Gulliver’s Books really is joining the current millennium. If only we had a facebook page. That still hasn’t gotten the ‘okay’ yet.

This week I’m heading out to book heaven, the PNBA Fall Trade Show. I’m looking forward to meeting several authors and the seventy-pounds of books I’m bound to come home with. I just can’t seem to avoid ‘free’ books. Seriously, something breaks in my brain!

I’ve filled my procrastination time with several knitting projects-I’ve got a new sweater almost finished. It’s blocked and sewn up. I’m searching for the right buttons and then it’ll be done. Just in time for sweater-season!

I’m on the final draft of Strange Essence. If you remember, the first draft of it disappeared from my flash drive at Christmas last year. I actually think the story is all the better for that particular disaster. I like it a lot and have enjoyed writing it, but I’m looking forward to starting something new for NaNoWriMo this year.

It’s going to be a bit trying, though, as I will be visiting family in Chicago for a large chunk of the event. Slavery to my two-and-a-half-year-old nephew is not very conducive for writing. But it’s my job as an auntie to spoil the hell out of him. I’ll be doing some exhausted-writing after he goes to bed at night. I’m curious to see what it produces. I’ll keep you updated, and this time I won’t keep you waiting two months!

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Busy, Busy, Busy

August 15th, 2011

Phew. It has been a crazy couple of weeks. (That always seems to be the case towards the end of summer!)

I finished up the Clarion West Write-a-thon. Many thanks to everyone who donated. Here’s how it went: I sent off six short stories to various markets and I’m still waiting to hear back on all of them. I got a shit-ton of work done on Strange Essence, I’m finishing up chapter eighteen tonight and then it’s on to nineteen and twenty and then this final (?) draft is done.

For all intents and purposes, I took a week off of writing when I visited my family in Chicago. The bookstore sent me for a one-day workshop and the rest of the time I was slave to my two-and-a-half-year-old nephew.

I really have no idea how anyone with kids manages to get anything done. I tried to do some writing after he went to bed, but I was so fried that I started dozing in front of the computer. I failed to come up with much workable material. And then, instead of writing during my flights, I read and napped.

The obsessive-compulsive in me is looking forward to the predictable monotony of my daily routines and the writer in me is looking forward to finally finishing this novel so I can shop it around and start something new.

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A Weekend Without Writing…Natural Dyes Class

July 25th, 2011

I wrote not a single word this weekend.  It was both marvelous and excruciating.  I did a two-day natural dye workshop with Moxie Pender of Skyflight Alpacas.  It was intense.  On the first day we dyed 74 mini skeins in three different dye baths with different premordants and post modifiers.  This class was just as interesting as the Cochineal Workshop she led back in March.

We did Brazilwood, which produced lovely shades of purple.

Osage Orange for golds and yellows.

And Logwood for a range of blues.

It was great fun, but I woke up Sunday morning and my body ached.  It knew I had done physical labor all day Saturday.  (On normal days, I sit on my ass at a desk and only move to get more food to eat.)

Sunday was a little more relaxed.  We cut up the samples from yesterday for the dye record book and chose the colors we wanted for the larger skeins.

There were only one other student, so there wasn’t any fighting over color choice.  The Osage Orange and Brazilwood both turned out lovely, but something happened to the Logwood and the dyebath looked like someone had spilled black ink into it.

Moxie tried to salvage it by adding exhaust from a previous Brazilwood bath and when that didn’t work she went for the exhaust from a previous Cochineal bath.  Nothing worked and the yarns came out in shades of gray.  Gray’s not a bad color, except when you’re wanting blues.  We couldn’t figure out what went wrong with it.  Moxie’s going to re-mordant and re-dye them.

It was a great weekend.  I didn’t know that I needed a break from writing, but I am so excited to get back to work on Strange Essence that I have nothing more to say right now about the workshop except that it was great fun and I know I’ll be taking more of Moxie’s classes in the future.  Oh, and her little herd of alpacas are so cute!  Their fur-framed faces look like little muppets.

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Write-a-thon Update

July 11th, 2011

It’s halfway through the write-a-thon and I’m starting to feel the pressure that I’ve put on myself for those goals.

To recap: I’m submitting one short story to a new market every week and I’m supposed to be editing two chapters per week in my current science fiction novel.

I’m one chapter behind on the novel edits.  I probably shouldn’t have allowed myself all the slack time I took during my three-day Fourth of July weekend.

I really wanted to reach my weekly submission goal.  I don’t know why it’s been so hard for me, I have five recent short stories in my submissions-to-send folder, so why are they still sitting there?  I’ve had some rejects on a couple of them, and fear of rejection is definitely a contributing factor.  I just need to close my eyes and go!

One of the stories waiting to go out, A Strand of Pearls, is a little different from the stories I normall write.  It’s a fantasy mermaid-romance thing.  It’s been sitting in my ‘to-send’ folder since I finished editing it a month ago.  I don’t have the slightest clue what market is best for it.  Is anyone compiling a mermaid anthology?  Anyone out there buying mermaid stories right now?  If you hear anything, please let me know…

As far as the fund-raising aspect of the write-a-thon goes: Thanks to everyone who has donated so far!  Donations made on my author page are halfway to last year’s total.  An uber-big Thank You!!! to Bonnie Dunne for her generous contribution.

There’s still time to donate.  Just follow the link and click on the paypal button.  And now, I’m going to get back to writing.

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Write-a-thon Begins!

June 21st, 2011

This is the first of six weeks of the annual Clarion West Write-a-thon and I’m participating for the second time.  Several of you donated last year and your money was appreciated.  The Write-a-thon benefits the Clarion West Writers Workshop.  It’s an intense, annual workshop in Seattle for science fiction and fantasy writers.  I would love to be accepted to the program one day.  Professional writers lead the participants and mentor them during the six weeks.  The write-a-thon is a way for others to participate in the madness.

Your donation helps fund the Clarion West scholarship program.  Of course, donations are tax deductible.  (It’s a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.)

Just as the students are pushing themselves, participants in the Write-a-thon are also setting goals.  This year, my goal is to edit two chapters of my novel-in-progress every week and to submit one short story every week to a new market.

Already, my writing goals for this year have made it feel as though I’ve been participating in a write-a-thon since January.  I’ve been writing and submitting two new short stories every month and while I’ve gotten back some rejections, I’ve also had two acceptances.  I’ve been revising my current novel for about two months now and I just started work on chapter nine.  By the end of this write-a-thon I’ll be at chapter twenty, and that’s the end!

I didn’t get accepted to the program this year.  Maybe if enough people donate money in my name, they’ll accept me next year!  Check out the website and make a donation.  Just click on the paypal button on my donation page.  Any amount you give is appreciated by aspiring writers everywhere.  For more information no the program, check out the Clarion West website.

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Two New Publications!

June 1st, 2011

This has been an unprecedented week in writing.  I had a highly productive long weekend during which I finished a new short story.  I received an acceptance email for Polar Explorations from EveryDayFiction.com on Monday morning.  Then, this morning, as I was brushing my teeth and checking my email on my phone, I got another acceptance email.  Also from EveryDayFiction.com.

This confused me at first.  It was five o’clock in the morning and as I read the email, I was thinking: Hey, they’ve sent me a duplicate email.  It took me a couple of seconds to realize that it was for the other short story I submitted to them, Eve of Destruction.

So here’s the lowdown:  Polar Explorations will be posted on EveryDayFiction.com on June 2nd.  Read it and Rate it!  (Five stars, please!)  Eve of Destruction should be posted on the site sometime in July.  It’s flash fiction, nice and short, you can read it in a matter of minutes.  Give yourself a little break and check ‘em out!

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Knit Your Own Dog

May 25th, 2011

I got a new knitting book the other week and it has been a major contributor to my writing procrastination.

Knit Your Own Dog by Sally Muir and Joanna Osborne. And yes, as the subtitle says, the patterns are easy to follow. My one complaint is that there are so many seams at the end. I started with the Scottie and that has about ten seams. I am not a fan of sewing up. I’ve already started modifying the patterns to knit the legs in the round. Four less seams!

I love the look of the Old English Sheepdog. The loopy stitch they use is not one I’m familiar with and it did take me a while to get into the groove of it. (And the Old English has less seams than the Scottie, especially after knitting the legs in the round.) Practice, practice, practice on the loopy stitches listed at the back of the book.  Another little strange thing: the authors don’t list a stitches per inch gauge for the projects.  Other than that, I love the yarns that they wrote the patterns for, Rowan is one of my favorites.  Only problem is, none of the yarn stores in my town stocks them so I’ll have to order the rest online.

I’m always one for experiments, though, and I’m going to have a lot of fun changing up the colors.  I’m thinking of doing a purple and green dalmation and perhaps a lemon yellow poodle.  The natural colors in the book are very realistic, but I’m looking forward to some fun color experiments here.  This book is a must-buy for knitters.  I’ve also learned a new technique for turning the heel on socks!

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