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ARC! Blurb!
I've just received the advance review copy for Closing Arguments. That's like...you know when you're at a used bookstore and you find a book with all kinds of stuff on the cover saying UNCORRECTED PROOF, NOT FOR SALE? In the world of print publishing, that's what the publisher sends to book reviewers. Which is to say, those copies in the used bookstore have been sold illegally, but I guess book reviewers are just like a lot of us,unable to bear throwing a book in the trash, only they get a lot more books piling up in their houses than we do.

In the world of electronic publishing, the ARC is just a .pdf file. When you contact a reviewer or an author who might consider blurbing you, you ask whether s/he would prefer to receive it as an email attachment or as hard copy, and send it accordingly.

So, for all practical purposes, now that I've printed out hard copy, I've already held my first book in my hands. It isn't how I envisioned it when I was a kid, but it's still good to have arrived at this moment. Deena's design is delightful, but if I say exactly how, I'll spoil one of the running gags of the story.

This week, I'm contacting authors to ask for blurbs, and Drollerie Press's intern is contacting reviewers to request reviews. Things are really moving along now. It's a pretty inconvenient time for my entire household to have come down with a barking cough. I drink tea, I pop lozenges, I try to keep up with myself.

Meanwhile, I've been reading Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn. His protagonist has Tourette's Syndrome, so I thought that might help me play around with ways of putting Ria's OCD on the page in the next Rugosa story. The Tourette's Syndrome could have been an authorial gimmick, and I was a little worried about that, but damn, Lethem does amazing things with it. He makes me want to be a better writer.

Now I will confess my arrogance.

A lot of the time, when I'm reading someone else's work, I'll think I could do that, or My way of handling that would have worked way better, or I couldn't do that, but why would anyone want to? With books that really blow me away, I can usually tell myself, Maybe I couldn't do that now, but when I've got the years behind me that this writer does, I'll be this good. It's not often that I read a book by a living writer and wonder whether, in a lifetime of honing my craft, I would ever be able to pull off something that cool.

Only twice in the past year have I finished reading someone else's book and, days later, still had the protagonist's voice in my head just as clearly as the voices of my own characters. The last time, it was Tremaine Valiarde from Martha Wells's Ships of the Air series. Lethem's Tourettic detective Lionel Essrog is a very different creature. Poor guy, he's keenly intelligent, well read (albeit poorly educated), and perceptive as only an obsessive person can be because he's unable to stop paying attention to details, no matter how much he wants to. But the people around him, who are not privy to the first person narration of his inner life that we get to read, think he's stupid because of all his verbal tics and his precarious impulse control. His constant struggle to hold in the word soup that his illness is always cooking up from the language around him is tragic and hilarious.

So, yeah, I have a character stuck in my head who uncontrollably blurts out bizarre, occasionally profane mutations of any unusual word I come across. As my virtual Lionel Essrog said when I wrote my editor an email about the ARC and my blurb solicitation plans, ARCadelphia! Blurbopolis!

Progress, And, Yeah, I Guess That's Progress, Too
It looks like we'll be sending advance copies of Closing Arguments out for blurb requests and reviews this week, and like the release will be before the end of this month. Hooray!

The moment when the Ria story will be needed approaches rapidly, though we have no deadline. So what does my brain want to work on? The Big Book, or rather, Big Book Volume 2, a project nobody wants. O Brain! Get with the program! The sprawling epic of Beltresin revolution might eventually see the light of day, but the best way to get that to happen is to succeed wildly with the Rugosa stories. Which would require finishing the new Rugosa stories I've already started.

It's going to be a really big deal to me the first time I finish a new project, post-birth. Before I had a child, I was really good at finishing things--especially long, seemingly impossible things. I've been working, working, working, but haven't finished a story in almost a year.

Well, at least my brain wants to work on a manuscript. I was kind of worried that the mommy neurochemistry would knock out my writing drive. Down and sideways, but not out.

Some Interesting Differences Between Print Publishing and Electronic Publishing (And A Slight Delay)
I spent so much time studying how print publishing works, but e-publishing is a whole other world. A print book from a major house may take 18 months to get from the signing of the contract to the first copy sold at a bookstore. An e-book can, in theory, get from the contract to the first sale in about 4 months. Cutting out the printing, the binding, the warehousing, the shipping, the stocking of shelves, etc., cuts a lot of time out of the larval stage of a book's life cycle. Whereas authors and editors involved in print publishing have to live in fear of missing deadlines and throwing off their press's publishing schedule, there's a lot more wiggle room in e-publishing. Booksellers don't, or at least don't yet, impose drop-dead-dates on all the folks upstream.

Which is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, when life happens, you don't have to run yourself quite as ragged. On the other hand, when you're working with a small press, and both author and editor fall afoul of Murphy's Law simultaneously, you can watch your release date recede into the unknown. We really thought Closing Arguments would be out on May 5th. Now we really think it will be out Sometime In May. Everything's okay, it's just getting to better-than-okay kind of slowly.

I'll post more news as I have it.

Back to the Passion Puddle to Visit the Gnarly Tree of Awesome
After last year's post about Ag Field Day and the New Jersey Folk Festival, some of you said you wished you'd been there. I had all kinds of good intentions about posting the date here in advance this year. Oops. That would be today. Maybe next year.

Anyhow, barring torrential rain, we'll be there. And this year there won't be any morning sickness to prevent me from eating the Entomology Department's free bug cookies.

Everybody Loves Duct Tape
I argue with my protagonist.

RIA:
I'll attach it with duct tape. It'll be a great punch line.

ME:
Duct tape is a cliche. It's a cheap shot. We're not doing that.

RIA:
But everybody loves duct tape! Besides, you've never seen anyone do this with duct tape, have you?

ME:
Wow. Um. No. Okay. I guess everybody loves duct tape.

Methods of Musical Instruction
I've been bartering teaching time with the Pianist. Now that she's in the middle of her Master's thesis, she's been a grad student too long to be able to afford me, but now that I have a child, I'm happy to rack up credit for hours of one-on-one instruction for him with an expert in the Dalcroze method of early childhood music education. By the time the Pianist graduates, Gareth will be old enough for a first session to make sense.

My husband, who looks gift horses in the mouth so often he has a special set of equine dental mirrors, immediately started researching other methods of early childhood music ed. Okay, I really can't blame him. When he was an undergrad, one of his majors was classical guitar, so his opinion on the subject is bound to be more informed than mine.

One evening, while he was doing web searches, we had this conversation:

DAN:
According to the Kodaly method, we're already doing it all wrong.

ME:
Doing what? We're playing music we like and dancing around with him. What could possibly be wrong with that?

DAN:
Kodaly would say a lot of the music we like is too complex for a child his age to be exposed to. He says a very young child should only be exposed to the folk music of the region he lives in.

ME:
So, in our case, the folk music of New Jersey. Right.

DAN:
I'm drawing a blank here.

ME:
Springsteen and Bon Jovi.

DAN:
Do we have to?

ME:
Which do you think Kodaly would approve of more? "Born to Run" or "Dead or Alive?"

DAN:
I don't know. Which do you think would sound better performed by a full children's choir?

And A Book I Wish Were In Print
Because I really wish I could teach my little geekling to read with an ABC Book of Invertebrates. Such gorgeous, bizarre mandalas.

Cover Art! And A Release Date!
Closing Arguments will be coming out as an e-book on May 5th. Now that it's an event with an actual date attached, it's starting to feel much more real. We still need to arrange for blurbs, send copies to reviewers, and...oh dear, I finally need to turn all that stuff I took notes about at all those How To Promote Your Book panels into some kind of coherent game plan.

Don't mind me, I'm just hyperventilating.

Okay, much better now.

Meanwhile, I have my beautiful cover art to look at. One of the things that drew me to Drollerie Press in the first place was the consistently high quality of their cover art. I'm delighted to be sending my story out into the world wearing this image.

A Book Not To Buy
So there I was at Barnes & Noble, doing some research for the new Rugosa story: horological astrology, obsessive compulsive disorder, and the Jersey Devil. And I found a book on OCD that promised to be a complete guide to getting well and staying well. Up to the minute! shouted the jacket copy. Cutting edge! All the latest websites! The copyright date? Why, that would be 2000. Who, I wondered, spends $35 on a hardback that's eight years out of date? And then, flipping through the pages, I found the punch line.

About a third of the chapters were upside down and in reverse numerical order. No matter what the content of the book might have been, the physical object was like a warning about the hazards of recovering from OCD. Well people, non-obsessive people, let books go out into the world upside down, backward, piebald, and in dire need of a new edition. If that major university press only employed a proper complement of OCD sufferers, one of them would have been sufficiently fretful about what-ifs to think, The blurbs need to praise at least one thing about the book that will age well, if we're not planning to do a revised edition within the next few years. One of them would have caught the printing and binding problem before the books were shipped.

The Solid Food Dancers (Or, Why The Food Network Should Not Hire Me To Develop New Programs)
It's time now to start introducing Gareth to solid food. Over the past few weeks, he's been watching Dan and me with fascination whenever we eat. He's five months old, teething, curious, and due to run out of his body's iron reserves by the end of the month.

And yet, I hesitate. Not just because of La Leche League's warnings about the risk of food allergies. No, the real obstacle is my memories of my first two nieces' early experiences with solid food. For a very young child, it's not enough to explore a food's flavor, texture and color. A very young child feels a profound need to explore a food's ballistic and adhesive properties, too. Am I really ready to cope with flying gobbets of applesauce? With finding the pages of my books stuck together with masticated rice? And no sooner will Gareth be through the ballistic and adhesive explorations than the picky-eater stage will set in. The whole prospect is so daunting, it makes my early travails as Dr. Moo Cow seem rosy in retrospect.

So I got to thinking, maybe what the world needs now is a sort of epicurean equivalent to Sesame Street, an educational show that would do for children's eating skills what the Children's Television Network has long done for the foundations of children's literacy and numeracy. I got to thinking this because, every time I would say the words solid food, it would trigger a memory of that goofy 1980's pop music show Solid Gold. If you're of the wrong generation or nationality to remember the Solid Gold Dancers and their theme song, YouTube can show you the kind of thing I have stuck in my head.

I have a lot of conversations that go like this:

FRIEND OR RELATIVE:
So, when is the baby due for solid food?

ME:
Oh, he's ready now. We just need to catch up with him. This could be the weekend for solid food.

MY BRAIN:
So-lid FOOD!
Fills my life with pureed carrots
So-lid FOOD!
Jamming rice grains up your nose

FRIEND OR RELATIVE:
I remember when we started our kids on solid food...

MY BRAIN:
There's a jar that's unopened
Though the baby is hopin'...

ME:
I'm sorry, what were you saying? I seem to be somewhat addled by sleep deprivation.

FRIEND OR RELATIVE:
What really worked for us was...

MY BRAIN:
The floor is covered with Gerber's
Covered with food
SO-LID FOOD!

The interpretive contortions of the Solid Food Dancers are best left as an exercise for the reader's imagination.

But really, is it that much more far-fetched a premise than that of, say, Iron Chef? And the Food Network already has its stable of culinary celebrities who could be recruited for the project. Some of them (I'm thinking of Sandra Lee and Bobby Flay) are suited, by temperament or style of self-presentation, for spandex and hip-waggling. Others, I admit, would not make the transition into the ranks of the Solid Food Dancers quite so gracefully. Mario Batalli and Alton Brown probably should not appear in the same sentence with the word "spandex," but it's too late now. The part of Dionne Warwick will be played by Anthony Bourdain.

You see now why I don't have a future in television?

"I Feel Like A Flea Between Two Giant Elephants"
This delightful sentence comes from an article at Publishers Weekly about an unsavory bit of strong-arming that Amazon.com is up to. A less restrained explanation of why Amazon's behavior is a problem can be found here.

The short, perhaps reductive, version is this: Not satisfied with the cut of the sales price that they get as a bookseller, Amazon wants to force small presses to use their print-on-demand service. They're pressuring the small presses to get in line by saying that they will refuse to sell books that have been printed through any other print-on-demand service. The biggest reason this is a problem is that the one big distribution company that handles almost all distribution to brick-and-mortar bookstores, Ingram, also has a print-on-demand service, and if the small presses don't use Ingram's service, Ingram won't distribute their books. Using both services is prohibitively expensive for small presses, but neither can those presses afford to be forced to choose between bookstores and the Internet.

If the situation is, in fact, as described in the two articles in the above links, then Amazon's plan is bad for small presses, which are perpetually imperiled by distribution costs at the best of times, bad for authors, to whom some small presses would have to pass on the costs of getting their books out through both Ingram and Amazon, and bad for readers, who would encounter obstacles to their efforts to buy books from small presses.

(Full disclosure: Yes, it would specifically be bad for me, because it would make it harder for my publisher to put out a print volume of Rugosa stories.)

If you find Amazon's behavior objectionable, you can contact the Federal Trade Commission to complain. The FTC is in the process of deciding whether to investigate the matter. The number for their complaint line is 1-877-FTC-HELP (1-877-382-4357).

The FTC website offers these instructions for other ways of contacting them about anti-trust issues:

Contact the FTC's Bureau of Competition, and please include your day-time telephone number.

* Phone: (202) 326-3300
* Mail: Write to:
Office of Policy and Coordination
Room 383
Bureau of Competition
Federal Trade Commission
600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20580
* Email: antitrust@ftc.gov (Note: Email is not secure. Mark confidential information "Confidential" and send it via postal mail.)

The Kind Of Revision Letter Every Writer Dreams Of Getting
Sarah, I don't think I've ever edited a manuscript that clean before. I had very little to do--a couple of things here and there, self-explanatory, and most of them I'll defer to you if you disagree with me.

And that's it. I hope I haven't used up all my good revision letter karma on the first book.

Thank you, faithful beta readers. You know who you are. I don't do too badly on my own, but it takes help from a lot of keen, fresh eyes to earn a revision letter like that. You make me look good.

Wonderful Publication News, And My First Convention With The Baby
Drollerie Press has accepted the other completed Rugosa Coven novella, "Atlantis Cranks Need Not Apply." The new plan is that "Closing Arguments" and "Atlantis Cranks" will come out as ebooks at the same time, and if they sell well, they'll come out sometime later in the year in a print collection with a third Rugosa Coven novella. (The old plan, before "Atlantis Cranks" was accepted, was that "Closing Arguments" would be the anchor story in an anthology of short fiction by several different authors. Needless to say, I'm even happier with the new plan than I was with the old one.)

This means I need to beef up my daily writing discipline, because there's an editor who is actually expecting a new piece from me, and whose plans will be impeded if that piece doesn't get done. That is an excellent thing. I get to rearrange my priorities in a way I'll like better.

Meanwhile, we're recovering from Lunacon. Science fiction conventions always make for strenuous weekends--now I know that going to one with a baby is slightly more strenuous and vastly more frustrating. I tried to bring Gareth along to a couple of panels, but he kept trying to weigh in on the various topics, so I kept having to whisk him out before it stopped being cute. He was particularly interested in the panel on "The State and Fate of Short Fiction," where he waited attentively until all the panelists had introduced themselves and given their opening comments, and then he suddenly let out an "AAAAAAAAGH!" Admittedly, that's a pretty apt description of the current short fiction market, but it was the only point he wanted to make, and he wanted to make it again and again. Whisk!

Next Lunacon, readers willing, I'll have a book to promote, and a toddler. I wonder how that'll go.

The Cool Part
A lot of things make Gareth happy, but the one that delights him above all others is lying in his crib looking up at his mobile while I blow on the painted felt fish to make them spin around overhead. If I do that between phrases of singing Three Dog Night's "Joy to the World" and wiggle his legs for him in time to the Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea line, that elicits his biggest, most perfect laugh.

I find I prefer blowing on a fish mobile while singing and wiggling baby legs over almost all other forms of human endeavor.

I'm Calling It A Victory. Honest, I Am.
This afternoon, with Gareth wide awake and perched on my knee, I started work on a new story and produced actual pages of new writing. I've marked up lots of manuscripts for revision since October, and done a lot of research for projects new and old, but this is the first day of truly fresh output since the baby was born.

It bugs me that this is such a big deal, because for several years I produced an average of five pages a day, seven days a week. And it bugs me that it took me almost four months to get to this point, because everyone tells me that once Gareth starts walking, everything is going to get a lot harder. My mother tells me I started walking when I was nine months old, so I have this feeling that the clock is ticking away, and I only have five months to accomplish whatever I'm going to get done in 2008.

Probably it's not as dire as all that, and anyhow, panic does not make me work faster or better. I need to stop seeing the time between now and Gareth's first steps as the writing equivalent of a sprint, and to reframe it as a marathon.

Maybe I should clear a new space among all the other things that are already magnetized to my refrigerator, so I can put up a picture of that runner who won the New York Marathon right after giving birth to her daughter.

Where Do Blurbs Come From?
I've been to a lot of writing conferences, read a lot of articles, and generally tried to educate myself about the publishing process, but when I conferred with Deena Fisher, my wonderful editor at Drollerie Press, about authors we might ask to blurb Closing Arguments, I realized I had no idea how that part of the process worked.

Her explanation was so helpful, I urged her to post it online.

Thank you, Deena!

Thank you to all of you who've been sending kind wishes over the past several weeks.

We're doing really well, considering. Despite the massive disruptions of birth and death, daily life is starting to come together in some sort of new equilibrium. A week ago, I didn't even know, from one hour to the next, whether I'd lay my head down that night in Maryland or New Jersey. As much as I wish Kay were still with us, it's a relief, especially with the baby, to have a little more stability.

Some things haven't changed, even through all the chaos. One of the axioms I came to embrace while writing the Big Book is that everything can be improved by the addition of pirates. So tonight, over the kind of dinner new parents cobble together when they've forgotten until too late that it's Valentine's Day, we finished our meal like this:

DAN:
The vegetables turned out just fine. In fact, there's only one thing that could make this meal better.

ME:
Pirates?

DAN:
No, silly. Chocolate!

ME:
Oh. Yeah. That would work, too.

What She Was Like
Ever see a bonsai sequoia? There it is, a being that should, by its nature, be one of the largest organisms on the planet, bound by wire and ceramic and years of judicious cutting into a space about the size of an old-style electric typewriter.

Right out of college, Kay was Joseph Papp's stage manager when the Public Theater's Shakespeare in the Park was a new thing. The first time George C. Scott attempted a major Shakespearean role, Kay was the person who taught him how to make it work. She eventually left the theater and landed in public relations, and soon she was on her way to becoming a big cog in Manhattan's Democratic machine. There are a lot of ways to go about marriage and motherhood--Kay's ways shrank the scope in which her vast intellect and talents could operate, until she became a perfectly miniaturized version of herself, bound at root and branch with some very strange ideas about the nature of honor. She was the most voracious reader I've ever known, and one of the most discerning. It is everyone's loss that the only writing projects she ever finished after she became a mother were PR articles. It is everyone's loss that her career in politics shrank until it could fit within the bounds of the local PTA.

The first time Dan brought me home to dinner with his parents, I found Kay terribly intimidating. It wasn't just that she was so erudite, so certain of herself, so ardent about her political positions. She was also just plain loud--because, as I only learned much later, she was completely deaf in one ear and could barely hear herself. At her table, I always had a sense that everyone in the family had to be prepared to shout from the rooftops anything they wanted to say, no matter how trivial or tentative. Once I got used to it, it was kind of exhilarating. If fame could be earned by raw decibel levels, Kay would have been one of the great pundits of our times.

I loved her fiercely, and she could really drive me crazy sometimes, and I loved her fiercely. I don't just wish she'd lived longer--I wish she'd lived bigger.

The End
For a while, I was irked at Kay for the timing of her cancer, as if it were something she had chosen. After all, I was having a baby, right? When Dan's sister had a kid, Kay offered lots of free babysitting, and homemade applesauce. Homemade applesauce, for pete's sake! And now that it was my turn to reproduce, instead of helping Dan and me cope, she was becoming someone we needed to worry for. I was angry on Dan's behalf, too, that his pleasure in being a new father was so muted by the expectation of loss. Being miffed at Kay was so much easier than acknowledging to myself how heartsick I was that she was going to leave us all, and far, far too soon.

The moment the pneumonia hit, that bit of self-distraction fell away. Suddenly it seemed that Gareth had been born at exactly the right time. He could offer instant comfort to the whole family, and Dan especially, without having to share in our sorrow. I wouldn't trade the look on Kay's face when I brought her grandson into her hospital room on Saturday for all the homemade applesauce in the world.

On Wednesday evening, Dan's family honored her wishes and took off her oxygen mask. Within the hour, it was all over.

It now seems as impossible that she should be gone as on Monday it seemed impossible that she might live out the week. I can hear her voice so perfectly saying...not anything important, exactly...just the verbal tics that were particularly hers.

The Bad News Is, My Mother-In-Law Has Probably Closed Her Eyes For The Last Time
When it was just her lungs, her oncologist thought she might make a full recovery.

When her lungs were clear of the cancer, but she had a bunch of little tumors scattered in her brain, her oncologist thought she might have as long as two years.

When she went in for pneumonia and it became clear that her lungs were failing after all, her doctors thought she might have six weeks left.

This afternoon, her oxygen absorption dropped precipitously and hasn't come back up. No one expects her to regain consciousness. Her doctors anticipate that it will all be over in the next couple of days.

When Dan tries to wrap his mind around his mother's stoic acceptance of her mortality, he says, "She's like a mage of Earthsea, walking open-eyed into death. It just holds no fear for her." The books he loved as a child are making it possible now to face the very worst. If I ever meet Ursula Le Guin, I'll have one more thing to thank her for.