Authorial frustration

About a month ago I read a travel book, about twenty years old, and was pretty moved by it. I found the author's website on the Internet and emailed him to say I enjoyed his book and ask if he'd done any further traveling. Two weeks later, I received an email message from him responding to my questions and thanking me for reading his book.

 I was glad the author responded and answered my questions. But I wasn't prepared for how his email was written.

Capitalization seemed to be his enemy. It was nowhere to be found in the email except, inexplicably, a single acronym. He even spelled my name with a lowercase "p." Formatting was absent, and while I could tell where paragraphs should be there were no spaces between them. Periods sometimes ended sentences, and sometimes not. The whole text seemed to just jumble together, like a third grader wrote it.

 It's a little disillusioning to get a response like this. An author, of all people, should not respond to his or her readers with poor grammar and punctuation. You aren't sending a text message, you are engaging in correspondence with someone who liked your work. You want them to still respect you. I have to wonder what this gentleman's cover letters looked like, how his correspondence with publishers and book signing organizers went. His book was so engaging and polished, but that can't have all been the work of an editor. No publisher will even look at a manuscript without it at the very least having letters capitalized when they should be...right?

I've had bosses who send out emails with much of the same poor writing. Trust me, reading those did not solidify their authority. I still have a high opinion of this author's book, but I am disappointed in him. You should never press "send" if you'd be embarrassed having the result published in bookstores across the nation.

I lost

I didn't blog yesterday. To be fair, I was busy with making gingerbread cookies and catching up on Breaking Bad and going to bed early for today's bookstore shift. But this early into January I have already broken my resolution of blogging everyday for 366 days.

Oh well, it was only an idea. I considered making a random post yesterday ("...") or changing the date of a post to "January 11", but I didn't want to waste your time. With a blog like mine with no real focus and only a few readers, it might be better that I post only sporadically. Maybe it'll make those mysterious Russians showing up in my page view stats lose interest in me.

Reading and rejection

Perhaps I should catalog what I've read recently. Just yesterday I finished In Caddis Wood by Mary Francois Rockcastle, which was part of a two-person book club I am part of. It's a novel about tragedy and redemption set in a Wisconsin forest. While it's well-written and very evocative, it's not the type of book I normally read, and therefore I was left feeling kind of blasé about it.

I had another rejection in my inbox today. The email began "Dear Author," and when that's the case, you know right away which direction the message is headed.

One year ago

It was one year ago today that I got job interview for the bookstore. The call came a day after I applied, and I only applied the day after reading the job listing online. A few days later I was given the position.

I probably will never get a job faster ever agiain.

Car shopping!

A few days ago I went to a local family-owned car dealership to look for a used car. This would be the first car I ever bought for myself, which is kind of anxiety-inducing for me. Insurance--that's like free money, right? An oil change--isn't that just refilling the tank? Mileage--well, I guess Indy said it best.

I didn't buy a car that day. For one, I've just started my car shopping and am not quite ready to buy. Second, the dealership was all out of Hondas, a make that's very reliable and thus in high demand.

In the meantime, I'll make due with my parent's cars, seen in the file photo at right. The main focus of that picture is actually a friendly rabbit (on the bottom) being stalked by our neighbor's very hungry cat (on the top).

It's still a small world beyond the bubble

My alma mater is Beloit College. It's a small school, with fewer than 1,500 people enrolled in it any given year. However, all I have to do is put on a Beloit hoodie or t-shirt and I can go anywhere in the world and be stopped by someone who has gone there, or knows someone who has, or at least knows about the college. This has happened at the Apple Store, at the airport, in Chicago, in Washington, D.C., and in England.

Just last night an unusual coincidence occurred. It is the sequel to one of those chance encounters between Beloit alums that happens every time I put on some college outerwear.

In the summer of 2010, I was walking with a friend from Lancaster near the Milwaukee Public Museum. I was wearing my Beloit College t-shirt and I was stopped by a young man on the street who asked if I went to Beloit. I said I graduated from there and asked the young man what he was studying. He said "political science," I asked him about a professor, and after a nice chat we went on our anonymous ways.

Flash forward to January 2012. I am walking with my boyfriend to a birthday party for one of his friends. We are talking about random encounters with people from our pasts and I mention to him the Beloit meet-up described above.

At the party, I am told that there is another guest there who went to Beloit. I glance at the other alum across the bar and he looks incredibly similar to the young man I met more than a year and a half ago on the street. Eventually, I work up the courage to introduce myself awkwardly to him and ask if he went to Beloit and if he majored in political science. He says yes. I ask if he had ever stopped anyone on the street because they were wearing a Beloit College t-shirt.

Whaddya know, it is the same guy! He remembers the incident and vaguely remembers what I looked like. We chat briefly just like we did many months before, exchanging names and what we were doing with our lives. He happens to mention that often times when he wears Beloit apparel he gets stopped by random strangers with a connection to the school.

When you are at Beloit, they say you are in a "Beloit bubble," meaning an insular environment with no relation to the world outside campus. But it seems that the bubble has followed me everywhere, and I am going to keep putting on my Beliot shirts until they fade to nothing. These chance encounters are well worth the price of tuition.

Queries for Christmas

This Christmas I received a premium membership to querytracker.net/, courtesy of my mom. It's a website that allows you to search available agents and submit queries to them based on the types of books they represent. You can search by how often the agent responds, how often they ask to see a full manuscript, etc.

I used it throughout 2011 to submit a dozen or so queries for my sci-fi novel. Form letters were the norm and sometimes I received no reply at all, but I did get one full and one partial request. Though both agents declined to represent my manuscript, the fact that they liked what they saw is encouraging. Since I have already declared 2012 to be a year of success, I plan to use this membership as much as I can. I will be published!

Uuuuuugh

I'm nursing a sore throat which causes me to moan this post's title every five minutes. A brownie sundae was unsuccessful in soothing the pain. I usually get mildly sick at least once a year, but almost never to an extent that I have to skip work or school. There are two recent exceptions: my senior years of both high school and college.

The second-to-last week of high school I fell extremely ill for the first time since middle school. I will spare you the details. That sickness I blamed on a tainted dice that was passed around during a Monopoly game in my AP Government class.

Senior year of college I got sick three times. The first was during the Swine Flu pandemic, when some dorms actually had their basements quarantined so that students with the Pig Virus could be sequestered there. Brave volunteers (for at least a half a credit, one can assume) were to deliver lunch and dinner to this leper colony. I wish I remembered if anyone was exiled to these rooms--not me, because I think I only caught Swine Flu Lite.

I also got sick a week or so later as I was having a conversation about how everyone was getting sick. I started coughing in the middle of my sentence and I wasn't well for a week. I think the cause was psychosomatic.

My third and final time getting sick arrived inexplicably, as always. I remember being in bed coughing from midnight until around 3am. How I got to sleep I don't know, but I emailed my professor that morning saying I would be missing Critical Literary Theory (a rare occurrence).

As bad as I felt today, I still wrote 500 words or so and I still went into work. Yet again everyone wanted The Hunger Games, which I was only asked about twice today. It was a slow day.

Illustration by Ollie Crafoord

Postzooism

It's been more than a year since I had to work at the zoo (I visited once in July to find everything more or less the same). Looking back through my old postings, it's hard to believe that was the main subject of my blog for many months. In comparison, I've hardly talked about the bookstore.

"You need to have a focus" is common advice given to those starting a blog. Looks like I'll have to decide on one soon if I'm going to post for 366 days. For now, I'll settle on my life as well as ruminations on books, the bookstore, and the state of my world. Provided interesting things happen to me, of course.

The Most Popular Book in the World

I have just reserved my copy of The Hunger Games from the library. I'm sure it will be weeks or months before I get to read it, but it's better to do it sooner than risk encountering spoilers.

Also, I should probably read it before seeing the movie.

It's easily the most popular book in the United States. Dragon tattoos or southern maids can't hold a candle. At least a dozen times a day, someone asks for it at the bookstore--so much so that I have started to just say two words to young people approaching me: "Hunger Games?" This works especially well if I am near the children's section.

In fact, it's becoming too cliché to say "we don't have it." I am trying to think of varied ways to break the bad news to people. So far I've said "The Hunger Games is the most popular book in the country" and "...the most popular book in the world," and also "crazy popular." Maybe soon I'll move to "insanely popular."

Sketch by Katherine Marshall

The Best Books of 2011

Most book reviewers, whether in newspapers or on websites, tend to pick their top ten out of books that were published during the previous twelve months. This makes sense for professionals, but not for a private reviewer such as myself. I read whatever book strikes my fancy, from whatever decade. From my own count, I read 54 books in 2011. Of these, 23 were fiction, which is the same percentage of fiction (42%) that I read last year. That follows the national trend of people preferring nonfiction to novels.

The following are the ten most enjoyable, fascinating, or thought-provoking books I read in 2011. Enjoy!

1.) The Borrowed Years by Richard M. Ketchum
2.) Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens
3.) Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
4.) The Spies of Warsaw by Alan Furst
5.) A Kidnapping in Milan by Steve Hendricks
6.) The Men Who Would Be King by Nicole LaPorte
7.) A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson
8.) Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams
9.) The Golden Spruce by John Vaillant
10.) Dogsbody by Diana Wynne Jones

But there are many honorable mentions, including Eaters of the Dead (Michael Crichton), Farm Boys (Will Fellows), Life Itself (Roger Ebert), and The Unlikely Disciple (Kevin Roose). UFOs by Leslie Kean kept me thinking for weeks, and Zeitoun by Dave Eggers inspired a lot of outrage from me. Persepolis would rank up there in the top 10 if I chose to count graphic novels.

This year I look forward to reading just as many books, and am anticipating greatly The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, The Day of the Locust, The Hunger Games, and Undaunted Courage.

366 Days of Blogging

How about this for a challenge: blogging every day for a year. I'm sure it's been done before, but I want to try it. I feel like 2012 is going to be a momentous year for me, as I try to publish a novel and buy my first car. I may even move out on my own.

Even if I do skip a few days, I'll try and recap what exciting things happened while I was away--and they will be exciting things. Why wouldn't I blog unless I was distracted by doings a-transpiring.