Ask Dr. Pretentious

The Secret Life Of The One-Sentence Pitch, or, Adventures in Hand-Selling

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 03:27:09 GMT

I knew I needed a good one-sentence pitch for any book I wanted to sell, and that any agent or editor I pitched to would be listening for an answer to the question, Will people pay to read that?

What I didn't know was that actual readers, face to face, would be asking for my one-sentence pitch in the moment of decision about whether to buy my book.

I'm really glad I went to the Totally Normal Event. I was there to sell books, and not a lot of books got sold, so mostly I learned stuff. The people who were there to have fun manifestly had a whole lot of it, so I'd say overall that it looked like a success for Jeff Mach and his event-planning crew.

The merchanting arrangements were unconventional. Instead of having one hucksters' room for all the merchants, there was a main merchanting area that had a stage off to the side, with live music and dancing, and then there were several smaller themed rooms on another floor that had various activities going on, with a couple of merchants whose wares were relevant to the themes. It was an interesting idea, and it might have worked, but for those of us who were selling books, it didn't pan out terribly well. On the other hand, trying to hand-sell books while competing for attention with heavily amplified Gothic/Industrial music might not have worked better.

So there David and I were, trying to sell e-books (which is already a hard sell because everyone prefers print), at our little table in merchanting Siberia. Our respective very patient spouses had come to help out and to tend our respective offspring, while the two of us spent nine (9) hours selling seven (7) e-books on CD. We didn't even come close to recouping our publisher's costs for the box of CD's (complete with glossy cover art labels!) that she'd sent us to sell, but considering that it was our first time out, and the weird conditions we had to work with, I'm glad we managed to sell any. That we did sell those seven was largely because we had our one-sentence pitches to fall back on when people asked us what our books were about.

Every year I went to the Writer's Weekend conference, I'd attend the panel on How To Pitch To Agents And Editors, just in case some new tidbit of information or advice slipped out that hadn't the year before. I'd spend the hours on the plane between Newark and Seattle, and then between Seattle and Newark, scribbling out variation after variation of the one-sentence pitch and the one-paragraph pitch. Between sessions during the conference, I'd pace around the hotel room, memorizing the pitches and playing around with the delivery. And each of those years, I'd have a few five-minute appointments in which to put those pitches to work with agents and editors.

I may not have persuaded any of those industry pros to take me on, but now I know I can get strangers to open their wallets and hand me cash on the basis of my pitch. That's got to be good for something.

Drive With Aloha

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 03:27:02 GMT

We're just back from five days in Hawai'i. We snorkeled in two different reefs, hiked a ridge above one of the wildest valleys on the Na Pali coast, eavesdropped on the nests of various pelagic birds at Kilauea Lighthouse, and celebrated the very excellent wedding of garybart and jaimesama, which was the first and best reason for the trip. We stayed in a remote part of Kaua'i, separated by seven tiny one-way bridges from the nearest tiny town, so we've been in a news, phone, and internet blackout all week. I've got a lot to catch up on.

Gareth handled air travel better than we could possibly have hoped, though he still hates car seats. He enjoyed riding out our hike from his vantage point in the baby backpack. Anini Beach's reef slows the waves down enough, we were able to introduce him to the Pacific Ocean. It looks like he's up for going anyplace Dan and I would want to go.

Poor kid, just when he's starting to talk, his mother gets fixated on pronouncing Hawai'ian words like humuhumunukunukuapua'a. (Use this word in a sentence: "Check out all the stripy humuhumunukunukuapua'a wriggling in the reef.") Hawai'ian trips me up. The vowels are pretty much the standard Latin vowels, so I keep putting the stress accents in place names where Latin would duration-accent them, and then I can't stop throwing in the tiny bit I remember of Greek pitch accent, and just when I start getting the hang of where the accents are supposed to go, my brain goes completely haywire. I try to say thank you (mahalo), and my synapses spit up the Korean equivalent (kamsa'hamnida). One of the other wedding guests, a friend from grad school, is now a high school French teacher by trade, so my high school French started coming back. Now that we're completely knackered from the 24 hours it took us to travel home, I can write okay (I think), but I can barely speak an intelligible English sentence.

Language shock aside, my only bout of culture shock was on the roads. The State of Hawai'i urges its people to "Drive with Aloha," and the locals seem to take that official exhortation seriously. I guess it makes sense to concentrate on love of your fellow beings while driving, since that's when you indisputably hold their lives in your hands. Driving with Aloha entails etiquette for handling all those narrow one-way bridges, and stopping to pick up any hitchhiking little old ladies who might be Pele in mortal disguise, and driving about ten miles an hour under the speed limit no matter what the road conditions. That last bit was the hardest to adapt to. After all, I'd done my homework on Pele. I knew to offer food to old women, and not ever ever to take a lava rock off the island, and besides, none of the hitchhikers we saw could have been a day over eighteen, so we never had to consider whether to offer Pele a lift. But driving ten miles an hour under the speed limit? That may be driving with Aloha, but here in New Jersey, we drive with Fuck You. It's not a principled position, just the custom of the country. Driving with Aloha around here would be a sure way to get ticketed. Too bad. I liked living a few days on island time, poky traffic and all.

Appearing Saturday As A Real Live Author At An Event (That May Be) Near You

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 02:15:22 GMT

I'll be at Jeff Mach's Totally Normal Event on Saturday in Whippany, NJ. Don't be deceived by the name--go see the website for the premise, which is kind of charming and may actually work. David Sklar and I will be personning (or perhaps alternately manning and womanning) a Drollerie Press table in the Talesenders' room. We'll have Closing Arguments and David's wonderful The Shadow of the Antlered Bird for sale in various electronic formats on CD, as well as some other Drollerie Press e-books. There may be readings. In the grand tradition of mystifying panel titles at cons, I find that I am to be on a panel called "Impossible Technologies." Maybe I'll talk about Madame Blavatsky's obsession with inventing a radio for communicating with the dead--anything might happen. Unlike most of the folks in New Jersey who read this blog, I've never been to one of Jeff Mach's events, but I hear they're a blast.

So now I have to figure out which excerpt from Closing Arguments to prepare in case a reading actually occurs. Any suggestions?

First Word

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 04:03:41 GMT

This morning, Gareth and the cat and I were sprawling on the bed. Gareth was practicing crawling, which so far he only does backward. I was doing some physical therapy exercises. Sonia was gazing at Gareth and purring. Typical start to my day.

Suddenly, Gareth took it into his head to pet Sonia. He concentrated all his intent on her and reached for her tail. "Keetay," he said.

"Did you just say kitty?" I asked.

"Dabdabdabdabdab," he replied. I decided to take that for a yes.

When I called Dan to tell him the Big News, he said, "Oh, yeah, he said that before you got up this morning, too. When I had him for the dawn shift, he was in his exersaucer in the kitchen, watching Sonia eat, and he said, 'Keetay.'"

So I called my mom to tell her the Big News. While I was talking to her, Sonia came and sprawled right in front of Gareth. He grabbed her tail, hanks of her fur, her feet. She just rolled around in cat bliss. Despite our attempts to cue him--"Is that your kitty, Gareth? Do you like your KITTY?"--he wouldn't say his new word for my mother. "Oh, well," said mom, "I guess I should start making dinner."

And the second after we got off the phone, what do you suppose Gareth said?

Ah, well. I'm satisfied, more than satisfied, that my seven and a half month old baby said an identifiable word in its correct context three times in one day. If he doesn't want an audience yet, that's his prerogative.

At Fictionwise

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 21:40:43 GMT

When they first got Closing Arguments up for sale, you could only find it by searching by publisher--title and author searches were to no avail. But at last the biggest purveyor of e-books has everything set up properly. I feel so legitimate! Now we're just waiting for Amazon.

My Geekiness Knows No Bounds. Good Thing I'll Be Allowed To Bring It On The Airplane.

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 01:02:23 GMT

Is it just me, or does the TSA's list of permitted and forbidden carry-on items read like the equipment chapter of a role-playing game handbook? It was when I got to the section that lists ice axes, swords, and sabers--none of which are permissible for your carry-on, but all of which could be checked in your suitcase--that I started having Dungeons & Dragons flashbacks. Maybe it would be easier to explain to the American public why they can't bring blasting caps in their luggage if the TSA told them the caps would cause, I don't know, 2D6 of damage?

If I were still in the Game Master business, I'd be inspired to run a one-shot or maybe three-session game set in an airport, in which players could only equip their characters with items from the TSA permitted and prohibited item list. What can you do to a shoggoth with a crochet needle, hair straightening gel, and a cricket bat? The GURPS combat system is a pain in the butt to run, but Call of Cthulhu would work just fine.

The First Guest-Blogger Interview Is Up (And We Survived Our Midsummer Festival)

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 00:16:59 GMT

Joyce Anthony is one of those generous people who invites guest bloggers to talk to her readers about books. You can find her interview with me at her Books and Authors blog. Thanks, Joyce!

In other news, Dan and Gareth and I have just returned from a short visit to a long festival. It went really well, despite the last lingering bit of pneumonia. Lots of people helped Dan take care of me, so I didn't lose out on rest. None of us got sunburned, bugbitten, or poison ivied. There was no property damage, no wear and tear--there weren't even any regrettable purchases. We took it easy, hanging out with the friends we only get to see at the Free Spirit Gathering, showing off our baby and catching up on the year's gossip.

I got to find out just how mellow my son's temperament really is. A big thunderstorm rolled through camp. Hours before the first edge of the rain came, we could hear the heat lightning coming. With Gareth buckled into the jogging stroller, I bustled down the big hill to reach the dining hall ahead of that first edge. Barely made it. So there we were on the tiny dining hall porch, huddled up with maybe fifty other people who'd had the same idea, when the storm broke right over us. It was Gareth's first prolonged outdoor chance to see and hear really heavy rain, his first summer thunderstorm, his first crammed-into-a-crowd experience. Lots of babies would have freaked out under those conditions. He knitted his little brows together a moment, clearly considering freaking out, but decided against. Being so close to the rain without actually being in it was fascinating, and he went with fascination instead of fear.

Because The Very Short Wire Service Articles Available So Far Won't Tell You

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 00:06:16 GMT

In case you're wondering what the 35 articles of impeachment are that Dennis Kucinich has introduced against President Bush, you can find the full text here, on Kucinich's site at www.house.gov.

But What Does His CV Say About Teaching Experience And Committee Service?

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 16:04:34 GMT

I've heard about some weird hiring decisions in academia, but hiring a Hindu deity to chair a business school takes the cake.

Thanks to my excellent writing critique partner David Sklar for the link.

EDIT: My mom thought I was being figurative, but no, the news story claims that a business school in India has made the monkey god Hanuman its chair. Professor Hanuman has his own office, his own computer, his own conference table, and daily offerings of incense. This is the point at which some folks would say, "You can't make this stuff up." Well, actually, I've made up some pretty wacky stuff in my time, but this one happens to come straight from Yahoo news.

Oh, That's Much Better!

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 22:15:11 GMT

Thank you all for your kind wishes.

My immune system seems to have befriended my antibiotic--a great relief, since I'm allergic to so many of them. My breath capacity is coming back. I have a little more energy, enough that I'm tempted to run around cleaning my house. Fortunately, my mom came up for a couple of days to make sure I got some rest, and now Dan is home for the weekend on rest-enforcement duty. At this rate, I'll be well enough to travel in time for garybart and jaimesama's wedding in Hawaii after all. I don't know, though, whether we'll still be able to drive down to the Free Spirit Gathering for a day next weekend. It'll depend on the temperature, since I'm not so good at temperature regulation right now. If we miss it, it'll be the first Midsummer festival we've missed in over a decade.

The trick is to keep recovering at this rate.

Meanwhile, I've been invited to do a little guest posting and interviewing on other people's blogs in connection with the book. Drollerie Press's intern has been tireless in her quest for promotion opportunities--thank you, Chris! I'll post more information as it develops.

..And One More Thing

Sat, 31 May 2008 05:00:17 GMT

Drollerie Press is holding a chat session to celebrate the releases of Closing Arguments and Imogen Howson's Fire and Shadow. You can find more details here. I meant to announce it last week, but, well, pneumonia... I'm very glad it's not a podcast interview, because I've still got major laryngitis. On the internet, no one can tell you've got a mouthful of lozenges.

It's On The Loose!

Sat, 31 May 2008 04:12:45 GMT

You know those final scenes in nature documentaries when the animal that's been raised in captivity gets released into the wild, and the music swells, and the voiceover narrator says something like, "The future remains uncertain for keystone predators like little Spiky," and you cheer the creature on--Go, Spiky, Go!--as the credits roll? Well, okay, maybe not everybody cheers the creature on, but I always do.

That's kind of how it feels to look for the first time at my novella for sale at the Drollerie Press Bookshop and Mobipocket.

My book has now been released into its new habitat, one of the habitats for which it evolved. Manuscripts shouldn't have to live in captivity, in proverbial trunks--they should roam wild in bookstores and readers' brains. Fortunately, Closing Arguments is not a keystone predator, or any other sort of beast that you can best help by keeping your distance. Walk right up and pet it. Take it home with you. It won't eat any of your other books, I promise.

jeneralist asked, "Where's the best place for your friends to buy it to help it go big?" It was a kind thing to ask. I think every place where it'll be on offer has some advantage. If you buy it directly from the publisher, that gets the middleman out of the way of my eventual royalties, but Mobipocket, Fictionwise, and Amazon have more reach, and good sales figures through a big bookseller seem to breed more good sales figures. (Closing Arguments will go up on Fictionwise sometime next week, and I'm not sure about Amazon's timing, but that'll be soon, too. They carry all the exotic formats, which apparently means they always have a lag.)

What would help at least as much as buying it would be rating or reviewing it. The three big online booksellers have their various ways for customers to give public feedback. If you enjoy Closing Arguments, please consider saying so on one of their webforms.

Lots of friends have said they've never bought an e-book before, and that the whole process seems very intimidating. If you want a user-friendly way to buy Closing Arguments, and you don't want to have to read it on a screen, your best bet is to go directly to Drollerie Press and buy it in Adobe PDF, which you can then print. It's 116 pages long, fairly easy on your printer. If you run into difficulty as a newcomer to the world of e-books, you can ask for help here or email me at first name dot last name at gmail dot com. If I don't know the answer, I'll find someone who does.

Thank you all so much for cheering me on in this process. Many of you have been doing your equivalent of Go, Spiky, Go! for years now. It's meant the world to me to have such great support.

Almost There!

Fri, 30 May 2008 21:05:37 GMT

My editor's in the final stages of getting Closing Arguments into place so that you can all rush out in a buying frenzy to get your copies. Sometime this evening, the book release will be complete. I'll put up a big celebratory post here whenever I get the good word.

Meanwhile, I've been added to the author pages on Drollerie Press's website, and there's a big juicy excerpt among their excerpt pages.

In Case Anyone Needs To Reach Me...

Fri, 30 May 2008 01:57:58 GMT

It seems I lost my cell phone at the emergency room on Monday while I was getting diagnosed with probably-pneumonia. I usually tell people the best way to reach me is by cell phone, but at the moment, the home phone's the better bet.

Given my inconclusive X-rays, the question of whether I actually have pneumonia seems to turn on which doctor is holding the stethoscope. Over the course of my two ER visits and a follow-up, some have said yes, some have said no. At least it's clear I'm on the mend.

I've decided to embrace the word pneumonia, because that word means the rules are different. If all I have is a cold, well, I soldier on. If I have a virus, I soldier on without antibiotics. Soldiering on is what landed me in the ER twice, so I need a new game plan, one that's compatible with what all the doctors agree on: my recovery will take weeks, maybe months.

Breva the Axe (the Barbarian Queen of Concision Revision) points out that it's not a good idea to soldier on through colds and viruses, either, and that she wishes I would stop attempting stoicism. She's right. She also made us chili. She's a Savage Editor and a mighty fine cook. She and rianders and sporos have provisioned us for the coming week, since my mom's heading home tomorrow. Praise them with great praise.

Lemon Remedy

Sat, 24 May 2008 06:04:41 GMT

Juice of one lemon
One garlic clove (core removed for prevention of heartburn)
Several leaves fresh mint
One tablespoon honey
One teaspoon fresh ginger
Light sprinkling crushed red pepper flakes, to taste
One cup boiling water

Zizz with hand-held blender until honey dissolves and ginger and garlic chunks are cut to tiny smidgens.

Optional: Zest the lemon before juicing it and add the zest.

This is a much-embellished variation on a family remedy that appeared about ten years ago in the Washington Post. I'd credit the author, but I don't remember her name.

When I was a grad student, my dissertation director once gave me a cup of her family's traditional cold remedy, hot rum with thinly sliced raw onions. Not the tastiest combination. I suppose you could add rum to the lemon remedy. At the moment, though, its main virtue for my purposes is that I can take it while nursing. Lots of over-the-counter stuff is not so great for nursing mothers, or, more to the point, their babies.

Gareth's scary fever is much reduced. As long as he's in physical contact with Dan or me, he's his usual easygoing self, but if we step away, the poor kid panics. This is the second time he's ever been sick. Two colds in seven months is not bad, for a beginner's immune system.

For ourselves, Dan and I have even resorted a couple of times to another traditional American remedy for upper respiratory infections, the television. Funny thing, it turns out that television works better on colds if you've already got a lot of television built up in your system. Ours has been an almost television-free household since the baby was born, so it's not doing much for us. The lemon remedy definitely works better.

What's Next? A Rain of Frogs?

Thu, 22 May 2008 05:10:21 GMT

No, I really shouldn't tempt fate with a title like that.

But, but, but! Fate's been egging me on. Fate started it! It wasn't bad enough that Dan and Gareth and I all caught the Chest Cold That Ate Pittsburgh. Last night, my computer's hard drive succumbed utterly to a head crash, and the Very Reputable Repair Guy has a three day queue of jobs ahead of mine. I had all my important files backed up, but Dan's computer doesn't feel like talking to my flash drive, so it'll be all cloud computing and longhand rough drafts until I get my Mac back from the shop.

As Virginia Woolf famously observed, a woman writer needs 500 euros a year and a computer of one's own...no, that's not right...a woman writer will gain 500 pounds a year if she sits her butt in her writing chair all day in a room of one's own...how did it go? Anyhow, I'm pretty sure Virginia Woolf would have shaken her head with dismay at seeing a fellow writer in my predicament, going through handkerchiefs at a frightful rate and having to borrow her husband's computer in the wee hours of the morning, when her first book is, at least in theory, coming out in two weeks.

ARC! Blurb!

Tue, 20 May 2008 04:41:55 GMT

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

Wed, 14 May 2008 04:55:55 GMT

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)

Mon, 05 May 2008 21:36:54 GMT

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

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 04:33:40 GMT

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

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 04:21:43 GMT

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

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 03:21:26 GMT

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

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 22:25:50 GMT

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!

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 02:43:10 GMT

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

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 05:02:38 GMT

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.