New paperback, new cover 13 Apr 2011

The paperback of This Is Where We Live will arrive in bookstores in just a few weeks. You may recall that the hardback cover was dark and ominous: Black, with dying tulips in a shattering vase.

Well, here's is the new paperback cover, and there's not a dot of black to be seen:

 

Familiar? Yes. Those who read "All We Ever Wanted Was Everything" may find the cover eerily similar, in fact. (There is, for example, a dessert theme going on). Does it make you want to eat strawberry shortcake? Hopefully. But hopefully it will make you want to read even more. 

Personally, strawberry shortcake is one of my very favorite desserts. This cover is going to be a form of torture, because every time I look at it I'm going to want to pick up a fork. 

In any case, it's out in stores on May 17. (Though why wait? Buy it now at your favorite online retailer. Really, no need to wait. Seriously. I mean it.) And even though the cover is different, the content remains the same.

The ascendance of the local bookstore 29 Sep 2010

 A few weeks back, I was invited to go on a tour of San Diego bookstores with the Southern California Independent Bookstores Association -- which is exactly as it sounds, an organization of all the indies in SoCal. About thirty of us piled on a bus and spent the day driving around the Southland, stopping in at a half-dozen bookstores en route. 

Having come from San Francisco, where there are seemingly more indies (including the great indie chain Books Inc) than B&N & Borders, I've been known to bemoan the state of independent bookstores in LA. In all of Los Angeles, there are roughly ten (or so) indies: Skylight, Vromans, Book Soup, Diesel, Stories, and a handful of specialty stores. And yet, even as Barnes & Noble is battling to stay in business, these bookstores are actually thriving. Sure, Duttons closed its doors a few years back, but Skylight, Diesel and Vroman's have all done well enough in the last few years to expand.

The tour of the Southland was equally uplifting. There were bookstores that had been around for years and were thriving (Warwicks in San Diego, Book Works in Del Mar), and also some brand new ones, including Pages in Manhattan Beach -- which, despite just opening this year, is already about to open a second branch in Redondo Beach. 

The optimist in me likes to think that, perhaps, with the superstore bookstores suffering, the tide is turning back towards independents. Superstores (for the most part) don't offer much that you can't also get at Amazon.com (without having to look for parking). They are functional and comprehensive and great for discounts but absolutely impersonal. An independent bookstore, on the other hand, often has personalized charm -- like the displays of obsolete technology at Book Works (pictured above) -- and a staff that not only reads (which, sadly, the staff at superstores don't always do) but that thrives on giving recommendations. One bookseller at Laguna Beach Books told me that she'd hand-sold 500 copies of an otherwise obscure novel that she loved. Her store is blanketed with little hand-written cards recommending books, and the customers flock there for her opinions

Then there are the community events. Book Works, which specializes in science books, has a science lecture series, weekly events for kids, and free live music on Friday nights, and a whole host of book clubs -- despite being smaller than the check-out aisle at your average B&N. These are places where you would actually want to hang out on a Friday night, rather than just grabbing your Eat Pray Love for 50% off and racing next door to Bed Bath & Beyond.

It's telling to me that B&N's newest endeavor is going to be selling personalized teddy bears. Because, you know, nothing says "Call Me Ishmael" like a stuffed plush toy. Still, even though B&N is struggling financially, I certainly don't hope B&N goes out of business - fewer bookstores is bad news for everyone, including the indies. But I do hope that those customers who used to shop at the Lincoln Center B&N, which is now closing, will now to go to the fantastic indie McNally Jackson instead.

And let's also hope that the rise of the ebook doesn't drive the independents out of business altogether. But that's another story for another day.

An Epigraph, Unused 21 Jun 2010

When I wrote "All We Ever Wanted Was Everything," I thought it would be a nice character detail if Janice Miller drove around town cheerfully humming a song from her youth. I ended up structuring the novel's first chapter -- which takes place on the day that Janice becomes unfathomably rich, and is simultaneously dumped by her husband -- around the song "Happy Together," by the Turtles. ("Imagine me and you, I do, I think about you day and night" etc. Trust me, you know it). I wove the song into the entire chapter, starting with the second paragraph of the novel, using it in different places to trigger memories from Janice's past, her optimism for the future, etc. 

This was all well and good until my editor asked me if I'd secured the rights to the song. 

Oops.

My editor gently enlightened me to the fact that I needed permission to use these lyric snippets -- that, in fact, there are entire law firms that deal almost exclusively with this kind of thing. So I hunted down The Turtles' law firm, and got in touch. It turned out that the rights-holder (ie: the songwriter who composed the tune for the Turtles) was fine with me using the song ... as long as I paid him a chunk of money. A chunk of money so sizable, in fact, that I began immediately to rethink using the lyrics at all. Unfortunately, the surgery on the novel would have been so extreme that I decide to suck it up and just pay. Which is why you see the "Happy Together" lyrics all over the first chapter, and I stopped drinking lattes.

So I learned my lesson, right? It's true, I did. With my second novel, "This Is Where We Live," whenever I felt the urge to quote a song lyric in the text, I stopped myself and asked whether it was vital to what I was trying to achieve with the book. Uniformly, the answer was no. I managed to write a whole book (and one about a musician, to boot) without extensively quoting any song, and I don't think it suffered as a result.

But I did have an epigraph. Since "This Is Where We Live" was inspired in part by a Robert Frost poem called "Directive," I thought I would use four lines from the poem as my epigraph. "Great," my editor responded. "So, do you have the rights?"

Oops.

It turns out, the whole permissions question also applies to poems, essays, other novels -- pretty much any text from which you quote more than two lines. You'd think that after 15 years as a professional writer, I would have known this. Somehow, I didn't. And this time around, I had a baby with a college education I needed to save for, so the idea of spending the money was far less appealing. An epigraph would have been nice, but it certainly wouldn't be missed if it wasn't there. As a result, anyone who buys "This Is Where We Live" will notice that there is no epigraph. My daughter will get a month at Harvard (no pressure, kid), instead.

As a side note - Whenever I now read a book that quotes extensively from songs, or poems, or other books, I always wonder whether that person shelled out a small fortune for rights, or whether they personally knew those musicians/writers/poets and somehow received permission gratis. ("Lit" by Mary Karr, for example, is chock-full of poetry, but I imagine she got most of it for free from her fellow poets.) Perhaps this is the new literary bragging rights: Free words from famous people.

In any case, I'm fairly certain that it's fine to publish the epigraph here. If not, I'm sure I'll hear from Robert Frost's lawyers. Until then, here it is, for your edification, my epigraph:

Weep for what little things could make them glad
Then for the house that is no more a house,
But only a belilaced cellar hole,
Now slowly closing like a dent in dough.
-- "Directive," Robert Frost. 

Not a very good blogger 26 Aug 2009

So you start a blog, with the very best intentions of updating it regularly; and for a few weeks you’re pretty good about putting up new posts; thoughtful ones, with considered ideas. And then a week passes and you realize you’ve fallen behind. You post something hasty, just to get it up, and then you fall behind again. And suddenly you feel all this pressure to come up with something pithy and profound, and yet your mind is void of anything that seems remotely interesting, so you put off writing another post until you’ve got something of interest to say.

And time passes, and yet more time passes, and you still can’t think of anything to say, until you realize it’s been nearly two months since you posted anything. And you realize that you’re not a very good blogger.

I spent part of this morning reading Dooce.com, the personal blog of Heather Armstrong, who posts about all the minutae of her daily life. Much as I enjoy her writing, I am just not that kind of person: I like to keep things private. Which is why I don’t Twitter about every meal I eat and song I hear or post Facebook status updates ten times an hour. My grandmother would have said that nice ladies don’t air their dirty laundry in public — and maybe it’s some part of my puritannical upbringing that pushes me to retain some modicum of privacy — but I don’t think that’s the only reason I’m reluctant to share. I just don’t feel comfortable with strangers knowing the intimate details of my life. So I’ll never be a personal blogger like Dooce.

And I also can’t quite muster the enthusiasm to be a news and commentary blogger. I feel like we’ve reached a saturation point, where every things that happens in the world that is even vaguely news-worthy is immediately thrashed apart and commented on by at least a hundred different blogs. The noise is overwhelming. Do I really have that much to add to the fray? When I’ve already read fifty different homages to Teddy Kennedy, or analyses of the latest Caitlin Flanagan screed in the Atlantic Monthly, or thoughts about the new trends in book covers, I don’t feel energized to jump in to the discussion and contribute my paltry two cents. I mostly just feel exhausted.

What I want to contribute, instead, is a little peace and quiet.

I’m about to have a baby, so I’m going to officially take a little time off from the blog — or, more accurately, take time off from feeling bad about not updating the blog. I will return, when I have more to share — about the next novel (due to hit bookshelves next summer, if all goes well), or about the life of a writer, or about what it feels like to put a sophomore effort out into the world. Otherwise, I’m going to be saving most of my creative energies for the printed page.

Until then –

Janelle

Blogging, but not here 13 Jul 2009

Just a quick note that this week I’m guest-blogging at The Well-Read Donkey, which is the Kepler’s Bookstore blog. Kepler’s is a legendary bookstore in Menlo Park — and also happens to be the bookstore where I killed endless hours during my high school years. It is so beloved in my old hometown that when the store shut down a few years back, due to financial difficulties, the town rallied together in order to get it to re-open.

So come by and say hello. I’ll be blogging about the writing process.

Responding to critics 1 Jul 2009

The literary blogosphere is all a-twitter right now about how the author Alice Hoffman posted more than two-dozen angry “tweets” responding to a review of her book that ran in the Boston Globe. She called the reviewer, Roberta Silman, a “moron” and “idiot” and proceeded to post her phone number and email address online, suggesting that her fans “tell her off.”

A bad idea, especially now that Hoffman’s twitter feud has been reproduced all over the Internet — Hoffman has come off looking sour grapes, unnecessarily bitter. Of course, she’s not the first author to go public with her pique. Mary Elizabeth Williams had a great piece in Salon yesterday that documented a long series of these kinds of feuds, from Dave Eggers’s spat with the New York Times to the time when Richard Ford spat on Colson Whitehead for a bad review.

As an author, though, I can empathize with Hoffman’s impulse. When you’ve spent (as I did) four years of your life working on a book, it starts feeling like your baby; and when a journalist then casually — or, worse, cruelly — dismisses your efforts in a piece they churned out in just a few hours, it’s pretty hard to take this lying down. And unfortunately, the low-attention-span theater that is the internet has rewarded us with an era of critics (film, book, TV, you name it) who use snark as their primary writing tool. After all, it’s so much easier to be cruelly funny than it is to be measured, and apparently readers love the juicy thrill of those kinds of hit pieces. It’s criticism as shark tank, with your book as the bait.

In my journalism days, I was guilty of this kind of criticism too, and I wrote a fair number of reviews that, looking back, seem unnecessarily catty or snarky or mean. These days, I cringe at the thought of even writing a review at all, knowing all too well what the author on the other end might be feeling. (I can’t even tag a book on GoodReads with less than five stars without feeling bad about inflicting pain.) Not that I think every book deserves a good review, but I wish more critics would take all this into consideration before they tear a work apart with vicious glee.

So yeah, I can relate to Alice Hoffman, even if she did overreact. But I hope she turns her Twitter account off for a while, in her own best interest.

Signs of the apocalypse 17 Jun 2009

My friend is in the process of selling a book & movie deal based on… a Facebook status update.

On Friday, she posted a status update — a cute little anecdote about her dog — and within the hour, she had two film agents approach her, wanting to pitch it as a movie. By the end of the day, she was already getting emails from industry friends all across the country, saying, “I heard you got a movie deal based on a status update!” By Monday, the agents were taking meetings, and my friend was also discussing a series of short books based on the idea. Watch for it to show up in Publisher’s Weekly any day now.

This being Hollywood, it’s still more about buzz than content — nothing has actually sold yet — but considering the amount of chatter around this one status update, I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised if she ended up with a handsome deal.

I find this utterly depressing. Not that I don’t think that the quality of the movie and/or book series will be lacking — knowing my friend’s skills, she’ll knock it out of the park — but it signifies a major problem with the way the entertainment industries works these days. Everything is sold based on a pitch - a one line “hook.” Got a complex idea, that’s hard to summarize in one sentence? Forget it.

My husband and I sometimes walk out of movies and imagine the pitches that were used to sell them. “It’s Wedding Crashers… in Italy!” “Three guys wake up in a room with a chicken, a lion, and a baby” “Two brides are booked in the same room in the same day!” What happens from there doesn’t seem to matter to the companies that fund the movies — as long as it will make a good pitch line and a decent trailer, who cares what goes on in the middle? A catchy premise is more important than the story to come.

The sad truth is that we’re living in a one-line (or 140 character) world these days, and anything that takes longer to explain is often lost in the noise. Being someone who likes to write long, occasionally convoluted, intricately plotted tales, I find this just upsetting. A year after my book came out, I *still* have a hard time summarizing it in one sentence.

That said, I’m honestly happy for my friend — God knows how hard it is to sell anything these days that isn’t based on a comic book series, a sequel, or a children’s toy. All the best to her.

I guess I’ll consider it a reminder to refresh my status updates more often.