It's Here!

I got an early Christmas present today, brought by my friendly UPS delivery man:
I can't quite believe it. It's done. It's here. It can be there: link to Amazon for the purchase



Cheers!

My Creation(s)

My book is done. I have just (immediately preceding the posting of this entry) submitted the final final final proof of the book, and it will be in the production line tomorrow. This is cause for celebration, which I will be doing tonight by going to see Sufjan Stevens at the Orpheum in Boston. I'm so excited.

But perhaps more importantly, and certainly more amusingly, I must tell you of my favorite latest Conversation with Lucy (TM). We've been reading a lot of Halloween-themed books to her lately (her choice, though certainly we have quite a stock of options) and a current favorite is one about the Littlest Pumpkin, wherein, on the final page, there is a picture of a giant Jack-o-Lantern surrounded by three kids in Halloween costumes.

When we get to the page (as part of her ever-widening stalling routine) she asks "What are their costumes?" which is now just what we do at the end of the book, every time.

Last night, I dutifully told her "there's a witch, a clown, and a Frankenstein."

Last night, Lucy replied: "No, Mommy, that's a Frankenstein's Monster."

Seriously, I could not be more proud. I go over this ALL THE TIME in my Gothic novel/horror story classes, about how Frankenstein is the name of a person, and he created a monster, so really, the guy with the green head is "Frankenstein's monster," NOT "Frankenstein." I can't believe I even tried to get away with not giving her the correct name this time. I stand corrected. And glowing (green?) with pride.

Happy Halloween!

Halloween Greetings, visitors to 83 Durant. I'm writing this post while sitting by the door waiting for the trick-or-treaters to show up. Jake has taken Lucy up to Ruthie's house where the kids (Lucy, Ruth, Woodrow, & Aiden) will trick-or-treat together (probably just to a few houses). Carter is here with me, being protective. He tried to pounce on the first three-year-old witch who showed up at our door. Thankfully, I restrained him, and now I have him in the front room, with a baby gate in the doorway between the front room and the hallway so that he can see what's going on but not be a danger to visitors (or himself for that matter).



Lucy is dressed up as Madeline. There's one shot up there, but there will soon be more once I get the camera unloaded.



We had a lovely Halloween today, with Jake competing at Orchard Cross, a cyclo-cross event at a New Hampshire Orchard (Applecrest Farm). It was a great day, with kids and families in costumes. Lucy's friends Emma and Jonah even raced in the kids event. There were cider donuts, lots of dogs, and good New England fall fun.



I'm blogging while I wait for the doorbell, so as long as I'm writing a silly (and soon-to-be-interrupted) post, I'll give you some mini updates on our lives.



My book: I currently have in my hands the proof for my book. I even know what the cover will look like. I'm making the index, which is a difficult thing to do. It's supposed to be out in January, which is pretty exciting. And by the way, if you're reading this and want to read my book (seriously, people, it's an academic book) don't pay the full price on Amazon. Seriously. That price point is really meant for libraries buying the book. But if you seriously want a copy, let me know, as I get a considerable author discount and I can hook you up.



Upcoming Holidays:

1) Lucy's Birthday: Boy, she's a bit excited about this. She's very into telling us what is going to happen on her Birthday. One of the things she claims is that she will use the potty then. Potty training has not really been happening, as every time we suggest we try, she responds "I will use the potty on my Birthday!" Jake's sister Jess informed him recently that Josh did something similar, so we are hopeful that she really is into this and we will be diaper-free by Thanksgiving. That would be something to be thankful for indeed.



2) Thanksgiving: Are you coming to our house? Because a lot of people are. If you are coming, you might want to BYOC, by which I mean, Bring Your Own Chair. I am quite sure we will have plenty of food, but chairs may be in short supply. Our official Thanksgiving dinner will be on Friday (so we can get the marked-down, day-after-Thanksgiving turkeys on sale, of course).



3) Christmas: We have no idea what we're doing yet. We're thinking we might just be sticking around here because of



4) Los Angeles: Bridget's going to LA for her business's convention in January. Do you have any recommendations for things she should do there, besides enjoy the chance to sleep through the night with no interruptions from Lucy?



Sadly, Lucy has been night-waking a lot lately. Mostly I mean that she's been waking up in the middle of the night demanding a drink and a diaper change. But also, for a couple days now, she's been waking up super-early and insisting that it's time to wake up. This makes me grumpy. I think I'm going to take it out of her future allowance. Or possibly her trick-or-treat candy.



Also, somewhere out there, there are photos of me in a Madeline costume. It was sometime in grad school, at a Phillips Place Halloween party several years ago. After a quick combing of photo albums, I have not been able to find any pictures. I suspect that they only existed electronically in some older online photo gallery thing that I have no longer have access to. If you have a picture of me as Madeline, could you send it to me?

Both sides of the table

This is not a post about our house. The "table" I refer to in the title is the book-signing table. Yesterday, I had the rather odd experience of being on both sides of it, signing books in the morning and then having a book signed in the evening. Strange, strange, strange.

In the morning, I went out to Hadley to participate in a group signing of a collection about the history of Hadley, Massachusetts. You can check out the details of the book at the UMass Press website here. I didn't write the whole book; I wrote a chapter about Mary Webster, a "witch" who lived in Hadley in the 1600s. The book came out a couple of months ago, and it coincides with the Hadley 350th celebration (1659 - 2009). So there are a lot of people in Hadley who are interested in Hadley history right now.

I had never participated in an author signing before. In fact, I'd never really heard of author signings for academic books. It's not like we have fans (except our family members & friends, obviously*). I kind of assumed we'd just be sitting around talking to each other the whole time.

But to my surprise and delight, the place was hopping. We had a constant stream of people who wanted to talk to us and have us sign their books. It was very fun. We sat in a corner of the Barnes & Noble cafe with name cards in front of us (yes, I kept mine) and signed away. [One of the other authors had a camera; I'll hopefully get some images to post here from her.] We chatted with folks and heard their stories of Hadley. I felt almost famous. At least as famous as one gets in academia without being at the center of a scandal or running some major center or conference (all things I'd prefer not to do).

After my own signing, I went to see/hear one of my very favorite authors, Margaret Atwood, who was talking about and reading from her new book, The Year of the Flood out in Cambridge. Jake heard about it on the radio and bought me a ticket. Thanks, Jake! It was awesome. She played some songs that appear in the book, read from the book, sang a song from the book herself (I'm not kidding), and then answered questions from the audience. Afterwards, she signed books.

Now, I'll provide some backstory here: In researching the article I wrote about Mary Webster (the one in the collection I was signing earlier in the day), I learned that Webster is actually an ancestor of Margaret Atwood. In fact, Margaret Atwood wrote a poem about her. So I wanted to include an excerpt from the poem in my article. Copyright is a complicated thing. In order to include the excerpt, I had to contact (and pay) the various publishers of the poem. This meant that I had to get in touch with Atwood's assistant to figure out the appropriate people to contact for permissions.

In my exchange with Atwood's assistant, I found out that she (the assistant) is also related to Mary Webster. How crazy! So I suggested that both she (the assistant) and Margaret Atwood herself might both like to read my article. Assistant said "yes!" so I sent two copies -- one for each of them. Oh, and meanwhile, I paid the permission fees and everything was cool with getting the poem excerpt included.

A month or two later, I got a very nice, hand-written card from Margaret Atwood on her personalized stationary, thanking me for sharing the article with her and saying that she had enjoyed reading it.

Margaret Atwood read something I wrote.

Margaret Atwood *enjoyed* reading something I wrote.

Just to be clear, this, for me, is a Big Deal. I've been in literary love with Atwood since I was in middle school, when, while babysitting, I would read Atwood while the kids were napping (and always wish the naps would last longer). I've taught Atwood's short stories and her novel, The Handmaid's Tale, many times. I admire her. A lot.

So when I got to the front of the signing line, I was really nervous. The line was huge, stretching around the whole room. Atwood was a signing factory. Two bookstore employees stood beside her, one to take the book, the next to open it to the right page. Previously, we had all been given post-it notes on which to print our name if we wished to have a "personalized" inscription. It was some serious assembly-line production here.

Atwood had nearly finished signing my copy by the time I was actually close enough to the table to talk to her. Here is my rough approximation of our "conversation":

Me (flustered, talking too fast; I actually had to repeat myself because she didn't hear me the first time):I wrote an article about your ancestor, Mary Webster.

Atwood: Good for you! Where can I get a copy?

Me: I sent it to you....you read it, and I wanted to thank you for your feedback.

Atwood: Oh, lovely. Thank you.

And then she was signing the next book and I was moving along. It was somewhat anti-climactic and rushed and awkward. I'm not complaining here, just reporting. I definitely understand -- she had a HUGE line of people asking for her signature, so it's not like she could have a conversation with anyone. She did a fabulous reading, and now I have a signed copy (I'm just a few pages in, but I like it so far!).

I was struck by how different it was from my signing earlier in the day. At my signing, I had been looking for something to say to people, since they would often just come up and hold out their books. My usual starting place was "do you live in Hadley?" since the book is about Hadley and all. This usually set people off talking about where in Hadley they live, what they wanted to know more about, and so forth. But I kept finding it somehow odd that people were there, holding out a book, clearly wanting this connection (whatever connection one gets from having a signed book) and yet not really saying anything. It was fun and flattering to sign books, yet the people we were signing for seemed to feel bashful. When I asked them where they'd like me to sign, or what they'd like it to say, they'd say "where ever you want" and "you're the writer!" While the latter is true, I kind of wanted them to tell me where they wanted the signature and if they wanted an inscription. Since it was a group signing, in some cases, we would sign on our individual essays, while in other instances, we'd all just sign on the title page. When this happened (all of us signing on a single page) I started to feel like I was writing in a yearbook. "See you next year" or "Have a great summer" or "I can't believe you failed calculus!" were tempting possibilities. I mostly just signed my name.

Mostly, I was struck by how the physical book seemed to get in the way of an actual conversation. I think that if I had given a talk on my topic, a lot of these people would have had questions to ask or shared interesting things with me. In fact, this is what happens when I do give talks on this very topic (I did exactly this last weekend in Hadley). But somehow, because my thoughts were in writing, and inside a hard-cover book, it was like we couldn't talk about the writing or ideas, and instead, we had this stilted conversation about signing the object. This seemed odd to me.

But as I stood on the other side of the table, facing Margaret Atwood, although I actually had something specific and personal to say to her, I found myself stumbling and unable to speak up loud enough, unsure how to address her. I realize this is largely because I'm very much in awe of her, and I'm not implying at all that in this analogy, I am Margaret Atwood, but I saw a bit more clearly how strange the book-signing ritual really is. More importantly, I felt like there was something strange about not just the signing itself, but this relationship between reader, book, and writer. Reading can be such an intimate activity, where we sometimes feel we know the author. It's understandable that we want to meet the author, but then, what do we do? What do we say? It's not like we're meeting her characters. That would be another dilemma entirely.

My students are always talking about authors by their first names, as if they're close personal friends. I try to correct them (at least in their papers), but I realize that in some ways, it feels that way, like we are friends (or sometimes enemies) with our authors. Then, when we meet the author and he/she is or isn't all that we'd hoped and dreamed and imagined, it's an incredibly strange feeling.

On the other hand, for the author, we send these words, sentences, paragraphs, off into the world and we really have no idea what the hell they're going to do out there. Will someone love them? Will someone hate them? Will someone name a child after some character of our creation? So meeting those unknown someones, seeing the audience in a literal way, is just as much of a disconnect as the reader experiences when finally meeting the author.

My, my, my, this post has gone on quite long enough now on a non-house digression. Thanks for reading if you got this far. I'm happy to send you a signed copy of this blog post.

*note: family members will be getting a signed copy of the book for Christmas, so don't go buying one for yourself. I don't get any royalties on this anyway. ;)

The book is in the mail

I know, you hear it all the time. But this time it's true! It's in the mail!
We rode the tandem to the post office yesterday, and also enjoyed a celebratory breakfast at Shaw's. Yum! Lucy loved her pancakes.

Here she is doing her impression of me over the last few months:

Printing in Process

I'm printing out my book. It's very exciting. It's going to take a while. So while I'm waiting, I thought I'd post this update. No, I will not post the text of my book, as my publisher might get a bit upset. But up there above you can see a word cloud here based on it. You too can make a Word Cloud from anything you're writing.

I'm relieved to be getting this off my plate, although my plate is still pretty full. Now that this is done, I need to catch up on all the grading I've been putting off. I'm afraid my freshmen writing portfolios have been neglected and are now perhaps breeding with my American Lit students' papers. Who knows what horror they will create.

But thanks for your support, dear readers. We'll keep you posted on late-breaking news.

This just in: Carter got a haircut today! Film at 11.