Oh, The Places We Went

I’m not going to be able to see my mom on Mother’s Day, which bums me out. We have fun together, even in less than perfect conditions.

For example, one time she and my sister Erin came to visit me. Brandon and I had just moved to a place called Mt. Crawford, and I was not yet fully aware of the culture. I found a music festival and we all hopped in Erin’s little convertible. The festival was called “Home Grown.” A more discerning person might have gotten a clue what the festival was really all about from the title, but it was only after we parked the car amid a field of Jeeps and jacked-up pick-ups, and as we picked our way through the patchoulli-scented crowd—Mom carrying her white purse, Erin in a kicky floral print, me in dressy sandals—did I realize that I had taken my mom and sister to a big, rednecky pot party.

Or: When we went on vacation to the Outer Banks and attended a performance of the Lost Colony play. (Every vacation with me somehow turns into a social studies field trip.) We sat in the audience, rapt, as the players reenacted what might have happened to the lost colonists. At one point, a main character accuses the group of being willing to desert the colony. We had good seats. So good, in fact, that we could hear the murmurs of the bit actors. “I’D NEVER DESERT!” one piped up. Mom and I promptly lost our shit and started laughing loudly and inappropriately. The actors dispersed towards the outer edge of the stage. I had visions of them coming to scold me and stifled it. Mom did not get it back together, however.

Or last summer, when we went up to North Adams, Massachusetts. I was scheduled to give a reading with the awesome writers, Jenn Mattern and Catherine Newman. I did. But then I booked us in the hotel for an extra day for some mother-daughter hijinx. Guess what happens on Sunday in North Adams, Massachusetts? Nothing. NOTHING AT ALL. The big modern art museum was open, so we went and gawked at things like a video by a woman who claims she has two people living inside of her (not twins, but two separate and mentally healthy people inhabiting the same body) and some paintings of what an Italian hotel room wall looked like at various times of the day. For dinner, we had items from the hotel vending machine. We went back to the room and analyzed our own walls. We read the museum’s program notes. We were pretty happy not have noticed the installation made from used tampons.

I can’t wait until this summer. We’ll be taking on New York City.

An Open Letter

Hey! The paperback of Practically Perfect in Every Way comes out today!

When I turned in the manuscript two years ago, I was very, very sick of thinking about myself. In my work with Brain, Child, I’m either on the phone with Steph, emailing writers/artists/photographers, checking in with other editors, writing a newsletter for readers, blahdee blah. In other words, interacting with people. Whatever I did next, I thought, it best be collaborative. This life of being sent off to work alone in the attic for months at a time? Who am I—Emily Dickinson?

I didn’t realize then that the really collaborative part comes after, and it’s between the reader and the writer. Because, hey, you can write all you want and even get a publisher to snazz it up between two covers, but if no one reads it and no one talks about it, it might as well not exist.

This is all to say thank you for making PPIEW exist. I’m offering up all the gratitude in my moderately hopeless little heart to everyone who bought the book, read the book, posted a review on Amazon or Good Reads or Library Thing, wrote about it online or in print, recommended it to a friend, invited me to a book club, come out on my travels last year, had me at their bookstore, had me on their show, sent me a kind email, or somehow felt a connection to the book.

Mad love to you. And now let the Amazon ranking obsession begin anew.

Six

Oh, thank you, gods of the meme. You’ve saved me from posting a movie that Caleb and I made Thursday night. (And by “movie,” I mean two minutes of the two of us being unable to tear our eyes away from the image of ourselves in the monitor. Don’t let your babies grow up to be narcissists, people.) In a very cool coincidence, both Tiffany and Libby tagged me for the Six Things Meme.

The rules:
1. Link back to the person who tagged you.
2. Post these rules on you blog
3. Share six unimportant things about yourself.
4. Tag six people at the end of your entry.

In honor of the impending paperback release of PPIEW and the finishing of Brain, Child’s summer issue (not there yet), I’m going to do six things about me related to publishing.

1. When my proposal for the book went out, quite a few houses wanted to see a picture of me. So I scanned in a bunch and sent them off. Then they came back and asked for, like, full-length ones. Miss Jay said I lost my neck, but Tyra thought I looked “fierce.” On my go-sees, everyone agreed I needed to work on my walk. Oh, I’m kidding. Except about them asking for pictures. And looking fierce.

2. If I had it to do over, I wouldn’t have written the whole section about Caleb and Parker in PPIEW. I believe I did it well and sensitively, but nonetheless, I wouldn’t do it again.

3. The cover of the hardback PPIEW is the same image that we ran as a cover one time on Brain, Child. I kind of fought against having that image on the book until I almost wound up with a cover with a fake-me-out Barbie doll, then one of (inexplicably) toast. Eventually, I became fond of the cover. But I really like the snazzy new paperback cover. One of the little circles has a drawing of a dog that looks like Luna, one of our pups. The woman holding the book is not me, although I do admire the arch of her eyebrows.

4. At Brain, Child, we run between one and two percent of the essay submissions we get. Isn’t that crazy? And to be honest, in the early years, if I myself had submitted an essay to Brain, Child, it probably would not have gotten in. I’ve learned so much about writing from editing really good writers. So, holla, you BC contributors!

5. I have really excellent graphic design skills for a person working in 1995.

6. Stephanie and I live about an hour and fifteen minutes from each other and I don’t have a single picture of us together that floats my boat. (We were recently asked for one because faces tend to attract people's attention--hence all those magazines with babies/models/celebrities on the cover.) There’s one that comes close, but the expression on my face might be best summed up as Yes, I Work For Brain, Child, But Let Me Tell You, I Am Not Happy About It. Subscribe today and you can achieve the same grimness as me! Jeesh.

So, I can’t remember who does memes and who doesn’t, so if you’re interested? Consider yourself tagged!

Two Things

Thing One: This, from Julianne, cracked me up so bad.

Thing Two: A woman named Lauren Thompson dancing with herself, at four:



via Crooked House.

Think her influences might have included the Solid Gold dancers?

[Added later: I just rewatched and the four-year-old bit was filmed in 1987, so duh to me. At that point, I'm pretty sure the SG dancers had stopped filling all our lives with music and putting rhythm in our souls.]

Last Lecture

When I was but a whippersnapper, one of my first real assignments at C-Ville Weekly (then C-Ville Review) was to interview this guy at UVA who’d done pioneering work in virtual reality. I was not computer literate; I wrote all my college papers on a Brother typewriter. I’d actually had to learn how to use a computer (thank God, a Mac) for this job. At C-Ville, we didn’t have Internet access and I did most of my research at the library.

I went to the interview with a photographer. The guy I was interviewing was a young professor, cute (although I was a student at the time and well schooled in What Is Inappropriate, which included finding professors cute). He was good at explaining things in layman’s terms. I got to try on some virtual reality goggles and run through his program. It was really cool, but I have weak eye muscles and wearing the goggles gave me a headache. That’s about all I remember from the interview.

The guy was Randy Pausch. If you’re an engineering folk, you might know him from his accomplishments in the computing field, but if you’re a YouTube watcher or a bestseller-list observer, you might know him from his Last Lecture. Pausch was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer and has blown people away with this lecture.

I don’t really have anything to add to what’s already been said about his talk, which is funny and inspirational. But yesterday, I was feeling whiny and overwhelmed and up to my armpits in three different projects, and the lecture popped in my head. I (or any of us, really) could be dead by next year, I thought. Which is, I know, kind of maudlin and drama-queen-ish, but sometimes it takes maudlin and drama queen to get me to realize that I need to chill the fuck out.

If you have seventy-six minutes to spare...

I Need to Be Stopped

Holy hell. Have you ever gotten sucked into Ancestry.com? Every spare minute I have, I'm on it, which makes me either (a) researching a project, or (b) impersonating a retiree who just discovered the Internet.

I can read old newspapers all day. So far, my favorite thing I've come across is one of those old-timey ads that looks like an article. The headline is: "Attention, Fat Girls!" I could kick myself that I kept reading.

Paperback Writer

So, the paperback of Practically Perfect in Every Way comes out on May 6. It has a new cover, a reader’s guide of sorts, and the correct spelling of seretonin. I’m all kinds of excited.

I’m also a little nervous. It’s no big secret that in publishing, you have, max, three months to make a splash before the next crop of books rises up and takes over the shelf space. So part of the job, with nonfiction anyway, is putting on a publicist hat and (if I can take this metaphor and torture it), the hat is about as comfortable for me as a bale of straw. I think I’ve gotten pretty okay with it, though. But I’ve come to a wall; I’m not quite sure what else I can do to publicize PPIEW.

Except, maybe ask you? If you’re interested in writing about the book—whether it’s a review, an interview with me, or a suggestion for your book club—I’d be ever so grateful. I have some TV and radio experience, too, if you need a somewhat chunky lady with fabulous new shoes to book on your show. (jennifer dot niesslein at comcast dot net.)

Even posting this request kind of weirds me out. I guess I’m trying to practice what I preach: If you need help, ask for it. And it’s true: you should, I should, we all scream for ice cream. But the other part of me, the part that believes in chaos and randomness and what will be will be, is at work, too. I pre-ordered the paperback on Amazon and wrote a small, kind note to myself. It’s to remind me that even if the three months pass without a blip, you can still revel in small victories and use them to keep on trucking.