A Tasteful Pictorial

The picture-taking? A little random. Erin and I popped out the camera whenever we remembered, but I, for one, was pre-occupied with remembering the fifty pounds of stuff I slugged around the city.

On the plus side, I can now share some very important lessons.

1. Make someone else in charge of the camera.

2. Do not feel compelled to be in every single picture, particularly if the weekend before you took a devil-may-care attitude regarding sunscreen at your son's baseball game, giving you the complexion of an alcoholic tomato.

3. It's never a good idea to be the one in the middle with your arms around people, unless you like to look like a person who wears a bra that requires 20 hooks.

Not things they teach you on America's Next Top Model.

This is me in front of the Barnes & Noble in Brooklyn. My publicist at Putnam, Yamil took this one. I have a picture of the two of us, but I'm afraid it's not flattering to either one of us and if I wanted to share unflattering pictures, I'd whip out the middle school archives.

This is the travelling companion divine, my sister Erin. It's been forever since just the two of us hung out. In this picture we're in front of the New York Public Library in Manhattan. No real reason we chose to document this (although if it were an elementary-school yearbook, the caption would be something like, "Fourth-grader Erin Niesslein checks out the NY Public Library.")

This is my agent Dan Lazar. If your dream agent is one who can work a mention of Karen Walker from Will & Grace into a bit of solid professional advice, then you know why I heart this man.

Me (me again!) with my editor Jackie Cantor. It's probably unprofessional and/or creepy to say that you'd like to have a slumber party with your editor. So I'll just imply it.

And finally, me and the writer Carol Paik, who turned out to be just as cool in person as she is in print. (She's on the right and her friend is on the left.)

I wish I had pictures of a lot of other things: the excellent people who came out, for one; the little bar that Erin, Yamil, and I went to in Park Slope, for another. I saw my friend Roland in the audience, and we stayed in what really should be called The 25-Year-Old Businessman District. On the train, a man in front of us kept repeating into his cell phone, "BUT IS THE CLOCK TICKING ON THIS PROJECT?" (Call me a shut-in, but I didn't know people actually spoke like that.) To sum up? Good times.