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Library Bookspotting December 2012

Library Bookspotting December 2012

Published by Kelly on January 7, 2013

It was a December to remember at the branch library I volunteer at here in town. Here are my finds for the month, and the end of the year.

Sometimes, I see a book whose cover is so bad and so boring, I think I could probably do a better version of it in Notepad. This is one of them. Of course, there is no shortage of books designed to scare people about what they put in their children’s bodies, so why wouldn’t there be a handful of them for easily persuadable pet owners? And at the very least, they could have borrowed one of those pitiful-looking faces that we see in those Sarah McLachlan commercials. “I will vaccinate you…”

I know I have made fun of some punbelivable adult mystery titles before, especially those that play on classic literature, but this one really takes the cake. It’s just… shameful. Even the chihuahua on the cover is like “This is so wrong”. I can only imagine it is about a mystery-solving chihuahua whose ghost haunts the Baskervilles, a 2-bedroom apartment complex in suburban Salt Lake City.

Again, this is one of those book covers that is so literal, so boring, and so shoddily put together that it’s just laughable. Then again, if you’re learning how to hunt open country mule deer by reading a book, you’re kind of asking for it. I thumbed through this one a bit, just because I wondered what kind of content actually goes into an instructional text on deer hunting, and it’s mostly ammunition diagrams. Figures the content would be as boring as the cover. The author’s name also made me chuckle, as “Dwight Schuh” is dangerously close to “Dwight Shrute.” I wonder if he hunts mule deer on the open country of his 60-acre beet farm…

And the winner of the month. The spine of this guy caught my attention as I was shelving it with the other early readers, and I thought to myself, “Wow, Dragon Puncher might be the most awesome title for a book I have ever heard of. I can’t wait to see what’s on the cover.” I did not expect to see an actual cat in a cartoon cat suit, yet it somehow is even more amazing than anything I could have pictured in my mind. When I teach my future children to read, you can bet they will be doing so to Dragon Puncher.

See y’all next year! I hope one of your New Year’s Resolutions is to pay more visits to your local library!

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2012 is gone… what did I do?

Published by Kelly on January 1, 2013

It’s that goal-reflection and goal-setting time of year. The time when the whole world reflects on its activities completed in the year as it comes to a close, and determines what activities will transpire in the year to come. And buys a gym membership they use a lot in January, sparingly in February, and completely give up on by March.

I, for the record, spent far more days of 2012 in the gym than skipping it. So, what writerly activities did I complete in the last year?

I read 60 books.

Not to be all braggy, but that’s more than a book a week. The secret wasn’t having more time, although quitting my shockingly low-paying freelance gig did free up a little bit more time, the secret was having more access. I started volunteering for the library, which meant I could bring something home every week, download audiobooks to my iPod Touch, and borrow Kindle books. I had never really gotten into audiobooks before, but I found it to be a great reading addition for certain activities like lifting weights, putting away laundry, and walking to the bank.

I finished writing my second novel

It was a collaborative effort between an academic, eleven women with tattoos, and a handful of tattoo artists. The writing part was great; in fact I think it’s one of the best things I have ever written in my lifetime. Getting a publisher was a bjillion times easier than what I experienced with my first book, but boy howdy going through the hoops of the book deal process is hard. I’m not sure if it’s actually hard, or if it just feels that way, but stay tuned because it’s going to be hitting the shelves before you know it… I hope.

My first novel celebrated its first birthday

And in its first year, it got over 5,000 promotional downloads, and had significantly far less paid copies sold. It got 14 reviews on Amazon, only one of which was a 1-star-er, 3 reviews on Barnes and Noble, and 18 ratings on Goodreads. It made it to the semi-final round of The Kindle Book Review best independent book of 2011 contest. It also pissed off my mom.

I started writing my third novel

Full disclosure – it’s barely one chapter at this point, but it’s going to rock. It’ll also be my first novel-length work that uses true chapters instead of a series of short stories. We’ll see how the long form story works out for me.

I wrote other stuff

A handful of poems, a couple flash fiction pieces, nothing too crazy, and not nearly as much as I should have written. I only got a couple of things featured or published, which I again should have hit harder.

Yep, that was 2012. So what’s 2013 going to bring, besides more steady gym time (I do, after all, have to fit into a wedding dress)? Here are my goals, in no particular order.

Publish novel #2. This one’s at the top, because it will with any luck happen first. Stay tuned.
Finish writing novel #3. If I can write, edit, and publish novel #2 in a little over a year, I should really try to do that every year. Even with a full-time job.
ABQ. Always be querying. I need to keep all my poems, short stories, and other crap in constant rotation.
Start expanding my freelance portfolio, because I might not want to work for the man all my life.
Write more stuff.
Keep my workshop group going.
Show nothing but love for other authors (but still make fun of ridiculous library finds).

Authors – always be looking to improve your writing, your platform, and your abdominals. My New Year’s Resolution, for the record, is to schedule my tweets each week so I am consistently building my platform. And to floss more.

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“Getting” is to “Book Deal” as “Jumping” is to “Hoops”

Published by Kelly on December 24, 2012

Like most introspective, creative people, my least favorite form of communication is the phone. Sure, I enjoyed it plenty when I was 15, but I’m now 15 x 2 so I would much rather just email you, thanks very much.

When I began writing Portrait of Woman in Ink: A Tattoo Storybook, it was fortuitous of me to do the project for National Novel Writing Month, because I was on a time crunch. It also meant I couldn’t procrastinate picking up the phone and calling people to talk about their tattoo stories, and ask them if they’d be willing to let me write about them for this project. That was nerve-wracking, since I basically felt like I was asking them to bear their souls to me just so I could write another book. Still, they were my friends, and I appreciated their candidness and willingness to let me write about it. I was on a 30-day time crunch, so I couldn’t let people equally un-phone-y as me dodge my calls for long.

After I finished the project and started sending it around to publishers, I got a bite. The publisher asked that we have a – you guessed it – phone call. It was a good phone call, I learned a lot about what they were willing to do for me, but in exchange, they wanted me to do something for them: get all the friends whose tattoos I wrote about to sign a legal release form saying that when the book makes it big they won’t sue me for royalties, and to get all the tattoo artists who drew their tattoos to give consent to use the images. Which meant… 23 phone calls.

I also now had to ask my friends to sign a legal document saying they wouldn’t sue me and yes, I felt like a total dick. Pretty much without exception, all of them were totally cool about it; after all, they are my friends and they were as excited as I was about the prospect of me getting a book deal. I also had to ask them who did their tattoos, and call up their shops, leave messages, call back the next day, leave another message, explain myself several times… lather, rinse, repeat.

But this is what you do when you want your book to see the light of day, so I’m gladly doing it. But you can bet your britches that my next book will not bear any likenesses or have overlapping copyright implications that make me chew my nails down! Also, I refuse to make any phone calls over this long holiday weekend, so if I am waiting on you for your signed release form or tattoo image consent, you get a whole 4 days of me not calling to remind you.

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In Which I Reflect on Christmases Past…

Published by Kelly on December 19, 2012

It’s a week before Christmas, it’s 80 degrees outside, and I’m enjoying a nice cup of spiked hot cider with a real cinnamon stick. It doesn’t sound like that reflective of a moment, but it is for me. When I was a kid, I thought both liquor and real cinnamon sticks were something only rich people buy. My fiance picked up a couple baggies of cinnamon sticks last night for a hot buttered rum recipe we decided to try. I have never bought cinnamon sticks before because I always assumed they were a luxury item for fancy people. Turns out, they are less than 99 cents.

It’s odd to think of something that costs 99 cents as a luxury item, but Crayolas are only a couple bucks more expensive than less-than-crayola crayons, and I never go to have those as a kid, either. Christmas time was always a very tense occasion in my family. They usually involved my parents getting payday loans and putting things on layaway, things that because I went to college and worked hard to get a good writing job I could stroll into the store and buy even on the last day before payday. There was always more fighting around Christmas as money got tighter, and I got more and more complacent about the holidays as the years went on.

But that’s Christmas past, not Christmas future. I don’t buy Christmas presents with payday loans or nearly-maxed out credit cards. My fiance has revived the Christmas spirit that I thought died in me a long time ago. We make Christmas our own – with liquor and Nutella-stuffed cookies and our wall of Christmas lights, Mystery Science Theater 3000’s Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, and silly Texas Christmas cards.

And this might just be the best Christmas ever.

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The passive-aggressive breakup: It’s not you, it’s me.

Published by Kelly on December 3, 2012

When an acquisitions editor for a publishing house emails you saying he or she is interested in your book, it’s hard not to get your hopes up. When FOUR (yes, capital FOUR) editors email you saying they’re interested, it gets even harder.

Then comes the day one of them says they’re offering you a book deal, but the deal never mysteriously arrives in your inbox, they don’t return your calls, and you start obsessively checking your spam folders.

That’s not how it’s supposed to happen, but that’s how it’s happened for me. Late last summer, I started talking with a publisher who expressed interest in my book. They gave me a list of edits they wanted me to make; I made them. I emailed them, they responded. We talked format, marketing, tattoos (it’s what the books about), and they were incredibly responsive. Then they told me they’d have the contract to me on Tuesday. Tuesday came. Tuesday went. Another Tuesday came and went, and suddenly it felt like my emails were going straight to a fax machine that spit directly into a recycle bin (which we all know is what all fax machines really do, otherwise people would claim they actually receive the faxes I send).

Naturally, I didn’t want to be the pushy, needy author who demands to know where her contract is, lest they decide to pull the plug on the project, but still – I am a person, with needs! I politely sent some “followups”, but then something happened that made me back off a little…

Another editor emails me to say “they’d love to publish my book.” We start talking, over the phone (even though I abhor the phone due to the fact that I suck ass at it), over email (yay!). They begin putting up the hoops I need to jump through, I begin jumping like a good little author. They say they’re going to give me an advance and offer me a deal that’s quite a bit better than the one the aforementioned (but nameless) publisher was offering, so I keep in constant contact with them with each hoop I jump through, until they say they’re ready to move forward.

Then… AGAIN! My emails start going into oblivion. My phone calls start going straight to voicemail. Weeks go by, I maintain polite follow-up protocol, and nothing. Now, I’m even politely crawling back to the first publisher who ignored me, hoping they’ll notice this cool new thing I did to my hair and take me back, or take me, to begin with.

I find myself wondering… is it me? I feel like Cher in Clueless (who, if you didn’t know, was based on Jane Austen’s Emma) after Christian shuts down her sexual advances. What did I do wrong? Did my hair go flat? Did I stumble into some bad lighting? What’s WRONG with me?
… and then I remind myself that if the book’s good enough to get the attention (despite losing it later) of four publishers, it’s probably good enough to get the attention of one that will follow through.

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Library Bookspotting November 2012

Published by Kelly on November 30, 2012

It’s been crazy busy, so I have two months’ worth of library bookspotting to catch up on, but lucky for you, it’s worth it. Here goes!

My library has a pretty respectable collection of Spanish language books for all ages. This one is meant for early readers and asks the literary question “Who was Anne Frank?” (and why did she have such a gigantic head?) We have a whole collection of these “Who was” children’s biographies, and all the heads are huge. Sorry, Anne, but this caricature-like cover really doesn’t add to the somber tone.

I often rip on serial mysteries and how hokey their titles often are, but this one has the double whammy of a horribly puntastic title and an equally ridiculous cartoon cover image. I do like that they included the whitewashed fence in the background, I just wonder what they called the Tom Sawyer version.

The thumbnail doesn’t do this book justice, since you can’t see that it’s called “Afterbirth”. I think this is another case of the Japanese not quite getting the other meaning of the translation, kind of like they did with “Night Head.”

Did you know that Al Roker also wrote mystery novels in his spare time? Neither did anyone else. At least it doesn’t bear the characteristically punbelievable title convention, but all of his mysteries are set on the set of a talk show, which is a little uninventive from the likes of Al Roker.

I just couldn’t resist snapping a pic of this early reader that got returned right after the election. Regardless of what political side of the fence you’re on, it’s a fair question to ask. Some might be surprised to learn that this book actually contained pages.

I was a little taken aback by this children’s biography only because I can’t believe they couldn’t find a picture of Michael Jackson that didn’t look like his face was scratched up by an angry cat. There are probably more pictures of Michael Jackson than there are McDonald’s fries in the world’s landfills, and yet this is the one they put on the cover.

That’s all for this episode! Stay tuned for more horrible library finds as the holidays wear on.

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Foreword, Introduction, or Preface?

Published by Kelly on November 12, 2012

For my forthcoming project, Portrait of Woman in Ink: A Tattoo Storybook, I thought it would be a good idea to enlist an academic who could speak to the history between women and tattoos. After reading this article in the Lawrence Journal-World, I knew I had found my academic in Women’s Studies professor Dr. Marta Vicente, and I asked her (and happily enough, she agreed) to write me a foreword.

But did I mean introduction? Or preface? No doubt you’ve seen all three in books you’ve read, but what makes a preface a preface, a foreword a foreword, or an introduction an introduction? I wasn’t really sure I knew the difference, since it wasn’t exactly something they covered in my undergraduate creative writing studies.

Besides, who needs book learnin’ when there’s Wikipedia? So I looked it up.

Foreword: Typically written by someone other than the primary author of the work, it often tells of some interaction between the writer of the foreword and the book’s primary author or the story the book tells.
Preface: Generally covers the story of how the book came into beginning, or how the idea for the book was developed; this is often followed by thanks and acknowledgments to people who were helpful to the author during the time of writing.
Introduction: Typically describes the scope of the document and gives the brief explanation or summary of the document. It may also explain certain elements that are important to the essay if explanations are not part of the main text.

Since the piece she wrote summarizes some of the book, but also goes into some of the historical significance of women and tattoos, I’m not really sure which of these it falls into. The summary part of it screams introduction, but the academic references indicate foreword. I could even argue for preface, since you might say women throughout history set the stage for the women in the book to tell their stories through body art.

Or maybe I should just call it a unicorn and be done with it. What do y’all think?

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New poem up!

Published by Kelly on November 1, 2012

The poetry is back! And I have a new one for your verse-loving pleasure. I’ve been pretty well entrenched in wedding planning stuff for the past month or so, so naturally it was on my brain when I was thinking of writing a new poem.

And this is what came out of it! Check out Shotgun and let me know what you think 🙂

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What’s In A (Pen) Name?

Published by Kelly on October 22, 2012

I’ve been thinking a lot about names lately. For one thing, I recently got engaged, and my fiance isn’t super keen on the idea of me keeping my maiden name. As Kelly Hitchcock, I’ve published one novel (and hopefully one more), a few short stories, and several poems. Still, he maintains that he wants me to take his last name, which is four syllables… not exactly hyphen-friendly. And anyone who has read my work knows I am a big fan of the hyphen; almost as much as I would be a semicolon superfan if it didn’t make me look like a pretentious a-hole.

It also came up in my writer’s group the other day – when is it appropriate to use a pen name? I imagine that if your given name at birth is Brad Pitt or James Cameron and you plan on making a serious living as an author, you might want to use a pen name to distance yourself from the celebrity namesakes (then again, you might want to invite the connection). Then there’s the case of writers who cross over into writing in another genre – like erotica – and use a pen name to maintain the separation between the two genre’s writings. Or maybe your name just sucks, like Dentenia Zickafoose.

What I wonder is:

It’s common practice for doctors and lawyers to keep their maiden names based on public professional accomplishments. Income disparity notwithstanding, does the same expectation exist for authors?
Is it icky to take on a pen name for no apparent reason? No evidence of genre-switching, crappy namesake, or celebrity doppelhood?

What do you think?

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Library Bookspotting for September 2012

Published by Kelly on October 15, 2012

September was a great month for me, both personally and professionally, both of which I will elaborate on in a future post. For now, savor these tasty gems I found while volunteering at the library last month.

It’s a good this fiction (?) novel is geared toward junior high boys, because otherwise men of all ages might track it down and enjoy it. How do I know? My fiance laughed hysterically and said he would read it, and all he reads is programming books. I think we can all recall a day this very thing has happened – I once ate street tacos for every meal and yes, it ended badly. And The Day My Butt Went Psycho is supposedly based on a true story…

This one’s a little hard to read since the cover’s so busy, but it’s a children’s cookbook called The Star Wars Cookbook: Wookiee Cookies and Other Galactic Recipes. I’ve been trying to get a good shot of this one for awhile, but it never stays on the shelf for long. I want to believe that the publishers of this fine specimen had no idea that Wookiee Cookie had another, more grownup, meaning, so I will give them the benefit of the doubt. After all, they knew the correct spelling of Wookiee – which blew my mind when I discovered it. I’ll have to check it out and try the Boba Fettucine for myself sometime.

Remember how I told you that mystery novels, particularly those in series, have ridiculous titles based on bad puns? Well, here’s another case in point. Roast Mortem (part of the Coffeehouse Mystery series) is about as stretchy of a pun as you can get. Despite its terribly punny title, this book actually doesn’t look half bad.

The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln is an I-Can-Read book. I can’t think of more appropriate subject matter to use to teach my child to read with than the in-cold-blood killing of our 16th president. I’ll avoid this one like the plague – I’d rather wait until the dog passes away to explain the concept of death instead of using poorly illustrated photos of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.

Stay tuned for October’s finds!

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