for updates & short takes

About last night

Apparently the Hideout was filled to capacity last night and they couldn't let everyone in, so if you'd come to see me and trucked all the way on down to the bar's weirdly remote and semi-industrial location only to be turned away, I owe you a drink.

The show was a blast. The only trouble with reading at events like these is that I don't get to spend all that much time just sitting in the audience, and everyone was so funny that I hated missing any of it. Readers were: Mark Bazer, who was one of my favorites from Funny Ha-Ha 1 in the fall, Todd Dills from The 2nd Hand, Amy Krouse Rosenthal, Leonard Pierce, who read this thing which you must read, and Annie Logue, who was funny enough to make me suspect that the very serious-looking hand on her webpage is not actually hers. Plus some really fucking hilarious films.

I read a couple of short chapters from the book as well as couple of excerpts from my summer camp story, which is going to be in an anthology called Sleepaway to be published in June. A couple people were asking me about it, and there's a page up at Amazon already, and I'll keep an eye out for other places with ordering info.

Oh, and go buy books by Claire Zulkey and John Green, since it was their idea to throw this shindig in the first place.
pounded out by Wendy at 1:48 PM

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Army of me

I’ve spent the past couple of days being the exact opposite of the Ironwoman I was last week, acting like a total delicate flower in the wake of blizzards and colds and lots of work, but really, I’m milking it all I can before I start in with the three-days-a-week-for six-weeks early morning boot camp class next week. Jesus fuck, I signed up for more of that stuff, despite the torture from before. I’m like the Patti Hearst of fitness. MY NAME IS TANYA NOW!

I have gotten addicted to reading all these lovely weblogs and articles about promoting your book, and while some days I feel like I'm being very helpful to my book's cause just by reading these sites, other days they make me all like, "oh my God it's three months to publication have I memorized the promotional copy of my book yet so I can recite it to people I sit next to on the bus? Why haven't I called the restroom advertising people to check rates yet?! Or arranged for somebody in the taco mascot costume to stand on the street and hand out postcards?! Because everyone says that if you don't allow at least twelve solid weeks of taco costume campaigning you're doomed, you're screwed!" Then I have to breathe into a paper bag.

I did get my first postcards, though. I did not know what 1000 postcards looked like. Now I do.

Two places where I'll be very soon:

1.) At the Hideout tonight. I think you know the drill but click here if you don't. I'll be on the bill with some cool people, including Amy Krouse Rosenthal, whose new book comes out this week and who is getting the word out with a method that is way better than a taco costume.

2.) Guest-blogging for Maud Newton tomorrow. So if you've wondering why I haven't posted as much this week, it's because I've been saving it for Maud. That makes it sound like I took a vow or something, which I didn't, THOUGH I SO WOULD FOR MAUD.

I need a nap now. See you later. And elsewhere...
pounded out by Wendy at 10:56 AM

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testing testing

Is my server still being wonky? Yes? No?
pounded out by Wendy at 9:31 AM

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Six things

1.) Boot camp, Day Ten: Oh my God sweet Lord Jesus H. Christ on a holy flying fiddlestick good golly Parliament Funkadelic almighty balls of flaming firey fire, I'm done.

2.) Hey look! A poster for next week's thingy.

3.) I'm taking suggestions for other features the Book-Touring Femmebot ought to have. Those of you who have attended or given book readings are welcome to drop a line in the comments.

4.) If you didn't catch the discussion the over at One Good Thing about whether or not this Dilbert cartoon was insulting and whether or not Scott Adams was kidding when he further explained his point by saying "It's just a fact that women get a seratonin rush from shopping," you can still read the really hilarious comments from the orginal post, including comments from Adams, too, as well as the follow-up post. (Though keep in mind the discussion seems pretty much over at this point, and I doubt anyone on either side needs any more comments on their behalf.)

5.) I think this has been the longest four-day week of my life. That is all.

6.) Either Blogger or my server has been acting up this week, which is why I haven't posted as much. I've been too tired to worry about it much.
pounded out by Wendy at 8:56 AM

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Boot camp, Day 6:

Maybe one night sometime in the future I will be in the parking lot of a Miami nightclub minding my own business, when a well-known rap artist and/or producer and/or promoter extraordinaire will step out of the building escorted by several bodyguards at the precise moment a late-model black Escalade with tinted windows careens past the entrance with a menacing shriek of tires skidding on asphalt, and shots will ring out, and the bodyguards will pop a few back, and then, just a second later, some instinct will compel me to put one leg out, extend the other leg back, and, keeping my feet carefully aligned at shoulder width, dip down and execute a perfect squat lunge just as a bullet zips overhead and misses me by a few inches.

Because there has to be a reason I did about a hundred and fifty of those fuckers today, right? Right?
pounded out by Wendy at 4:31 PM

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Beyond the Thunderdome

(Day Five of boot camp: you know how in movies like Mad Max and Conan the Barbarian there's always an elaborate forced-labor scene involving lots of extras chained to some kind of giant carousel of torment that they have to propel all by themselves by pushing and/or pulling and all the while they're grunting and shuffling along looking sort of passive-aggressive, but really you know they're supposed to be exhausted? You know? I forgot what my point was. Anyway. Ow.)

I keep meaning to mention that I'm going to be reading at the Hideout on the 26th in yet another people-reading-funny-stuff extravaganza hosted by Zulkey and John Green. I might pick a short selection from the book, but I'll be reading other things, too. You should come. The films are funny.

Speaking of readings, did you see how Margaret Atwood went and invented this thing that signs books from a remote location? No, really: Margaret Atwood totally invented a robot arm that signs books. That's just surreal. Wouldn't it be great if writers just did that stuff all the time? Like if David Foster Wallace just came up with some crazy precision laser beam that can render legible footnotes in microscopic -15pt type, or Tom Wolfe devised an electromagnetic wand to detect irony in sex scenes? Personally I would improve on the book-signing invention by solving the women-writers-can't-get-male-groupies problem at the same time. That's right--I would build a Book-Touring Femmebot, with Realdoll parts and NPR personality. Among its many features it would adminster a stun-gun-like shock to anyone who says something like, "So your book, it's really just chick lit, right?" or "Why aren't you on Oprah?"
pounded out by Wendy at 10:02 AM

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Like "Private Benjamin" except not at all

Today is Day Three of the two-week (ten-day) boot camp fitness class I'm taking at my new gym. I've always sort of wanted to take a boot camp class the way I've always sort of wanted to see if I could actually fit a regulation billiard ball into my mouth, and my excuse for not doing either was always NO NO NO I COULD DIE. However, the fact that my gym is affiliated with a hospital and is right there on the hospital campus has managed to convince me that I will not die if I do a boot camp fitness class there, and since the class is short I knew if I hated it I wouldn't be stuck with it (which is more than you can say about the pool ball, probably).

When I first saw the class on the schedule, it said, "M-F 5:30-6:30 am" but when I registered at the front desk I was given a flyer that said it was "M, F 5:30-6:30 am." "Are you sure?" I asked the girl at the front desk. "You mean the class meets only four times altogether?" She looked at the flyer. "That's what it says," she said. And even though there's a HUGE FUCKING DIFFERENCE between a comma and a hyphen in this instance, I found I actually didn't mind finding out on Monday morning that you bet your booty it's five days a week all right instead of two, because if I'd known for sure I think the days leading up to this week would've felt a lot different, like facing a death sentence or, well, actual military deployment. Instead, I just sort of cheerfully agreed to come back the next day for more good times running around the track feeling like an alien was trying to burst out of my chest cavity. I don't know, I was feeling spontaneous.

Yes, it's at 5:30 in the morning. Yes, I know that's not even in the morning but some spooky nether-hour when I'm sure garden gnomes come alive and scuttle around. I thought I would hate it but I'm finding that when the class is that early it gives me a pleasantly numb distance from the trauma for the rest of the day. Yesterday I went up and down seven flights of stairs TWICE and then we jogged a mile and then we tied bricks to our feet and did running drills. And it all just feels like a lucid dream, except for the catatonic hour or so afterwards that I spent at my desk.

And no, it's not all that boot-campy. Nobody calling us "maggots" or making us march in formation in the rain or pointedly not asking us about our sexual orientation. Sorry.
pounded out by Wendy at 1:09 PM

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The studio thing

On Friday I went to a recording studio down in Streeterville to record a short audio track from the book. I guess it's for a promotional CD that they'll be giving out to booksellers, so that they'll get a chance to hear the sound of my voice. I read a five-and-a-half minute selection from the book, as well as a subliminal track where I whispered gentle suggestions to booksellers to blow their Harry Potter pre-ordering budgets* on my book instead. Or was I not supposed to mention that?

I have to admit I got way too excited when I saw who else had recorded at this place. When I went to the ladies room I wondered if Aaliyah had spent any time deep in thought in the wicker chair in the lounge area, and I got dizzy trying to use methods of probability to guess who might have used my bathroom stall before. Britney or Christina? Stall One or Stall Two? What are the odds they used the same one?

It was the first time I'd ever been professionally recorded, where I got to do several takes and go back whenever I stumbled over a word. After all this though, that chapter is now full of sentences I wish I'd never written. The phrase "when it was in all the papers" is harder to say than you think, especially when it's in the middle of a longer sentence, and the context is such that I didn't quite want to put the emphasis on the word all, so I'd say "when it was IN all the papers," and wind up mumbling "when it was" and then I'd try again and completely lose my rhythm, which was very discouraging, because it meant I couldn't even non-rap. Also the phrase "minutes extend" totally killed me. Somehow that combination of words produces so many tongue clicks I swear I could summon fruit bats. But I managed to get through the session.

*Okay, so speaking of huge book releases, apparently a couple months ago people in the book industry were getting worried that the new Harry Potter book would come out at the same time as the Da Vinci Code sequel, because supposedly there wouldn't be enough printing capacity in North America to produce the gigantamungous first runs for both titles at once. It's true! Or so I heard. Like, second hand. But still!
pounded out by Wendy at 9:32 PM

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What you should do this weekend

Go to Big Happy Funhouse and write a story based on this found photo. I'm one of the guest judges, so you better make it good. If you win the prize, you can drink coffee out of a cool Boy Wonder mug for four days in a row without having to do the dishes.

In other news, I was at a recording studio this morning. Luckily for everyone I wasn't singing. More later...
pounded out by Wendy at 3:28 PM

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Mid-week miscellany

An attentive reader pointed out that I totally forgot to mention The M Word in my year-end-review post, so I'm fixing that now (and here's a Powell's link, too).

And speaking of book links, I'm Not the New Me has its own promo site now. We'll be adding other pages to it in the coming months, but for now I hope it's enough to gaze into the eyes of the Girl On the Cover Who is Only Figuratively Me.

And speaking of family values (like The M Word does), I checked back at that moralvalues.com website that I'd found before and while it's still just an empty default page, I'm alternately amused and freaked out that whoever is holding on to this domain (and no doubt hoping to sell it for big conservative Republican bucks) is thoughtful enough to put up a photo of a presumably very moral family:

(Copied here in case the site changes the picture)

2004 in a capsule, or maybe even an easy-to-swallow gel tablet.

In January I sold my book proposal, though I couldn't announce it here until a little later. The submission process that month was kind of a wild ride, and I learned a lot about trade publishing in a very short time; the whole thing was one of the most exciting experiences you never heard about. Come to think of it, when I was writing the "year in review" entry last year I knew that the proposal would go out on submission soon, and I had to just sit on that news, and if you go back and read that entry you'll see how I was being all hinty-hinty about things. And here you thought I was just putting up cat pictures.

In February I made some nice Single Girl Valentines and subsequently spent the rest of the year finding hotlinks to them in my referral logs. In March I turned 33 and went to New York City and managed to have lunch in the Conde Nast cafeteria without dropping my tray, which would have been eight thousand times more mortifying than dropping your tray in high school.

In April I raised a big stink (if not a slightly misinformed one) about Curves and the anti-abortion movement. In May I was interviewed by the local Fox news affiliate, and I lived to recap the experience. That same month Shylo and I broke another important story--about American Girls Gone Wild.

In June I had an arts residency at Ragdale, and while I managed to write a good chunk of my book there, I utterly failed to bring you the sounds of the prairie. In July I accidentally acquired Bootsy the fish, and I'm pleased to report that six months later he's still alive. Also, I met Ron and, well, that's a long story that I shouldn't tell here, but I managed to not kill him, too.

In August I was interviewed on Zulkey.com and I finished the damn book. In September I tried Seattle Sutton and really, I have no explanation for that at all. And in October I guess I complained a lot. In November I voted, and then I reacted. In December I finally opened up comments so all you pukes could have your say, and so far you have been remarkably well-behaved.

I still can't believe that just a year ago I didn't have a book. That makes me dizzy. It's very strange to look ahead to 2005, which is already plotted out and scheduled far more than any other year of my life. I suppose I could drop little hints about things I'm hoping will happen in the future but a lot of it is as foggy as it was a year ago. And that's okay.

Here's to the new year!
pounded out by Wendy at 10:24 PM

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