All Others Are #2 or Lower

We've won this a time or two over the years, but never with such a sweet poster.

World Book Night 2012: A Raging Success

April 23rd is the day Shakespeare was born, and the day he died.  Cervantes also died on April 23rd, and UNESCO marks it as World Book Day.  This year, volunteers in the UK, Ireland, the US, and Germany spent the day giving books away.  I don't know how others fared, but Becky and I had a hell of a time.

In the United States, 53% of males and 39% of females are re-incarcerated after they're released from prison.  The recidivism rate for inmates who read in prison drops to 20% (couple that with a GED, and only 4-5% of inmates return, but our fucked up prison system is a post for another time).  So Becky decided to drop a box of Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle at a women's detention center in downtown Miami.  

It was all razor wire and defeat, smaller and dingier than it looks from the highway (you drive past it all the time on I-95), but that's no reason not to deliver books with a smile.

You Should Read Jenny Lawson

BUY THIS NOW.

“Because you are defined not by life's imperfect moments, but by your reaction to them. And because there is joy in embracing - rather than running from - the utter absurdity of life.” 

― Jenny Lawson, Let's Pretend This Never Happened

When I wrote about all the books Becky and I were giving away at our wedding, I compared Chelsea Handler to David Sedaris.  For months now, I've intended to write all about the sexist literati who heap accolades on Sedaris while dismissing Handler as a vulgar TV star with some hit memoirs.  I put it off because my heart wasn't in it.  As promising a start as My Horizontal Life was, Are You There Vodka?  It's Me, Chelsea didn't measure up.  And I still haven't read Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang past that first tear-inducing (from laughs!) story.

My heart is behind Jenny Lawson.

Shaq: Uncut... or is he?

I often forget how special Books & Books is.  Every bookstore is not minutes from South Beach or Venetian Pool.  Every bookstore does not get shoppers like Sir Paul McCartney, Michael Moore, and Shakira.  Every book store does not host author appearances with Bill Clinton, Barbara Walters, and Shaquille O'Neal.

Does Clinton do candid shots?  Of course not. . . only if you're Becky Quiroga.

Yet there's a dark side to the celebrity-studded bookselling lifestyle, one you've probably never heard about but which claims the good moods of half a dozen booksellers a month.

Don't see it?  Let's take a closer look.

Yes, that's right: autograph theft.

If Shaq knew people were doing this to his books, he'd go Punisher.

I first came across this phenomenon when Gina and Dann Gershon visited for their book Camp Creepy Time in 2007.  For a few years, selling signed copies online became a lucrative business for us (if you're interested in a signed copy, email me; I'll hook you up).

I can't find my picture of Gina Gershon dressed as a naughty nurse for the appearance, so enjoy this instead.

Apparently, Gina Gershon's autograph is worth money on its own and paying $16.99 for the hardcover children's book would blow the resale margin all to hell.  It's much easier to take a razor and slice her signature out, making the book unsellable and killing our sale in one shot.  Thanks, asshole.

Since then, we've found slashed copies of Jerry Rice's Go Long, Alonzo Mourning's Resilience, Elizabeth Berkley's Ask Elizabeth, and Condoleezza Rice's No Higher Honor.  Apparently, sports figures, people with the last name Rice, and people from the movie Showgirls are high-risk groups.

Why not just steal the book altogether?  Sure, it's easier to sneak a piece of paper out the door but I think the real reason is that the thief likes to rub our faces in it.  There's a place in hell reserved for this perpetrator (perpetrators?) wherein paper-thin slices of skin are removed from portions of his/her body over the course of years.  S/he will plead for death but find none.

But that's just my opinion.  In the meantime, I'd like to catch this asshole in the act.  It would almost be worth him doing it, just to catch that asshole doing it.

How Come You Don't Call Me Anymore?

I’m always amazed when people abandon their book orders.  I don’t mean the folks who buy books and then never pick them up, which happens more often that you’d think; we’ve got shelves of prepaid titles that have been taking up space for years.  We hang on to them because people not only show up years after the purchase, but get livid if their book isn’t waiting for them years after the purchase.  Moral of the story?  Book lovers are special.   

That’s a different kind of person, one who spends so much they have no idea what they’re buying.  I can make that judgment because I’m on a budget.  I don’t care how disorganized or forgetful you are, if you abandon a $25-$35 hardcover - or a stack of them - it’s because you can afford to.Not them, though.  I’m talking about my internet customers.  As I write this, I realize the phenomenon I’m about to explore probably happens because people who are interested in books are primarily (ha-ha) bookish types who'd rather just let things die by ignoring them than confront anything, but I’m going to go right ahead and write about it anyway because it took me a long time to figure out how to get that screen shot.  Check the dates if you don't believe me.

 



Handling internet orders for Books & Books coming up on eight years, it’s always a little hurtful when I find myself begging for communication with people who seem to have ordered something they don’t even want.  I can empathize when people complain about a great date who never called back.  

Girl with the Pigeon Tattoo & Anna Dewdney, Too

Yesterday at Dylan's after-care program, two girls with eyes and a flair for the obvious told Becky she was the most beautiful girl they'd ever seen.  As Becky walked away, one of them pointed.

"Llama llama!  Llama lama!" she shouted.

This led to a tour of Becky's arm, a few minutes of book talk, and the near kidnapping of two girls from Dylan's after-care program.  

I'm sorry, kidnapping is never funny.  There was nearly a Forceful Non-Blood-Related Family Expansion, but we had to leave in a hurry to beat traffic.

Llama llama is a character from a beloved series of picture books that have been flying off the shelves for about seven years now.  Is it llama llama's sweet naivety?  The fact that llama llama can always count on Mama?  Or some magical combination of charming rhymes and gorgeous illustrations?  Whatever the secret, llama llama is one of Dylan's most-requested bedtime stories.  When author / illustrator Anna Dewdney came to Books & Books, Becky had the spot on her arm all picked out.


The tattooing has already been covered in depth by Publishers Weekly.  I love the picture I took with Llama Llama Red Pajama in the foreground, tattoo artist Dicky Magoo in the center, and the Miami Dolphins playing in the background.  I especially love that we just returned from our honeymoon and the last name "Curtis" was all over the place.

But since Shannon Maughan was so thorough, I'm reduced to this:

Look how cute!  Buy it.

I said, BUY IT.

Please buy it?

I'll also share some pictures which weren't in Publishers Weekly.

Signed by the artist; that arm is worth money.

There was a good deal of blood involved, but Becky was determined to get llama llama picture-ready.

All that scrubbing was worth it to see the look on Anna Dewdney's face.

This is why Dewdney looks so pleased; sweet job, Dicky Magoo.

One Reason My Wife Is Awesome

Yes, she is.

On Sunday night, Becky got back from New Orleans for the American Booksellers Association's 2012 Winter Institute.  Exhausted from meetings, loggy with shrimp po' boys and beignets, it was all she could do to keep her eyes open long enough to tumble into bed.  Mere hours later, she was sitting at the computer in her pajamas, on her day off, listening to the ALA webcast.  She had an open purchase order for Books & Books ready to go.

If you check out Newbury Winner Dead End in Norvelt and Caldecott winner A Ball for Daisy, for example, you'll notice that both titles say "special order - subject to availability."  That's because they're in reprint.  Every time a book wins an award (or an author dies), you can bet the publishers and wholesalers will go from hundreds of available copies to nothing in a matter of hours.

But we've got them.  We've got the winners, because Becky is so dedicated that she spent her one day off in two weeks ordering them.

If you wonder what makes Books & Books continually successful. . . well, sure I'm biased.  But Becky Quiroga is a big reason.

The Girl with the Pigeon Tattoo Gets a Tractor to the Forearm

Barack Obama's daughters loved Drummer Boy so much that when Obama wrote a children's book, he picked Loren Long to illustrate it.  The result is Of Thee I Sing:

Buy it, coz.

But toddlers couldn't care less about that.  When you need to entertain a five-year-old, you want something a little more funkengrooven.  You want a friendship between a tractor and a calf.

If that sounds dumb, it's because you're old and your heart is a brittle, numb thing.  It sounded dumb to me when Dylan requested it as his bedtime story, the first time I ever watched Becky put him down. When she read the gentle purring of the tractor's engine that lulls the little calf to sleep, Otis's putt puff puttedy chuff, I fell in love.  Being a family is mostly making things up as you go.  There are very few moments you feel you're getting it right, while they're happening.  That was one.

Also, when it comes to matters of the heart, Becky is my Otis and I am her calf.  In fact, when Loren Long scheduled appearances at Books & Books Bal Harbour and Coral Gables, I wanted to ask for the calf to go with her tractor.  It would have represented her saving me, us as a couple, and the father I became when she brought Dylan into my life.

But I didn't ask, so we'll have to come with another couple tattoo.


You know how this thing with Becky's arm works, right?

First comes the drawing.

While Mo Willems scribbled the Pigeon in about twenty seconds ("The thing is to capture the energy!"), Loren Long was meticulous.  He stopped several times.  He'd stand, step back, stare, erase, and start again.  "I wasn't this nervous for President Obama," he said.

Then comes the tattooing.

Dicky Magoo of Tattoos by Lou (seriously) loves the challenge of replicating other artist's work, trying to get the same effects in tattoo as they did in whatever medium they originally used.  He did Becky's first illustrator tattoo, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and returned to the scene of the ink for Otis.

Side Note: That last link is to the Los Angeles Review of Books, where Lisa Jane Persky writes, "Becky Quiroga’s “Very Hungry Caterpillar,” drawn on her arm by Eric Carle himself, is a piece of body art that soccer moms from Sandusky to Timbuktu would find it [SIC] hard to disapprove of."  But people see what they want.  The more ink Becky gets, the more strangers are wary of the badass tattooed chick.  Few look closely enough to see that they're pictures from children's books.


So it's a tattoo artist's rendering of an illustrator's actual drawing on Becky's arm, get it?  Stop saying, "I guess you'll never wash that arm again."


Becky was able to get Otis between Loren Long's first and second appearances, so he was able to see the finished product.

Pictured: Natural behavior.

Long was soooo nice.  He's the type of nice guy who's so nice that I walk away thinking, "Why can't I be more like him?"  Most people who meet me immediately think I'm an asshole.  Which is 1) not far off 2) why hand-selling books is difficult for me.  So this asshole thinks I should buy "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet;" whoop-dee-freaking-whoo.

The Otis tattoo made Shelf Awareness as well, on September 19th.  Yes, that's how topical I am.  More to the point, that's what Miami Book Fair International 2011 did to me.  It took over all three of my lives, the internet one, the writing one, and the breathing one.

With the presidential credentials on her forearm, can Maurice Sendak's Max be far behind?  Are you listening, Mr. Sendak?  Say the word and we're Connecticut bound.

Miami Book Fair International Day 6: The Party Starts Today

This year opened with Christopher Paolini's Inheritance on Sunday afternoon.  The Miami Writers Institute, Student Literary Encounters, and the heavy hitters - Dorothy Alison, Harry Belafonte, John Sayles, Ron Suskind, Calvin Trillin - have been hitting all week long, but these next three days are key.  The Street Fair is its own monster, and Books & Books is 90% ready.

It's ten minutes to six am.  Becky and I are dropping Dylan off at school in the dark so we can finish the job of getting the tents set up.

Some retailers have the holiday season; at Books & Books, we have Miami Book Fair International.

Tensions are high.  Illness runs rampant.  Three of us have almost quit this week, including me.  When the gates open in about four hours, we'll find out if it's all been worth it.

There have been more cancellations.  I read an apologetic email from an author just recovering from the flu.  This author knew that flying down to Miami for the weekend would cause the flu to return, so... he can't make it, sorry.

Not everyone at Books & Books is or has gotten sick but there's a fairly sturdy illness making the rounds on some key players.  I worked a sixty-hour week, spent a miserable Friday night and all day Saturday in bed, and then worked another sixty hour week starting Sunday.  14 and 16 hour days are just as beneficial for your health as you'd imagine.

I'm putting more effort into stocking Authorton McFluwhiner's books than he is into promoting them.

As Becky says, "His loss, don't it so personally."  I don't.  Much.  I just get annoyed when people have the kind of jobs where they can make those choices.  I wonder what it is about me that I have never had the kind of job where I can take a sick day.  It is me, refusing to take one?  People call out all the time at every job I've ever had, so maybe it is just me.

Anyway, I've gone off topic and now the alarm is going off.  My point is, there's stuff I wanted to do.  I haven't written in forever, and not just blogs.  I've been sleeping in until seven, because waking at five would be pushing myself too hard, and this cold keeps nipping at my heels.  I wanted to morph that post about the wedding books into something Book Fairish for The Heat Lightning, because a ton of those authors are appearing.  I wanted to interview someone awesome like Vera Brosgol or Hillary Jordan for THL, too.  I wanted to drink juice and eat soup.

Well, I did that last one.  Just not enough.

By the end of every day, I'm in that mode where I have to keep moving, because if I stop, I'll crash.  It was over a hundred degrees in the tent yesterday.  I think I lost ten pounds of water.  I know I didn't pee once.  It's supposed to rain all weekend.

Wish us luck.

A Letter to Miami Book Fair International Authors Who Cancel

Dear Authorton McWriterface,

God forbid you have a successful tour.  Poor you, having to meet folks who adore your work.  You don't want attention, then guess what?  Don't tour.  Before that, don't publish what you write.

Clearly your work has struck a nerve, but screw the fans whose purchases have assured you'll never need a real job again, right?  Screw the folks trying to schedule hundreds of authors around your event, huh?  Fuck that guy in the buying office beating his brains against his desk trying to find copies of your book somewhere, anywhere, because your publisher is caught by surprise and your book is in reprint, yes?

Fuck those people because it's all about you, and flying in an airplane, checking into a hotel, sitting in a chair, and signing your fucking name is just too much.  You know why David Sedaris signs for four hours at every gig, even after all these years on tour?  Because he knows that real work is much, much worse.

Get a fucking job.

Google Images doesn't have much in the manner of book beatings. 

And if your tour is not successful, so what?  You published an honest-to-God book.  In this climate, where publishers are leary of anything not rambled (or co-rambled) into existence by some "celebrity," you did it - you didn't self-publish, you didn't CreateSpace, you didn't offer your book on the Kindle for 99 cents.  A publisher looked at your work and thought, "This.  This will keep the doors open a while a longer."  That's not enough affirmation for you?

I get it, it's frustrating to think you have something to say and that no one will listen, like this is your one big chance to shout your message to a mass audience but the crowd went, "meh."  I have no idea what that feels like.  But you know what it feels like being the guy ordering books for the guy for whom that's not good enough?  It sucks.  It's soul-crushing.  It sets my teeth a-grinding.

So think of me, pull your head out of your ass, and woo the half-dozen people who care what you have to say so hard that they'll have no choice but to tell half a dozen others.

Of the two book beating images on offer, this is the clear winner.

And if this is your second year canceling... oh, Authorton.  Nothing could make me agree to this again, order everything for Miami Book Fair while doing my regular job.  But to see you come in, give your presentation, and melt down because your books aren't here, thinking of that almost makes it seem worth the effort.

Better yet, maybe we'll just have you sign copies of our return paperwork.  Fuckwad.


May All Your First Printings Be Remaindered,

Frustrated in the Buying Office

Breaking the Fiction in the A.M. Rule

Because the days are just packed!  If you're unfamiliar with the Miami International Book Fair, it's in its 28th year.

Circa 1984. That's my boss on the left.

Because of Mitchell's involvement with MBFI, and because of our rather large sales tent, folks assume that Books & Books always handles sales for the author events.  This has been true from time to time over the years, but it's never a given.  2011 is a make or break year.  We're trying to be more organized than ever, looking at everything as hard as we can, to determine once and for all whether handling event sales at MBFI makes us money, or if we should hand event sales off to someone else (again).

I mention all of this because MBFI is consuming me.  I do the event appearances for Books & Books, among other things, and I've been tapped to order for this event as well.  It's like being handed a second full-time job on top of my regular full-time job.

Thankfully, some co-workers have stepped up to lighten my load.  Not a lot, but enough to where I haven't actually torn my hair out.

I know, I know, I'm lucky to have a job in this economy.  Particularly a book-industry job.

Then there's being a husband to my love, a father to my other love, Halloween, the After-Wedding Karaoke Jam Party, costumes, cleaning, meals, scratching the cat (no, that's not some gross metaphor).  You know- life.  I could be selfish and lock myself in my room until I'm published, but I don't think that would make me happy.

Besides, art doesn't happen in a vacuum.

I'm trying to keep the faith.  Pushing the cursor isn't coming as easily as it has at certain moments in my life, but I still tell myself most days that it matters.  I will dream big, and not listen to people who aren't.  I will stop listening to the little voice in my head that says "It's been five years, Curtis, who you trying to kid?"  I will follow The Rumpus's rule and Write Like a Motherfucker.

In the meantime, you'll probably find me in Books & Books buying office.  Please send dark chocolate peanut M&Ms and Tito's Handmade Vodka.

Bye Bye Borders: So Long, and Thanks for all the Books

To no one in the book industry’s surprise, Borders Books & Music is bankrupt.  On a blogger’s level, I’m very jealous of a person named Corey.   Instead of wringing his hands over what to post, editing, rejecting, shuffling, he’s posting every day about life in his Borders during the liquidation.  He’s got spelling errors, but his work is more visceral than mine.  It’s called abooksellerwithoutborders.  It’s an optimist struggling with occasional bitterness.  It’s a solid writer chronicling an important, historic moment in the book business.  It’s a condemnation of corporate bullshit, a celebration of the Third Place, and an examination of what happens when that place must close.  Feeling a little jealous, but I’ll get over it.

Borders was my introduction to the book business.  Chrispy had been there for five years when I started, but he was such a veteran it came across as a much longer stretch.  He told me 2000 would be his “last year working  a holiday in retail.”  When I left in 2004, he said the same thing.  He’s still there at our old store, #47 in Pinecrest (still Miami, just a snooty zip code), the one doing big business every day on US-1. 

Jorge (pronounce that George, please) is closing #47 down.  He’s worked for Borders for nearly thirty years.  In South Florida, he’s the the last of the old-school booksellers still working for Borders.  They were everywhere in my day, the ones who loved working for Borders so much it became their career, the ones with 15 to 20 years under their belts.   An email came down from corporate a couple years back.  For the few old-timers who’d watched Borders devolve and still held out hope that it would be a special place again, this soulless email was the final straw.  Digusted with what a job they once loved had become, the old guard departed en masse. 

Closer to where I work, a former Books & Books manager is closing the Borders at Merrick Park.  Working for him is Claus, a guy any employer would thank his lucky stars to have on payroll.  Claus was also in the Chrispy range of employment when I worked at Borders of Pinecrest, which means he’s also old guard now.  Claus is Danish.  Borders is the only place he’s ever worked in America.  

Writing this is depressing the hell out of me.  Here’s more misery for the sadness pile; Borders’ bankruptcy gives publishers who were already hardening their accounting practices more reason to be harsh, puts 11,000 booksellers out of a job, and completely eliminates physical bookstores in many small towns. 

If no one steps into these “smaller markets” with an indie, people will get their books online, and getting books online means one place.  It’s a great time for indies to open, but only under a very specific set of circumstances.  No one is going to invest in the Chrispy and Claus’s of the world opening their own stores, so any new bookstore owner needs deep pockets and an unusually high tolerance for going without profit.

Did you know that’s the goal at independent bookstores?  Every corporate job I’ve had looked for 4% growth each year, but independent bookstores consider a year without red ink a success.   

I’d love it if three stores stepped in to take the place of Dolphin Mall, Merrick Park, and Pinecrest.  I’d love to see Miami become as rich with indie bookstores as Philadelphia, New York City, or San Francisco.  Of course, I’ve been waiting for that to happen for years.  Those of us who could realistically make a go of it are too busy working for Mitchell Kaplan to apply what we know into opening stores of our own, and the booksellers whom Borders’ bankruptcy is putting out of business don’t have the means.  

When you spend twenty or thirty years in retail avoiding management, you don’t have a lot of capital to show for it.   

Here’s to booksellers left behind.  May they find something else they love as passionately as books.  Barring that, may they find something which throws gobs of money at them.  

And may a few lucky, brave souls open bookstores of their own.  

Banana nut. That's a good muffin.

You never know when banana bread is going to be part of your life.  It's out there, waiting for you to leave your bananas out too long, then you notice there's a little too much black on the peel.  A few more days they'll be completely unappetizing but a few degrees shy of disgusting, and it'll be banana bread time.  

I'd forgotten that the perfect banana bread recipe requires three bananas rather than the two I had.  We have more bananas for smoothies but they're entirely too yellow.  Because you can't will a banana to rot (what an awesome super-power - ripening), I immediately switched gears into muffin land.

I don't want to think about how much seeing the video above played into this decision.  Do I make my own decisions, or do I just react to stimuli?  Let's just admit that Adaptation is one of the most brilliant movies of all time and move on.  

This is a rare real-time post.  I can smell the muffins as I type.  I woke up at five am, thought about my writing-work-dinner-wedding prep  agenda for the day, and looked at the bananas in their now-or-never ripeness.  My upbringing won over my longing to write.  Wasting minutes I could've spent writing is intangible; throwing two perfectly usable bananas into the trash is real waste.


My posts have thinned out lately, and I expect them to get thinner.  If you look over the proceeding, you can imagine why.  I'm a bookseller.  Unless you're Cory, there's not a lot of drama in the day-to-day.  Well, maybe for those of us in the business.  But Indie vs. A-Word, paper vs. ebook, dying industry vs. renaissance of the story - those posts can only go so far.  I want to write about anything and everything.

The downside is that I sometimes end up writing about nothing.

I flatter myself that my thoughts on books, movies, parenting, relationships, food, and life are worth sharing.  Still, I like to polish these thoughts up a bit before I share them.  More importantly, especially for things I've started to write for reasons I'm not aware of, I want these posts to have some meaning.  This sometimes means opening the same file dozens of times, revising, rearranging, looking for a point.  Since Sweet with Fall and Fish doesn't have a unifying theme (apart from being the Official Blog of Aaron John Curtis), it's important to me that the individual posts try to have a point.

I have thoughts about Borders closing, and Amy Winehouse dying, and mass killings in Norway, but by the time I decide how I really feel and the best way to express it, those feelings are years out of date.  Witness the post I've been working on about The Dark Knight and Tropic Thunder, movies which came out in 2008.  Not because I just got them on Netflix, but because I wasn't sure how to express my feelings about Heath Ledger's death.  After all that microscopic consideration, the challenge becomes making someone care.  But I suppose that's always the challenge.

Did you know I saw Patti Smith at the Miami Book Fair International days after Just Kids won the National Book Award?  As part of letting the standing room only crowd know about the upcoming (at the time) OMiami! poetry festival, I was one of dozens who helped P. Scott Cunningham perform Arthur Rimbuad's Vowels, a random act of culture about which Smith said, "I've never seen anything like that."

I've mentioned Hilldawg from time to time?  That's her holding the sign.

Did you know Patti Smith performed three songs during the reading, and that the last one became a sing-along?  Did you know I loved Just Kids?  Did you know I met Patti Smith?  Of course you didn't.  I worried too much about capturing the magic on the page, I procrastinated starting, then so many months had passed that it seemed silly to try and remember how I'd felt at all.  There have been many nights like this I've passed over, but I offer this as an extreme example.

There's a lot of pressure in my life right now.

I'm getting married in 32 days.  The marriage doesn't stress me at all, but there's a lot of prep involved in the event which marks the beginning, especially since this is DIY wedding.

Also, I know in this economy I should be pleased to have a job, but the work load I'm saddled with lately is ridiculous.  Our week's run Thursday to Wednesday, and I'm over 32 hours for the week.  These thoughts occurred while I was baking and I wanted to share, so I'm pushing back biking in to get this posted.  I'll probably take Wednesday off to be with Dylan - Becky and I are taking turns watching him this summer since we can't afford camp or daycare - but I can't be sure.  I could live in my office and work there every waking minute and it would take half a year to get on top of things, and even then I probably wouldn't be on top of things because they'd find even more for me to do.  Grawr.

Finally, I've had a setback in my writing life.  The mighty Carl Lennertz has left Harper Collins to become CEO of the North American branch of World Book Night.  This is excellent news for the world of books which is semi-devestating to me personally.

As I've written my stories and taken time polishing my novels, it's always been in the back of my mind that my first published essay was a given (I've had pieces published online and in print, so I guess I mean published by the Big 6).  I know I acted like it wasn't, but I was fooling myself.  I'm glad I chose not to shout State by State from the roof tops, but I no longer have that foot in the door, that significant set of eyes which has looked at my work and deemed it worthy and which invites prospective agents and magazine editors to do the same.  I'm back to square one.

In some ways, it's good.  It gives my morning writing time more focus.  With the help of my writers group, I am polishing four or five of my best stories until they will knock a magazine editor on her ass, so that she'll share the story with her readers, and I'll have a nugget of something to put in my cover letter to an agent, something more substantial than hopes and dreams.  I need a credit.  As Laura Munson writes in This is Not the Story You Think it Is, "You can't put good rejection letters on a resume."

What this doesn't bode well for is Sweet.

Of course this comes as my gradually-increasing readership reached its zenith in July.  I should be writing more to keep you guys coming back, but something's got to give.  I'll try to take a day to myself (if I can find it) and automatically schedule a bunch of stuff I've been tinkering with so it looks like I'm active while I take a break (or maybe it will be like today's post: write it, look for glaring errors and hope I didn't miss any, then publish post).  Just because I don't see the point doesn't mean you won't, right?  Reading is a relationship, and finding a piece's moral and sharpening it to a point is just me trying to bully your reaction.  Of course, you might just get nothing but this for a while.  We'll see.

Meanwhile, WLRN's Under the Sun released a CD of the last Lip Service event.

"What's this?  A CD of a live Lip Service event recorded for broadcast by Under the Sun?"

"And who is that at #5?  Why, it's me.  Remember when I freaked out over the edits...
Wait, I never blogged about this, either?  Fuck me."

As I sat in Books & Books cafe, reeling from the realization that Carl Lennertz left Harper Collins before he could publish me, a favorite customer approached and told me he enjoyed hearing me on NPR.  Co-workers told me they'd heard and enjoyed me on the way in to work.  It's the only thing that kept me from a meltdown that day.

Since then, strangers have come to the bookstore looking for me.  One asked, "Which one of you is Aaron?" while I happened to be there.  She didn't shop, but just stopped off on her drive home to tell me how much she enjoyed the piece (thankfully, I wasn't in the buying office at the time).  Customers have congratulated Becky on her upcoming nuptials (which I mentioned in the Q&A after the reading).  Apparently, I also "sound cute" on the radio.  I feel like my writing career is foundering, but more people are aware of me than ever.  It's fairly surreal.

So take heart.  Even if you don't see much of me here in the coming weeks as I prepare for my nuptials, you may hear me on the radio.


And the muffins?  They smelled better than they taste, but they are solid, moist, and they put two rotten bananas to good use.  Here's to a morning well spent.

When in Doubt, The Heat Lightning

I don't know what that means either, but at this moment, when I lower my bucket into the depths of possible titles for the book stuff I do over at THL, the well is dry.  U of M Library just ordered 114 travel guides from Books & Books, and since most of them are new it involved a lot of data entry.  To break off the monotony, I'd leaf through them from time to time.

As Christine Borges responded to the THL post on Facebook, "as a born and raised Miami girl (and trained journalist) I'm completely offended by the lack of research and intelligence all of those guidebooks used.  I mean seriously... did they even TALK to a local before making their own assumptions based on stereotypes?!"  I wasn't born here but I've adopted Miami as my home, and I was surprised by the guide's tone and content.  According to the author bios, there is nary a native in the bunch.

Here's the post.  Most importantly, here's the image I created for the article.

That's right, I made this collage, and I am proud of it.

Let's look at that again, shall we?

Google image searches included "beach party," "Miami Beach party," "Miami Ocean Drive," "Miami Beach Washington Ave," "beach dance party" (NOTE: want pictures of old people having fun?  Put the words "dance" and "party" in the same search), "South Beach party girls," "South Beach clubs," and "South Beach drunk."

I also saw a search for Salvatore Farragamo in the middle of all that, but I don't know why.  It could have been the only designer I could think of at the time.

DJ Kitty Kitty was already on my desktop.

I don't know how to put this but I'm kind of a big deal

When I opened my mail at Books & Books this week, I got a pleasant surprise: a promotional flyer for the paperback version of the mighty Brocke Clarke's Exley.  Let's have a look, shall we?

That's right.  Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times... and Aaron Curtis (oh, and The Washington Post).  Sweet Readers were the first to realize that I'm a taste-maker, but now the publishing industry has spoken.

Yet this flyer is served with a soupcon of shame.  I've mentioned Exley three times in passing here at SwF&F.  Well, five, if you include The Heat Lightning and the best of 2010.  But I've never recommended it all on its own.  I've also yet to review it on Goodreads, although I read it more than a year ago.

Call it Out of Sheer Rage syndrome; I loved it so much I didn't want to turn anyone off with a lame recommendation, so I ended up writing nothing.  But it's even worse than that.  Some people have a tough time blogging about friends and family.  I feel that way about books which have won a place near my heart.

So if I haven't been clear, you should read Exley.  You'll love it, and it might even win a place near your heart.

 

You Should Read Wildwood

Signed by the author and illustrator.  Estimated value on Ebay?  $52.6 kajillion.

My favorite Wildwood moment was reading the Bandit’s song.  In a flash I was nine years old again, reading the goblin’s song from Tolkien’s The Hobbit.

Bake and toast 'em, fry and roast 'em!

till beards blaze, and eyes glaze;

till hair smells and skins crack,

fat melts, and bones black

in cinders lie

beneath the sky!

So dwarves shall die,

and light the night for our delight,

Ya hey!

Ya-harri-hey!

Ya hoy!

My arms broke out in gooseflesh.  Of course, when you’ve written The Rake’s Song, a few bawdy rhymes aren’t as much of a challenge.  Still, for me, it was a moment which took the book from good to great.  There’s a lot to enjoy in these pages, but the most impressive feat is how Ellis and Meloy reference past Young Adult epic fantasies without being derivative of them.  The Dowager Governess is a villain as instantly timeless as the Queen from Snow White.  Somehow, in the context of the book, she even manages to be scary (this is coming from someone who’s loved Stephen King for almost thirty years).

I suggested you read Wildwood via The Heat Lightning and I mentioned the Wildwood Dinner in my BEA wrap-up but I didn’t tell you that the first person I met at the Harper Collins dinner was the book’s illustrator.  

I walked into the north dining room upstairs at the Savoy - the white linen tablecloths crawling with flowers and vines (and appetizers!), the plates set with signed artwork and Wildwood Irregulars buttons, the place cards featuring different images and quotes from the book.  I wasn’t intimidated, exactly, just humming with that awkwardness bookish types feel when faced with a pre-alcohol social situation.

A redheaded woman who looked not unlike a Bizarro World Martha Plimpton held out her hand.

“Hi, I’m Carson,” she said.  

I gave her my name and told her I was from Books & Books in Miami.  This doesn’t often get a reaction at book conferences, but then I offered the name which always does - our owner, Mitchell Kaplan.

When she didn’t mention her store, agency, or publisher, I chalked it up to a book-lover’s gawkiness.  When she didn’t react upon hearing Mitchell’s name, I should’ve known instantly that she was not in the book business, so the only thing which could bring her to a dinner for Wildwood is that she’s THAT Carson - illustrator Carson Ellis. 

Well, the penny didn’t drop.  We stood there grinning at each-other and looking around the room for someone who looked chatty enough to fill the space we’d reserved for painful silence.  When the waiter put a glass of wine in my hand, my nerves leapt from my body, wrapped him in a hug, then dove inside the glass.

After we’d ordered but before we’d gotten dinner, Carson Ellis and Colin Meloy got up to talk about the process of creating the book.  Listening to them, I realized that the four of us - Carson, Colin, Becky and I - could have been great friends if we lived in the same city.  We’d run in artsy fartsy circles and drown in an orgy of music, art, and books.  During the talk and while they sat with us, they blew me away with their book knowledge.  

About the highest complement I can pay to any reader is this - Ellis and Meloy could have been booksellers.

I also wanted to crawl under the table because I didn’t recognize Carson Ellis when I walked in.  Not that she expected me to recognize her or anything, but to paraphrase Matthew McConnoughey’s character in Dazed and Confused, it would’ve been a whole lot cooler if I did.

I would have told her that of all the Best American Nonrequired Reading covers, that 2007 was my favorite.  I would have asked if she had any advice on how I could support Becky as an illustrator.  I would have told her how every author site in the world links to Amazon but the fact that she chooses personal conviction over commerce by linking only to independent bookstores, is uncalculably badass.

Oh, well.     

What else?  Colin Meloy was bearded and burly.  It looked like the two of them had a great relationship.  I sat with two cool people from Harper Collins, the editor who worked with Margaret Cardillo on one of Miami’s favorite titles, Just Being Audrey, and Emilie Polster, who put the whole amazing dinner together.

Polster also happens to be working on the next offering from Maurice Sendak, who she insists is not as misanthropic as The New York Times would have you believe.  She also thinks he’d dig contributing to Becky’s arm.

Getting Maurice Sendak to draw Max for Becky to get tattooed?  Name the time and place.  

You Should Read "Blood, Bones, and Butter."

Still got one or two signed ones left.

At her event with Books & Books, Gabrielle Hamilton claimed that as much as she would like to write a novel, she could not see herself writing fiction.  I've no reason to doubt her, but my wish to read more of her voice makes me refuse to believe it.  It would be a loss.

Vegetarian blogger Ellen Kanner wrote a great review for the Miami Herald.

I gave it 4.5 on Goodreads, and also mentioned here at SwF&F how the book helped me propose to Becky.

There are many things to love about Blood, Bones, and Butter.  The stories, the writing style, her lack of pretension, Italy, Greece, New York City, the way she effortlessly deflates the worship of celebrity chefs.  I pull this quote because I like what she does, flirting with run-on to help communicate that feeling of being forced from bed and into life before you're ready, culminating in my favorite metaphor for grogginess that I've ever read:

He was not yet awake when I called at seven thirty and had that funny sleeper's defense where you pretend that you are wide awake in spite of having just been roused and you want to sound like you know exactly where is where, who is who, and what is what when in fact you are still wearing a narcotic brain helmet of cement and foam.

Read it.  There are a lot more riches where that came from, I promise.