Category Archives: publishing

Welcome Tootie, Shopsitter III

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Many of you remember Andrew. And Mark and Sally. Now it is time to welcome Tootie to the family.

DSCN0154At Southern Festival of the Book, Tootie came up after my author talk and said, “You mean you let people live and work in your bookstore? Where do I sign?!”

And that’s how we met Tootie. She seemed an energetic bubbly sort, but we didn’t need a shopsitter at the time, so we lamented the lateness of our meeting, and went our ways.

But a few months later, when I hopped over to Winston-Salem for an event with BOOKMARKS (a very active group of literary women over there) who should be attending but Tootie and a friend. And by then we knew that we needed to be in Wisconsin for a week in April, for the Fox Cities Book Festival, and a couple of day trip events later that month.

“Are you still–” I started, and Tootie’s eyes lit.

“You need a shopsitter, don’t you!” she cried.

So that’s how Tootie drove over from Southern Pines, NC last week and spent two days tucked up in the guest room learning the ropes. She and our indoor/outdoor cat Beulah have taken a particular shine to one another, so Beulah has decided to come back inside and help Tootie with the shelving.

Tootie, who recently retired from a career in sales, quickly figured out the shop’s daily regime, and was “pure dead brilliant” with customers, as Jack said. She also got the full whack in one day. Our bookstore rejoices in a few “oddballs,” what we like to call colorful local characters. One young man is schizophrenic and obsessed with “getting a PhD in guitar.” Tootie, hearing him talking to Jack, told him what a great career choice he had made. “Music makes the world turn!” I’d never seen this guy look so happy.

For her part, Tootie brought along a copy of Little Bookstore and started pointing out landmarks to herself. Very META. She also identified the staff cats correctly based on the book, calling them by name on first meeting–which impressed Valkyttie, and that’s not easy to do.

I read the first (but only the first) of the Left Behind books on the flight between London and Chicago that opened the action. That kinda gave me the willies, but Tootie says she likes “being inside the Little Bookstore‘s covers, literally.”

Tootie will be working the shop from today through next Saturday, so if you’re in the area, come over and say hello. She’s got a great sense of humor. And Valkyttie likes her. You can’t say that about just anyone.

The Monday Book: THE YEAR OF FOG by Michelle Richmond

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FogPublished in 2007, this drifted into our bookstore, and I picked it up because it had a beach on the cover. It’s been a long, cold, lonely winter, and despite what your teachers told you, yes, you can judge a book that way.

From this inauspicious beginning, Fog turned into one of those books you carry with you from bathroom to bedroom, stuff into your purse in case you get a spare minute, sneak open when you should be dusting. It’s a cracking good read.

Richmond has a kind of four-part harmony going throughout her novel: it’s part mystery, has a lot of science bits about the brain and camera function in it, contains about three love stories, and is lyrically philosophical. Too intellectual to be a fast read, too compelling to be a slow one, all I can say is Richmond may well have invented a new genre: smartlit.

The story rolls around a central theme: a photographer named Abby, engaged to a man with a little girl, takes her for a walk on the beach, and the child vanishes. The whole next year is about memory, loss, memory loss, and how our brains work–not to mention Abby’s search for her missing step-daughter-to-be. Reminiscent of Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams, but more tightly woven as one story, the themes swirl around each other: protagonist Abby relives a bad love affair while trying to keep her current one alive; she researches brain activity, giving lovely insights into what the hippocampus and amygdala do and how we live that out day to day; she explores what it means to be the stepmom in a family, to love two people as part of a whole package; and then there’s the actual mystery of where the little girl went, and why.

My agent Pamela and I often discuss narrative arcs (she sometimes in despairing terms at my journalistic writing style) and this book is not only a good read, but teaches a great deal about how to create one. The themes are so tight intrinsically, yet bounce off each other so well that, if one of them doesn’t interest you all that much, you can skip it and still enjoy the story. I didn’t give two hoots for Abby’s old love affair, but skimming those parts didn’t diminish devouring the book an iota. Richmond’s writing is an odd amalgam of tight and fast, yet relaxed and unhurried. It’s as if Ernest Hemingway had allowed himself to be happy in life, and this got reflected in his writing.

As our shop cat Valkyttie would say, two paws up for Richmond’s The Year of Fog. This author has other books; I’m going to keep an eye out for them.