Category Archives: publishing

Sleeping on Iron(y)ed Sheets

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Anyone who travels for work—book tours, corporate sales, what have you—knows the exhaustion of sleep in strange beds. Each city this book tour has taken us to—New York with its taxi honk operas, Philadelphia and the late night peace protest sing-alongs, Charlotte with that steady humming undercurrent of Big Money—we’ve hunkered into provided beds, covers pulled around our ears, and reached for the dubious slumber of country mice away from home.

So we were delighted when a three-day break let us sleep in our own little beds again. We arrived back at the bookstore, admired Andrew the Shopsitter’s latest innovations (this guy is a gem) and fell into bed.

Then Jack began to cough. And cough and cough and cough, the kind that medical professionals would call “unproductive,” what moms call “dry tickly.”

Or just bloody annoying. The sound of one’s spouse hacking up a lung in small pieces is heartrending, but for someone having her first night in the ol’ home place since Oct. 5th, it’s also bad timing. He tried NyQuil, extra pillows, throat lozenges, as I lay by his side in supportive wife mode, hoping. About 3 in the morning, Jack turned to me. “Go sleep in the living room. Your patient, understanding silence is getting on my nerves.”

The next day Jack announced that after I’d left, he’d stopped coughing.  “Which means the cabin will be okay.” I had a media interview in the early evening, but then we planned to flee to our two-room shack in the woods—so far back that Internet and phone service are not available, and if we hear a motor, it’s coming to us—until time to leave for Asheville Sunday.

The interview ran long because Kim (a writer for the paper in Southern Pines, NC) and I really hit it off, so we got down to the cabin about 9 pm—or, as my friend Heather says, about half an hour past my bedtime. We spooned into slumber beneath the comfy duvet…

…and woke at 1 am to a noise reminiscent of The Blair Witch Project.

“Dafuq?” my husband more or less mumbled, snatching up a nearby hardback and preparing to defend me to the last page. Book in assault position, he traversed the perimeter.

A homegrown girl, I knew. “It’s a mouse.” Locating the noise, I banged on the dresser and began opening drawers to reveal the (now empty) nest. We crawled back into our home turf bed.

The mouse crawled back to hers. And began to install a bowling alley. I got up and banged the dresser. Silence—and then a single acorn came spewing over the top of a drawer, as if fired from a cannon.

I went back to bed. The mouse invited friends over, one of whom played saxophone. There was also a bagpiper, and I think an electric keyboard player. I rose, banged the dresser, and shouted, “Lissen, if you little bastards don’t stop, I’ll call the law, do you hear me? There are noise ordinances! It’s 4 in the morning!”

My husband switched on the bedside lamp and peered at me closely. “What?” I snapped.

“Oh, nothing, nothing,” he said, smiling in a don’t-hurt-me way. “Come back to bed, darling. You’ve had a long couple of weeks.”

At 5 am the mouse partiers headed home. We heard their car doors slam, the loud farewells, the final blasts of the party horns and noisemakers.

That afternoon Jack and I carried the drawer with the cozy nest outside, turned the drawer upside down and watched a large, sleepy field mouse surface, blinking in the sun. “Dafuq?” it mumbled, staring bleary-eyed at us before racing into to the woods.

I’m not proud of this, but at that moment, if I’d had a saxophone, I’d have played it in triumph. But Jack and I then carried the sheet nest over to the rock whence the mouse had fled and left it as a peace offering. Sleep and let sleep.

A Feast fit for Bibliophiles

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The last stop on loop two of the book tour was Charlotte, North Carolina, where the Women’s National Book Association held a Bibliofeast in honor of Book Month.

I didn’t know much about the place before we got here, but Helen, a friend from college, is a member of the corporate culture and explained that Charlotte ranks only behind New York City and San Francisco as the leading financial district in America. Catching up with Helen—who in the intervening 20 years has risen in her field and raised two teenagers—was grand fun; we used to tease each other mercilessly, me the journalism major bent on “uncovering truth,” she the logistics and transport businesswoman who always won arguments by pointing out I could write all the truth I wanted, but if her trucks didn’t deliver it, it affected diddly. We agreed that the Internet had changed both our professions considerably since those earnest and robust exchanges.

(Helen also generously got us a hotel room with her “points” at Hampton Suites, where a flat screen TV embedded in the bathroom mirror faced a garden tub 3 feet around. Oh, that was fun. Thanks, Helen!)

But the bulk of the night was given to the Bibliofeast; eight writers, from mystery to memoir, gathered to spend 15 minutes per table with aspiring authors and bibliophiles from the region, talking about writing in general and our books specifically, then fielding questions.

One person asked, “When did you know you were going to be an author?” and I answered, “When my agent called me.” The women laughed, but it sparked a discussion that continued at the other tables. Most of the participants were shaping books in their minds. They wanted to know what had sparked mine, and I echoed Joan Didion, that we write to organize our thoughts, to find out what we know.

And we write because it’s fun. Musicians create music, sculptures fashion substances, cooks craft food. Everybody’s got a medium. If yours is writing, you write because it’s there. I’m not kidding, and I’m not waxing eloquent. To paraphrase a whole lot of authors over the years, the best way to tell if you’re a writer is to look down and see if you’re writing. Writers write the way runners run; it happens because you protect the time, give up other things to do it, without really thinking you’re making a decision. Even if you never publish, you write when you’re thinking the same the way you drink water when you’re thirsty or call a friend when you’re lonely. You write because you need to, want to, like to; it doesn’t feel so much like a choice as a way of life.

However, you publish because you want other people to read and like what you wrote—or because you can, or because you hope for money or recognition. (Oh, honey, let me buy you a cup of coffee and let’s chat about that last bit.) That’s different than writing; for one thing, there’s a helluva lotta marketing lurking below the surface, which most of us are not innately good at.

That was the biggest common theme at the tables of the Bibliofeast, an intimate night with lovely women–to a man, we were women, with the exception of one author who looked more and more uncomfortable as the night wore on–who had a lot of thoughts but not a lot of time to get them on paper: that the urge, the internal nudge to write is the biggest signal that one should, and its own justification.

Just write it down. Get started. Have fun. Go.

Jack and Wendy will be Malaprop’s in Asheville, NC this Sunday at 3 and in The Country Bookshop in Southern Pines, NC Monday at 6, if you or your friends and relations would like to come say hi. Jack brought his homemade shortbread.