Since beginning this company, we’ve seen the book business morph. Back in the good ‘ol days (and I’m talking 3 years ago), we only had to deal with physical copies of books. Aside from having to invest quite a chunk of change in purchasing many book shelves for the office, with the right tools, it wasn’t that difficult to keep track of the all of the books. We knew right off the bat that we needed to think “high-tech” — and wide and far. We immediately created a robust web-based database to keep track of the book orders, books received, reviews, etc. It’s all in one bucket (shhhh….don’t tell our reviewers that the database they  see is actually the scary database we administrators work in, which has about 20 additional fields).

Just when we think we have this book review thing down pat, technology throws us a curve-ball: eBooks.

It’s easy to keep track of what you can see.

One of my responsibilities here is to run our Sponsored Review program. It’s something we put in place for self-published authors who have to publicize their book themselves. Because we receive around 300 books a week to review, going the Sponsored Review route guarantees a review — especially if one’s book release date is outside of our 90-day window. Sponsored books are handled with kid gloves. They’re important to us, and the senders get a lot of hand-holding and communication. And their books are segregated from the masses on the other bookshelves.

Up until recently, I haven’t had to deal with eBooks. I’m up to my eyeballs in Post-It Notes that “represent” a physical copy of a book. If only they made Post-It Notes about 2 inches thick and could stand up on a book shelf, I’d be a happy camper.

The shelf below represents Sponsored books that are out for review. The top shelf are Sponsored books needing to be assigned to a reviewer. Organization by Post-Its.

But, today, I received an eBook that’s only available through iTunes. I can’t download it to our server like the ePub or pdf books. Even those, I can sorta “see.” This one downloaded directly to MY iPhone. Does this mean I have to ship my phone to the reviewer? No. It means I need to now keep track of a truly invisible book (a link, if you will).

Technology is great. I love technology.

In fact, I’ve gone so far as to give away the physical copies of magazines I subscribe to and only read them digitally on my iPad. (For the record, I still don’t *get* that publishers can’t figure out how to not mail a physical copy of something, instead of offering a customer one or the other.) Even as completely on board I am with reading a magazine digitally, I found myself the other day, as I’m going through Sunset Magazine, wondering how I can “rip out” this recipe?

Hmmmm.  Gotcha there, don’t I?

See…challenges.

Now, where’d I put that darn book?

About Heidi Komlofske

One-half of the founders of 1776 Productions, which is the company behind the San Francisco & Sacramento Book Reviews. She’s responsible for all things visual when it comes to the publications and websites. You can mostly find her hiding in her office, which is her sanctuary from the chaos that is the rest of the office suite — organized piles of books (or she likes to think that the staff has some sort of organization going on out there). She’s the Julie McCoy of this Love Boat operation — the one you’re most likely to get emails from.

This is the column where you get to call me a curmudgeon…or worse.  This is for self-published authors, and what I want to tell you is Embrace Editing. And, oh, yeah, Reading is good. And while I’m on a roll, spellcheck is your friend.

Seems I am talking to a lot of you. According to an article in Yahoo Finance December 9. “Last year, 133,036 self-published titles were released, up from 51,237 in 2006, according to Bowker, a company that tracks publishing trends.” That’s more than a hundred thousand authors writing and selling their work outside of traditional publishing. Being able to upload your manuscript onto Amazon and other sites, and format and publish your story in paperback through Lulu and other groups has allowed writers to publish immediately! Which is good, right? (Here’s where I start grousing.) Wrong!

Publishing immediately is bad. Instant gratification is for dummies and junkies. When I was in sixth grade, Sister Juanita would tell us at least once a day, “Patience is a virtue.” What I’m getting at is Editing is Good, and the patience to edit your work again and again will benefit not only you, but the whole indie publishing industry.

My memoir, Flirting in Spanish, What Mexico taught me about love, living and forgiveness was published by Antaeus Books about 20 years after I started writing it. When I submitted the stories about being the coach’s daughter to the Rittenhouse Writers Group in Philadelphia in the 90s, I had absolutely no idea how to fit them together to make a long story. Did I have a novel? A memoir? I had to go to Mexico to find the answers.

In San Miguel de Allende, Tony Cohan, author of On Mexican Time advised me to get rid of the chapters about my travel to Mexico. “Start in Mexico,” he said. “Sixty pages!” I ranted. “The story of my transition! All that work!” But I could see he was right. Chop.

While in Mexico, I became starry-eyed over a local teenager who hadn’t finished high school. So I spent a year or two holding hands with him. When I got back to work, it was clear he needed to be part of the story. Scribble, scribble. Then he became the story. Revise, revise.

For a couple of years, my writing group pals, Bev and Sandra, said “Keep this, expand here, lose that.” I rewrote and rewrote. Laura Fraser, author of All Over the Map, liked the memoir, once it took shape, and suggested I add an in-the-moment Prologue. So I did. A bit later, former Simon & Schuster Editor and Chief Fred Hills said, “Lose the early chapters about your father, keep the story about Carlos, and write an Epilogue.” Cut, slice, add. Finally, Jayne Navarre came into my spa for a pedicure, and when she mentioned she had a publishing company, I said I had a manuscript. I sent it to her with confidence. I knew it was close to being the best it could be.

Indie authors have a lot of support these days with sites devoted to cheering them on and finding readers. I’ve cruised these sites and read first pages, and I often close these chapters as quickly as I open them, upon finding misspelled words and lazy writing. Authors, do yourselves a favor and find, not a tribe of other authors who will applaud your work simply because you are on an Indie page or part of an indie group, but editors and careful reader friends who will help you construct pages that will pull readers in.

And read! I found a forum for memoir writers recently, where a member said, “I’m writing a memoir, but haven’t read any. Do other members read memoirs?” Does a musician start to play without having ever heard music? Can a mechanic fix cars if he’s never driven one? Reading is essential, of course. The more you read, the more you recognize good writing, plot, pacing and structures that work – elements you do want to put into your own work.

I know there are many fine, practiced and polished manuscripts being self-published and I salute their authors for taking charge, rather than forever trying to get through the narrowing door of traditional publishing. I’m addressing those whose impulse is to upload their first drafts. Don’t make me, your faithful reader, look at a first draft! That’s what your writing group is for.

I want to be your faithful reader, Indie Author. Give your whole industry a boost, and polish before you publish. Give me a great script, a great story, a great book, and I will be your fan for life.

About Susan McKinney de Ortega

Susan McKinney de Ortega, a former award-winning television newsreporter, is the author of Flirting in Spanish, What Mexico taught me about love, living and forgiveness (Antaeus, 2011). Selections of her work also appear in One Big Happy Family: 18 Writers Talk about Polyamory, Househusbandry, Mixed Marriage, Open Adoption and Other Realities of Truly Modern Love, edited by Rebecca Walker (RiverheadBooks, 2009) and Mexico: A Love Story (Seal Press, 2006).

McKinney, lives in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, with her husband and bilingual teenaged daughters.  Find more at susanmckinneydeortega.com and sueinsanmigueldeallende.blogspot.com

Sitting down for a sunny Monday start; complete with maple brown sugar oatmeal and a healthy serving of homework procrastination to start out the week right; my preschooler and I pulled out the story of Dog and Bear. Those two little rascals had us in stitches, well, mostly her, but me enjoying the laughter of my youngest and the sheer excitement of her slurping up a bowl of literary bliss. Books and kids will do that to you, if you let them.

As I went through each story, I found myself learning some very valuable lessons. Yes, I am now taking encouragement from paper animals bound in cardboard and plastic covering. But really, what has changed? In the first story, Dog is high up on a chair, and Bear wants him to come down and play. How he got up on that bistro, wiry-legged thing is a question for another time. Bear calls his pal down and entices him to enjoy the day with him, but Dog is afraid to come down—and this is where my lesson begins. Fear. And heights. I am afraid of heights (freakishly, even the third floor of Nordstrom’s better have something not offered anywhere within a 20 mile radius or I am seriously going without, and what’s worse is that the preschooler finds the see-through rotating arm rests ‘fun’) and fear is something I struggle with on a momentary basis and know that I am being held in its sinister bondage, letting it control my choices and, therefore, passing up chances to play with the Bear’s in my life. So what’s a Dog to do? Bear, in his almighty and furry wisdom, suggests that Dog takes one small step forward. Oh, that Bear, always have a voice of reason, but how easy is that to offer when you are the one firmly planted on a non-moving surface, only inches away from a soft landing? Again, I have accepted that I now question, have dialogue, empathize, and sometimes arbitrarily argue with storybook characters and often find answers embedded within their narration.

But Bear has a point, I ponder. That over-sized to-do list waiting for me when I return from school drop-off and the Letter of Introduction to the wellness trade mag and the query to that parenting rag and the crag of dried laundry crumbling off of the dryer surface…what do they all have in common? One step, as small as it may seem and some determination that if I get this underway I may just want to take one more step and another, and perhaps I will soon find myself where I had only envisioned, down on the floor with Bear (or published or with a pretty checked off list, and the fat, giddiness of accomplishment to boot). I like that part.

Fear has a strange way of convincing me that it is the way it is, because it says so. Kind of reminds me of a parent who doesn’t want to argue or give any sound reason so they just rely on the old, ‘Because it just is!’ And I know that fear is really just a motivator, a barometer so that I can change course if the waters become choppier than necessary. But oh, how I succumb to its clutches.

Dog and Bear (along with my Little’s laugh) reminded me of a few things at this early morning engagement:

1. See my destination. What do I want more? The assignment, the fulfillment, the play date with Bear or my comfy spot on the teetering stool?
2. Take a step in the direction of my goal/fear, what’s the worst outcome I can imagine? Okay, that’s the worst it can get. Are my pants still dry? Good, we’re good then, and
3. This may be the best and most challenging part…laugh. Laugh at myself, at the scary distance from air to ground, at the huge expectations I put on myself and laugh heartily with the friends who encourage me to come down and play. So thank you Dog and Bear, and early morning Quaker with my kids.

About Sky Sanchez-Fischer

Sky Sanchez is a native Sacramentan. She writes, blogs, substitute teaches and tutors and is always on the lookout for one more job to add to her bursting at the seams schedule. When she is not at her computer or flipping through writer magazines, she is on all fours summoning her unicorn abilities for her three and a half year old or plugging in one half of the ear buds from her thirteen year old son’s iPOD, usually followed by “Ya, I like that, but turn it down.” She shares a partnership, both in business and by law, with her best friend and biggest fan and proofreader. She writes for The Sacramento Book Review and The San Francisco Book Review, and contributes to Sacramento Talent Magazine andStories on Stage blog. She also scribbles out her own blogs at epicureanpc.wordpress.com and skysf.wordpress.com.

With the holiday just past, I assume you all sent Thank You notes (via email or snail mail) to anyone who sent you a gift. Right? While acceptable to verbally say thank you when you are together when the gift is given, a note a few days later is still the height of good manners.

How many of you say “Thank You” when you get a review, article placement, mention in an article, have been interviewed on radio or TV? We all like to get that pat on the back and know something we did is appreciated. The media are no different and may, in fact, feel that nobody gives them the attention they deserve.

Almost every day I get an email often with a hot link from someone who has done something for one of our clients—written a review, posted an article, quoted the author in an article, etc. I IMMEDIATELY send back a Thank You email telling them how much we appreciate the coverage. I try to add some specific comment showing them what I thought was extra special in their coverage, such as mentioning how their child has asked for the story every night since the book arrived, or commenting on how well their garden was growing thanks to the tips they learned from the book, or the art they selected to run with the story. A comment on their show or web site overall is also a nice idea.

I also try to add a personal comment, not related to this piece. If I see they live in California where is it 80° and I’m in Michigan where it is 10°, I may ask them to say hello to the sun for me since I haven’t seen it in weeks. In some cases, this short remark starts a volley of back and forth short emails about the weather or children or pets. Suddenly I am not just another publicist but a PERSON.

Since we post reviews at our http://www.ksblinks.com web site for most of our clients, before I send the thank you, I post a blurb from the review or post a mention that an article by an author appears in the latest issue of their publication. If possible, I add a hot link back to the full coverage. Then in my thank you note I can say a blurb has already been posted at xxx and that this links back to their site. This immediate response and giving back always is a win-win.

Some of our authors who are active with Facebook and Twitter will ALSO send a their own thank you notes and mention that they are tweeting about it, etc.

When appropriate my note gives me a chance to mention that the author is always happy to answer questions about her area of expertise and so please contact me (or the author directly) when they need a last-minute guest for their show or an expert for an article.

Pitching other authors or their particular books may or may not be appropriate. That depends on the situation. I can occasionally add something like, “If you want a different take on disciplining children, Dr. So-and-So, whose book is YYY, might make an interesting counterpoint to today’s piece. Let me know if you would like to receive a copy or talk with the author.”

I know an author who did very nice notecards using the cover of his book as the front, having their website and book information on the back where the Hallmark information is usually found, with the inside being blank. The hand-written note on this stationery is a nice touch.

The saying is true about getting more flies with honey.  When you are nice to the media, they remember and will be nice in return when appropriate.

No need to thank me for this advice, but do add “Regularly send thank you notes” to your To Do list.

Kate Siegel Bandos has been doing book publicity for more than 40 years, the past 22 on a freelance basis from KSB Promotions (http://www.ksbpromotions.com). Over the years she has worked with thousands of books and authors, and can’t imagine how many media contacts she has made during that time. It still amazes her when she realizes she makes a living reading and working with books – the things she loves most (after her family).

Philip Fradkin’s extensive body of work is essential to understanding California and the American West. Over the past half century, he has written numerous newspaper and magazine articles and thirteen books about the region, its natural and human histories, varied landscapes, and some of its seminal characters. He shared a Pulitzer Prize for covering the Watts racial conflict in 1965, was a correspondent in Vietnam, and was the first environmental writer at the Los Angeles Times and the first western editor of Audubon magazine. His book, A River No More: The Colorado River and the West, remains the seminal work on that subject. He taught writing and western history courses at the University of California at Berkeley, Stanford University, and Williams College. The University of California Press has published most of his books. His two latest books are The Left Coast: California on the Edge,  whose companion photographs were shot by his son, Alex L. Fradkin, and Everett Ruess: His Short Life, Mysterious Death, and Astonishing Afterlife. Mr. Fradkin lives with his wife in Point Reyes Station.

ZR: In your new book, The Left Coast, you tag transience as “the dominant human characteristic” of Californians. Your father immigrated to the East Coast of the United States in 1905.  The very next generation—represented by you—migrated again—this time to California. What does this transience mean to you?

PF: There’s no doubt I’m a transient. My father came from Russia. When I added up the number of times I moved between 1960, when I arrived in California from the East Coast, and the 1990s it was 22 times. And I’ve moved about a half dozen times since then. I’m a very typical Californian. I came from elsewhere and I’ve been a transient within the state. What does that mean for me? I suppose an enquiring mind not saddled by too many preconceptions. I’m very settled now in West Marin, and I don’t imagine I’ll ever move unless the high cost of housing forces me to.

ZR: In your biography of Wallace Stegner, you quote him: “Most of us have one overbearing story to tell and tell it in many ways, over and over, often without being aware that we are repeating.” Is this true for you? Do you feel you have in your long and varied writing career one story to tell? And if so what would that story be?

PF: Stegner’s story was the Big Rock Candy Mountain. Once I read what Wally had to say, I found it clicked, and I’ve applied it to myself. My work, from which everything that followed is partially derived, is A River No More. It was like a first love. It was very challenging. The methods of organization I established for that book haven’t changed much. The thrust of A River No More has carried me through to my most recent book: it is about the excitement, the drama, and the sense of loss one experiences in the West. When I read what Stegner wrote, I knew where my beginning was and where my ending would be. The memories of researching and writing that book the late 1970s are still very vivid. I recall the excitement of entering the Colorado River Basin and having to be on instant alert. I knew that somewhere in that place was the nub of what I was searching for. It’s my most successful book. It has remained in print since it was published in 1981. It’s still regarded as the classic work on that subject. I went on to produce a cohesive body of work about the West. I never consciously meant it to be so cohesive. I just followed my interests.

ZR: A River No More is dedicated to your father, who first brought you out West when you were still a teenager.

PF: It was a grand tour. I was fourteen; my father was 64. (He was 50 years old when I was born.) As a younger man, he had been a marvelous horseman. He had grown up on an estate in Russia. He loved the West because it reminded him of the vast spaces of Russia. When he was younger, he used to take pack trips into the western wilderness. By the time I came along, he was a little old to do that, but he wanted me to experience those landscapes. We set out by train. The first stop was Yellowstone. Salt Lake City, Bryce, Zion, the Grand Canyon, and Lake Tahoe followed. We drove over Tioga Pass to Yosemite Valley. As I describe it in the Everett Ruess book, we saw the firefall from the valley floor. Next was San Francisco. Then we took the train to Seattle, and from Seattle on to Vancouver in British Columbia and over the Canadian Rockies via train to Lake Louise and Banff. These are all places that I later revisited and wrote about. He gave me a great gift with that trip. He gave me a feeling for the West, and as soon as I finished college and my military obligation, I migrated there. That is why the river book is dedicated to him.

ZR: When did your father die?

PF: He and my mother were visiting me when I was working at the LA Times in 1967. My father had a fatal heart attack in his hotel room. He was a gentleman. He was a prince.

ZR: Tell me more about your father’s background. He grew up on an estate: was he a White Russian, then? An aristocrat?

PF: No, no. His father managed the estate for an absentee general. He was Jewish and facing the very active discrimination practiced against Jews at the time in Russia. His socialist leanings also did not endear him to the Czar’s police. So he got on a boat and came to New York in 1910. I found the records of his landing on Ellis Island. He changed his stated occupation. He was a dentist. The customs officials were favoring other occupations, so my father said he was a “variety artiste,” and got into the country. He was listed as “Hebrew.”

ZR: You began as a journalist.  What drew you to journalism? Did you always know what you wanted to write about?

PF: I began in 1960 on a small weekly newspaper near San Francisco selling advertising during the day and covering city council and school board meetings at night. A writer’s best work emerges when he follows his interests. I was interested in finding out what was happening around me, and I thought journalism was the best way to satisfy that curiosity. I eventually wrote to find out who I was, where I was, and how I fit. I also wrote to tell an interesting story. I had no previous experience and learned the craft of nonfiction by practicing it.

My mother inadvertently gave me my occupation. She was a wife, parent, activist (women’s vote and world peace), and a writer. She was both brilliant and erratic. She went to Vassar College and was suspended for marching in a suffragette parade in New York City. She graduated from Vassar in 1913, got a master’s degree in economics from Columbia University, and worked as a social worker in New York City. All of this was highly unusual for a woman at that time. Then she met my father.

ZR: You grew up on the East Coast. Where, exactly?

PF: Montclair, New Jersey. It was a heavily Republican, upper middle class/upper class, racially and economically-divided town then. My mother was a wild card. The Ku-Klux Klan burned a cross on my parents’ lawn because of my mother’s activities. She was an NGO at the League of Nations and United Nations, participated in a number of conferences, and wrote about various aspects of disarmament. [In 1946, the American Unitarian Association appointed Elvira Fradkin as an official delegate to the United Nations.-ZR] She was sharply criticized by a reviewer in the New York Times Book Review for being a woman who wrote about such serious topics. She was a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, and when my football coach wanted to deride me he would call me “Mrs. Roosevelt.” She could never find the balance between being a mother and wife and being out in the world supporting these causes. I remember her saying numerous times when facing publishers’ rejections, “If I was only a man.” It was a different time.

ZR: What was her name?

PF: Elvira K. Fradkin. If you do an internet search, you’ll find references to her work and the publications she authored.

ZR: So your mother influenced you to become a writer.

PF: Yes, but it took awhile for me realize it. I was a mediocre student. I did what most boys did in those days: I chased girls, drank beer, and played baseball and was co-captain of the football team. My parents said I could do better, if I wanted to. I didn’t want to, at that time. Then I discovered ambition. Later I received an award from that school.

ZR: [Looking on the wall of Mr. Fradkin’s office] You are an Outstanding Alumnus.

PF: Yes, from Montclair Kimberly Academy.

ZR: And you went on to Williams College in Massachusetts and two years as an enlisted man in the Army. What did you think when you arrived in California in the 1960s in the midst of a cultural revolution?

PF: There wasn’t a cultural revolution when I arrived. It took a few years to develop. You mean what did I eventually think of the laid-back, hippie lifestyle? I don’t know what I thought. I had to work. I didn’t have the luxury of just hanging out. I had to make my way up from the bottom of the journalistic ladder. As a journalist, I saw a lot. I saw college students rebel. I was in South Central LA during the riots and got beat up the first night. I followed the urban riots to other cities. I was at the first violent anti-war demonstration. I was there when Robert Kennedy was shot. I documented the flight on the underground railway during the Vietnam War from the State of Washington to Canada . Finally, I covered the war for the Times. I observed and learned, but I did not participate. I came from a very sheltered environment. By the end of that decade I had a very good idea what the realities of the world were.

ZR: My son is now a student at the University of Pennsylvania; he finds quite a difference in attitudes in the East.

PF: Yes, there are physical and cultural divides between the East and West Coasts. If I had stayed where I had been raised, I would have been a very different person. I know that for a fact when I go back East and visit my friends.

ZR: Moving from one coast to the other can create a feeling of displacement, I think.

PF: Displacement can mean freedom. There is a feeling of freedom in the West. Each coast has developed different habits or patterns for living that evolved over the years to fit those different places. When I first came here, I was struck by the great diversity of landscapes and the freedom that engendered. I later figured out how we all adapt to our very different environmental niches. We can pass from one to the other in a manner of minutes here, while it takes hours back East. This concept of adaptation to a landscape was imbedded for the first time in The Seven States of California: A Natural and Human History.

ZR:  In 1989, you wrote in your book Sagebrush Country, “In the last twenty-five years I had continually sought the feeling of emergence in the mountains and deserts of the West. . . “ [88] Where did that feeling come from? In Wildest Alaska: Journeys of Great Peril in Lituya Bay you describe the only settler there being a hermit. And then more recently, just this year in fact, you wrote about the lone vagabond artist/poet/ named Everett Ruess. What draws you to such individuals as Ruess and Wallace Stegner and to the wild places that have formed them: such places as the canyonlands of the Southwest, the Saskatchewan prairie in Canada, Lituya Bay in Alaska, the Uinta Mountains in Utah, and the Lost Coast in California, which you wrote about more recently in The Left Coast: California on the Edge?

PF: I am drawn to good stories that take place in wild places inhabited by distinct individuals who have been shaped by those landscapes. That landscape determines, to some extent, destiny, history, and character has been the dominant theme of my writing since the early 1990s. I was drawn to Ruess, for example, because I also went on a quest hitchhiking and walking through Europe by myself. Like him, my youth was shaped by progressive education and the Unitarian Church with its emphasis on using your own mind to find your way. I chose to locate myself in the West. There were certain parallels with the western landscapes, and with Ruess, that drew me. I, too, had a manifesto: I wanted to live a full and productive life somewhere between the mountains and the sea.

I began my writing career in the Bay Area. It‘s a very dramatic landscape located between the Coast Range and the Pacific Ocean. It’s certainly not New Jersey. If you’re going to live intelligently in this landscape, you’re going to have to explore it. I have done so by rowing, sailing, and kayaking on Tomales Bay. I have a mountain bike. I take frequent day hikes in Pt. Reyes National Seashore. I have expanded my horizons. I sailed a 22-foot boat to Los Angeles when I went to work for the Times in 1964. Three times, the first for the newspaper, the second for my book, and the third to revise the book, I traveled from the headwaters of the Colorado River in Wyoming to where it ends ingloriously in the Gulf of California in Mexico. I took an eleven-day backpacking trip alone along the crest of the Uinta Mountains, using the hike as the structure for Sagebrush Country. I have car camped all over the West in three different versions of the VW van. I yoked my explorations to my work whenever I could, and those trips ranged from the Arctic Ocean to Tierra del Fuego. Most of my time outdoors has been spent alone in wild places.

ZR: There’s a moving passage in Wildest Alaska: Journeys of Great Peril in Lituya Bay, in which you describe what drew you to this dramatic and dangerous place. If you don’t mind, I’d like to quote this passage:  “Our feelings about a place, and its impact on us, derive from many factors in our past. The whiplash of my mother’s erratic moods, and thus the rhythm of my early years, matched the vicissitudes of Lituya Bay.” To research your book Magnitude 8: Earthquakes and Life along the San Andreas Fault (1998), you went underground to view the Hollywood Fault where construction workers were digging a subway under the Santa Monica Mountains. For A River No More you hiked steep canyons miles from anyone in the days before cell phones. You really were fearless, often putting yourself in danger for your work. Is that your mother’s influence coming in?

PF:  The dangers were all calculated and are relative in the mind of the beholder. My father first showed me those types of places. My mother’s emotional eruptions represent the background rhythms of my life. I think you can see how both affected me. But if you’re going to write about the dark side of nature, an earthquake fault, a river, or anything else, I believe you have to go to that place, or as close to it as possible, and experience it. Otherwise your prose is incomplete.

My attraction to the link between the violence of the landscape and the human history of Lituya Bay encompassed other factors. I find the dark side of nature fascinating because people who love nature, say wilderness lovers and the organizations who represent them, won’t deal with that aspect. I proposed Lituya Bay as a magazine article for Audubon. They paid my way up there. I visited the bay and wrote the story. The editor wouldn’t run it. I tried to interest the Sierra Club magazine. They, too, didn’t want an account of nature gone berserk. It clearly violated their rhapsodic view of a Thoreau-like nature untouched except for the depredations of humans. Humans are destructive, but nature, according to this view, is not. I learned to recognize nature’s dark side by living next to the San Andreas Fault and being very aware of the natural history of this place: the earthquake of 1906, the flood of 1982, the forest fire of 1995, and periodic large waves that sweep people off the beaches. Everyone thinks this place, Point Reyes, is a very peaceful landscape, but it has a violent side where you trespass at your peril.

And that’s why my story of Lituya Bay was hard to place. I put it aside. Then the University of California Press offered me a contract for my 1906 earthquake book. I asked them to publish both books, and they agreed to do it.

ZR: I can see why. It’s a fascinating story.

x
End of Part One.  This interview will be continued in  second part, where we explore Fradkin’s biography of the great writer of the West, Wallace Stegner, as well as Fradkin’s own professional life as a journalist and as a photographer. Stay tuned!

About the Interviewer, Zara Raab

Zara lives in Berkeley and is one of the first women to graduate in architecture from UC Berkeley. She grew up along California’s North Coast, attending school in Portland when she was fourteen, and later Mills College and the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) for college and graduate school. In her twenties, she traveled, living in Paris, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., where she made a living as a freelance editor and writer, participating for a time in the Capitol Hill Poetry Group, before returning to the West Coast to raise her children.

Early California is a subject of her book Swimming the Eel, just as the drama of family life is the subject of The Book of Gretel. In leaving behind the rural counties, she became a part of the human potential movement of the 1960′s, and that movement perhaps more than anything, shapes her life and her work. Since she was a teenager, she kept journals, and sometimes returns to those early notebooks for ideas. Her poems appear in many literary reviews and magazines, including The Dark Horse, The Evansville Review, River Styx, Crab Orchard Review, Nimrod, Dos Passos Review, Arts & Letters, and others. She also review books and writes essays on literature for various publications, including the Redwood Coast Review, Poetry Flash, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Colorado Review, and The Boxcar Poetry Review.

The big problem with finding a habitable planet like Earth is finding a planet satisfying many conditions similar to those on Earth.  Those conditions include a wide range of planet functions.  We all know that life cannot exist without water and air.  However, many creatures can breathe carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen as a waste product, thereby replenishing the oxygen supply for oxygen-breathing creatures like us.

While some bacteria have been known to live in hot springs in Yellowstone National Park, most creatures require a more moderate temperature.  Therefore, we can rule out ovens like Venus, whose surface temperatures reach 800- degrees Fahrenheit.  Similarly, microbes have been known to live in glacial ice.  Again, this is an extreme and it rules out really cold places like the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.  The one exception is that under the surface ice on Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, a liquid ocean could harbor life.

Life, at least on Earth, requires mechanics that would protect it from gamma and other types of rays.  Earth possesses a magnetosphere, produced from the molten iron core, which shields living creatures from harmful radiation.  Few planets and planetary moons possess it.  The one exception is Jupiter, but its magnetosphere is over a hundred times as strong as Earth’s.  Not only does a habitable planet need to possess a mechanism to protect living creatures, but it must do so without excessive strength.

Size does matter.  Big planets would simply allow life to exist that remained flat against the surface, thereby minimizing the planet’s powerful gravity effect due to its mass.  Similarly, very small planets would tend to produce living creatures that could grow quite tall, basically for the opposite reason.

Strangely, it’s only been in the last 20 years that cosmologists and other scientists have even considered the possibility that life could exist elsewhere in the cosmos.  It was with the launching of the Hubble Telescope that the real quest for extraterrestrial life began.  We must look through the new James Web Telescope planet finder interferometer to seek answers. We will be in for a real treat in 2014 with NASA’s launch of the 21-foot mirror scope with the promise of new discoveries. A full-scale model is currently being displayed in New York City’s Battery Park.

About D. Wayne Dworsky

D. Wayne Dworsky addresses the importance of being informed of Currents in Science & Nature by participating in science & nature book reviews, writing feature articles, aviation and preparing students for State examinations in mathematics and language arts. He’s been reviewing science and nature titles for Sacramento Book Review for the last two years.

In addition to his own literary career, he hosts a radio talk show on Blog Talk Radio’s Alpha Centauri & Beyond . And he writes a blog at his website, Alpha Centauri & Beyond.com. He remains active as an airman and writes articles for American Chronicle.

Over the years, one of the most common questions I have been asked is “When do I start marketing my book?” Depending on my mood, I may respond with, “You’re kidding, you haven’t already started?” Creating a success for your launch involves setting up a marketing plan months in advance of your inauguration. There are two primary phases to use as a guide in setting up your plan:

1. Creating a social media and physical platform.
2. Timing your book’s launch according to holidays and seasons appropriate to your material, and months ahead of time. True, timing may not “be everything” however it is an essential ingredient to developing your promotional campaign.

Timing your launch to match your book 6 months before release:

• What’s the best season to release your book? Let’s start with June. Do you have a novel that will compliment someone’s tan, or a Father’s Day special?
• Where do you want to be with the book’s launch? This will be your base for any events you do. Depending on the subject your launch activities can include events in book stores, retail stores, healing clinics, beauty parlors; the list is endless and specific to your subject. Start planning these events.
• What magazines want a copy of your galley or manuscript to review 6 months before your launch? Magazines that are bi-monthly need more lead time to prepare.
• What groups or organizations can help you launch your book? Do they have a newsletter, conference, or lecture series you can participate in? They plan at least 6 months ahead.
• In your Blog about your book offer advance sales discounts.
• Research local, regional and national columnists who cover your material, and connect with them. Become a source of information on your topic. Offer to write timely pieces that coincide with the holiday or season of your release.
• Determine who will be your distribution partners by researching their expertise.
• By now you will have finished your study of your competition and have determined what has worked for them. Begin to develop your competition as allies for speaking opportunities or radio interviews etc.
• Have a social media platform in place and daily be networking those connections.
• Become active in professional groups, church groups, charities, social services, clubs, and any social activity in the physical world that relates to your subject matter.
• Design your promotional material, brochures, postcards, posters.

Where should you be 3 months before release?

• What magazines want your manuscript in their hands by now to potentially review? A trade journal like Publisher’s Weekly needs your book 3-4 months ahead of publication. Often you can find these guidelines on their website under author or publisher submissions.
•  What events have you already set up, and what more can you set up for the launch? This is your last chance to create events that will have media coverage. Depending on the size of the city the media needs varying amounts of lead time to cover events. For instance New York City media needs at least 3 months of advance notice. While small cities rely on personal connections and need your good will and reputation to help them decide to cover you in a timely fashion.
• Begin to develop media coverage for your events. Who are the columnists, reporters, or bloggers that will help you promote your event? Print media takes more time to set up. Radio interviews may book a month or two in advance. And TV may book days or weeks in advance. To line up a TV interview the work of connecting and preparation months in advance is well your time.
• Print your promotional material. Use your book’s cover over and over again.
•  Start traveling locally or regionally with your promotional material and begin to place these promotional tools in areas close to your events. Use the postcard as a calling card to develop your elevator speech and network, network, network:
  • Secure your distribution partners.
  • Find affiliates to help you promote your material. Affiliates can be your competition, or people with similar goals. Want to work with them? Make them part of your launch plans. Ask them to contribute a promotional product that will be a bonus to your promotion.
  • Offer contests and anything that will start to develop buzz about your book through your social media and physical platforms.
  • Be active daily on your social media networks.
  • Oversee the minute to minute details of the production of your product. This can be a-hands on approach with a printer, or book shepherd. Selby ink specializes in walking authors through the process of becoming a published author.

What are other options you can do either 6 months or 3 months before a book’s launch? Be creative! The most important element is to start planning for your launch with these guidelines in mind. Behind every successful book launch there are dozens of people, events, and activities. No one succeeds from a standing start. To be able to do the broad-jump any athlete knows that practice and patience are their strengths. Go ahead make mistakes, take chances and see what works. With a plan that involves timing, your buyers will be ready at your launch with cash in hand to purchase your book.

Copyright Mari Selby, January 2012

About Mari Selby

Mari Selby founded Selby ink in 1998 after working for a small publisher where she was successful in improving their sales from 20,000 books to over 100,000 books in one year. Prior to being a publicist Mari was a family therapist in private practice for almost 20 years. All of us at Selby ink are passionate about healing and transformation, we prefer to work with books that make a difference in people’s lives, their relationships, our society or the planet. Our passion for books, drive to make your work well-known, and international contacts will provide just the edge you need to create a successful promotional campaign. Selby ink covers all the publicity and promotional bases, from book-shepherding to traditional book tours to online services to viral campaigns. Contact Selby ink today for a free short consultation about your book and you! mari@selbyink.com or www.selbyink.com.

“The Esquire story is a great opportunity, but you really should think of this as a book.”

It was a charged observation from an old friend, even more so given that the old friend, Mitchell Waters, is also literary agent who’d come to call. He’d read an advance copy of my autobiographical feature story, The Man Who Couldn’t Eat, that would appear in the magazine the following month. Funny thing was, my Esquire editor, Mark Warren, had said the same thing. I didn’t need further convincing.

Having spent my adulthood writing novels that failed to get published, I knew that I was up to the challenge of completing a book, even though I’d be a rookie in this particular genre. I’d never written, or thought about, writing a memoir. Call it confidence, call it arrogance, call it cluelessness, call it what you will – I, and all writers,  must have it, “it” being the quality necessary to face a blank page and fill it with story. It is the foundation of book writing, magazine writing, all writing. My “it” would surely see me through whatever was required to expand a single story all the way to book length. I’d had no reluctance to sell the book concept based solely on the magazine story and a first chapter. “Trust me” was the subtext of the proposal. Then, I received the contract from the publisher – “author agrees to deliver an 80,000 word manuscript in six months” – exactly what I had offered and agreed to in the pep rally of the conference room overlooking Rockefeller Center! I must have been dizzied by that heady atmosphere. What was I thinking?

The challenge I’d faced writing the Esquire story concerned how to throw so much away and still hold the narrative together. My 15,000-word first draft had to be reduced to 5,000 words (paper and ink cost money, and magazine advertising isn’t what is was when Mad Men sold the pages), so the art of storytelling was metered by the act of compression. I suffered the usual writer’s pain in having to scalp my own coiffed prose, but I couldn’t complain about the result. The published story was intense and hard as a diamond and well-received, nominated for a National Magazine Award and winning – ironically – the 2010 James Beard Foundation Award for food writing. Getting scalped never felt so good. And from what I heard in the juiced conference room with the view, that was the mode of precision Simon & Schuster expected in the book version. Obscured by the cheers was an unspoken question: did I have it in me to mine that size of a jewel?

Lesson One: Get To It

Deadline pressure accelerated my thinking and led me to realize the first of two key lessons for the story-to-book process. One man’s panic is another man’s opportunity. All those years when I’d been frustrated by agents’ and editors’ failure to see the brilliance of my 100,000+ word manuscripts, I would have killed for this kind of an opportunity. Put it in perspective, brother. You’ve been graced with dumb luck and handed a great story (the basis of The Man Who Couldn’t Eat).  You’ve been telling people for years at cocktail parties, little league games, car washes, that you’re a writer. A writer writes. In the words of John Berryman, “The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he’s in business.” The best writing is done on an empty stomach, right? You’ve got hunger in your wheelhouse. Get to it.

Lesson Two: Open The Valve

If the first lesson of the process was practically essential, the second was creatively liberating. Open up the narrative. The central theme of the magazine story – the existential crisis of food deprivation – contained acres of events, characters, experiences, and reflections for which there just wasn’t enough real estate in Esquire to tell. Simon & Schuster had more land. Immediately, I saw the three-month scope of the magazine story as just a section of a much longer narrative arc. I wrote an outline – a chore I normally detest – to chart the journey, but kept it simple: three parts, three chapters each. Once I began writing (eventually going to 11 chapters), the story hydrated. Watering the dynamic elements that always inspired me as a fiction writer – dialogue, character, description, setting, conflict, meditation – grew the story into a book. The word counter on my laptop screen showed 60,000, 70,000, 80,000, 85,000 and up. There wouldn’t be enough paper to hold the damn thing!

I delivered the manuscript on time and true to the proposal. Skilled editing directed me through three drafts. The reviews have been good and taken little notice that the book began its life on five glossy pages. My friends were right; the story really was a book.

About Jon Reiner

Jon Reiner is the author of the debut memoir The Man Who Couldn’t Eat, published by Simon & Schuster. The book is based on a story of the same title he wrote for Esquire which won the 2010 James Beard Foundation Award for Magazine Feature Writing, was nominated for a National Magazine Award, and was translated into multiple languages for international publication.

After earning a B.A., magna cum laude, in English and theater at Fairleigh Dickinson University and an M.A. in English at the University of Maryland, where he was an instructor of writing and literature, he worked for two decades as a creative executive for international corporations and arts organizations. Jon is a member of PEN American Center and is writing his next book, Chutes and Ladders, (read a post on nytimes.com) a memoir of finding work and meaning in an age of greed and unemployment. Jon lives in New York City with his wife and two children.

He is still learning how to cook.

Jon’s blog.

There are many people on this planet who know what an MMO and/or an MMORPG is, but by the same token – like so many things in life – there are also many people who don’t what those acronyms mean.  MMO stands for Massive Multiplayer Online, and MMORPG stands for Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game.  Some examples of these MMOs include EverQuest, World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online, and the forthcoming and constantly-growing-in-popularity Star Wars: The Old Republic, which is still in beta and scheduled to be fully released December 20.  They’re essentially online video games that allow for much more ability and opportunity than usual console-based video games, and have no real end point: with each new expansion, players have higher levels to achieve, more quests to do, and more of the world to explore.  Players get all this and more for a monthly fee, or some MMOs are free to play (ftp), but payment is required for certain quests or items.  There are literally millions of MMO players across the planet, and I’m proudly one of them.

What’s interesting is that MMOs are starting to show up in fiction, mainly science fiction, usually as a construct of the fictional world the author has created.  Sometimes it is a quasi dystopian future where playing the game is all there really is, while other books have the MMO be a main part of the story and play off it in the real world.  It is an interesting growing sub-genre of science fiction that seems to get new additions each year.

Below are the books featuring MMOs that I have come across in my reading and reviewing, though I am sure there are more out there and invite anyone reading this column to elucidate on them in the comments section.  As you read about these books and their respective MMOs, what do you think it says about our world and our society?  More importantly, what do you think it says about where we’re headed?  How likely is it that some form of one of these MMOs will come to be our reality?  You be the judge.

Reamde by Neal Stephenson

Richard Forthrast is our approaching-middle-age hero who is one of the big brains behind the multi-billion dollar MMO, T’Rain, which is known throughout the world, whether you’re a rich white kid who likes to pretend he’s an elf, or a gold farmer somewhere in Asia looking to make some good money. T’Rain was in fact created with that in mind – Richard’s past is not a completely clean one by any means – to be open and available and possibly profitable to just about anyone on the planet with a good Internet connection.  And then a very specific virus attacks T’Rain, known as Reamde, which immediately begins making a lot of money for its creators and screwing over a lot of the regular players.  Richard and his team of brainiacs are now working round the clock trying to bring a stop to this.

Meanwhile, one of Richard’s family members – Zula – originally from East Africa and adopted into the family as a young girl, was hired by Richard to work for T’Rain, and becomes involved in a really big problem when her boyfriend Peter – who happens to be a renowned hacker – is looking to make good money selling credit card numbers to a shady, unknown character.  Things take a turn for the worse, when the Reamde virus hits and screws everything up for him.  Before they know it, the Russian mafia is breaking down their door, kidnapping them, and taking them to Asia by private jet to find the perpetrators of the Reamde virus and get their revenge. (Read the full review)

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

In the not-too-distant future, the world is quickly going to hell in a hand basket.  It’s very much a dystopian world, but within this gloomy, depressing place is an MMO that just about everyone plays.  OASIS is not just a game, but a way a life for most, where you can have fun, meet friends, got to school, and pretty much lead a full and entertaining life under the guise of your anonymous avatar (whose façade is of your choosing).  Depending on what people can afford, the experience can be fully sensory so that players feel as if they are actually existing in the world of OASIS and experiencing it in just about every way possible.

James Halliday, who grew up in the 1980’s when computers were beginning to take off, quickly became addicted to video games and then began making his own.  He is the creator of OASIS, which has gone from a game to life and reality for so many people in this world, and he is many times a billionaire.  When he dies, he activates his will which states that whoever finds the three keys and solves the puzzles will be entitled to his entire fortune.  Wade Watts is an eighteen year old nerd who has hopes of finding all three keys and gaining those untold riches.  His parents are dead and he lives with an aunt who treats him terribly and he cares little for her, scraping by in abject poverty.  And now he thinks he might’ve just found the location of the first key. (Read the full review; read an interview with the author)

Omnitopia Dawn by Diane Duane

There are two worlds here: the compelling fantasy world of the massive multiplayer online game (MMO) Omnitopia and the real world where video game companies fight to keep doing what they do best and keep the fans hooked, and make lots of money.  It is the near future and when one sits down to play an MMO – like Lord of the Rings Online or World of Warcraft – they can use the familiar screen and keyboard set up, or there is the full immersion into the game, akin to virtual reality only better, where one experiences almost all senses of the game.  It is an incredible complex world of fighting and raiding, of gaining levels and increasing your wealth, and even eating and drinking with friends, while discussing your next strategies.  But Omnitopia is unique as every once in a while it selects one of its subscribers to create their own unique world of their own choosing and actually make money from it.  So there is the world of Omnitopia, and then there are the thousands of other user-created worlds covering all of history and the imagination.  The result is a game that one can quite literally be completely absorbed by, almost forgetting the real world.

Rik Maliani is an ordinary person with an ordinary job who’s been a fan and player of Omnitopia for years.   Then he gets selected to create his own world; it’s a dream come true, especially with the possibility of making serious money, but the question is what type of world to make?  What would make it truly unique and encourage people to come see and play?  As Rik begins creating his world, he notices some unusual events happening in the world of Omnitopia that seem to affect the one he is creating, but at the same time to be affected by his world somehow.

Dev Logan is the CEO of Omnitopia and started the whole enterprise many years ago as a college student, and is now the eighth richest man in the world because of it.  He has a crack team of computer whizzes and geniuses who spend their days monitoring Omnitopia, making sure it’s running as smoothly as possible, and preventing the constant attacks and hacks against the worldwide popular MMO.  And now things are really heating up, as the new expansion is about to be released.  Everyone is working pretty much nonstop and none more so than Dev, who forgets to even eat at times.  Delia Harrington is doing a story on Omnitopia for Time Magazine about the company and the expansion.  As Dev deals with the reporter – who seems to be snooping around a little more than she should be – he’s constantly being barraged by updates and news on what’s happening with Omnitopia.  It seems there are an absurd number of attacks building against the MMO, more so than usual, even for an expansion, but then that’s all in a day’s work for the CEO of Omnitopia.

Finally, there is Phil Sorensen, who was a good friend of Dev’s in college – they were going to revolutionize the gaming world together, but then had a falling out – and is the CEO for Infinity Inc. with his own giant, money-making MMO.  He would like nothing more than to see everything that is Omnitopia come crashing down, and have Dev come crying back to him.  He’s going to stop at nothing to make this happen. (Read the full review)

For the Win by Cory Doctorow

For anyone who’s ever played an MMO game like World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings Online, you know it can be a lot of fun.  What you might not know is that if you’re really good at it, play it just right, and know where to advertise, you can make a lot of money from it.

There are certain quests or missions that can be repeated over and over for maximum experience points and/or gold; that gold can be turned into cash.  People who do this are known as gold farmers; it’s illegal; thousands of people around the world do it for profit. (Read the full review; listen to an interview with the author)

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Daemon by Daniel Suarez

Daemon begins with Matthew Sobol, a renowned computer programmer and video game designer, dead from cancer.  It is upon his death, when the obituary is posted online, that the dormant daemon is unleashed upon the world.  In this world – just like our own – everything is automated and computerized: banking, transportation, defense, government, patient records; there are few things remaining “off the grid.”  The daemon works fast and incredibly efficient, beginning a systematic takedown of technology and world systems, causing deaths and the collapse of companies, and a financial meltdown that is scarily similar to the current economic climate.

It’s up to Detective Sebeck and computer genius Jon Ross to try and stop the daemon somehow from destroying everything.  Then there is The Grid, the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game – in the style of World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online – created by Sobol, where the daemon secretly begins recruiting the disaffected but brilliant youth who play the game as part of its efforts to bring down technology and society. (Read the full review; listen to an interview with the author)

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As you can see, each MMO is quite different in each book, and in how the MMO is used as a construct.  Sometimes it is a tool for good, sometimes a tool for evil, and sometimes a tool for something completely different.  Regardless of what the future may hold for us in the growing world of MMOs, and whether any of these possible and seemingly plausible realities will come into being, the fact that this subject is being written about by a growing number of different authors sends a message that this is not something we can just ignore or assume will go away.  MMOs are here to stay, whether some of us like it or not, for good or ill; the question remains: how are they going to stay and what affect will they grow to and continue to have on our lives.  Only the future knows.

About Alex Telander

Alex C. Telander is the creator and host of the book review and author interview website BookBanter.  He’s an avid reader, writes whenever he can, and even records audiobooks.  You can find all this on his website.  You can also find him on Twitter, @BookBanter, or drop him a line at alex@bookbanter.net.

That time of year again. The old is kissed-off and the new is excitedly waving her arms as I look through the peephole. Right? There is just something about taking down all of the tinsel, lights and red and green throughout the house, I always find myself a bit tearful and sad that it all has to end. Don’t get me started with the tree. Suffice it to say that the sight of it laying in the gutter has, on more than one occasion, prompted me to keep it up well past the safe stage. This year I ate a bite of cheese (camouflaged quite well in a tempting tamale) and was out with a violent allergic reaction for seventeen hours while the husband and in-laws, and four-year-old, took almost all of what was left of Christmas and packed it away.

Where does all of this lead me? To a fresh start, the New Year of course, and what I love about it.

Here are a few simple things I look forward to this year: the 50% off calendars and datebooks after the 1^st of the year (I held out until the 7^th and am seeing this as a test and victory in self-discipline). The clean white boxes and lines of nothingness, so much possibility; must I say more on this? Next, a new perspective; okay, I won’t fib here, I have been working on this for the past two years with leaps (and some drags up the hill) in progress. Every thing in it’s season, so I declare this as the season, my season, to move forward and not look back, to not allow fear to hold me captive one moment longer and, instead, to listen to the voice of Truth over the warbling of fear and anxiety. That’s a big leap for me. Will someone please hand me the sheet metal shears?

I want to start thriving in my daily musings, everything from parenting to making time for writing to learning the ins and outs of my new Canon (thank you, dear) and my way around the kitchen with ingredients that are comforting, healthy, and won’t have me running for an EpiPen. Honestly, the anxiety of eating out is enough to have me huddling in a corner mumbling the horrors of another botched dish at times.

I need to learn a few things this year, for my own good and growth. So, there are many things I am looking forward to: a trip to Disneyland (our first as a family) in December, more business, freedom, a renewal in health, fitness (yep, I held out until yesterday when my Groupon expired, but I am officially a gym member), permission to consider myself an artist and do my thang (the permission comes from within, in my case) and some new wonders that I will have to keep you posted on.

But mostly, I want to get out of bed with an energy that propels me into my day, one that is mirrored best by my four-year-old. It kind of looks like this: 6:40a.m. and she is standing by my bedside (on Christmas break). The wisps of her uncombed hair are tickling me into thinking I have something of the flying nature stuck to my face. I open a half-glued eye and smile because she is so alive at such an hour as this. She is still in her p.j.s, but has undoubtedly picked out her first round of clothes for the day and set them out, as well as her accompanying accessories (oh, she’s good). And what are the first words out of her mouth after Hi Mama? “Let’s Go Play!” And although I am only thinking of washing my face and plopping back down on the recliner for the next hour I am inspired by her enthusiasm for this gift of a new day. This year, every day, I want to wake up seeing it as a new opportunity to play my day away.

About Sky Sanchez-Fischer

Sky Sanchez is a native Sacramentan. She writes, blogs, substitute teaches and tutors and is always on the lookout for one more job to add to her bursting at the seams schedule. When she is not at her computer or flipping through writer magazines, she is on all fours summoning her unicorn abilities for her three and a half year old or plugging in one half of the ear buds from her thirteen year old son’s iPOD, usually followed by “Ya, I like that, but turn it down.” She shares a partnership, both in business and by law, with her best friend and biggest fan and proofreader. She writes for The Sacramento Book Review and The San Francisco Book Review, and contributes to Sacramento Talent Magazine andStories on Stage blog. She also scribbles out her own blogs at epicureanpc.wordpress.com and skysf.wordpress.com.