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Sundays are not rest days. #

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So everyone at church said goodbye to DS18 (this was his last Sunday) and I bawled like a baby. A big weeping baby. #

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I think I’m almost off my disaster-book jag here, but I had two more on my stack and decided to read them as a follow-up to A Wall of White and Into Thin Air.

Week 28, The Children’s Blizzard by David Laskin: intermittently gripping, so grade B+.

This is an account of the January 12, 1888 blizzard that swept down through Minnesota and the Dakota Territory into Nebraska, Iowa, and Kansas. It killed hundreds of people, including scores of children who had been sent home from school when bad weather loomed and were caught on the prairie by the storm. Vivid descriptions of the catastrophe, including this quote from a South Dakota man who saw the blizzard approach:

We were all out playing in our shirt sleeves, without hats or mittens. Suddenly we looked up and saw something coming rolling toward us with a great fury from the northwest, and making a loud noise. It looked like a long string of big bales of cotton, each one bound tightly with heavy cords of silver, and then all tied together with great silvery ropes. The broad front of these cotton bales looked to be about twenty-five feet high; above them it was perfectly clear.

An excellent step-by-step account of the storm; once I got halfway through, I was engaged enough to stay up late finishing it. The book did suffer a bit from awkward backstory insertion, particularly right at the beginning before the reader’s attention was thoroughly seized; right after the preface, Laskin goes all the way back to Scandinavia before the Norwegian immigrants leave for the American prairies. He nearly lost me there. Plus, he halts the narrative way too long to tell us all about nineteenth-century methods of predicting the weather. But his story is definitely worth a read, and the conclusion told me something I didn’t know about the Great Plains of today:

Out-migration is on the rise once more. Nearly 70 percent of the counties in the Great Plains states have fewer people now than they did in 1950. These days nearly one million acres of the plains are so sparsely populated that they meet the condition of frontier as defined by the Census Bureau in the nineteenth century….Indian and buffalo populations have now reached levels that the region has not seen since the 1870s….in large stretches of the prarie it’s beginning to look like European agricultural settlement is a completed chapter of history. “It’s time for us to acknowledge one of America’s greatest mistakes,” wrote Nicholas D. Kristof on the op-ed page of the New York Times, “a 140-year-old scheme that has failed at a cost of trillions of dollars, countless lives and immeasurable heartbreak: the settlement of the Great Plains.” The blizzard of January 12, 1888, was an early sign of that mistake.

Fascinating. Intend to find out a little more about this. (Is Kristof’s view peculiar to him, or shared by others?)

Week 29: Forever on the Mountain by James M. Tabor. Grade: B-. Or maybe C+. I really, really wanted to like this book, which is a carefully researched account of the 1967 expedition to Mount McKinley in which seven men died and no rescue was launched. It was clear and interesting but Tabor’s style drove me nuts. He uses the present tense for much of his retelling, which fits chick lit better than history, even recent history. It obscures the distinction between what Tabor knows and what he guesses, and it also forces him to make strained use of past and future tenses: here’s a passage describing the doomed expedition in the middle of the storm:

Fatigue and altitude are dragging all of Jerry’s men down. They have been without food and water probably for twenty-four hours now. Jerry may think vaguely of trying to take off his boots and massage his feet, but the effort required will seem insurmountable….Jerry will understand better than the others what is happening, having learned more about high-altitude and cold-weather physiology during his Antarctic training. He will not say this to his friends, because he doesn’t want to frighten them, but Jerry must know that if the storm doesn’t break soon, some of them will be unable to move and could die right here. Given the way he’s feeling, he could well be one of them.

Those tense shifts are so weird (to my ear, anyway) that I had to stop and puzzle them out right when I should have been transported by the story. Plus, Tabor further confuses the issue when he refers to present-day interviews he conducted with the survivors. Those also go back and forth between past and present tense. Additional distraction: Tabor uses quotation marks for dialogue which he can validate, and no quotation marks for dialogue he’s inventing…something which I didn’t figure out until the very end of the book. Bottom line: not as effective as it could have been.

Week 30: The Invention of Love, by Tom Stoppard. Grade: Er. Um. I have no idea.

I picked this up on a whim because I have fond memories of reading Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead about fifty times in college, and because I haven’t read a play since I finished writing the drama section in The Well-Educated Mind. Possibly my play-reading skills are rusty. But man, did I struggle with this one, which I’m tempted to think is only going to appeal to Brits over fifty. It was premiered in the U.S. in 2000 (with James Cromwell in the leading role). I have to wonder what that was like. I mean, with lines such as “Affability is only suffering the fools gladly, and Cambridge afford endless scope for this peculiar joy. I introduced creme brulee to Trinity, but if that isn’t enough I’ll talk to people. Do you still ride a bicycle?”

I have a stack of new plays to read, though, so maybe I’ll revisit this one once I’m back into drama-mode.

Simple fact of writing in 2009: anytime you get offered an opportunity to promote yourself, you should take it. (Hey, all those people who post one-star reviews of my books should have some competition. Particularly when they make nasty statements without supporting evidence. But I digress.)

So I followed the link to my Author Page, where I posted my photo and a brief bio. Now any Amazon.com readers who are dying to see what I look like can indulge themselves.

Amazon then notified me that it would have to confirm my identity with my publisher. Works for me; I don’t want random people masquerading as me on the world’s biggest online retailer.

Apparently this involves checking with my publisher to verify my email address. I’m kind of curious as to who, at W. W. Norton, got to answer that particular important query.

Anyway, within 48 hours I got an email from Amazon: “Hi Susan Wise Bauer…”

Congratulations! Your publisher has verified your account information. Your Author Central account is now activated.

We encourage you to sign-in to Author Central and share more information about you and your books:
Add your books and suggest changes to your bibliography
Post a photo and provide a biography (if you haven’t already)
Connect with your readers by blogging
Any information you’ve already provided through Author Central will be reflected on the Susan Wise Bauer Page shortly.

Thanks,
The Author Central Team

Five minutes later I got another email from Amazon:

Hi Susan Wise Bauer,

Random House was unable to verify that your email address belongs to Susan Wise Bauer.

We’d like to help you complete the activation of your account. If you believe there has been an error, you may contact your publisher through Author Central. Or you can contact the Author Central Team directly.

Thanks,
The Author Central Team

Quite apart from the weird sort of logical parodox in the salutation and first line of this email (not to mention the use of the hyphenated adjective “sign-in” as a verb in the other message), this puzzled me because I have never written ANYTHING for Random House. So I sent them a query. Why, I wondered, were they pestering Random House, as 1) I am not a Random House author, and 2) Norton already confirmed my identity? (And why would I want to contact my publisher through the very indirect route of Amazon’s Author Central Team when I could simply call the editor-in-chief’s cell phone? But perhaps there are reasons I’m not aware of.)

A day later, I got this response:

Hello,

I understand your concern as we have contacted “Random House” to approve you as an author even though they are not your actual publisher.

We requested that “Random House” approve your registration because they are listed in our records as your publisher, or at least one of your publishers.

We sometimes have more than one publisher listed for an author, and in these situations we send approval requests to all publishers listed.

*****However, only one publisher needs to verify your account.*****

After looking into your Author central account, I see that one of your publishers “Norton” has already approved you as an author and your Author central is active now.

You can find your Author central page using the following link:

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001IQW9KY

You can now add or edit your photo as well as biography on this page.

I hope this information was helpful. Thank you for using Author central.

Please note: this e-mail was sent from an address that cannot accept incoming e-mail.

Best regards,

Sujay P.

As there’s no way to contact Sujay P., I can’t point out that this link goes to the Author Page of a nice man named Briane Keene, who apparently writes horror for a publisher called Leisure Press. Nor can I ask them to correct their records to reflect that I do not and have never written for Random House. Or, indeed, any sub-section of the Bertelsmann Group.

I do, however, appreciate the sudden appearance of caution in the vague and non-specific salutation, “Hello!”

If I were a bad person, I’d see whether I could edit Brian Keene’s account. But I resisted the impulse (and I’m hoping that whoever got sent the link to MY account shows similar restraint).

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The manuscript was the last workbook in an elementary writing series for Peace Hill Press, the small press I own. (We are, without question, the most famous publisher in Charles City, Virginia.)

I have a real passion for teaching writing, particularly to the kind of kid who weeps hysterically when you give him a pencil. It comes from years and years of teaching writing to college freshmen who never learned the basics, and thinking to myself the whole time: What should you have learned before you walked into this classroom?

This last book in the Writing With Ease series is scheduled for publication in January 2010, which means that the manuscript was supposed to be finished in mid-June. But, naturally, I’ve been running behind. So this week, my husband took the kids off to visit cousins and I stayed home to fulfill a speaking engagement, feed the horses/chickens/cats/dogs/rabbits/goldfish, and work on the final draft of the book. I worked nonstop until yesterday and…finished it.

For at least the last seven years, I’ve constantly been working on books which are already in the system–already listed for sale in our catalog or Norton’s catalog, which means already available for pre-orders on Amazon, B&N, Books-a-Million, you name it. This is not quite the same as working on a deadline. Deadlines are necessary, for me anyway, because if I don’t set a target date for finishing a manuscript I’ll just keep researching and writing and researching and writing and editing and tinkering and rearranging. But deadlines, as long as you have a sympathetic editor, are semi-flexible. If the book goes in an unexpected direction, or you end up with unanticipated difficulties, a deadline can be pushed.

Once a book is in the system, though, you’d better get it finished on time. Otherwise there are cancelled orders, indignant readers, annoyed bookstore owners, and general unhappiness.

When the book goes into the system is actually under my control. My PHP books don’t go into the Peace Hill Press catalog unless I put them there myself. And my editor at Norton always says to me, a year before my next deadline, “So, is the book on time?” And I give him an estimate as to when the manuscript will be ready.

I am always wrong. You’d think that after more than a decade of doing this for a living, I’d have a better sense of how long it’ll take me to finish a project. Apparently not.

So why do I keep saying, happily, “Sure, let’s put the book in the catalog, I’m sure I’ll be done”? Because if I were to wait until the manuscript were actually finished before giving the OK to list it, publication is delayed by an additional year or more. And the unhappy reality of publishing/writing for a living is that new books have to keep on coming out.

But I made a resolution back in December, when I sent the manuscript for the History of the Medieval World in. The resolution: as soon as I finished the two remaining books in the writing series, both of which were already in the system, I would never again say blithely, “Of course I’ll have it done in time! Put it in the catalog!” Not unless I have a finished manuscript in hand.

Why? Because once there’s that inflexible date at the end of the creative process, writing changes character. With each page, I no longer think: Hey, that was a pretty good page. Instead I think: That took too long. Must be more productive. It’s wearing and exhausting and joy-sucking.

So here I am. Without any unfinished books in the system anywhere. I’ve got new projects I’m looking forward to starting on–the next book in the Norton series, above all. But that familiar panicked drumbeat echoing around in the back chambers of my brain? Silenced for the first time in seven years.

Listening to the silence.

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Last week I picked up a disaster book that was on the New Books shelf of the Williamsburg library: A Wall of White: The True Story of Heroism and Survival in the Face of a Deadly Avalanche, by Jennifer Woodlief.

(If you have to have a subtitle THAT long, maybe you ought to have a longer title instead? Although I should talk, since the subtitle of my upcoming book is “From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade” and the subtitle of the corresponding kid’s history book is “History for the Classical Child, Volume 2, The Middle Ages, From the Fall of Rome to the Rise of the Renaissance, Revised Edition.”)

A Wall of White was OK, but not gripping; I skimmed through a bunch of pages to get to the end. Grade: C+

So this week I balanced it out with a disaster classic that I haven’t read for a while: Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air. Grade: A+ on any scale.

I’m in awe of Krakauer’s narrative. I find that disaster books encapsulate the challenge I have (in a much more sprawling way) in writing narrative history: how do you keep the pages turning when the end of the story is already ? Barbara Tuchman, a writer I much admire, says in Practicing History that she does her best work when she writes as if she didn’t know what was going to happen: Henry VIII won’t grow unhappy with this wife, the English will drive off those Norman invaders, the plague won’t spread across the known world. That’s a mental trick that doesn’t work at all for me. What’s astounding about Krakauer’s work is that he tells you right at the beginning of the book exactly what happens, who’s going to die, and how, and yet the narrative still holds you all the way through. Woodlief tries to create suspense by not revealing the end of the story…and it doesn’t work. I was bored.

There were a couple things I could point to: ill-timed digressions (Krakauer has plenty of digressions, but once events really start to accelerate he stays on task; Woodlief takes off three pages while a rescue dog is digging for a dying avalanche victim to tell us about the dog’s babyhood and training), clunky prose (”The final tumbler in the lock of their fate clicked smoothly into place.” You can use a metaphor if you only have to touch on it twice, but three times is flogging it), cliched language (”Jake was moved by the experience”). But I’m not sure that analyzing technique explains why Woodlief’s book flags while Krakauer’s drives relentlessly ahead. Into Thin Air comes out of some deep well that’s accessed by novelists more often than by writers of nonfiction.

It’s so tempting to explain exactly why a reviewer who didn’t like your book has the comprehension skills of a mole.

But every writer I know who’s done this regrets it. The following is courtesy of Publishers Marketplace

Go Ask Alice: Author Hoffman Shows Authors Not to Tweet In Anger, Apologizes

With one angry electronic outburst novelist Alice Hoffman may have changed how many readers view her. After novelist and longtime critic Roberta Silman wrote a mildly critical review of Hoffman’s THE STORY SISTERS in the Boston Globe, Hoffman reacted with a series of angry tweets. Not just a grumpy post or two, but 27 in all, according to NY Magazine (they have now been deleted, along with the corresponding Twitter account.)

The series of 140-character-or-less insults also included Silman’s phone number and e-mail address (with a typo) and a rallying cry to “Tell her what u think of snarky critics.” But Silman was out of town, isn’t on Twitter, and first learned about the controversy from a friend, she tells the LAT’s Jacket Copy. “There have been nine emails to me, all in support of my review and/or my right to review and all apologizing for Alice Hoffman’s perplexing behavior.” Silman adds, “I wouldn’t change anything about my review. I have written many reviews for The Globe and say what I believe, and, in this case, I praised her earlier work, which was clearly better. I’m sorry Alice could not take pride in the good things I said, and perhaps mull a little on the criticism.”

Hoffman issued an apology through Goldberg McDuffie, now saying that she was upset because she believes the review gave away the plot: “I feel this whole situation has been completely blown out of proportion. Of course I was dismayed by Roberta Silman’s review which gave away the plot of the novel, and in the heat of the moment I responded strongly and I wish I hadn’t. I’m sorry if I offended anyone. Reviewers are entitled to their opinions and that’s the name of the game in publishing. I hope my readers understand that I didn’t mean to hurt anyone and I’m truly sorry if I did.”

Separately, Page Six notes that Hoffman also criticized blogger and reviewer Bethanne Kelly Patrick on Twitter after a Barnes & Noble panel discussion before “making up.”

The response to Hoffman doesn’t surprise me, but today I’ve been thinking it through and realize that I’m not exactly sure why it sounds so bad when a writer takes a reviewer to task. There’s little question in my mind that writers come out looking like losers when this happens, which is why I usually try to chant the mantra above. (I also try not to read the Amazon.com reviews but always fail.) But why should that be? Why the aroma of whine when we fight back?

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So yesterday was my Writing Day, the day I usually try to go off the grid to get some actual WORK done. But by the time I got to my office, I already had four emails and five voice messages from reporters asking for comments on Governor Sanford’s lame confession. (You may remember that I wrote a book about this.)

In how many ways was it lame? Here are the top four…

1. Never said “I sinned.” Just, “I hurt people” (a good thing to admit, but makes it sound like an accident), “I apologize” (this is not the same as admitting sin; you can apologize for something you never even did), “I let people down” (again, an accidental-sounding sort of event). The closest he came to it was, “It was wrong.” Note the sudden shift into the impersonal as he approaches the heart of the matter.

2. Never said clearly whether the affair was now officially over. Or whether he had gone down there to break it off before a reporter spotted him at the airport. Or why it takes FIVE DAYS IN ARGENTINA to say, “It’s over.”

3. Did a nifty bit of blame shifting right at the beginning of his speech. Anyone else notice this? Reduced to its essence: “Obama’s stimulus plan caused me so much stress that I had to go to Argentina and see my mistress by way of recovery.”

4. Left us all wondering: Who did exactly pay for these jaunts to Argentina? And not just the plane tickets. Security? Hotel? Food? Breaking an oath to your wife is bad enough; playing around in the state treasury in order to do so is probably unforgivable.

Anyway, I went ahead and commented, as asked. Then worked at top speed for three hours. Then took a quick shower and headed off to an appointment in an old orange T-shirt with no makeup on and wet hair. As I was driving, Fox News called and asked me to do a TV interview. They’d already booked a studio near where I was heading. So I agreed.

Yes, I know you’re not supposed to powder your nose and put on mascara while driving. The orange T-shirt was past help.

Got to the TV studio only ten minutes late. Sat on stage under very very bright lights for over an hour while the studio solved technical difficulties. Earpiece didn’t work, so couldn’t hear interviewer in D.C. Had to put interviewer on Blackberry speaker-phone and hold it in my lap out of sight of cameras and then talk to picture of myself.

Out of all that, they decided to use a fifteen-second clip. And then the piece got bumped. Ah, well. (My friend Justin points out that Library Journal was kind enough to highlight the connection. Thank goodness Library Journal isn’t obsessed by celebrity passings.)

If I were Mark Sanford, I’d be offering libations/lighting candles/writing grateful requiems in Michael Jackson’s memory.

One Million Pounds=
= Slightly Less

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Week 17: Curtis Sittenfeld, American Wife. Really? Seriously??? A top ten book from Time, People, and Entertainment Weekly? A New York Times Notable Book? She’s a good writer (I loved Prep), but this is just plain sloppy. Completely unbelievable characterization and motivation. Writing means you’re supposed to ENTER INTO the psyches of people you loathe, not just caricature them and then pat yourself on the back.

Week 18: John Sedgwick, In My Blood: Six Generations of Madness & Desire in an American Family. Promising study of the hereditary tendency to manic-depressive disorders, bogged down by way too much irrelevant detail and far too much worshipping of one’s Mayflower-disembarking ancestors.

Week 19: Stephen Fry, Moab is my Washpot. Recommended by a blogger who posted on this site. Fascinating: I’m guessing that nothing, from home education to board-school-privilege, erases that out-of-place feeling of unbelonging. (See Prep, which, like Fry’s book and unlike American Wife, was actually insightful.) Fry reminds me that this discomfort always co-exists with creativity.

Week 20: Geraldine Brooks, People of the Book. I hate it when I get invested in a first-person narrator and then am suddenly jerked into a third-person perspective. Stuck with this book and enjoyed it, but I still wish the narrative strategy had been different.

Week 21: G. K Chesterton, The Secret of Father Brown. Haven’t read this for years; popped it back onto my to-read pile for nostalgia’s sake. Here’s Father Brown, explaining how he solves murders:

I don’t try to get outside the man. I try to get inside the murderer. Indeed it’s much more than that, don’t you see? I am inside a man. I am always inside a man, moving his arms and legs; but I wait till I know I am inside a murderer, thinking his thoughts, wrestling with his passions; till I have bent myself into the posture of his hunched and peering hatred; till I see the world with his bloodshot and squinting eyes, looking between the blinkers of his halfwitted concentration; looking up the short and sharp perspective of a straight road to a pool of blood. Till I am really a murderer….No man’s really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be; till he’s realized exactly how much right he has to all this snobbery and sneering, and talking about ‘criminals,’ as if they were apes in a forest ten thousand miles away; till he’s got rid of all the dirty self-deception of talking about low types and deficient skulls; till he’s squeezed out of his soul the last drop of the oil of the Pharisees.

Curtis Sittenfeld, are you listening?

Week 22: Kathryn Harrison, The Mother Knot. Like Sedgwick’s book, a potentially fascinating study of mental pain, made less interesting by its intensely personal nature; not too many points of contact here between the narrator’s journey into her individual past, and anyone else’s. Perhaps this is the nature of writing about mental illness: that it is almost impossible to connect yourself with a pain that might be larger than yourself?

Week 23: Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression. Disproves the statement above. Sweeping, painful, empathetic, real.

Week 24: Charles Barber, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry is Medicating a Nation. Blanket statements, unsupported suppositions, sweeping generalizations, and just plain fuzzy thinking. Skip it.

Week 25: Sophie Kinsella, Shopaholic and Baby. Oh, shut up, I was tired and it was fun. Also I kept trying to read Karen Joy Fowler’s Wit’s End and never got past the first chapter. Might try again next week.

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Read it and weep.

I am finishing up my second year of Teach for America in [an inner-city school system], and am preparing to begin my third year of teaching at my school. I was shopping at the [local] bookstore the other day and I came across “The Story of the World: History for the Classical Child.” Flipping through it, I got very excited at the way in which it is written. I’m a 6th grade ELA and Social Studies teacher in a district with next to no resources. My school has textbooks that the children cannot read, and extremely incomplete classroom “libraries” from which we’re supposed to somehow construct a curriculum, though there are no books at the children’s reading levels with which to teach, and teachers do not have access to copy machines from which to make curriculum-related worksheets. (I have spent hundreds of dollars this year just to provide any sort of suitable reading materials for them!) As I read your book, I became very excited because I realized that, finally, I found a text that covers all of the 6th grade social studies curriculum in an accessible manner. This is exceptional, because you must understand–I taught seventh and eighth graders last year who told me that they had never received social studies instruction before (probably because of the resource and curricular difficulties that I just enumerated).

I immediately bought one copy of the book itself and of the activity book for my own reference. However, I know that without some sort of waiver from the copyright holder, we cannot make any copies from these books. I believe that “The Story of the World” would be an amazing curricular resource for struggling readers eager to learn Social Studies content. Unfortunately, given the current economic crisis, my principal recently announced that the school will not be purchasing any new supplies next year (paper, chart paper, pens, notebooks, etc.), that we will not be able to pay for substitutes to come in on days when teachers are absent next year, and that, most likely, a few teaching positions will be cut in order to conserve funds.

I was wondering if you have any advice on what can be done in this situation. My first thought was that my I should somehow purchase class sets of these materials- either thirty (enough for one class), sixty (enough for the two different SS teachers to use), or 90 (enough for each student to have his or her own copy to reference). However, I realized soon after having this thought that if my principal is unable even to hire substitutes for next year, there is no way we can afford this. Can you tell me what the cost of a class set of these books would be, in case I am somehow able to fundraise and try to get money to purchase a set?

After reading this, I am more impressed than ever by the recent grads who join Teach for America, and stick it out.

I know there are no easy solutions to this educational mess. In this one situation, I can help; Peace Hill Press is organizing a charitable donation to try to get this dedicated teacher the necessary resources. (If you’d like to give us a hand, call our office.)

But what a knotted mess this teacher’s dilemma represents. How do we find the end of the string–the one we’d have to pull to unravel the knots?

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Talked to a lot of readers, signed a bunch of books.

I promised a few scenes from Salt Lake City, and here are the ones that struck me…

roses (they must like desert air–roses in Virginia don’t look like this),

Salt Lake City’s extraordinarily wide streets,

the headquarters of the LDS church, with the Temple behind it,

the Temple, from the sidewalk outside,

a gate I was not allowed to go through (there were many).

And then leave again. Drove up to Washington D.C. after lunch and caught a plane for Salt Lake City. (It was the only way to fly direct. And going out of Richmond, I could only fly business-class by going through L.A., which seemed like wasted effort.)

Anyway, here we are at the Plaza at Temple Square, on the tenth floor, separated from the outside air by the ricketiest tin balcony rail I’ve every seen.

There are mountains,

and I can see the corner of Temple Square.

Tomorrow I’ll post pictures from the Utah Home Education Association conference and a few more shots of Salt Lake City. But just now I’m going to bed.

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