Archive for category Authors as Guest Bloggers
ON THE MEANING OF TOUR… By John Hart
Posted by Wanda in Authors as Guest Bloggers on July 27, 2011
ON THE MEANING OF TOUR…
By John Hart, author of IRON HOUSE, on sale now
Tour is a strange time for an author. Just saying it feels odd.
“Tour…”
“I’m going on tour…”
Tours are for rock stars and celebrities, for people with well-known faces, limousines and handlers that drink top-shelf liquor and tip with folded bills and cupped palms. Not that we authors are shy or overly-retiring – we’re usually not – but we do spend most of a year shut up with our imaginary friends. We live in the stillness of our minds and have learned to be wary of questions asked at cocktail parties and by the pool.
It’s not that people are unkind with their questions. In fact, most are warm, wonderful people with genuine curiosity about how this whole writing thing works. That’s not the problem, at least not for me. I’m a superstitious guy when it comes to writing. I don’t like to talk about what I’m doing for fear that such conversation might drain some vital energy or sap my will in a nefarious way. The net result is that I keep to myself when working on the next book. I stay with my family or near the close friends who long ago lost whatever fascination they might have had with writing, writers or the number of books I’ve sold.
I remind myself that without the reader I cease to matter in the world of books.
Tour, however, is a very different animal. It’s a sustained commitment to openness, a carefully orchestrated reinsertion into the human race. This is a good thing, of course, but only if I prepare for it. The tour for IRON HOUSE is six weeks long, so I store up time with my loved ones. I exercise and lose weight, ready myself for photo-shoots and TV spots. Most importantly, though, I remind myself that without the reader I cease to matter in the world of books. This is no platitude, so let me say it again: Readers matter. It’s an easy thing to forget, especially as successes mount and career rises behind me like a plateau so tall and broad it might have always been there.
Thing is though, it hasn’t.
My success came through hard, consistent effort. It came from talent and drive, from a belief in myself so searing and clear it could be laser-cut. So, I’m not ashamed to feel proud. This is a brutal business, after all, and few become bestsellers. What’s most important, though, is to remember the other side of the equation, the readers and reviewers, the publishers and booksellers who put gas in the tank and keep the pedal floored. Writing may be solitary, but success is shared.
Tour is the time to celebrate that mutual endeavor.
This means the most important preparation for tour is not the haircut or the new suit. Rather, it is a careful, heartfelt reminder that though I may have heard the same question a hundred times, it’s new to the reader asking it. It’s a mental note that these are real people with busy lives, free thinking souls who care enough about what I do to show up and share their feelings. They stand in line to tell me why my books matter to them. They tell their friends about what I do. They turn off the television and read.
Think about that.
So, as the tour unfolds, I remind myself every day what matters. If I’m giving a talk, I give the best damn talk of my life (never mind that I’ve given it two-dozen times already). I don’t shake hands and smile like I mean it. I mean it.
Tour is not about me.
It’s about them.
Gold Star, Grins & Good News
Posted by Wanda in Authors as Guest Bloggers on March 21, 2011
By Renea Winchester, author of SIBA Book Award Nominee: In The Garden With Billy: Lessons About Life, Love & Tomatoes
Most people do not notice the paper plate-sign with the words “Eggs, Firewood, Okra” scratched in black and duct-taped to a weathered piece of wood.
Most people, like me, are too busy.
However, a multi-level paper plate with the words, “Baby Goats 4 Sale” served as a beacon for my then eleven-year-old daughter, Jamie.
“Mom, can we stop…can we?” was the beginning of what I knew would be incessant begging. Reluctantly, I parked my car in the drive and met someone whom I had overlooked daily for almost ten years. Someone who would change the way I see others.
What do an Atlanta mom and a seventy-eight year old goat farmer have in common? At first blush, absolutely nothing. Extending his hand in the tradition of a true Southern Gentleman, Billy cast his magical spell by shaking my hand, then pulling me into his world. A world where chickens crow, rainwater is recycled and “hocus pocus” must be spoken before the tractor will crank.
Hours after our initial meeting, Jamie and I were so touched by this stranger that we skipped her tennis lesson and returned to his “little strip of land” where we became garden helpers. We still help Billy in the garden today.
Since meeting Billy, I’ve learned more about myself than I have about him.
His patience revealed my impatience.
His generosity revealed my selfish tendencies.
His acceptance of others revealed my exclusive nature.
These silent lessons occurred while I worked beside him picking “tow-maders” and “pink-eye-purple hulled peas.”
Some of my experiences were captured on napkins. My dirty hands scribbled fast, leaving a thin layer of dust as I attempted to keep up with the remembrances in my mind. I intended to share our garden experiences with my mother who has Stage IV ovarian cancer. Except the more I shared with her the more I realized that the world needed to hear what I call, “The Message of Billy.”
That message is that everyone matters. Regardless of where they live, what they do for a living, who (we think) they are, everyone matters.
Those napkins became a manuscript, and the book a nominee for the SIBA 11 Book Award. I immediately called Billy after learning of the nomination from fellow nominee Jennie Helderman. A smile lined his face. He lifted his chin a fraction of an inch and said, “I’m right smart proud.”
We tried not to cry…but the emotion was too strong. We cry often at the farm. Saline drops of appreciation for an unexpected friendship that is changing how others see strangers.
We launched In The Garden With Billy: Lessons About Life, Love & Tomatoes at his farm in what is arguably the most exciting day of my life. Imagine a blend of fall festival and family reunion where strangers are friends we just hadn’t met yet. Many traveled for hours and stood in line to meet this remarkable man. Afterward, I received emails such as the one that said: “It’s like Billy fills an empty place in my heart I didn’t know I had. Meeting him made me rethink the way I see others.”
That is the magic of Billy.
Since the sell-out October release, Billy has traveled with me to Yawn’s in Canton, Georgia where (after eating Nadine’s delicious chicken salad sandwich) he wove his magic on a crowd whom, I’m certain, came because of him. We’ve spoken to civic groups and garden clubs on the importance of slowing down and “seeing people.” We urge others to give the most precious gift you have … your time. However, the most important message from Billy is the education of “young folks.” We’ve spoken to schools and established a children’s area on his “little strip of land” where we will teach the future about the importance of gardening, relationships, and of course, tomatoes.
To Wanda and the Indie Booksellers, “Thank You,” for believing in Billy’s message and for allowing me to share the Good News with readers throughout the South.
Gold Stars. Grins and Good News
Posted by Wanda in Authors as Guest Bloggers on March 16, 2011
by Jennie Helderman, author of #SIBA11 Book Award Nominee As the Sycamore Grows
When I grabbed a notepad and a sandwich back in 2005, never would I have thought that today I’d be grinning over gold stars.
In 2005 I needed 1500 words for a magazine article, due in two weeks. Then I met Ginger.
She dashed in from court that day, briefcase in hand, feisty and confident, until she told me about escaping from a padlocked cabin where she lived without electricity or a phone, eking a subsistence living from the land to feed her boys. She had made soap, roofed the cabin and chopped wood for the stove while her husband Mike sat in the swing chain-smoking, his Bible in his lap, his .38 strapped to his belt.
My nose twitched. Like any writer, I sniffed more than a magazine article here.
Fast forward five years and 90,000 words to September 29, 2010, when Eagle Eye Books in Decatur, Georgia, launched As the Sycamore Grows. An open date on the store’s calendar selected by chance, September 29 marked ten years to the day since Ginger’s escape. Just one of several coincidences which convince Ginger that her story was meant to be told.
And the story?
Imagine living as in The Glass Castle while Sleeping with the Enemy in the woods. Mike slapped and shoved but isolation and economic abuse were his mainstays. Until he discovered the power of the Lord as another tool of abuse. Ginger was brought up to pray and obey but she escaped to become a powerful voice for victims.
Both Ginger and Mike speak, as do family and friends. Thus, Ginger is revealed as a flawed heroine. Mike ran away from his father’s fists only to glimpse himself years later in his father’s casket. Theirs is a true story of abuse, loss, redemption and hope that winds from south Texas to a sycamore tree in Tennessee. A story about courage and resilience of the human spirit. Especially for those who can forgive. Like Ginger.
Since September, we’ve placed books in all the women’s shelters in Alabama and Georgia, been surprised at the number of men who are reading Sycamore and saying so, and touched by those who confide their own stories. Or announce them to the world, as did one California woman on George Scott’s talk radio show in March.
My role? I’m the reporter or chronicler, privileged to be entrusted with this story. And today I’m grinning over gold stars:
As the Sycamore Grows took three top honors in Reader Views 2011 Literary Awards: first in Humanities; tied for first in Biography/Memoir; and first over all categories, fiction and nonfiction, for the Southeast Region. Reader Views grants awards annually to books published by small, independent and university presses and gold stars are the prize.
I’ve been spilling over with this good news. Thanks, Wanda, for letting me share it here. And BTW, Jeannette Walls sanctioned the comparison with the lifestyle of The Glass Castle. We spent a rainy afternoon in January talking about her story and Ginger’s prior to appearing together on a panel.
Okra Pick Talking to Students?
Posted by Wanda in Authors as Guest Bloggers on March 8, 2011
TALKING TO STUDENTS
By Wayne Greenhaw
Since my 22nd book, FIGHTING THE DEVIL IN DIXIE: How Civil Rights Activists Took on the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama, was published by Lawrence Hill Books on January 1st, I have been on the road across the South.
Most of my stops have included independent booksellers, television shows, radio talk shows, and book festivals. But some have been high schools, colleges and university libraries.
“Why schools?” one fellow writer asked. And then answered, “Students don’t buy books.”
I shook my head. “Maybe only a few buy books,” I said. “But they talk. And perhaps their older friends and parents buy books.”
What is most important is that when I speak to these eager young people I am imparting knowledge that I have gained over my 70-plus years and during my two decades of covering civil rights as a journalist beginning in the mid-1960s and the civil rights history that my older friends handed down to me from their experiences during the 1950s.
At Calera High School in Shelby County south of Birmingham I spoke to two assemblies: middle school students and upper grades. After my short 20-minute talks, youngsters came up and shook my hand and said, “I really think I now know why we have Black History Month. It makes sense.”
One senior sat with me in the school’s media center and wanted to hear more about the African-American attorneys I simply touched on in my talks. I told him about Birmingham’s first black lawyer, Arthur Davis Shores, a small man with a huge intellect and an equally large amount of courage. I told him how Shores, born in Bessemer, had graduated from LaSalle Extension University Law School in Chicago and came back home to become the only practicing African-American attorney in the state. He stood up time and again to threats of the Ku Klux Klan and represented Vivian Malone and James Hood when they registered as the first black students at the University of Alabama when Governor George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door.
I also told him about Orzell Billingsley Jr., a young man from Birmingham who attended A.H. Parker High School, Talledega College, and earned a law degree from Howard University in Washington D.C. He came back home and fought for more than 15 years to clear the name of Caliph Washington, a young black convicted by an all-white all-male jury of killing a white policeman. Billingsley proved his expertise in the art of incorporating all-black towns that had been gerrymandered out of white city limits. These residential areas scattered throughout Alabama in the mid-20th Century were refused paved roads, running water, sewage and other conveniences. Billingsley would go in, draw up incorporation papers, then show the new town leaders how to apply for federal assistance to obtain the necessary services. One was Roosevelt City between Birmingham and Bessemer, where Billingsley became municipal judge.
At a college near Amelia Island, Florida, a few weeks ago, I spoke to an over-flow crowd of young people who asked question after question into the late morning.
At Snead State Community College at Boaz last week, Keri O’Neal, an African-American sophomore from Lafayette, Georgia, appeared on a student panel with me. She and the other three asked questions about civil rights history. After the talk, Ms. O’Neal said, “For Snead State being a majority white school, I think it’s good to have a person who experienced civil rights to get more information about it. “
For me, hearing such comments makes me want to continue to talk to more and more students in high schools and colleges.
Man Martin on Being Rich
Posted by Wanda in Authors as Guest Bloggers on January 17, 2011
Having Books and Being Rich
by Man Martin
When I was a child, my sister asked my mother, “Are we rich?” At least that’s the way I remember it; my recollections are sometimes faulty, but as I recall, my sister was the one for asking impertinent questions, as I stood by innocently observing.
“Are we rich?” is one of those questions the wise parent knows to evade, and in the wisdom game, Mur, which is what we called my mother, was pretty hard to beat. “It depends on what you mean by rich,” I remember her saying, “Dr. So-and-so is a lot richer in books than we are.” Dr. So-and-so was not his real name, I don’t remember the name, but I do remember her waving a hand at our living room bookcase to demonstrate the books we did have, inviting us to imagine the far greater wealth of Dr. So-and-so’s collection.
My mother’s answer had the desired result; it silenced my sister without in the least satisfying her curiosity, because what Chris really wanted to know was did we have more money than other people. Instead, Mur, while pretending to give a helpful answer, effectively communicated that any queries along the material-wellbeing lines would be met with platitudes about the value of knowledge versus cash and semantic analysis of the word “rich.”
I knew even at the time Mur’s answer was a dodge, but nevertheless, it left a deep imprint on my psyche. You see, we had a lot of books. Not only in that bookcase, which to a five year-old was a veritable ziggurat, but in a smaller bookcase in my parents’ room, and seemingly stacked on every available horizontal surface from coffee table to toilet tank. One in particular I remember was a book of reproductions called Pictures to Live With. There was a picture by Henri Rousseau of a sleeping gypsy with a lion sniffing at him. The lion didn’t seem inclined to do any harm, just curious, I suppose, and the gypsy had a mandolin lying beside him in the sand. I imagined that if I went to sleep outside, curious animals would come and sniff me, too. For some reason, this seemed like a pleasant thing to happen.
Another book was Thurber’s Lanterns and Lances. Mur had several books by Thurber. One time, Chris pointed it out to me and told me it was a dirty book. This did little to pique my interest. I wasn’t a very good reader yet, and from the cover art, what dirtiness it possessed offered little to interest a six-year-old. I’ve read it since, of course, and it’s not the least bit dirty. I don’t know where Chris got the notion it was. Maybe Mur had told her it was “for grownups.”
Pursuant to a New Year’s Resolution to divest myself of unwanted junk, I have been culling my own collection of books. For example, I had two copies of Aubrey’s The Yellow Admiral, and multiple copies of Huck Finn. It’s a funny thing with Huck Finn, no matter how many copies I get rid of, I always end up with more. I think they’re having litters. Also, college textbooks on Algebra and Introduction to Finance. Out they go. Out also go certain books on writing craft – I will not name these here – that I find either jejune or downright bad. When I die, having reached the pinnacle of immortal fame that is my destiny, I don’t want my biographers to find these among my bookshelves and say, “Huh! So this was one of his influences.”
Let it be understood, I still have a hell of a lot of books. Mur’s words made me subconsciously equate how many books I have with how well off I am. I may not have as many books as Dr. So-and-so, but I have a lot.
One book I will not get rid of is 101 to Ways to Checkmate, a book of chess problems Mur gave me when she was teaching me to play. It was already old when I got it, and the cover is long since missing. In similar sad shape is Build Your Own Monstrosities with Tooth and Nail, a weird little novelty item of goofy anarchic household advice such as instructions for constructing a home guillotine. And The Book of the Hand, a massive, gorgeously illustrated palmistry book, also given to me by my mother, when she was teaching me palmistry. (Ah, the things my mother taught me!) These books have no particular value, but they’ve seen a few years. The copyright on Build Your Own Monstrosities is 1959, the year I was born. These books I will never part with. They once belonged to my mother.
I am rich.
Brilliant Essay from Author Anthony Doerr
Posted by Wanda in Authors as Guest Bloggers on January 11, 2011
Anthony Doerr on Books, Memory and the Twelve Bright Stars Scratched Across Page 302
Whenever we buy a book, we say we buy a “copy” of it. We buy a copy of Gravity’s Rainbow, say, and we carry our copy home. We open it; we fall into it. And it is here that the word “copy” fails.
Because what I experience when I read Gravity’s Rainbow, or Beloved, or The Moviegoer, is not at all a “copy” of what you experience when you read the same novel. Now that the books are in our hands, in our homes, in our heads, the copies have become something much more idiosyncratic and alive. They’ve become individual experiences. They’ve become memories.
Last year I bought Daniyal Mueenuddin’s story collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders at Annie Bloom’s Books in Portland. I read two-thirds of it, wrote all over it, flew to Boise, drove home, and realized I’d left the book on the airplane.
“It’s okay,” my wife said, when she saw my disappointment. “You can buy another copy.” But I couldn’t, not really. That was my copy. My experience of the book. And once I finished it, I planned to stow it on a shelf in a particular spot in my office and there it would sit, with my notes scribbled in it, waiting to be called back up, in the way I imagine individual memories wait to be called back up inside our brains.
It is the weather in which one reads a book that interpenetrates the paper. It is the mood one is in, the mindset one carries, the hunger in one’s gut, the quality of the sunlight falling across the page. It is the little coffee stain on page 29, the twelve bright stars scratched ecstatically across page 302.
Maybe, rather than copies, a more precise way to think about books on the shelves of a bookshop is to think of them as something closer to recipes. The execution of a recipe, after all, depends on a thousand variables: elevation, humidity, the freshness of the vegetables, the temperature of the oven, the kind of metal in the pan, how much wine the cook has been drinking.
What one cheese souffle is a copy of the next? What cook hasn’t tried preparing the same dish five years apart, only to produce significantly different results?
To contemplate the intense, complicated latticework of memory and experience summoned by a single book on my shelves boggles my mind. I bought this little orange-spined paperback—Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People—at Iconoclast Books in Ketchum, Idaho. While I was reading it, I found myself in a tense and terrifying version of South Africa. I was also, literally, in a hotel room in London.
Or this book, Death in Venice. I bought it earlier this year at the newly-relocated Rediscovered Books in downtown Boise. While I read it, I was an aging, world-famous German writer in a decadent, damp Venice. I was also—simultaneously!—in McCall, Idaho, in a dark cabin, surrounded by falling snow, while my little sons slept twenty feet away.
Indeed, every book on my shelves is a key to a little vault of memories. Here a boy in an egg-blue suit handed me an ornate invitation to a party at Jay Gatsby’s; here I met the harpooner Queequeg at the Spouter Inn; here I floated a stretch of the Mississippi with a slave named Jim.
We live through life, but we live through art, too. And in art, as in life, nothing is generalized. No one thing is a copy of the next. Everything is individual.
Look, Earth is four and a half billion years old. The rocks in your backyard are moving, if only you could stand still enough to watch. How are we supposed to measure the brief, warm, intensely complicated fingersnap of our lives against the absolutely incomprehensible vastness of the universe?
How? We stare into the fire. We turn to friends, bartenders, lovers, priests, drug-dealers, painters. And we turn to books.
All around us right now, tucked into the valleys and along the coasts, bookshops glow in the winter light. Think of them like singular, magical, and multi-dimensional recipe boxes. They wait for us to pluck out a card, to stand over the stove, to start cooking.
I, for one, am deeply grateful for their existence.
Signing Books in the South
Posted by Wanda in Authors as Guest Bloggers on December 13, 2010
Signing Books In the South
By Wayne Greenhaw
Throughout the southeastern U.S. there is a liberal sprinkling of independent book stores. They are run by friendly open-armed sellers who not only welcome customers but embrace writers with a genuinely warm hospitality. They are well-read up-to-date providers of information on today’s and yesterday’s books.
My first booksigning took place in November of 1968 at Capitol Book & News, a small indie in downtown Montgomery, Alabama, where proprietor Victor Levine was an amiable gentleman who not only hosted the party with his wife Jean but became my life-long friend. After selling more than a hundred copies of The Golfer, my first novel, Vic and Jean took me across the street to the historic Whitley Hotel, where we had more than one celebratory glass of wine and a platter of appetizers.
Little more than a year later, Vic called the newspaper where I worked as a reporter and invited me for coffee “with a friend who wants to meet you.” I went, met Nelle Harper Lee, and we talked and talked over coffee. After that meeting, every time Nelle came down from her home in New York to visit family in Monroeville, she called and we met Vic and enjoyed each other’s company. We shared not only an editor, Tay Hohoff, at J.B. Lippincott, but Victor Levine’s friendship.
Some years later, after Vic sold his store to his clerk, Cheryl Upchurch, and her husband Thomas, we continued a warm friendship. When Nelle Lee visited to buy Christmas presents at this small book shop, we got together, shared coffee and conversation, and talked with Cheryl and Thomas, who also visited the author of To Kill A Mockingbird from time to time in Manhattan.
From my first booksigning I learned that writers are valued by the people who make their living selling our books. Through the years I have met many. In the early days of Southern Independent Booksellers Association (SIBA), we met in a hotel in Nashville and read from and talked about our books. In that informal atmosphere, Ferrol Sams and I talked at length about our families. Roy Blount Jr. and I talked over drinks. All of it was a delightful learning experience for this boy who was raised mostly in rural Alabama. From the legendary Mary Gay Shipley, whose That Store in Blytheville, Arkansas, is a gem to Jake Reiss’s off-the-beaten-path Alabama Booksmith in Birmingham, the sellers are friendly and open-hearted. It’s always more like a welcoming into a cozy living room than a store’s open house.
After my twenty-second book is published in January, Fighting the Devil in Dixie: How Civil Rights Activists Took on the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama, I plan to travel the South doing readings and signings. I look forward to working with the friends I’ve known for years, like Mississippians Richard Howorth at Square Books in Oxford and John Hughes at Lemuria in Jackson, or Floridians like Linda and Bob White at Sundog Books at Seaside, and new people in stores across the countryside.
Signing once in Burke’s Books on South Cooper Street in Memphis, I wandered amidst the first editions and found From Here to Eternity, my first favorite contemporary novel. I picked it up, felt its strong weight in my palm, and I had to have it. After all, that is part of the process of browsing, to feel and open and peruse the printed words, and experience the wanting.
Signing at the Page & Palette in Fairhope, Alabama, is always a delicious time for me. Not only are Karin Wilson and her booksellers friendly, they welcome my friends and fellow writers, like Sonny Brewer, who founded Southern Writers Reading and edited Stories from the Blue Moon Cafe, and Winston Groom, the author of Forest Gump who lives in nearby Point Clear. And occasionally songster-novelist Jimmy Buffett wanders through the crowded stacks.
In the South, where Wanda Jewell is the guru of SIBA, we writers and booksellers hold hands as we sing her praises. It is all truly a family affair.
#SIBA10 Rocks!
Posted by Wanda in Authors as Guest Bloggers on October 26, 2010
It’s been a couple weeks now since Daytona. That’s long enough to begin to process another well-oiled SIBA convention, compliments of Wanda, Nicki, and the rest of the incredible SIBA staff, but not long enough to make a dent in the towers of reading material stacked at my right hand. Don’t let this get out, but people at SIBA will hand you books free books! Never mind that you and your book loving self have books on top of books piled in heaps back at your home base, books you need to read, books you want to read, books you feel you need to read. Nothing compares to collecting a whole new crop of lovelies.
In the event that you have tripped across this blog without any prior understanding of who or what a SIBA is, let me fill you in. SIBA stands for Southern Independent Book Alliance and it’s a publishing industry event unlike any other. Think speed-dating for the book world and you will have the barest inkling to build on. In short, it’s where word addicts binge on their drug of choice, celebrating those who write books, those who sell books, and those who promote books. Here’s a confession: As a life-long reader I find it extremely difficult not to turn into a fan when surrounded by authors whose work I’ve come to love. I do my best not to fawn but I fear they see right through me.
As an author myself, I go to SIBA to build professional relationships with independent booksellers who do me the incredible honor of putting my book into the hands of their loyal clientele. I consider myself doubly blessed by those who extend their personal friendship as well.
I’ve been to three SIBA conventions now. My favorite was the first, second, and third.
Hugs,
Shellie Rushing Tomlinson
A First-Time Writer at #SIBA10 Shares
Posted by Wanda in Authors as Guest Bloggers on October 22, 2010
A First-Timer at SIBA
By Ellen F. Brown, author of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind: A Bestseller’s Odyssey from Atlanta to Hollywood
This snapshot of my desk sums up my experience in Daytona better than anything I could write. For me, it was all about making connections. Meeting booksellers and bloggers. Getting to know and learning from other writers.
The weekend was so chock full that I am still trying to process it all. Things got off to a brilliant start on Friday morning at Steven Johnson’s talk on innovative ideas – loved his comment about the value of the internet as a “serendipity engine.” The panel discussions the rest of the day were each fantastic in their own way. As I tweeted that evening, I laughed at some, cried at others. I learned something at all of them. Then the fun really began: drinks and good music courtesy of Bookazine and Marshall Chapman, followed by a fortuitous dinner with author James Swanson. I stumbled back to my room ready to sleep when a Tweet came through that the Late Night Readings had started. Ooops… had forgotten about that. I got back in the elevator and headed downstairs for a literary night cap.
Saturday was another whirlwind. The tradeshow is a blur of books, people, and good conversations. And, I experienced a random act of kindness that day I will always treasure. Rhodi Hawk – author of Okra nominee The Twisted Ladder – had been invited to appear on Book Marc, a local radio show, and invited me to join her. If all writers are as generous, I have indeed landed in the right profession.
I was riding on a complete bookish high by the time the taxi came to take me to the airport Saturday afternoon. I snapped back to reality when I got on the airplane and realized that I had been assigned a seat in the very last row, right next to the bathroom. I was within moments of asking to find another seat when I saw Shellie Rushing Tomlinson – one of my favorite panelists of the entire weekend – headed for my row. Let’s just say an hour and a half with her was well worth the noxious fumes. I can’t remember the last time I laughed so hard. When we got to Atlanta, we carried on our conversation over a plate of nachos at an airport bar. More laughs ensued with a young waiter who kept referring to us as babies. “You want another glass of wine, baby?” “Baby, do you need a napkin?” “I’ll get your check right now, baby.” And don’t even get me started on all the life-changing advice Shelley gave me about the writing biz.
My only regret is that my co-author John Wiley, Jr., had to cancel his trip to SIBA due to illness. The poor thing is still in the hospital. I haven’t yet had the heart to tell him what a productive, inspiring, and fun trip he missed.
Now off to spend a rainy day entering all these new contacts into my address book.
On a Windy Night at #SIBA10
Posted by Wanda in Authors as Guest Bloggers on October 21, 2010
It WAS a windy night and the full moon was covered by shining clouds over the 
ocean as I walked over from the Friday night author dinner (Fannie Flag, Emma Donoghue–and more!) to the late night reading. I was excited to read my new picture book, On a Windy Night, to its very first audience. The booksellers of SIBA were right with me as I read them a “bedtime story” and they looked at George Bates’ delightfully frightful illustrations. Felt lucky to be the only author who could read the whole book in 6 minutes, but enjoyed the other authors’ excerpts, too. Hope everyone got a signed copy that wanted one on the exhibit floor the next day. Had a great time talking to like-minded book people and hated to leave in the morning. Thanks for the enthusiastic reception, SIBA!
Nancy Raines Day, author of On a Windy Night, illus. by George Bates (Abrams Books for Young Readers)
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Lady Banks Bookshelf
