Choose to Learn About our Choose Your Own Misery Books!

Something other authors always talk about on the interwebs, but which you sort of fail to appreciate until your book is in that weird pupal stage between "being done" and "existing in the world," is that there's a LOT of not-really-book-stuff you have to do.

You know, so that people have any idea your book exists in the first place.

That should be enough, right?

Winter Reading List

Lately, for a whole host of reasons, I just can't. Even.

Seriously.

I'm all over my "real" writing (read: the three books in various stages of completion, and the essays, and the new freelancing gig, and the side projects with my humor writing partner, and, and, and), but this day job racket isn't cutting it in the middle of cold, dark January. Just getting through the days sucks any "even" I had right out of me, and every evening I wind up in a fetal curl on my couch, staring mindlessly at the TV,

Which is why I need a good book list.

I used to think that winter was the time for reading serious books, since you don't want to leave the house anyway, but I'm starting to question that; I have so little energy that I CAN'T leave the house. I certainly can't use what's left on Proust.

Of course I can't waste perfect summer days on something so mentally taxing, either. Or fall, coz that's my favorite season. It's possible I'll never read a serious book again. But that's another matter.

Point is, I need suggestions of can't-put-'em-down books to get me through these darkest of days.

So tell me the most recent book that fits that bill for you.

Help keep my brain from freezing up the same way my social life has!

The "What's Your Writing Process" Blog Tour!

I was chatting with my writing partner and my agent last week (confession: I set up this sentence just so I could say "my agent," which still feels magical and almost illicit, like saying "my boyfriend" after months of does-he-like-me, or "my pony" if you're the kid whose dream actually came true), and she brought up the idea of blog tours as an additional way to promote a book.

I promptly admitted I had basically no understanding of blog tours. I've seen them, of course, but I have no idea how one sets such a thing up. Do you just call up the blog and offer to stop in and read from your...no, that's wrong. No one has given their phone number to a stranger on the internet since the early days of AOL chat rooms (and then only because you were the person who was ACTUALLY 11 and were really, really stupid, even for 11).

Which of course meant that less than 24 hours later, my awesome writer friend Julie Artz--author of amazing MG adventures and a great lady to grab a cocktail with--asked me if I'd be interested in doing one. Thanks, karma! I must be helping all the old ladies these days!

Anyway, Julie's tour is about writing process, something I mostly don't have. Without further ado...

The First IMPORTANT Book You Read

I remember dozens of books from my childhood.

I can picture myself breezing through any of the interchangeable dozens of American Girls books my mom had been forced to buy us on the dark, carpeted hallway that led to my father's tiny den. Or see me and my sisters snuggling up against my mother as she read us Laura Ingalls Wilder's novels, or cried through Where the Red Fern Grows. I remember gloating about the 437-page length of Amy's Eyes (though I now have no recollection whatsoever of what the book was about), a book I was directed towards after I exhausted my elementary school library's stock of John Bellairs stories, starting with The House with a Clock in its Walls.

But everyone has a FIRST most-important-book. A book that changed things for you, made you a reader, somehow inflected the literary life you've had since. 

I'll Never Let Go, Book! I'll Never Let Go!

So after a few months of "research" reading only (which amounts to SOME legitimate touchstone-choices, and quite a few this-candy-tastes-good YA reads), I was feeling a bit intellectually guilty.

Stupid Slate article messing with my head (because I can admit this much: I'm defensive first because I think she's totally uninformed and wrong, but second because I fear there's some grain of truth beneath the total wrongness).

So I picked up a grownup book a friend was vociferously recommending, and which, as a Pulitzer-winner, I should have read a while back, anyway: Olive Kitteridge. 

I am shocked at how much I'm loving this book, especially since it's structured as a bunch of short stories, a format I rarely respond to as readily as I do to the full-blown-novel thing. I'm totally absorbed. I even turned off the Real Housewives to get back to it last night.

I know. Whoa.