Anniversaries, Cover Art, and Twitter
Today I’m celebrating my 16th wedding anniversary. That just seems crazy – where did the time go? In Napa, the weather is really romantic this time of year – always warm with the smell of jasmine and green things, the hills with vines on them, white egrets flying in the sky and deer and jackrabbits on the trails.
Also, since I became allergic to wheat after 36 years Glenn has been diligently learning new gluten-free recipes left and right. I am thankful he is trained in chemistry and just like that Old Spice commercial guy – baking me a cake in a kitchen he built with his own hands! (Well, we’re renters, but I’m sure he could build a kitchen if he needed to.)
I’ve been thinking hard about cover art and what cover art can and can’t do for a book. Good cover art might make someone pick up a book, might give someone a correct impression of what’s inside, and acts as an adjunct for the writing. I really like Kelli’s cover art, which seems evocative and strange, something that invites rather than subtracts. You want art that invites the reader into the book. Something that communicates the mood without ruining the surprise. Also, how awesome is it to worry about cover art? So much more fun than worrying about rejections. Doing a little happy dance again for the book and for my new publisher. So many things to be thankful for this weekend!
Related to this: I promised a story about how twitter led to me finding a home for my second book. For a long time I resisted twitter. What can you do in 140 characters, I asked. Then, for some reason, I just signed up. I knew Margaret Atwood was up there, twittering away, and Aimee Mann, two artists I respected. I knew publishers – like Kitsune Books, Graywolf Press, among others – had twitter accounts. One of the terrific side-effects of signing up for a twitter account was learning more about a potential publisher and their likes/dislikes – the Kistune Books editors talked about music, querying, and publishing biz – all of which made me like them more and feel that they were a good fit for my work. This led me to the querying, and then the rest is history.
Another reason to sign up for twitter? A suprising number of job leads – people post links to jobs almost every day!
In honor of my publisher and the fox-wife theme of my new book, here is an adorable picture of baby bat-eared foxes for no reason!
Books Reviews, 5 AM, Twitter, Summertime
I have a new book review up at The Rumpus, where I compare Karyna McGlynn’s I Have to Go Back to 1994 And Kill a Girl to Twin Peaks, Momento, and Sixth Sense. It’s one of my favorite books of 2010 so far!
It is finally feeling like summer here. Wednesday we drove an hour and a half to walk on the beach and the wind was so hard and cold it blew sand into my teeth and hair but the water was so blue, the sky was cloudless. We lost twenty degrees driving out to San Francisco, what seemed like dramatically too-warm clothing at home felt too skimpy near the water. We went to the San Francisco Zoo at the Golden Gate park, the zoo is shabby and not updated except for the fantastic meerkat-and-prairie-dog exhibit which is open to the sky and has wonderful heated rocks all around. Still, though it was a sad zoo, otters showed off every time I walk by, as river otters do. The most beautiful otters. I still miss being able to go out and see otters every day on the dock at my Port Townsend beach.
For a long time I resisted twitter. Now I have an account and you can follow me there if you look me up under “Jeannine Hall Gailey” or find me @webbish6. Later I will tell the story of how twitter helped me find and fall in love with my new publisher. I actually signed up to “follow” a bunch of my favorite poetry book publishers!
My heart still hasn’t slowed down from the time I got the news about my book. I don’t think it will settle down until the book is in my hands, until then, I’ll just be a skitter mass of nerves. All things to get in order: blurbs, cover art, maybe a new author photo. I have to proofread, proofread, proofread. I’m changing order, adding new poems, deleting lines from old poems, reshaping the MS. You think it’s finished, then you realize you weren’t.
A shout out to the lit mag 5 AM as I am always pleased with the reading experience whenever I am lucky enough to get a contributor copy – the magazine falls towards the quirky and funny, along with the occasionally heartbreaking, so I guess maybe my poem “The Robot Scientist’s Daughter [circuits]” fits in alongside the “quirky” in Issue 31 with other poets such as Marge Piercy, Michael S. Harper, Charles Harper Webb, and Denise Duhamel. Buy it! Read it!
