Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

It’s National Library Week, and I’m forced to reflect on the importance and power of my favorite libraries and librarians.  Frankly, I’m well over most media portrayals of librarians as shushing, finger-wagging arbiters of old-school values.  Everyone else I knew when I was a kid wanted to do something daring…I wanted to spend every day, night, and weekend in a library and lusted over stamps, cards, and catalogs.  For me, librarians are personal heroines (and not just because I’m a library school dropout), and I’m lucky enough to count several employed and not-yet-there librarians among my closest friends and role models.  Here are a few of my favorite library memories:

Mrs. Walton:  When I was very small, my mom and I would walk to the Oak Park public library in San Diego to get my weekly dose of books.  Mrs. Gloria Walton (mother of the epic basketball star Bill Walton) was really tall and really friendly and really, really helpful.  She’s the woman who led me to the shelves with Laura Ingalls Wilder and Beverly Cleary books on them, and she’s one of the people I credit with the love of reading that has sustained and saved me my whole life long.

The Summer Suck:  The library in the suburban San Diego community where I spent my teenage years, frankly, sucked.  It was one room with a scanty selection of books, but I still visited it religiously, walking a mile or so to get there, loading up my backpack with as many books as it would hold, taking time to peek into the trashy novels I knew I wasn’t supposed to be reading, and walking home, often reading the entire time.  It was a humble place, but I still remember it fondly because it felt like home.

The Coven:  When I was in college, I worked at the Sophia Smith Collection, an incredible archive housed in the former Smith College Gymnasium building where the first women’s basketball game ever was played, home of the collections of the papers of people like Margaret Sanger and Agnes deMille.  As I toiled over the painstaking work of preserving and cataloging the papers of Judith Raskin and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, I was consistently amazed by the collegiality, good humor, and grace of what my boss there called “the archival coven,” women who had devoted their entire lives to the preservation of women’s history and who patiently helped legions of students and researchers make their way through their impressive collection.  I am oh so jealous and oh so encouraged that Smith now has an entire archival concentration to offer students, and I can honestly say that the time spent in that library is among the happiest I can recall.

What about you?  What are your favorite library memories?

I recently had the pleasure of having coffee with the well-spoken and fascinating Nava Atlas, a writer, vegan cook, and visual artist whose popular Dear Literary Ladies blog is currently being turned into a book.  We were talking about the way the Internet has revolutionized the idea of being a fan, allowing readers of all cultures, ages, and locations to converge around their favorite authors and books.

Ever since then, I’ve been thinking about another set of conversations I started having when I arrived at Smith College as a confused seventeen-year-old ready to take on the world.  Inevitably, I’d feel uncomfortable as I started to converse with young women whose backgrounds and socioeconomic histories couldn’t have been more different than mine…until heroine magic happened and we were talking like old friends about The Babysitters Club or A Tree Grows in Brooklyn or Jane Eyre.

And it occurred to me:  in a way, heroines are glue.  They bind together different generations that can find common ground in the pages of timeless books.  They connect people of wildly different backgrounds, ethnicities, and daily lives in a shared and common experience that is interpreted through a million different lenses.  They’ve allowed me to reach a lifelong dream (publishing my first book), and they’ve also formed the foundation of what I know will be lifelong friendships and connections as I move into an ever-widening world of fandom, readalongs, book blogs, conferences, and conversations.

Here are a few current and upcoming events that will feature heroines as glue…and that I’m super excited to share with all of you.

• ~ BronteAlong:  This awesome initiative is the brainchild of Melissa Averinos and Beth Dunn, two kindred spirits and the founders of Eggplantia, in order to bring together lovers of all things Brontë.  I’ve heard rumors of an AustenAlong and maybe even (eeee) an AlcottAlong rearing their literary heads in the future, and meanwhile I’m so enjoying people’s insightful posts, tweets, and musings about what makes Brontë books so very compelling and special, almost 200 years later.
• ~ LauraPalooza 2010:  I can’t even express how insanely excited my childhood self and my adult one are about participating in the first-ever multi-day academic conference/fan convergence surrounding Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Little House on the Prairie books.  The fact that going with my mom after a semi-epic roadtrip makes it even more awesome and thrilling and terrifying…I’ll also be presenting a panel with Wendy McClure and Sandra Hume that I’m all fired up about.  My people!  The people who wore bonnets as children!
• ~ Dewey’s Read-a-Thon:  This event is just cool.  For 24 hours on April 10, readers and book bloggers everywhere will challenge themselves to read for one day straight, blog about it, and participate in mini-challenges.  This event has grown to twice a year and I’m so looking forward to this April’s results!
• ~ The Classics Circuit:  This blog has been arranging blog tours for famous authors…with a leetle twist.  They’re all classic authors (i.e. dead).  Heyer.  Wharton.  This is as good as it gets!

So tell me…what heroines bind you to other people?  And what upcoming literary events are exciting you these days?

Thanks to everyone who participated in the fabulous Lorelei King audiobook contest.  Several entries and one random number selecter later and we have a winner…Katie Noah Gibson of Cakes, Tea, and Dreams!

Congrats, Katie…I’ll be in touch to arrange delivery of Lorelei’s Audy and Audiophile Award-winning reading of Sandra Dallas’s Tallgrass…so be sure to tell us how you liked it!

Just got word that I can announce something that’s put an extra spring in my step for about a week now.  The Heroine’s Bookshelf has sold in South Korea!

It will be translated and published by Minumin at some point (I’m thinking in 2010) and I’ll have the pleasure of seeing my book in an alphabet and language I have no hope of ever understanding!  Naturally, I am over the moon…and very grateful to the fabulous and hard-working people at HarperCollins who made the sale.

There’s still time to enter the Lorelei King Audiobook Giveaway…in fact, I’d like to beg you to do so!  Details below:

Lorelei King Tallgrass Contest

To celebrate my recent interview with audiobook superstar Lorelei King and to give readers access to a great heroine book, I’m giving away one copy of Lorelei’s Audy and Audiophile Award-winning reading of Sandra Dallas’s Tallgrass, a poignant story of the Japanese-American internment of the 1940s as told through the eyes of a young girl.  Here’s how to enter:  click here and leave a comment on this blog post telling who you’d have voice your favorite heroine (voice actress, actress, friend, mom…just make sure to identify her!) and why.  Comment with a link to your tweet, blog post, or Facebook “share with friends” about the contest and I’ll enter you twice! I’ll choose the winner at random at close of business this Friday, April 2.  Contest is open to United States, Canadian, and U.K. residents only.  Good luck!

As you may have heard, the audio rights to The Heroine’s Bookshelf were recently sold to Blackstone Audio, which got me thinking…what’s a day in the life of an audiobook narrator like?  Luckily, I have a great resource in my Twitter friend and new heroine Lorelei King, who just happens to be an accomplished actress and the multiple-award-winning narrator of an astonishing number of audiobooks and BBC Radio 4 programs (we’re talking the books of Margaret Atwood, Patricia Cornwell, Janet Evanovich, Sue Grafton, and even Louisa May Alcott…click here for an impressive list).  Lorelei isn’t just fabulous, she’s gracious…and she’s agreed to answer some of my niggling questions about the life of an audiobook narrator in my never-ending attempt to assuage the longstanding pain of waiting (in this case, to find out who’s going to narrate my book!).

To make things fun, I’m giving away one of Lorelei’s award-winning audiobooks to a lucky winner (details below).  But be sure to read Lorelei’s fabulous insights before scrolling down:

Erin Blakemore: Tell us a bit about the path you took to a career in voice acting and audiobook narration.
Lorelei King: Like most things in my life, I stumbled into it! I was living in London and working as an actress when I got a call from a friend who owned a recording studio; he was recording an ad for a client, and the US voiceover hadn’t shown up. Could I get there in 10 minutes? I did. Hurrah! I loved the experience, and found I had a knack for it. Audiobooks came about in a similar way — someone who knew my animation work asked me to do a book. Again, I loved the experience and definitely had a feeling of “coming home.” And my voice career then, as now, ran in parallel with my acting career.

EB: How does audiobook narration differ from acting for the camera?
LK: When acting for the camera, you normally only play one character. With an audiobook, you might be playing hundreds! Also, in front of the camera your character is normally engaging with other characters, which speads the load a bit — whereas an audiobook is essentially a very, very long monologue. And of course for tv you have to be ‘camera ready’ — no dark roots, no spinach in the teeth, full makeup. Recording an audiobook, I could turn up looking like a troll and it wouldn’t matter. Not that I turn up looking like a troll. Very often.

EB:  How do you prepare to perform an audio piece?
LK: To prepare the book for record, I read it through once and make a cast list on one side of a piece of paper, jotting down and clues about the kind of voice that character might have. Some authors are very helpful in that regard, telling you a character’s accent, voice quality and so on. If there are no clues, I have to make an educated guess! On the other side of the paper I make of list of any pronunciations I want to look up. A good producer will check all that for you, but I like doing my own research.

EB:  What’s the most challenging part of your job? Do you have any disasters or horror stories you’d care to share?
LK: The most challenging part of the job is maintaining stamina — having the same energy level at the end of the day that I had at the beginning of the day! Horror stories? The most horrifying thing is if the engineer makes a mistake and deletes the morning’s work. It’s only happened twice in my career, but I cried both times!

EB:  What do you like best about your job?
LK: I get paid to read books! What could be better?…. And I love being a storyteller. Audio is a particularly intimate medium — and I feel so privileged that people are wiling to listen.

EB:  What are your personal reading habits like? Who are some of your favorite authors and why?
LK: I get very little time to do reading for myself as I have to do so much reading for work! Of the books I read for work, I love the funny ones (like Janet Evanovich) and the crime fiction (like Tess Gerritsen). As for personal reading, my favourite author of all time is Gerald Kersh –Song of the Flea is probably my favourite of his books. I’m also very fond of horror — I like Stephen King, Robert Bloch and Harlan Ellison, among many others. I’ve always had a soft spot for Somerset Maugham — The Razor’s Edge had a HUGE impact on me when I was 11 — and of course I have to mention my Greek boys, Homer (I prefer the Illiad to the Odyssey) and Herodotus (it’s like reading Hello magazine)! For enjoyment I read them in English, and for torture I read them in ancient Greek.

EB:  What surprises you about the audio world? Are there any trends to watch for?
LK: I’m surprised at how much it’s growing! It’s wonderful that people are integrating audio into their lives, listening to audiobooks the way they might listen to music.  As for trends, I think digital audio publishing means we’ll be using audio in new and original ways: shorter titles, individual short stories and poems, getting to market much more quickly with subjects that are trending, publishing in digital download only, embedding audio into eBooks … I am co-founder (with Ali Muirden, former head of audio at Macmillan UK) of a digital publishing company, and we’re exploring some of these things already. It’s a scary and exciting time!

Lorelei King Tallgrass Contest

To liven things up a bit and give one of my readers access to a great heroine book, I’m giving away one copy of Lorelei’s Audy and Audiophile Award-winning reading of Sandra Dallas’s Tallgrass, a poignant story of the Japanese-American internment of the 1940s as told through the eyes of a young girl.  Here’s how to enter:  leave a comment on this blog post telling who you’d have voice your favorite heroine (voice actress, actress, friend, mom…just make sure to identify her!) and why.  Comment with a link to your tweet, blog post, or Facebook “share with friends” about the contest and I’ll enter you twice! I’ll choose the winner at random at close of business this Friday, April 2.  Contest is open to United States, Canadian, and U.K. residents only.  Good luck!

Be patient, Jo, don’t get despondent or do rash things, write to me often, and be my brave girl, ready to help and cheer all.

- Marmee’s last words as she leaves to take care of Father in Washington, Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

When I update my friends and (gulp) fans about book progress, there always seem to be a million unanswered questions.  Is there a cover yet?  Have you seen it in print?  When will it be in stores?  Have any of the foreign rights sold?  How will you possibly wait until October to hold your book in your hands?  Believe me, these are questions I share, too.

From sale (May 1, 2009) to publication (October 19, 2010) will have been just about a year and six months.  But before that came an even longer wait…three years of having an agent and no book to sell, years before that writing books that will (thank God) never see the light of day, waiting, working, and more waiting.  And I’m one of the lucky ones.  So many writers wait what seems like eons before finding the right publisher or agent for their work, before honing their craft or moving on or finding their perfect project.

Like Jo March, patience has never exactly been my strong suit.  I am quick to solidify an impression and even quicker to get flustered when things don’t go my way.  So this entire process has been an exercise in self-control.  Now that the years seem to speed by like unruly comets, I know that October will be here before I know it.  My challenge is to fill the wait with both enjoyment (this is my only time to enjoy being a first-time author, to experience the mystery of seeing my debut come into the world) and productivity (it’s time to get cracking on other projects so there is some kind of literary future ahead of me).  When people used to ask me about being a writer, my first question would be “how hard are you willing to work?”  Now I add “how are you at the whole waiting thing?” to the mix.  A heroine might not always be patient, but she can learn to love the wait, right?

Ah, Jane Eyre. You have sucked up innumerable hours of my time and God knows what kind of space in my head and heart over the years.  And your covers always tend to feature bland, bleak, gray-clad governesses who don’t really point to an appealing book within.  In honor of Charlotte Brontë’s timeless classic (and as a way of announcing my intention to play along with the Brontëalong over at An Accomplished Young Lady), here are some Jane Eyre covers that won’t bore you to death (click to enlarge!):

From left to right, top to bottom:

1)  Perhaps my favorite modern-day cover, Megan Wilson‘s silhouette for the Vintage edition;
2)  White’s Books’ gorgeous, somehow-still-moody floral take;
3)  Dame Darcy takes on an illustrated Jane Eyre for Penguin;
4)  The edition I first encountered in the library at Blessed Sacrament Parish in San Diego…Fritz Eichenberg’s incredibly illustrated box set from the 1940s;
5)  A pulp fiction fake take on J.E. that made me giggle;
6)  A gorgeous 1950 cover by Grau Sala via Jane Eyre Illustrated, your source for even more gorgeous Jane Eyre covers, dust jackets, and illustrations through the years.

I got the pretty, pretty page proofs for The Heroine’s Bookshelf over the weekend and have been rereading the book for the 2325632262368236th time (isn’t rereading a book about rereading that you yourself wrote so very meta?).  And, surprise, I’ve been thinking even more about literary heroines and the place they occupy in my life and the life of my friends and fellow readers.  Part of what motivated me to write the book was a sense that none of the books on reading I had come across really managed to convey the power literary heroines have had for me.  But I never expected to tap into a bit of my own resilience and (dare I say it?) heroism while writing a book about heroines.

When you think about it, the idea of heroism is a bit hard to wrap your mind around.  The definition I prefer goes something like this:

expansive: of behavior that is impressive and ambitious in scale or scope; “an expansive lifestyle”; “in the grand manner”; “collecting on a grand scale”; “heroic undertakings”

It’s hard to live your life in a grand manner, especially in times that aren’t exactly expansive.  So often, I’ve seen ambition rewarded with failure, high hopes with blah realities.  As someone who always seemed a bit off-kilter and out of place in her childhood home, I spent a lot of time looking outside myself for role models, people to emulate or call upon when I felt down.  I found many of my heroines in between the pages of the books I love; I found even more in history and some in my own personal life.

In my travels around the blogosphere I recently ran across this sentence by debut author Sonia Gensler, who writes in this blog post:

To the left of the bulletin board is my framed poster of the Brontë sisters. When I’m feeling whiny and pathetic, I think of the Brontës and how isolated they were, how many loved ones they lost, and what a crazy mess their brother was. So many sorrows and distractions threatened their creativity, and yet they managed to be quite prolific. One glance at that poster and I straighten my spine and get back to work.

I’m like Sonia:  after spending a year plus thinking about heroines, I love to invoke the idea of a heroine when, say, I am crampy and cranky and want to crawl into a cave for a year and cut off all contact with humanity.  I invoke the idea before a business meeting that scares the bejeezus out of me.   And I cut myself a bit more slack because I can see the ways in which my miniscule, pitiful daily struggles really speak to something heroic.  I am, after all, the girl who went to Germany knowing two words in the language and survived for a long exchange year at the tender age of fifteen.  I’m the girl who somehow got herself through college, who played roller derby and sung in an indie rock band and has started two successful businesses thus far.  And I’m the girl who, despite my wildest fears and reservations, keeps returning to the page even when nothing comes out right.

I bet you’re a heroine, too.  So…what personal heroism do you have to celebrate these days?  And who are the heroines you call on when you feel like quitting?

Yay!  I can finally talk about something that definitely put an extra spring in my step last week.  Harper sold the audio rights for The Heroine’s Bookshelf to Blackstone Audio, the country’s largest independent producer of audiobooks!  This means that THB will be appearing in DRM-free CD and MP3 form in November…and that I get an inside view on the process of how a book gets from the page to the ear.

Here’s the deal report from PM *beam*:

March 5, 2010:  Audio rights
Erin Blakemore’s THE HEROINE’S BOOKSHELF, a look at literature’s greatest and most enduring female characters — such as Jo March, Jane Eyre, Elizabeth Bennet, Laura Ingalls and others — and their authors, who have helped shape the inner lives of generations of women, teasing out universal tenets of strength, wisdom, and survival, to Blackstone Audio, for publication in November 2010, by Janice Suguitan at Harper.

It’s Friday, and my Google Image Search obsession is as strong as ever.  Since Friday is a day for fun, I hereby bring you the first in a series of Friday blogs about covers of books included in The Heroine’s Bookshelf.  First installment:  Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, originally published in 1813.  Click to enlarge these gems!

From left to right, top to bottom:

1)  First, a bit of history.  Here’s the original front page (they didn’t do fancy artsy covers in the early 1800s).

2)  is kind of a swinging late 60sish take on P&P (reminds me of the exquisite Fairy Alphabet on Sesame Street).

3) has to be in the running for Lamest Cover Ever, right?

4) This illustration by Reuben Toledo brings a bit of fashion to Meryton.

5) and 6) Marvel recently put out a comic version of P&P that deserves two postings for its amazing covers by Sonny Liew.  I’ve included the first cover and the fourth.  Make sure to click to enlarge…they’re exquisite. 

7) Harper recently released a version of P&P styled after the Sparkly Vampire Series That Cannot Be Named…eek!

For another cool roundup of P&P covers, check out Belle of the Books’ recent post, which features tons of international Pride and Prejudice flava.

I have of course neglected to post the many, many covers that include a classic portrait of a woman on them.  Zzz.  What’s your favorite of these covers?  Got a favorite P&P cover you’d like to share?