One Man's Monster is Another Man's Teddy Bear

Ah, June. Given the make-up snow days and make-up teacher-strike days, my children only officially got out of school last Thursday, but we lost no time in signing up for the library's Summer Reading Challenge. For my two younger ones, entering this contest isn't motivated by love of the written word so much as a desire to get a pizza coupon, art kit, and possibly possibly a laptop!

My oldest dearly loves to read, however, and while she now (at almost ten) pooh-poohs princess stories and JUDY MOODY, she's recently gotten into ghost stories and accepted my recommendation for Patricia Clapp's JANE-EMILY, a book that terrorized all the girls in my fifth grade class, including me.

Have we grown more jaded now?

One page in: "When is this going to get scary?"

Four chapters in: "This is the most unscary book I've ever read."

Really truly? THE most unscary? More unscary than THESE HAPPY GOLDEN YEARS or A BIRTHDAY FOR FRANCES? To make sure, I picked JANE-EMILY up again on one of the frequent occasions when my daughter had laid it down and found it as interesting as ever. Maybe not scary anymore, no, but I am, after all, 39 now.

If it's any comfort to me, this is the same daughter who couldn't bear to listen to LITTLE HOUSE IN THE BIG WOODS for years because of all the animal stories, especially the one about Pa and the panther. Grandpa on the sled with the pig couldn't begin to make up for the terrors of Pa and the panther.

All of which is to say, if you or your kids have any favorite spooky books, I'd love to hear suggestions. I can't have my daughter thinking I'm such a giant wuss.

Foregone Conclusions

"The last enemy to be destroyed is death." (1 Corinthians 15:26)

I don't know if it's still true, but when we were younger, my sister would never read a new book without first checking the ending to make sure it was a happy one. To me, this was sacrilege. Where was the surprise? What was the point of going through all the story in between? Cindy would say she didn't want to read sad books. Who wants to get invested in characters, only to have everything go south for them?

Last night our church community lost a beloved person. It was sudden, it was painful, it left everyone involved reeling. We had prayed and the answer was No.

When things are bleakest, we remember there is one story to which we already know the end: our human story. In the Gospel of John, Jesus faced his own beloved community, reeling from the death blow dealt to their dear friend and brother Lazarus. We recognize the emotions: grief, anger, disbelief, disillusionment. "Lord," says Martha, straight-shooting as ever, "if you had been there, my brother would not have died." If you had come. If you had heard our prayers. If you had said Yes.

Jesus answers, "Your brother will rise again."

Martha responds, effectively, "Yeah, yeah, so they say."

What follows, Jesus' miraculous resurrection of Lazarus, is God's response to our hollow, comfortless pieties. No, says Jesus, by his actions. I mean it: Lazarus will rise again. He will live forever. Everyone who believes in me will live forever. Here is my proof that what I say is true.

Our dear friend will live again and forever because of her faith in Jesus and what he does for us. End of story. We just have to get through the rest of it.

On Our Best Behavior

At lunch recently, some friends were discussing a movie they disliked intensely called HE'S JUST NOT THAT INTO YOU. Why the strong reaction? All the characters were dysfunctional and involved in dysfunctional relationships, and by the end of the film, nothing got better. This is the key, I think. We're willing to put up with dysfunctional characters behaving reprehensibly, but we want them to learn something and get better, for Pete's sake. Lame characters who remain lame are--well--too much like life.

Everyone loves a redemption story (will have to blog about that some other time), but can you think of non-redemptive stories that we also love?

In my Bible reading, I'm in Judges again. (My fancy study method is to start at Genesis, read a couple chapters a day till I get through Revelation, and then repeat.) Judges is all about non-redeemed characters who somehow got morals-of-the-story tacked onto their lives, and not very effectively, at that. Judges does contain, however, several superlative characters. Consider:

1) WOMAN YOU MOST DON'T WANT TO SHARE A TENT WITH. In Judges 4, when Sisera the Canaanite leader flees to what he imagines is a sympathizing Israelite tent, the hospitable-yet-tricky Jael hammers a tent peg through his forehead while he's trying to get some shut-eye. "So he died," says the narrator, deadpan.

2) LAMEST COUPLE WHO EVER BECAME LEGENDARY LOVERS. That would be Samson and Delilah in Judges 16. HE'S JUST NOT THAT INTO YOU couples could have nothing on these two. She must have been one fine-looking lady because all she wants out of him is the secret of his strength. He keeps lying about it, she keeps attempting to betray him, until finally, when "...she pressed him hard with her words day after day, and urged him, his soul was vexed to death" (16:16). Meaning, Delilah's constant nagging leads directly to Samson's downfall. Not as quick as a tent peg to the head, but equally effective.

And, just to be equal-opportunity, there's 3) MOST INSENSITIVE BOYFRIEND IN THE BIBLE. In the horrific Judges 19 (don't read unless you can do things like watch THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE and eat a hot dog at the same time), a traveling Levite runs into trouble with the Benjaminites, who want him to emerge from his overnight host's house that they "may know him." Not being a dumb Levite, the guy and his host instead chuck out their girlfriend and daughters to entertain the Benjaminites, while they rest up. In the morning, the girlfriend is dead from ill-usage and lying in the doorway, instead of helping him load up the donkeys. "He said to her, 'Get up, let us be going.' (Or, to paraphrase a la Eugene Peterson: "What the heck? How long are you gonna lie around doing nothing? Do I have to do all the work around here?") But there was no answer." She being dead, for crying out loud! He's lucky she didn't survive; otherwise he probably could have expected a quick tent-peg through the head the next time he nodded off.

Non-redemptive stories tend to leave us with a kind of really?-huh-okay-what-a-bummer feeling. Can't tell you yet if THE MOVIEGOER'S Binx Bolling falls in the redemptive or non-redemptive bucket, but I suspect it's the latter. Hence my difficulty in slogging through it.

If any of you are fans of non-redemptive stories, I'd love to know why.

Spare Me Your Despair

Headed into a rather nutty week with school ending and VBS starting and kids' swimming going full tilt, so I suspect not a lot of reading will happen. I'm completely bogged down in Walker Percy's THE MOVIEGOER because who has the time or energy to listen to anyone's existential despair? At least Percy treats Binx Bolling's despair rather lightheartedly. While I'm not rolling on the floor, I am at least smiling from time to time.

Speaking of despair, a teacher I spoke to this weekend asked me if I thought middle school was too soon to be doing CATCHER IN THE RYE with kids: YES. Even in high school I wasn't clear that Holden wasn't just wry--he was suicidal--so what would middle school kids make of it all? Heck, even freshman year in high school my teachers stuck with Golding's LORD OF THE FLIES when they wanted to show us all that life is the pits, and human nature in particular.

I'm picking up a theme here: schools like to teach despair books to teenagers.

ROMEO AND JULIET: Grown-ups just don't get it, and they're all about war, so kill yourselves! Here's more to do with hate.

MACBETH: It's all written, and if you're slated for doom there's nothing you can do about it! What, you egg!

HAMLET: Should you kill your machinating uncle or yourself because everything is so completely screwed up? Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt!

KING LEAR: One day, should you ever have children, they're going to turn on you like jackals, while you wander the heath in despair with someone annoying who doesn't even crack funny jokes. How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child!

At least, that was my high school curriculum.

I'd love to know if anyone read perky books in high school or has kids in high school being assigned perky books. Do Christian schools do despairing books or perky books?

Have His Carcase

Agent Nathan Bransford warns about the self-publisher's frequent pitfalls in his blog, including susceptibility to "Acute Sequelitis," an inability to let one's first, self-published novel and its characters go, although that novel may never be picked up by a mainstream publishing house, and its sequel certainly won't. I mention this because I already have the disease and just wanted to let you all know, in case you wanted to send flowers. In my defense, I did try to branch out and write a middle-grade novel, the partial submission of which Bransford himself kindly requested and then just as kindly rejected.

In any case, it got me to thinking about sequels of all sorts. It isn't only authors who fall in love with characters and would love to keep hearing about their (mis)adventures till every last one of them is dead. I keep telling myself I've read enough #1 LADIES' DETECTIVE AGENCY, and then I keep seeing a new one on the library rack and checking it out. Like a fool, I also tried Donald McCaig's RHETT BUTLER'S PEOPLE, despite Alexandra Ripley's SCARLETT almost doing me in, years ago. (McCaig's book actually isn't bad until it intersects with the original...) Then of course there are all the children's series I devoured: BETSY-TACY, Montgomery's ANNE and EMILY books, good old NANCY DREW, LITTLE HOUSE, HARRY POTTER, L'Engle's A WRINKLE IN TIME and its successors.

Maybe adult sequels are less satisfying, especially when written by a different author. After snapping up every Dorothy Sayers mystery I could find, Jill Paton Walsh's additions proved impossible to get through. It wasn't that her plots were bad--it was just she wasn't Sayers, and her Lord Peter and Harriet moved and spoke like reanimated corpses. Better to have one's own characters.

Can you think of adult sequels you enjoyed? Ones that aren't movies? I'm coming up blank. This may be the sign that I should dump the six draft chapters of my sequel and go back to revamping that middle-grade novel. Or that other, highly marketable idea I've been kicking around: JANE AUSTEN'S WEEKEND AT THE SHACK WITH VAMPIRES.

Ladies Who Launch

Thank you to all of you who came out last night for the book launch. Margo's house was the perfect setting, and her Pinkalicious cupcakes absolutely delicious (www.pinkaliciouscupcakes.com). We completely forgot to mention that, for every $3 that went to Margo, $0.25 went to support Children of the Nations (www.cotni.org), a group that provides birthday parties for children in Africa. You weren't just enjoying a frivolous evening, you all, downing wine and cupcakes and buying some lady's beach read--you were changing the world! (Okay, I exaggerate, but I want you to know it wasn't all fun and games.)

I spent the day trying not to think about the launch, lest I get too anxious. After that SCBWI conference, I pictured something similar: me reading out my first chapter that suddenly seemed too long and dull, while everyone in the first few rows passed out from heat, wine, and the crushing weight of boredom. Like showing your newborn to people--no one is going to tell you flat-out that your baby is ugly, but you still want to know: are you secretly thinking my baby is ugly?

It reminded me of a scene at the tail end of MOURNING where Perry's musical has opened, and Cass asks him, "Did [the audience] applaud or storm out? Did they laugh and cry in the right places?" Last night's audience laughed and murmured sympathetically in the right places, and then even in some places I didn't expect. (Who knew "Clyde Hill" was such a punchline? When I told my husband, he said that that was a laugh of "surprise and recognition." Well, we desperate writers will take any laugh we can get.)

Thank you again. If you enjoy the book, tell a friend. If you hate it, please dash off any time you see me coming and then post a blistering 1-star review on Amazon.

Framed

It's been a weekend of frame stories. For those of you unfamiliar, frame stories are stories-within-stories. The book/film opens with some characters, and it turns out this isn't the main event. Those opening characters are there to introduce the real deal. Sometimes the frame adds to our understanding of the main story, and sometimes, when the story returns to the frame, we'd forgotten all about it and it feels tacked on. Generally I'm not a huge fan, but occasionally it works.

Firstly, we finished THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON. Frame: daughter reads strange man's diary aloud to dying mother and discovers her mother's secret past life and love, as well as her own paternity. To show my hand, we loved this movie and want to use it in this year's ("Coming of Age") Literary Night. The frame wasn't totally necessary--each time we returned to the daughter talking to her mother while Hurricane Katrina drew nearer I thought, uh-huh, uh-huh, let's get on with Brad Pitt's make-up jobs. But it did pay off with poignancy points at the end. BUTTON's frame worked tons more effectively than TITANIC's, say. In TITANIC, what was the point of that granddaughter anyway? And by the time you return to Rose, now ancient, on the looking-for-Titanic ship, all you can think is, Wow, Lady, you sure do own and travel with a huge collection of pictures of yourself.

Secondly, I finished July's book club reading, David Benioff's CITY OF THIEVES. Frame: grandson interviews grandpa about grandpa's adventures during the Siege of Leningrad. Loved this book, too, by the way. MADONNAS OF LENINGRAD crossed with I LOVE YOU, MAN or another of the recent R-rated "bromances." The frame never got returned to, and I wasn't sure why it was there, other than to mislead the reader into thinking the book was somehow true.

My all-time favorite frame story, if one can have such a thing, is probably Wallace Stegner's ANGLE OF REPOSE. Here the frame story doesn't just enclose the main story--it interacts with it, is changed by it, as the main story unfolds. As Lyman Ward (or whatever his name was)reads more about his grandmother and her marriage to his grandfather, it affects his own thoughts about his life and his failing marriage. The mores of his grandparents' time comment on the mores of the frame story (1960s). (ANGLE is also probably top ten for best-last-lines-of-a-book.)

One of my least favorite frames has got to be in Shakespeare's THE TAMING OF THE SHREW. If you haven't seen the frame, it's because plenty of people hate it, and it often gets cut. To be fair, I have to admit I loathe drunk scenes in movies and books because they're almost never funny, and like opera arias, take an inordinate amount of time to move the plot along. SHREW's frame is irrelevant to the story and has a drunk in it. Boom--two strikes. Flush.

There are too many to go into, but the dream-frame is worth a mention. You know, the whole story unfolds and then cut to some person waking up, rubbing sleep out of his eyes. Whew! It all didn't really happen. Think THE WIZARD OF OZ (film).

Or the frame/main-event switcheroo. Will the real real story please stand up? Think SOPHIE'S WORLD by Jostein Gaarder.

All my commenters have fallen silent, which makes me think I ask ineffective questions. Or else you're all hoping you'll wake up and find these posts were only nightmares. In any case, if you have thoughts on any of the above, let me know.

This Means War

At my son's last non-tournament baseball game, I was doing the usual: asking people what books they were reading while we all tried not to choke on infield dust the kids kicked up. One dad confessed that he was reading a "chick book," Margaret Atwood's THE ROBBER BRIDE. It fell into the chick book category because the three primary characters were women, and so was the antagonist.

(Minor digression: in grad school, the English professors would play a game called Humiliation. To win the game, you had to name the most famous book you'd never read, like MOBY DICK or DAVID COPPERFIELD. Now who said academics aren't fun? Anyhow, I have never read one single word of Margaret Atwood.)

"Then I must be reading a guy book," I answered. I'm on page 266 of Roger Crowley's EMPIRES OF THE SEA, a history of the siege of Malta and the Battle of Lepanto, and there hasn't been one single woman yet. Instead there are Ottoman Turks and Knights of Saint John and pirates and popes and sultans. (This was another book billed as "exciting as any thriller" on the cover by no less than John Julius Norwich, author of the 736-page A HISTORY OF VENICE, but that must be because EMPIRES is only 291 pages--a mere novella in Norwich's eyes.)

Are war history books necessarily guy books? While I'm not crazy about EMPIRES and only found it exciting when I got to Lepanto, there have been many battle histories I've loved. NELSON'S TRAFALGAR: THE BATTLE THAT CHANGED THE WORLD by Roy Adkins is flat-out thrilling. Weapons and ships hadn't changed much between Lepanto (1571) and Trafalgar (1805), which is what made Nelson's tactics so brilliant. I also loved Richard Zack's THE PIRATE COAST, a history of Jefferson's war with the Barbary Pirates and the real reason the Marines sing about the "shores of Tripoli."

Maybe books set in wartime are guy books if you're actually in the battle and chick books if you're fleeing or sitting at home--think VANITY FAIR or GONE WITH THE WIND. Then there's the unclassifiable MARCH, where the guy goes to battle (somewhat) but behaves like a woman.

"We could have peace now, if we didn't love war so much," reads the bumper sticker. And we humans do love a good war! Even if you don't go in for war books, chick books would also go nowhere without a conflict. Is fighting for oil any dumber than the plot of BRIDE WARS? Do humans come off worse in the Crusades than in DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES? Give me a good naval battle any day.

MOURNING BECOMES CASSANDRA in Haiku

My mother calls again yesterday to tell me she's finished THE BONESETTER'S DAUGHTER and is ready to move on to her next-favorite Chinese author, me. "I'm a little ways into Chapter One, but Ron says he's ahead of me." Ron is my stepfather, and while I rarely see books in his hands, when I have, they've been WWII histories or Tom Clancy thrillers. MOURNING BECOMES CASSANDRA would be an example of him branching out.

"I don't think it's his type of book," I say.

"Well, he's reading it on his iPhone."

I begin thinking and speaking in exclamation points: "On his iPhone! It's a really long book--it'll take him forever to read on his iPhone!" As in, the rest of his natural life. We'll have to bury him with the darned thing, and he may only be up to Chapter 17. I saw Amazon offered the Kindle option to download to an iPhone, but I didn't think anyone actually did that. Who wants to read a book one haiku at a time?

"Don't worry," says my mother, misunderstanding me, "he can enlarge the print size." Okay...at four words per screen and a total book length of 140,000 words, Ron will have to scroll with his finger 35,000 times, and I am not paying for his repetitive stress injury.

She goes on to tell me about the Indian co-worker he's lent their other hard copy to, and his sister who's ordered it on Amazon while I squirm. Most first-time authors might be thrilled at these random readers, but as the only Christian in my family, the thought of all these valiant atheists and agnostics suffering through a Christian beach read for my sake makes me want to hide under the couch. I read somewhere that the Christian fiction business would love for non-Christians to read Christian fiction (but heck, they'd love for Christians to read Christian fiction), so my suggestion would be to sign more authors like me, with my built-in non-Christian platform.

Ron apparently wondered how my church was going to take some crack the protagonist makes about "Bible thumping" in Chapter One--after all the warnings I gave them about MBC's PG-13 rating I doubt they'll even blink--and this could be the upside: to expand people's views of Christians beyond the media stereotypes. (DIGRESSION ALERT: take the straw-man representation of a Christian in any of the hot new atheism books like Sam Harris's THE END OF FAITH or even E. O. Wilson's THE CREATION. The "Christian" they argue against basically struggles to clear the drooling-idiot IQ bar, clutches "God said, I believe it, that settles it" bumper stickers in one hand and the Republican voting guide in the other, and has to sound out all the words in the Bible he takes so literally.)

Anyhow, for those of you reading my posts on your iPhone, here is a haiku that should fit on your screen:

Upon Her First Book's Publication
by Christina Dudley

You-Tube videos
Have nothing on a first book
Embarrassment-wise

Fed UP

For my youngest daughter's 6th birthday I decided she was receiving enough plastic-junk-made-by-slave-children-around-the-world and instead bought her tickets to see UP! in 3-D. We'd been fed the previews for the past few months, those previews featuring the house floating away under a Guinness-sized cluster of balloons and an endearing, chubby boy scout. Ah-ha, I thought, this movie combines all the favorite balloon memories from my childhood, from CURIOUS GEORGE to that French movie THE RED BALLOON which we had to watch at school to Nena's hit '80s song 99 LUFTBALLONS, all rolled up with the chubby boy scout. There was no need to read reviews online--it was Pixar. At the best it could be NEMO, and at the worst--well, it couldn't be as bad as CARS.

And it wasn't a bad movie. It just couldn't decide what it was, and ended up being something like THE NOTEBOOK crossed with THE BUCKET LIST crossed with SILAS MARNER, with some snarling dogs and a Charles-Lindbergh-gone-nutty thrown in. Unlike most other Pixar films, I can't see it moving any merchandise. My daughter ended up on my lap, hiding her head ineffectively (because of the Buddy-Hollyesque 3-D glasses) in my arm, freaked out by the dogs. Nor did it even need to be in 3-D, since there was no "breaking the barrier" stuff, and it was stinking TWO HOURS LONG. Even Buddy Holly would've gotten a headache from wearing the glasses that long.

My point isn't to rail about the movie, actually, which I would give a B. It's to note once again, for all of us, that you can't judge a book by its cover (or back copy) or a movie by its preview. But there's no use in saying it because we all do it and will do it again. I'd love to hear from anyone who has been hideously misled or pleasantly surprised by any books or movies recently, based on what they thought it would be about.

As for my daughter, when we were walking out, her trauma over, she said, "I hated my birthday present." Yeah, well at least I didn't have to break it out of one of those impossible plastic packages, undo three million industrial twist-ties to pry it loose, and then spend the next six months stepping on itty bitty pieces from it.

Tan Lines

My mother calls me yesterday. "I got your book!" she says. "I've only read one page, but I think you write like Amy Tan."

A few words of explanation here:
(1) This is classic my-mother. She also read one sentence of my very first blog post (not on this site) and immediately Commented, "I love your writing style! This is a great blog!" As if none of my three readers who came afterward wouldn't guess that that had to be my mother. Moreover, I don't think she's read my blog since, which is why it's safe for me to blog about her.

(2) My mother admitted later that she couldn't read my book right now because she was currently reading--you guessed it--Amy Tan. THE BONESETTER'S DAUGHTER, to be precise, which I also enjoyed, though it was nothing like my writing in style or content. I wish!

(3) My husband's take, after looking mystified and saying, "Your writing isn't at all like Amy Tan's!" was to decide, "maybe she meant you're both Chinese." There you have it, folks, Amy Tan and I are both Chinese, so buy my book, just like you buy hers.

Not that comparisons aren't helpful in describing a work.

At the recent SCBWI conference there was a session to review query letters, aloud and in front of everyone. Even anonymously done it was agonizing. Like having your picture put up on the screen and having them ask, "Would you date this person? Yeah, me neither, but why not? Why exactly is this person so repulsive?" (But I digress.)

Occasionally writers would pitch their work by comparing it to existing published books. I don't know if it was just the luck of the draw, but most of the projects pitched could have been TWILIGHT-crossed-with-FILL-IN-THE-BLANK. And TWILIGHT was, in fact, frequently enlisted. One memorable project was, according to the author, TWILIGHT crossed with ANNE OF GREEN GABLES, HARRY POTTER, and BETSY-TACY. What??? Does that mean a five-year-old girl protagonist living on Prince Edward Island who turns out to be a witch who falls for a vampire? Or does it mean a red-headed vampire girl growing up in Minnesota who goes to Hogwarts as an exchange student? In either case SOLD--I'm buying a copy. My own pitch, being about a ten-year-old (male) pastor's kid, didn't have any ready comparisons, so I didn't include any. Umm...SUPERFUDGE crossed with PEACE LIKE A RIVER, only without the murders, cross-country pursuit, and mystical events?

I originally thought of MOURNING as MITFORD crossed with SEX AND THE CITY but abandoned that. Then I thought of MITFORD crossed with BRIDGET JONES' DIARY, which was a little closer, except that it isn't very MITFORD, apart from the churchgoing protagonist. You'll have to let me know what you think yourself. One thing I can tell you for sure: it's not Amy Tan.

Hit the Road, Jack

We've been enjoying an uncharacteristically long and warm and sunny stretch of late spring days, and those familiar with the vagaries of Seattle weather can only hope that this is not, in fact, summer, and all the summer we're going to get. Whatever the case, all the heat puts me in mind of travel. With kids still in school (and I'm not complaining), last week's day trip to Centralia might be all the world I'll be seeing for the near future, but there are always books.

Given my weakness for disaster books, exploration books follow close behind. Especially since exploration often entails disaster. And how frightening and exciting it must have been to explore when you really weren't positive what you might find! Nowadays there isn't a corner of the earth that hasn't been Fodored or Lonely-Planeted or Rick-Stevesed to death. (Speaking of Rick Steves, when we were listening to the radio in the car the other day, my fourth grader asked me, "What's a midnight toker?")

Besides KON-TIKI, here are some of my favorite recent exploration reads:

1421 by Gavin Menzies. Like KON-TIKI, it may contain flawed science, but Menzies' account of the Chinese Treasure Fleet possibly discovering the New World and circumnavigating the world is thrilling. Besides, it brags on Chinese people.

1491 by Charles C. Mann. What was the New World like before the Europeans showed up? Not exactly how it's been presented in textbooks and film, argues Mann. Not your usual anti-imperialist diatribe. Very funny description of Native Americans' first view of Europeans, from American perspective.

OVER THE EDGE OF THE WORLD by Laurence Bergreen. Magellan's epic voyage. But after reading 1421, you may wonder how Magellan knew what he knew.

SEA OF GLORY by Nathaniel Philbrick. For those of you who couldn't stomach the cannibalism in Philbrick's IN THE HEART OF THE SEA, you'll be relieved to hear these sailors stick to rations. Charles Wilkes' 1838 Exploring Expedition and what they discovered.

THE RIVER OF DOUBT by Candice Millard. If you're a Teddy Roosevelt fan, what better than Teddy in an adventure story? Who knew he explored an unmapped South American river post-presidency. Top that, Woodrow Wilson.

BLUE LATITUDES: BOLDLY GOING WHERE CAPTAIN COOK HAS GONE BEFORE by Tony Horwitz. In the Tony Horwitz-Geraldine Brooks marriage, Horwitz apparently supplies the humor. Here he and a liquored-up buddy retrace Cook's epic voyages and find things rather shabby.

Flop in a shady hammock with one of these babies in one hand and a glass of iced tea in the other, and you're set. Travel without the drawbacks. No high gas prices, no snoozing head rolling onto your shoulder in coach class, no kids fighting in the back seat, no Montezuma's Revenge. This is the life.

Behind the Curtain

Last Friday, my husband and I drove down to Centralia, Washington, to pick up the first printing of MOURNING BECOMES CASSANDRA. Such has been the family busyness of late that this was the closest thing we've had to a date in a couple months. May I recommend the self-publishing process to all who need to inject some romance into their lives? Nothing lights a fire like a few thousand dollars going out the door.

Not only did I get to hold the Dudleys' metaphorical fourth child for the first time (the proof didn't count because they don't bind the pages--kind of like a preemie that you have to look at through glass in the NICU), I also met my cover designer and text designer face to face, while my husband/slave-laborer loaded up the twelve boxes of books. Afterward, another employee gave us the tour of the printing operation. This must be how Dorothy felt when she twitched back the curtain on the Wizard in Oz, only with less disappointment.

There was a table full of stacks and stacks of book covers, ranging from gorgeous, professionally-designed ones indistinguishable from those you might see in bookstores, to template covers that looked quite harmless but would never blow your socks off, to self-designed covers where you wondered if it was truly ethical for the printer to agree to run them. One in particular, an ambitious memoir with a run of 550 copies, featured a giant flower on the front, with the memoirist's PhotoShopped face blooming smack in the center, where the sunflower seeds would ordinarily be. Dada meets Anne Geddes, with frightening results.

My favorite was the binding machine: the neatly-stacked pages ride a little roller coaster to where a flat cover comes up from underneath. A squirt of glue, then the pages meet the center of the cover, and the machine folds up the sides. Neat-o. The hungry binding machine mangled one in front of our eyes, and it got tossed on a reject cart. I wonder if the worker ever sneaks rejects home to read, like people in the food industry munching up discards until they get sick of them. If a munched version of the flower-lady's memoir had been on the cart, I would certainly have tried a diversion tactic, so I could stuff a copy in my purse.

The twelve boxes were modestly-sized, and with a little rearranging in the garage of my husband's vast Christmas paraphernalia collection, we found room for all. Now today I get to experiment with shipping to Amazon's four warehouses, and after the two book launch parties in June, I can plan where to stash my own ambitious next printing: 500. Or maybe I'll design a whole new, second edition--I kind of like that flower-face cover.