Over 40 years ago, a public high school teacher named Lenny Horowitz changed my life completely by helping me believe I could write. And, since it was a change that was slow to grow fruit, I was never able to tell him. He was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease the following year, and died shortly after I left Buffalo.
So this morning I was rearranging the bookshelves a bit in my studio. For a happy reason. I have so many language translations now of my books, they don't all fit on the "foreign rights shelf." And I don't just mean Pay It Forward, either. Love in the Present Tense, Chasing Windmills, Second Hand Heart...all are being mailed to me in languages I don't speak. It's lovely.
I tend to archive at least one, hopefully two ARCs (advance reader's copies) of each book. But as I was arranging, I noticed I have many more for Pay It Forward. Many more. More like ten. I guess I thought I was saving them for posterity. Or...I don't know. Something. But they aren't doing the world much good on my shelf.
So. Want a signed advance reader's copy of Pay It Forward? Could be a collector's item
So, this is what I'm hearing, after the fact. I missed last week's YAlitchat, a Twitter chat for the book business. But it seems some feathers were ruffled. I confess I have not read the transcript, because I couldn't find one posted. I tried to access the Tweets, but, beyond a certain point in the chat, they were unavailable. So I'm going on blog wrap-ups of the issue by those who were there. If I get anything wrong, please feel free to let me know.
Apparently, a small handful of authors (I'm sure it was only a small handful, and I do not blame it on YAlitchat, which is generally awesome) expressed some unflattering thoughts
I wrote the first draft of the novel Jumpstart the World in 2003.
At the time I was writing it, I called Leslie, explained what I was working on, and asked for a specific permission.
I was writing a block of dialogue in which a fictional character made three references to real-life trans people and the prejudice they faced. One was Leslie, the other was Marsha P. Johnson, the third was Brandon Teena. I wanted the character to briefly quote something Leslie described in a published book. It's a thing that
If you haven't read the recent critical post about me, the following will make no sense to you. If you have, please know that any continued post I write about it, such as this one, is written not to add a shred of pain to the issue, for anyone involved. But this one sentence has kept me awake for large sections of three nights now, and needs to come up and out.
"Catherine Ryan Hyde was nowhere to be seen."
If you haven't read the recent critical post about me, the following will make no sense to you. If you have, please know that every story has two sides. Please read both sides and decide what feels right.
Nearly 20 years after Leslie left home, I initiated contact. For about two decades, we had what I felt was a loving relationship. Leslie and Minnie Bruce and I met in San Diego and enjoyed a trip to Tijuana, Mexico. We met here in my home town and drove up the coast to San Francisco together. I visited them in New York, and stayed in their apartment for several days.
I always have the same plan for getting off my butt and onto a high mountain trail. I make reservations at the Grand Canyon. Preferably Phantom Ranch, which is such a tough reservation to get. Then I know I have to get back in shape, and there's no way to really postpone it. Well...in this case I had to make my reservations a full year in advance. December '11. So I could postpone it. But, you know what? I never want to. I'm always so inspired by knowing I'm heading back to the Canyon that I fall in love with hiking all over again. This will be my fourth Canyon hike.
Marla Miller is an old friend and former colleague from the Santa Barbara Writer's Conference. She hosts a great site for "writers on the road" (meaning the figurative road to publication), and now I've joined with her to provide some curriculum to fellow writers.
My first contribution is a short video about the the virtual book tour. You can view it HERE. I enjoyed sharing my opinion (hint: it's a high opinion) of book bloggers, who I call the "new hand-sellers" in today's book market. If you're a writer, and feel intimidated by the online world, I hope you'll check out what I have to say, and I hope it makes getting started just a little easier.
Maybe it's just me. But this blew me away.
I was having a Twitter conversation with a reader and friend who was once on Sesame Street as a child. She even linked me to the video on YouTube.
It reminded me of the time I was on Romper Room School at age 4 or 5 (Romper Room School is infinitely less cool than Sesame Street, so I'm not comparing them in that regard--it just reminded me). And I dug into some old photo albums, sure I could find the photo. It was up on my bathroom wall maybe a decade or so ago.
For those of you who missed my big Jumpstart the World blog tour...or even part of it...well, I can see how that could happen, because it was quite extensive. Twenty-five stops. As it was going on, I'm sure it would be easy to miss bits and pieces of it. The posts just kept stacking up. (In a good way!)
The good news about the tour is that you don't have to experience it in real time. The posts will stay around a while.
Or at very least, semi-locals. If you live on the Central Coast of California, I hope you'll join me for a special event. It's a reading from, and celebration of, Jumpstart the World, my new young adult novel with a transgender theme. And I've teamed up with the local transgender support group Tranz Central Coast for this event. The idea is to raise consciousness for trans acceptance and money for TCC.
Copies of the book will be for sale, of course, all proceeds to benefit TCC. And I'll be reading from the book, talking and answering questions about it, and signing copies.
But there's more. I'll be giving away sets of two to
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Tuesday. Voting day. Did you vote? Are you about to vote? Or did you already send an absentee ballot in?
Whatever our views, this is no time for apathy. The U.S. seems to be at a turning point. Hell, mankind seems to be at a turning point.
I think the #1 reason people don't bother to vote is discouragement. They feel whatever
I think everybody knows that the book business is...how can I put this in fairly positive terms...unsteady, right now. And I think everybody knows that print newspapers are dying an agonizing death. I'm not sure anyone but an author would put the two together and nervously realize that print reviews are drying up just when authors need them the most.
So what do we do? How do we get the word out?
Enter book bloggers. Have I mentioned that I love book bloggers? They are the present
I can't really say, "Happy Spirit Day." Because it's nothing to be happy about.
The last few months have seen an epidemic of teens committing suicide in the wake of unmerciful bullying, violence and degradation. Because they were gay, or perceived as gay. Today the caring world wears purple in remembrance. And today I say, along with millions of others, "Enough!" You cannot tell
There sure is a lot going on right now around book banning and censorship. In fact, it's come to a town near me. San Luis Obispo, a small city about 45 minutes down the Coast Highway from me, reviewed a book today that someone wants taken off high school shelves. Here's the problem: We don't know who. After ten years in the school curriculum, the book was reviewed today as the result of an anonymous complaint.
The book is "Kaffir Boy" by Mark Mathabane, a memoir about survival as a child in South Africa during Apartheid. Some anonymous person is upset by page 72, which contains a fairly graphic description of children prostituting themselves for food.
I have an old friend, Dave Congalton, who's hosted a local talk radio show since...I'm not quite sure, but I think since the beginning of time. He asked me this morning If I'd call in
Now might be a good time to start. If you have a Facebook account, you probably know that "liking" a page is just hitting the button that says "like." It's a type of subscription. The only danger is that some page owners send you lots of pesky messages. But I don't. I don't spam.
Here's why you might want to like my page now. Because on November 1st, I'll be doing a drawing, and everyone who likes the page will be automatically entered. It doesn't matter if you've been with me since the day I created
Pleased--and a bit amazed--to report that the finalists have been announced for the 23rd Annual Lambda Literary Awards, and Jumpstart the World is a finalist in not one but two categories. It's one of five finalists in Children's/Teen Fiction and one of three finalists in Transgender Fiction. This is a great honor and I am grateful. And, as I mentioned, surprised.