Vacation Thoughts …
July 25, 2007 | 10:34 am
I’m on vacation this week, being lazy and watching boats go by (though I am, like Mole and Rat, doing my fair share of “messing about in boats” as well as watchig them), so this will be a short post. But I do have to say how well suited the Open Your Heart series is for being on vacation! Hopefully as the word gets out about them, more and more of the green covers will be showing up in places like this …
I’m setting a number of my geocaching books traveling via BookCrossing this week, carefully labeled and ready to be tracked online. As I said in the geocaching book itself, my own experience of BookCrossing has been — well, somewhat disappointing, not to put too fine a point on it, as getting people to actually log books in and pass them along is not an easy task. But as Paul has pointed out, the fact is, they’re out there, somebody’s reading them, somebody’s getting enjoyment out of them, so what more can one ask for, really?
BookCrossing is really a phenomenal activity — visit the BookCrossing site now if you haven’t yet — and not just for our books, either. It’s great fun to send a book you love out into the wild and enable many, many more people to read it! Read about how BookCrossing began, read some of the logs, and see if you don’t get hooked, too!
But in the meantime, I’m here to relax, so if you kind folks don’t mind, I’m heading back to do some more of that right now …
Until next week!
— Jeannette
www.jeannettecezanne.com
Posted by: — jcezanne
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More behind the scenes …
July 18, 2007 | 9:03 am
Today’s thank-you goes to the Isaacsons: Shelby, our marketing director, and her husband Tony. I met them both at Book Expo America this year and, it has to be said, they make a formidable team.
Shelby brings a voice and an outlook to DreamTime that will, I’m convinced, eventually bring younger readers to us. She’s already got an active DreamTime presence on MySpace (whereas I, frankly, would rather listen to a lecture on the Merovingian kings — a sorry lot, for those of you not familiar with them — than spend five minutes on MySpace!) and has a lot of creative ideas that probably wouldn’t occur to some of us with a few more miles on our chassis. She is enthusiastic, committed, and one of the nicest people I’ve ever met.
And Tony, who never gets *any* of the glory, helps quietly in ways that the rest of us neither see nor imagine. He was an important presence at BEA and I look forward to seeing him next time in Los Angeles as well.
Tjose of us who get our names on the covers of the books and our thoughts enshrined within them forget sometimes that without the people who *aren’t* on the cover, we wouldn’t be there either. Many thanks to Shelby and Tony!
– Jeannette Cézanne
www.JeannetteCezanne.com
Posted by: — jcezanne
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Generosity trumps not caring in interviews
July 11, 2007 | 2:23 pm
I’ve been thinking a lot about all the people who are making the Open Your Heart series work, and I’d like to devote my next couple of blog posts to them. It’s glamorous to be the author, in front of the microphone, signing the books; but none of us would be here if it were not for a lot of other people.
I’m going to start today with all the folks who agreed to be interviewed for the books. My own experiences in gathering interviews for three of the series books has been overwhelmingly positive. Oh, of course there are those who dismissed the notion out of hand (often, predictably, the “big names” out there; and I did have one author agree to an interview only to vanish from sight when it came due); but all in all, what I’ve encountered is a tremendous willingness to give.
Katherine Hall Page, interviewed for Open Your Heart with Writing, is a very big name indeed on the mystery scene; but she not only gave of her time and insight, she offered to feature links to the book on her own much-visited website. Regie Gibson, arguably one of the most important young poets in the United States today, spoke of the “honor” of writing a Foreword for Open Your Heart with Reading, while Phil Rickman, one of the few people in the world who has me totally starstruck, gave one of the most lengthy interviews of all — while on deadline for his next Merrily Watkins book.
I suspect that all DreamTime authors have had similar experiences, have wonderful stories to recount. Perhaps some of them will share those stories here. In the meantime, however, from one of us, a tremendous thank you to all those who gave of their time, energy, and insight to make these books come alive for the reader. I was told that the many different voices collected for Open Your Heart with Geocaching were the best part of the book, the best introduction possible to the hobby, and I couldn’t agree more.
We’re lucky to have these people in our lives.
– Jeannette
www.jeannettecezanne.com
Posted by: — jcezanne
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And now for something completely different …
July 4, 2007 | 2:46 pm
So I’m going to digress here and talk for a moment about Second Life, the virtual world that is the current wild wild west of the online experience. I’ll get back to words in a moment, I promise.
In Second Life, a great deal of what happens mirrors real life. There is shopping (far too much of it to my taste), and art galleries and clubs and secret societies. You can study there, worship there (even at the venerable Church of Elvis), grieve there. And you can write there.
My husband Paul and I run a review website (http://www.secondseeker.com); we visit venues in Second Life and write about them, since one of the difficulties in this virtual world is finding your way around. And lately I’ve been visiting and writing about — writing. I went to the Bakery of the Poets (named after a venue in the Cyrano de Bergerac novel) — here’s what it looks like (sadly when the photograph was taken, sans poets!):
… and this morning visited the Charles Benjamin Center, notable in that it offers subsidy publishing services: for very little money indeed you too can have your opus available in Second Life.
So what I’m thinking about is this: with so many authors frantic about new technologies and the possible End Of Literature As We Know It, it’s comforting to know that even as our worlds expand to become virtual, the printed word is still very much part of it all.
In Bucharest last month I was told that publishing is doing very well indeed, and this in an exceptionally poor country by American standards. Seems to me that the thirst for words — something that in Open Your Heart with Reading I describe as the impulse to fly away — is alive and well.
And as long as it is, books — in some shape or another — will be as well.
– Jeannette Cézanne
www.JeannetteCezanne.com
Posted by: — jcezanne
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