If you’re in Santa Barbara tonight and you want to come over to Chaucer’s and say hello and have me sign a book or two, that would be INCREDIBLE. For me! Maybe not for you. But probably for you? Look, I’m not making any promises. We’ll be at Harry’s afterward, then I’ll start making promises.
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Tag Archives: Let’s Panic
Lunch with an old friend
Note: If you are someone who has ever appeared to be the slightest bit open to paranormal explanations for everyday occurrences, I will happily infuse whatever subsequent conversations we have with that topic so that you don’t have to look like the crazy one.
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P-Day
Yesterday was the publication day for “Let’s Panic About Babies!” and I spent it badgering people on Twitter, eating omelets with Alice, harassing a nice young man at the NYU bookstore who knew that five copies of the book just had to be around here SOMEWHERE, and shopping for shoes that I didn’t actually need. (No actual money was spent. Gotta earn back that advance!)
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And I haven’t vacuumed in weeks
One of the jokes in Let’s Panic the book is about how the Internet is such a satisfying and entertaining resource for new parents. Alice and I single out six web sites for having been particularly helpful throughout our own early months as first-time mothers. The list is fake, of course–we would never go to the Internet for advice, my God! Who would do such a thing?–but it occurred to us that we should register those sites and put something up on them as a little reward for diligent readers (and not-so-diligent readers who just happen to see this post).
I volunteered to take care of it.
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Adios, NaBloPoMo
Just One Nipple!
This is a page from a magazine my mother received when she left the hospital with her first child in 1953. The drawing accompanies an article called “So You Can’t Afford a Nurse!” I don’t know anyone who brought an actual nurse home with her baby, did that used to be a thing you did? For normal, healthy babies? It sounds like a thing that Modern, Scientific People would have done when faced with the medical anomaly that is a helpless, pre-verbal human. And God forbid you’d put your own unsterilized nipple in its mouth.
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The Piggy Bank Gang
I spent the whole weekend on the phone with Alice finishing editing book pages and adding images and updating photo credits and such! And then sending the book back to New York via UPS! And now I’m drinking Champagne and I’m not about to try to post anything substantial! So here’s a good one from the archives. My parents’ house in Chicago was robbed in 1955 and apparently this was big enough news to make the Tribune. My dad lost his Heidelberg ring in the robbery.
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Happy
I happily, happily spent the day with designed pages spread out all over the bed, looking for typos and hanging out with Peewee. The book is looking so good. There’s stuff I still want to rewrite but I have to let it go. There are design problems but we’ll get them sorted out. I’m just so happy and proud and stoked, and I hope the book does well but even if it tanks? I’m still so happy with what we did. Can I say happy one more time? I’m happy.
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And on the twelfth day
I spent today’s writing-time allocation doing an update for Let’s Panic and getting ready for a weekend in Pismo. So, uh, you know. Sorry. You’ve seen a lot of family photos lately, so here’s a photo from our last trip up here:
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Yaaaaayyy!
Thanks to many hours put in by the handsome, unflappable Joe, my enormous blog has migrated from Blogger to WordPress. I have some mixed feelings about this — I wasn’t all FUCK YOU, BLOGGER, YOU SUCK! when they announced they were withdrawing support for the unwieldy circus my uploading procedures had (apparently) become. It’s just that our needs weren’t the same anymore. It was like breaking up with someone I still really liked, who always treated me pretty well and he had a certain style and we totally liked the same kind of peanut butter, but then suddenly he told me that to keep the relationship together I’d have to move to Beijing.
So since he was moving out anyway, I thought I’d redecorate.
My other news, of course, is that Alice and I delivered the manuscript for Let’s Panic to St. Martin’s Press Monday morning at 1:45 a.m. Eastern time so our editor would find it in her inbox when she arrived at work. (This was Alice’s idea. I was thinking of sending it around noon, maybe? After a late breakfast?) Surprisingly, to me, maybe not to you, after pulling several 16-hour days of writing and editing and IM’ing and losing the ability to tell if anything I’d written was funny anymore, I woke up Monday morning to discover my eyes hurt. I had legitimately overworked my eyeballs, my eye stems — all my eye appurtenances. My little eye biceps were tired, you guys! These drugstore reading glasses have done me no favors, I suppose. Apart from making it possible to read. So I need to find a good ophthalmologist, or maybe just an optometrist, and I’d go to Wikipedia to remind myself of the difference right now but, OW, IT HURTS TO LOOK AT THINGS, OW.
