June 15, 2010
Nothing says summer in Seattle like a hearty bowl of stew. I read comments and posts of friends and acquaintances from around the country and globe--the summer sun streaming in California windows, pea-soup humidity swaddling the Midwest, sandy beach frolics on the east coast, and so on, and I try to feel smug about our upper-left-hand "otherness." "We don't need no stinking sunshine." It doesn't work. It's mid-June, for crying out loud, and the same coats and hats hang from the backs of chairs in my house as they did in February and March. Oh, there have been a few teaser days of blue and relative warmth--perhaps four?--but nothing to, you know, bloom about. And it doesn't take much in these parts to get the shorts and sunscreen out.
I vividly remember a June day in perhaps 1998, when my older son was in the twilight of his Little League career, playing on an "All Star" team that had survived to compete beyond the usual Memorial Day season's end. I was helping out at practice, at a field just down the street, hitting fly balls to the outfield, while a group of women who'd just dropped off their kids looked on from the bleachers. The sun was out, the sky was blue, the fielders were (mostly) hitting the cutoff man and I was as close to playing baseball as I'm likely ever to get again--a happy moment to be sure. During a break one of the moms called me over to the backstop to ask, in all seriousness, if I thought perhaps we should cancel practice today. Puzzled, I asked her why on earth? "You know, the heat," she said. "We're worried about the boys in this heat." I assured her that there was plenty of water in the dugout cooler, and that I would make sure we took breaks so they could rehydrate, but that really I thought they'd be okay. "Well, just don't let them overdo it," she admonished, giving me one of the looks that women reserve for men they suspect of serious cognitive deficiencies (i.e., all men they know personally). I told her we'd be careful.
I didn't even wait for play to resume: I rushed to my nearby car, turned on the radio to the local news station and waited through a couple of commercials for the weather update. The temperature? 68 degrees. Fahrenheit. As warm as it probably got all month. The moms were not kidding. They feared for their children.
(The boys made it through practice without incident. Thanks for asking.)
This week marks two months since the Houdini Pie release party. I have no idea how many copies have sold. Reviews pop up here and there on blogs and such. One fellow thought it "moved slowly," which made me laugh as most readers have finished it in three sittings or less. I wonder what he would have thought of its first draft, which was easily three times as long as the final. (I noted that this particular reader's favorite books were the those of the Twlilight series. 'Nuff said?) A new printing, with corrected typos, is ostensibly in the works. (The typos are aggravating, as most of them either I or the editor had caught in the galleys, but somehow the printer missed our corrections.) In just two short months I find that my bookish energies have almost completely migrated to the work-in-progress, which speaks volumes of my (absent) skills a marketer and self promoter. I have a novel out? You don't say? It's hard to stay on task, promotion-wise.
Maybe it's the heat.
