L’esprit d’escalier

This probably isn’t going to be big news to any of you.  Matter of fact, if you know me outside of this blog — if I’ve been to your house, or you’ve been to mine; if you’re a fellow WoW geek and we share a guild tag; if when one of us has passed through the other’s town we’ve met for a meal — you already know this and it isn’t news at all.

If you’ve been reading the blog for a while and put on your Sherlock hat, you might’ve sussed it out already; it’s not something I’ve been trying to hide, exactly.  More something I’ve simply left out.

And, truly, it’s not an earth-shattering confession.  I’m certainly not a Name anywhere.  You’re not going to sit back from your keyboard, stunned and shocked and jaw-dropped when you read it.  However, I’d like to get it out of the way so I can feel comfortable talking about some of the things I’d like to chat about around here, but haven’t, because I wasn’t fully disclosing.  So.  Onward.

It’s no secret that I work for a publisher.  I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned at least once that I’m in sales, and if I went digging, I’m also pretty sure I’ve mentioned my company is one of the Big Six.  But I’ve left the publisher’s name out because, well, this is a personal blog, and while I’ll happily spout forth about the book industry in general, I’m not going to go into specifics about what I do during the day.  Because that would get me fired, and I’m kind of keen on that whole having-a-job thing.

The problem with that, though, is when I’m jumping up and down going “OMG I LOVE THIS BOOK SO MUCH,” if it’s one of ours, I feel weird not saying, “oh, and by the way, I work for the publisher.”  Which means I’ve talked about books in the past, but left out ours, and… well, I dunno.  The bookseller in me thinks that’s really bloody unfair.

Here’s your last chance for sleuthing: click that link and start eliminating publishers.  You can also knock Macmillan off the list, since I gushed about The Gathering Storm, and Simon & Schuster, since I wouldn’t shut up about Under the Dome last fall.  So, with the rest of that list, you can cross off Houghton Mifflin* (Life as We Knew It) Penguin (The Warrior-Prophet, The Name of the Wind), S&S again (Uglies), and Random House (Iron Angel).  That still leaves three big ones.  I’m too lazy to look back and see if I talked up any Harper books (though I did post pictures of my ARC of Fool).

I’ve talked about working in Boston.  Scholastic doesn’t have offices here that I’m aware of.

Which means, if you know your Big Six, you can see who’s missing.

Ladies and gentlemen, I work for Hachette Book Group.

Pick yourselves up off the floor, please, it’s unbecoming.

Now, like I said above, I’m neither a mover nor a shaker.  Not in the company, not in the industry.  If you said my name to someone (unless they’re one of my booksellers) they’d stare at you blankly and say “Who?“

I’m a sales rep, but I always feel like I need to put on the qualifier that I’m in telephone sales.  This doesn’t mean I call you while you’re having dinner and try to sell you stuff you don’t want.  I have an established territory.  I call booksellers whose stores might be smaller, or in out of the way places, or who just don’t need a rep coming out to visit them but still want someone they can call and talk to when they have questions.  I do the same things a field rep does, with the exception of selling face-to-face.

I talk to booksellers about books all day.  It is the best job ever.

It’s also the best company ever.  I’m not saying this to cover my ass in case someone at HBG sees this post.  I’m saying it because every day, something happens that reminds me I work with some of the smartest, savviest, most passionate people in the publishing industry.  From the top down, we have an amazing crew.  There are a lot of unsung heroes at any publisher.  They do jobs that, if you don’t know all the intricacies that go into getting a book on the shelf, you might not even realize existed.  I get to work with many of them, and they keep things running smoothly.

Did I mention the part where I get to talk to booksellers about books?  My buyers are amazing.  I’ve been talking to some of them for eight years now, and a week doesn’t go by that I don’t learn something from them.

I have several buyers who will geek out with me over sf/f books.  We’ll call or email one another and say “Have you read this yet?  Remember the part where…?”  Most of these are Orbit titles.  My booksellers get to go out and handsell them.  I’d like to gush to you lot about those same titles, but I’ve refrained since, well, they’re books I get paid to sell.  It didn’t seem right telling you to go buy a book without the disclaimer that I work for the publisher, so I just kind of self-censored.

Except… except that means I haven’t been talking about some of the books that I’ve absolutely loved, and the books I’m super crazy excited about, and that’s just anathema to me.  Yes, I’m a sales rep, but as I’ve said before, I still consider myself a bookseller at heart.  Booksellers spread the word about the books and authors that they feel strongly about because, well, we’re book lovers.  And if you’re here, reading this, I’m guessing you’re a book lover, too.

Which means, god damn it, we should be talking about books regardless of the ISBN prefix and the little symbol on the spine.

The official stuff, to satisfy my own personal ethics and for our official blogging policy:  the views and opinions expressed on this site are mine and mine alone, and do not reflect the views or opinions of Hachette Book Group.  If I say something stupid, it’s me, not the company.

And, to satisfy the FTC thinger, you can assume that if I’m writing about a book published by HBG, I have received a free ARC or have the manuscript on my shiny little Sony eReader.  (Though, more often than not, if I love a book, when it comes out I’m either buying a copy for myself or buying one for a friend who I think will love it, too.  Because I like it when authors get paid for their books, since that means they get to write more books for me to read.  I also like it when bookstores get to sell books, which keeps them open so I can go shopping in them.  I like bookstores being open.  I’m totally selfish like that.)

Understand, too, that I don’t get any kickback from anyone or anywhere if you lot go out and buy the books I recommend.  The only people who benefit monetarily from you buying books I recommend are the authors and the bookstores.  If you look, I don’t have any ads on here, and I don’t have any affiliation with bookstores that’d earn me money if you bought books through a link on my site.  I do encourage you to buy books through independent bookstores, thus the link to IndieBound over on the side.  But that’s because I like independent bookstores (see above paragraph), not because they’re slipping me twenties through the interwebs.

Lastly, if you have questions about what I do, it’s totally fine to ask, and I’ll answer to the best of my ability.  I reserve the right not to answer certain questions, especially if you’re asking me for proprietary information, or for specifics that I’m not comfortable putting out there on ye olde internet (see: not wanting to get fired).  But I’ll let you know if that’s the case.

Okay?  Okay.

*Houghton-Mifflin isn’t one of the Big Six, but they are one of the last big publishers in Boston, and they’re pretty damned awesome.

Best part of my weekend:

Last week was a long week for me. Very long, and filled with last minute scrambling. Also, lots of finger-pointing, as though I haven’t been saying You need this. No, more than that. Really. for the last three months at least – more like the last six or eight. There were some genuine moments of appreciation and sighs of relief when I delivered good news, but right now I’m having a hard time concentrating on those over some of the moments of nastiness.

I think it’s Generic Summer Burnout – seems like I always spend a few days wishing I was elsewhere at this time of year, and again as the new year starts. Neither do I help myself much by looking at neat places that are offering jobs I think I’d like to try – a bookstore in Cambridge offering full-time, a customer service/GM type position at Turbine for one of their MMOs (granted, WoW is the only MMO I play, but I bet I could do the job). But right now, I’m unwilling to take a pay cut and I’d be forfeiting any potential bonuses that might come from the last months of hell.

And damn it, I’m going to get more satisfaction out of this nightmare than just the gnashing of fangirl teeth (although that is at least a small balm, by itself.)

I had a pretty good weekend, at least. Started on Housework: The Decluttering and got my kitchen and study looking nice, plus a good chunk of laundry put away. I also went through a pile of comic books, separated them out by series, then put them in order. Now I can go through and see what numbers are missing (I’m sure there was a cat-related accident that made me have to throw some away a while back.) Though, I’m also fairly certain there’s at least another stack or two of comics hidden away somewhere – I found big gaps across several series, all the same month’s issues.

I need to buy longboxes to store them in. At least one, maybe two. Not that I have any idea where to put them…

It’s been a kind of listless week for writing so far, too. Several things I want to start, or continue, or finish, and yet whenever I open up their gdocs, I find myself just staring at the screen. I’ve partly overwhelmed myself, so I’m not quite sure where to start, or which one is shouting at me the loudest. Yesterday I thought it would be smart to simply go in chronological order. That didn’t go so well, either.

I’m feeling generally blah about my writing right now, too, which is never useful. On the one hand, as so many people have said whenever I bemoan how many titles on the bestseller lists are junk right now: if that kind of stuff can not only get published, but also succeed, it should be a comfort knowing that I can do better. But I’m frustrated by it and I think it’s getting under my skin enough that it’s been hard to write the last couple of days. Silly, I know, but there it is. What should be inspiring me to produce something better is instead making me look at my own stuff and wonder if I’m actually capable of doing better. It’s intimidating.

So, for the moment, while I could wait for the Muse to come kick me in the ass, she seems to have gone off on a bit of a jaunt. I’ll muddle through without her for a bit, pick something and stick to it and see what I can crank out that’s worth keeping in the meantime.

I’m a bad blogger.

I’ve been shirking my duties to entertain you lot, but for good reason!

First is work-related. There is a rant coming of epic proportions, and I’m trying to make it less angry-sales-rep-rawr and more constructive-advice-to-booksellers. But it’s tough right now since I’m still in the rawr phase. I’ll probably be in it for another month at least, but I’m hoping to get the post up this week.

Second is writing stuff (yay!). I’ve mentioned before that Annalea’s not terribly forthcoming with me. I have added notes and taken them away from her gdoc, trying desperately to figure out how the pieces of her puzzle fit together. She shuffles some around when I’m not looking, hides others in the cabinets, or under the plants, snatches one from my hand just as I see where it belongs and puts another in its place.

She’s mischievous like that.

I spent a good chunk of last week trying to pry a scene out of her, and finally posted it around 1:00 this morning. It was, I think, one of the hardest I’ve written for her in over a year. I know what happens from there on out, but this was a blank space – I knew the conversation had taken place, and that it hadn’t necessarily ended on an ideal note, but I didn’t know exactly what had been said.

It was awkward for her – Anna’s armor is, quite often, nothing more than her pride. Here she was, going to someone above her station, hat in hand, feeling as low as she ever had. It was hard getting it right for her – her words, her thoughts, her reactions. And the person she spoke with really isn’t the villain here, either (though the villain has made his appearance, now, finally), so it was tough to coax that bumbling chat out of him, too, and finding the line between him being an ass and simply coming from a different kind of mindset.

Of course, now that the scene is finished, Anna’s dangling another puzzle piece in front of me. She seems to have peeked over at the puzzle on her sister’s table and found a piece gathering dust. “I want to borrow him,” she’s saying, and Threnn’s too busy staring at something small and shiny and red to do more than shrug.

This hypothetical conversation between Anna and Robert Bell (a minor character who has appeared briefly several times in Threnn’s stories) came to me almost in its entirety as I was walking to get my coffee this morning. It’s a good one. Actually, it’s a very sweet one. I know I could take that puzzle piece from her, and if I turned it over in my hands, I’d have it done in less time than it’s taken to write this post.

But I don’t think it belongs in the story that I’m writing right now. It doesn’t hurt the tale, really, but I can’t say it quite fits, either. If it was a movie, it would be a deleted scene. I think it’s canon for her, because it’s the second time she’s tried co-opting this minor character that I’ve hitherto associated with Threnn, but I’m not so sure it’ll ever actually be written.

We’re going to argue about this, Anna and I, but I think she can see the other pieces wanting to fall into place, too, and this is a digression neither of us desperately need. The backstory is… nearly done. Two more posts/chapters/installments/whatever-you-call-them, maybe three, and then I’ll see about this other scene. If it’s anything as vivid as it is right this second, it’ll end up somewhere.

I have a folder called “Stuff the Author Knows” on my machine at home. It’s mostly for things I’ve cut out of my longer stories – worldbuilding stuff that I don’t want to forget, scenes that don’t fit anywhere now but might later on, characters who don’t quite belong to the story in which they first appeared. I’m starting to think I need to add one to my gdocs, too.

So, yeah. Bad blogger, no biscuit.

I am an occupational hazard waiting to happen today. I wish I could say that the stacks of samples perched willy-nilly along the edges of my cube’s walls were the building blocks for a Fortress of Evil, but alas. It’s awfully hard to make a Fortress of Evil out of colorful children’s books. Bunnies and farm animals just aren’t all that intimidating.

So, instead, I watch as people walk by and cringe if someone’s footfalls are too heavy, waiting for the inevitable crash. I’ll have a hell of a mess to clean up if they fall (and maybe some apologizing to do, if the heavy-treaded ones are too close.) But right now, there’s nowhere else to put anything; there’s so much sample material that it has overtaken the surface of my desk and made me resort to the stacking of things atop narrow ledges.

However, once it’s all mailed out and the leftovers put away, I am sorely tempted to open up a package of monsters and a package of knights and lay out a battlefield along my desktop.

The only problem with that is that Cthulhu is one of the monsters (yes, we have a children’s book featuring the greatest of the Great Old Ones.) I think he might eat all the others, rather than side with the rest of the hellspawn.

And then, when I come in one day and find that all my coworkers have turned into fish people, I’ll feel really bad.

(You got it, you got it)

I went walking at lunch.  They were there. 

I have a good job. For the most part, I love my company, and the people I work with. We have a great benefits package, more vacation time than I sometimes know what to do with (I’ve used almost all of it this year, but in 2006 I had to take a bunch of time off late in the year because I was in danger of losing carryover days. I know, poor me, right?) I’d like to make more money – who wouldn’t? – but every time I’ve looked, the only things I really qualify for that pay more are high-pressure sales jobs.

Yes, I am a sales rep. But I’m a very laid-back one. I probably could push harder for some things, but booksellers tend to dislike being strong-armed. I tell them what I like, what I think will do well, and they take it into consideration. It’s worked for five years. The idea of going to sell some other product somewhere else and having someone constantly looking at how close I am to hitting my quota makes me shudder.

Plus, I don’t think there’s anything else I could sell convincingly. So, really, if I leave here, my next job won’t be in sales unless I’ve hit the lottery and opened my own store.

I’m having one of my random wish-I-was-somewhere-else weeks. Despite all the pros of this job, I’m dwelling on the long days (11 hours, when you factor in my commute) and wishing I worked closer to home. I keep looking to see what openings are available elsewhere, especially at the college I went to. Six months working there, and I could start taking classes again, which I’d love to do, given the time and (what else?) money.

But the pros here still outweigh the cons. Unless something stellar (and bookseller-y) opens up close to home, I just need to suck it up and buckle down. There are things I could do to feel more productive at work and at home. It’s a matter of getting in the right frame of mind and doing them.

However, until I can kick my own ass into that mindset, I’m going to be at my desk, brooding and bleh.

I don’t know if this is a rant, a whine, or some strange kind of pep-talk, but it feels at least a little better to articulate whatever this feeling is. Best name I can give it is work-related wanderlust.

Wanderlust, by the way, is an awesome word.