Mallory's Camera

So by far the most exciting thing in my life is The BEAVE, in whom my interest has taken on the feverish fascination of an impending romance. He is a crepuscular critter. If I wait until 8pm or so to take Milo for his final walk of the day, The BEAVE will generally be sitting on the creek bank, shaping tree branches. On days I don’t see him, I stare obsessively at places where I’ve seen him in the past, thinking, Yesterday, THE BEAVE was there -- which is exactly what I do in the obsessive phase with boyfriends. He is quite the contractor – on top of all his other construction projects, he has decided to rebuild his original dam…

I notice too that it’s getting darker earlier: No dying leaves yet (yet)…

Novel going o-kay. Logistical difficulties despite the 45 page Master Plan: in Chapter 4, Joe saves a girl from drowning on a Monterey. Eighty pages later, in Chapter 4, I need Joe to meet a bootlegger – so I have Joe save the bootlegger’s nephew from drowning. This is a lot of junior lifeguard action. But what else can Joe rescue the bootlegger’s nephew from? Rabid otters? A pterodactyl? Vampires?

###

Date wasn’t a disaster. Was a disappointment. Originally I’d suggested doing the Finger Lakes cheese trail but then my afternoon got taken over with transporting RTT back to Hidden Valley. The assignation with PW got pushed back to 4pm.

“There’s a tasting room next to the library,” I suggested to PW hesitantly. “The Finger Lakes tasting room. Local vintages.”

I suggested hesitantly because despite being a huge fan of the movie Sideways, I’m not much of an oenophile. I don’t want to be much of an oenophile. By meeting in a tasting room, I figured I was opening myself up to several hours of pedagogic dissertation: Disappointing. A weak, flabby white. Oregon does much better Rieslings.

PW is a recent transplant from Portland and is obsessed with being the parfait gentil gourmand.

As it turned out though, the tasting room was closed.

So then we had the What-do-you-want-to-do?-No,-what-do-you-want to-do? discussion.

I could tell I wasn’t having a very good time because my voice was doing that Jackie Kennedy thing it always does when I’m not having a very good time. When I’m feeling out of my social element, I always start speaking very, very softly. Part of making myself invisible so I can disappear without anyone noticing, I suppose. Being entirely detached from my own emotions, I sit outside the circle, watching myself.

PW decided we were going to go to a place that fries fish in Cortland. “It’s on the Saveur 100,” he told me.

“What’s Saveur?” I asked.

His eyes grew very wide with astonishment. “You don’t know what Saveur is? It’s just the best food magazine around. You’ve heard of Gourmet, of course?”

“I have.” Abe used to write for Gourmet. A dream job – they were always sending him off to review cruises.

“They went out of business a year ago,” he said.

More like two, I thought. And they didn’t actually go out of business – they switched to being online exclusively. But I didn’t say anything. This was my afternoon for doing Presidential Wife imitations: Now, I was staring at him adoringly á la Nancy Reagan.

“They’d gotten really awful before they closed. Very far from their mission of food. They kept writing about all sorts of irrelevant things – travel and hotels and that sort of thing.”

“Right,” I said. “They were trying to reposition themselves as a lifestyle magazine. To woo a larger advertising base.”

“That’s not it at all,” he told me loftily. “Their editor was someone called Ruth Reichl –“

“I know who Ruth Reichl is.”

“And she’s never had a read dedication to food. Anyway, the magazine went downhill. I was glad to see it close. Saveur is a lot like what Gourmet was like when it was still about food.”

O-kay.

And then we were driving through Freeville. Fucking Freeville! And I said, “You know there’s actually an upscale restaurant in Freeville. I’ve never tried it but I’ve always been curious. Want to take a peak?”

“Sure,” he said.

First I took him on a walk to meet The BEAVE… They weren’t impressed with one another.

Then he started telling me he had hepatitis. Fatty deposits on his liver.

"That's not hepatitis. That's a condition called Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease," I said.

"Oh, I suppose you know more than my doctor?"

I shrugged. “When the aliens take over, they can serve you for fois gras!”

He was not amused.

The restaurant wasn't very good. He drove me back to my car, gave me a kiss on my cheek, and that was that.

Will I ever see him again? Oh, probably. Shopping for fois gras at Wegman's.

Really, if I'm going to end up with anyone, it will have to be someone who laughs at my jokes, gets my obscure movie references and doesn’t make me want to channel my inner Presidential Spouse.

Which means I'm doomed to live out the remainder of my life alone, I suppose.

Courtesy of nihilistic_kid – this very interesting NYT piece on the suddenly ubiquitous Amanda Hocking who is the first person to have figured out how to become a millionaire through ePublishing.

In order to become a millionaire through ePublishing, she had to sell a lot of books. The algebra problem looks something like this:

X x (.7 x 2.99) = 1,000,000 where X c a lot of books

She’s being written about because St. Martin’s just signed her to a two million dollar deal for four books that will be published, sold and marketed the old-fashioned way on paper and with ad campaigns. Will her fanbase be willing to pony up $15 for a trade paperback? Somehow I doubt it. Nor, from the excerpts I’ve read, does she seem to be a compelling enough writer to attract new readers who will happily spend $15 especially since her older stuff is available at one-fifth the price. One assumes, too, that St. Martin’s will be ePublishing the new stuff – are they going to keep to Hocking’s successful pricing model of $2.99 or $0.99 or are they, like most traditional publishers, gonna aim higher?

Hocking, by the way, attributes her success to the book bloggers who touted her and to the fact that she is writing YA novels in a wildly popular subgenre. The secret to success is that you must always write series – sales pick up with the third book but they can go off the charts with the fourth.

I dunno. Should I change the book I’m writing so that John Steinbeck is a vampire?

In other news, I remain funk-bound and incredibly panicky over money to the point where I’m barely eating or sleeping. I spend a lot of time – well, no, not fantasizing about committing suicide per se, just wishing I wasn't alive. Seems pretty clear at this point that my existence on this planet was and is a mistake. Still. I’m writing like an angel on my book project, and writing very fast. I suppose I should hang on at least until it's done. And of course the industrious beaves continue to be a source of great pleasure:



Yeah, yeah, slow till the end when the adorable beave makes his assault on the Beave Fortress of Solitude.