Tuesday, August 7, 2007

Because It's Attached To The Sky With Fishing Wire

I had a wonderful time at the Flying Pig Bookstore, in Shelburne, Vermont.

First of all, its co-owners, Josie Leavitt and Elizabeth Bluemle, were great- knowledgeable, professional, and tolerant. I had the unexpected pleasure of being there when Elizabeth received her 2007 Wanda Gag Award for Best Read Aloud Book, for her book My Father, the Dog.I trust the kabuki makeup I had on kept her from noticing that I was green with envy.

The crowd at my presentation was small but very high class. The gruesome Yankee Stadium scene from the dead & the gone held everyone's attention. I know this because they didn't throw spitballs at me, or if they did, their aim wasn't very good.

While there,I discovered that Life As We Knew It is in its fifth printing. I base this on my shrewd grasp of the alphabet. My copy has a little letter "A", and the ones I signed at the Flying Pig had little letter "E"s. I've seen "B"s and "C"s before, and I'm taking it on faith that there's a copy with a "D" floating around somewhere.

I have no idea how many copies are in the post "A" printings, but since I've written books that were remaindered on publication day, a fifth printing of any size delights me.

One of the women at my presentation mentioned that students at her school would be reading Life As We Knew It during the school year, and that it was at the suggestion of the school's science department that LAWKI was chosen.

If you think all this would be gratification enough for me, you haven't been reading this blog very long. The second minute after I got home, I raced to Google. And once again, Google didn't let me down. I discovered a place called calcurriculum, which is a pbwiki.com, whatever that means. And somewhere within it, it had a dozen suggestions for teachers, and Number 12 was for students to go to Sciencehack and find a video called "Why doesn't the moon fall down?" and then read Life As We Knew It.

Ha! I'm a science project! And deservedly so. Not only did I watch every single episode of Cosmos on PBS, but I even bought the book. And not at a yard sale either.

I'd been pretty sure that I'd mastered the fiction part of science fiction, but now that there's evidence I'm a Great Scientist as well, whole new career paths are open to me. Writing op-ed pieces for the New York Times. Testifying before Congress. Sitting on committees. Winning Nobel Prizes for Literature and Physics and any other ones they feel like giving me.

See you in Stockholm. I hear it's almost as pretty as Vermont!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Susan,

calcurriculum is part of a project by the California School Librarians Association to help school librarians catch up with Web 2.0. There are currently several hundred of us working with this program. It's really great and one of its best aspects is the wiki that you found where we can write in our own suggestions for using the Web 2.0.

In addition to being one of the librarians using the program, I am also a great fan. I read LAWKI it one sitting and then kept checking the moon expecting to see much larger than it should be. I look forward to the Dead and Gone.

Unknown said...

Well that is quite fascinating news :D.
I don't know about the winning the Nobel thing though...I don't think they usually give out such prizes to SF authors...the literary world is still trying to bat down SF and F as malarkey. The day someone like Asimov gets a Nobel for literature though will be a wonderful day for anyone who reads or writes SF :).