The Publisher's Marketing Manager and the Diseased Brownies: Staff Development Day part 1

Someone was in my apartment this weekend. Happily, it was an invited someone and not a stranger. 

While working in Raleigh, I was lucky enough to get to know the library marketing manager for a major publisher who was telecommuting from Chapel Hill. Recently, she agreed to come down and be part of a book buzz at my current library's staff development day. Talia is a ball of energy and has a sense of humor that rivals my own, so I asked her stay with me while she was in town. Not only was it the least I could do, but she'd be great entertainment for the weekend.

I picked her up from the airport on a sunny Sunday morning. "Oh!" she commented. "Its so pretty here!" Talia is nothing if not very well-mannered.

"Don't judge Gainesville by this side of town," I warned her. Because despite her enthusiasm, we were driving through an industrial area on our way into downtown and the edge of campus. 

She was insistent. "But, it's Florida!" she exclaimed. Considering that she'd just left a snow-covered North Carolina, anyplace where she could see pavement was probably acceptable. 

"Well, now," I responded, raising my eyebrows, "you don't see any palm trees, do you?" I explained that, in many ways, Gainesville and northern Florida is not like the rest of Florida, with a different climate and topography. Talia dismissed this with a wave of her hand. She was happy just to be anywhere in Florida. I love people who are easy to please.

My mind never being very far from food, I asked Talia if she was hungry. She tilted her head like she was considering this when I added, "I made brunch reservations for ten minutes from now."

She beamed. "Oh, good, I'm starving." Once again, easy to please. 

Brunch was lovely, full of excellent food and talking over one another in between bites. We were especially amused by the man who was charged with keeping the buffet full and fresh and found it necessary to announce what he was delivering at every pass through the dining room. Afterwards, we made a requisite trip trip through Target, as I wanted to illustrate that the floorplan of the Gainesville Target is simply wrong. We love Target (and since Talia found two pairs of shoes in less than ten minutes, I'm including her in the Target heartfest), but this one really needs to be rearranged. I'm just saying.

Making it back to my apartment, Talia finally got to meet Sasha. I think it was pretty clear that Sasha would have been all over her immediately if it wasn't for her even more immediate need for Fancy Feast. A girl's gotta have priorities. We settled in, and it wasn't long before Sasha's affinity for my lap was quickly replaced.
 









At this point, I need to explain that I had prepared for Talia's visit and the upcoming Staff Development Day with boxes of brownies and lemon bars. I rarely cook or bake (if you can call mixing up something from a box baking), but I had someone here to encourage me and an event at which I could share, so what better time to pull out the mixing bowls? Also, I could blame someone else if they didn't come out right. I spent a good bit of time comparing mixes to make just the right choice for this rare baking event. Some of the rejected candidates include:

I can't eat multi-colored food, especially if one of the colors is blue.

Is there enough cookie in that brownie?

Maybe others don't like PB & Chocolate as much as I do

Way too reminiscent of something healthy

I try to buy American

I settled on a box of lemon bars and a different brand of chocolate chip cookie brownies. Talia, being of similar mind, agreed that there was really no need to venture back out of the apartment when we had perfectly good brownies for dinner, not to mention the entire first season of Breaking Bad to watch.

We started with the lemon bars, Talia quickly showing mad baking skills by preparing the mix. "I need a tablespoon of water," she read from the box. This being something I could manage, I grabbed a measuring spoon and prepared the water. While she continued with the mix, I greased the pan. "How smooth do you think this needs to be?" she asked me. Like I knew. Luckily, we were working on a bottle of wine, so after a while, the texture of the lemon bar mix just didn't seem all that important.

Talia having the lemon bars under control, I moved on to the cookie brownies. See Tracy bake. You might never see it again.

Talia helped me finish the cookie brownies by dropping teaspoons of chocolate chip cookie mix onto the brownie batter already in the pan. "This doesn't look right," she said, peering at the pan. 

"It's brownies and chocolate chip cookies. How's it supposed to look?" I responded, motioning her to keep going. Eventually, we popped the pans into the oven and turned back to the counters to clean up (and I say that like it wasn't Talia who ended up doing the dishes. Great manners, that one.). "Um, whats that?" I asked, pointing at the measuring spoon of water for the lemon bars, still on the counter. Talia looked stricken. She looked at the measuring spoon. She looked at the oven. She looked back at the measuring spoon. She looked at me. I shrugged.

"The lemon bars are going to be a bit dry," she announced.

We settled into the living room. Talia got me invested in Breaking Bad while we waited, so my perfect Sunday afternoon of food, wine, friends, and television was complete. 

At one point, she got up to check on the brownies. "I really don't think these look right," she called from the kitchen. "They're diseased! They look like they have small pox!"

"Well, they smell great," I replied. I was not to be deterred from chocolate and sugar that easily. A short time later, we went in to pull them out of the oven. She was right. The cookie brownies kind of looked diseased. Or like a Jersey Cow. One of those. Talia refused to bring them to Staff Development Day, saying she wanted nothing to do with diseased brownies. But because we'd pulled them out of the oven just a bit early, they were nice and gooey and tasted just fine. Even if they were diseased.

Coming soon: Staff Development Day part 2

Keeping Up with the Joneses

This morning (just to be clear, morning on a Sunday refers to noon to 2pm), I finally got to catch up on some book reviews I've been wanting to write. My need to do them justice means I've put it off longer than I should (kind of like my blog entries), which means I've probably forgotten the best thoughts I had while reading them, which means everyone else I know has already reviewed the same books, probably better, and tweeted them far and wide, which means...well, you get the picture.

My name is Tracy, and I'm a book addict. I love talking with other people about what we're reading, and I love sharing my thoughts about what I've read with other people. Is that the same thing? In any case, I'm extremely lucky to be have a number of outlets for my addiction. As a librarian, many of my co-workers share this fondness for books, if not always to the obsessive level at which I find myself. I've had opportunities for getting to know publisher representatives at conferences, and I try to repay their kindnesses by sending along my thoughts about the many advance copies of upcoming books they send me. I have an account at Edelweiss, which the uninitiated might think is a Sound of Music Fan Club, but no, is actually an online community of publishers, booksellers, and librarians offering purchasing opportunities for booksellers and digital advance copies for book pushers (I told you it was an addiction). Recent improvements have made it a fantastic spot for sharing reviews with colleagues and publishers, and most recently, for voting for favorite books among librarians nation-wide in, to be shared with patrons via the new LibraryReads program, who love to know what librarians are reading (as well they should). Similarly, while I continue to refuse to get back on Facebook, I haunt Goodreads, which allows me to see what the general public is reading and enjoying as well as friends and family. I finally gave in and got a Twitter account, which is quite busy considering I use it only for keeping up with book, author, publisher, and library-related news. I've said it once, and I'll say it again...authors are my rock stars. And I try to participate in GalleyChat, a monthly chat about the advances my fellow librarians are reading sponsored by the fabulous Earlyword. 

And, you know, it's starting to feel a little like I'm that kid in school who can't manage to keep up with the rest of the class. Or that person in the neighborhood who has the smallest house and not nearly as many bells and whistles as the people next door. Don't get me wrong. I adore being part of all of these stomping grounds. But I'm amazed at how far ahead everyone else seems to be! They're putting out multiple reviews a month and seem to have read everything out there before it's ever published. I do read a few advances a month, but there's plenty out there I haven't read even AFTER it's been published, so I'd like to pull one of those out once in a while as well. And while there's a time and place for every type of book, my taste generally seems to run to less literary books than some of the people on these sites, so even when I've read several advances in time for a GalleyChat or a LibraryReads voting deadline, they're not necessarily the books everyone's talking about. I don't know how these folks manage to read everything they do as far ahead as they do!

So, I keep working at it. I'm nothing if not stubborn. I threw myself into it this morning and wrote several reviews of books that I really feel strongly about and want to share, maybe convincing someone to try one who wouldn't have otherwise. This is why I wanted to be a librarian from the start. It takes time to then post your review to all these places and hit all the people who might be interested, but it can be worth it. Last week, a friend submitted a 4 of 5 rating for a book I'd suggested to her, but which I'm not sure would have come across her radar otherwise. After I posted my reviews to what felt like a million places this morning, the author of one of them squealed "thank you!" back at me. Last time I commented on GalleyChat, the publisher retweated it to its thousands of followers. And I persevere. I may eventually be persevering via fewer venues, but I persist nonetheless.

But at the same time, I'm not going to lose the love I have for books by trying to keep up with all those people out there who seem to be ahead of me in their zeal for commenting on new books ahead of publication. Three of the four books I reviewed this morning have already published. One was published several months ago, but I decided to share my fondness for it anyway. I mostly only review books that I want to recommend, and I'm going to do so whether the book is new or not. If I can fit in some of those same advances everyone else is tweeting about, great. I have an unofficial 50 page rule, the general spirit being that life's too short and there are too many good books out there to keep reading something I'm not enjoying, advance publicity or not. I also really like listening to audio books, which generally don't come out in an advance form ahead of the print release, so if that means everyone's talking about it before I get there, well, then I'll have something to look forward to.

And now I must go get ready for my library's upcoming Book Buzz, at which we'll have not one, not two, but THREE major publisher representatives live and in person to tell us what's going to be hot this Spring and Summer. I'm a lucky girl.