Archives - Weekly Update

The weather in the New York area has been amazingly spring-like this week; it was 73 as I walked into the office just now. I do not remember a February with a string of weather like this. The year Greg was born, there was one really warm day in February. I remember bundling him up to take him for a walk and then realizing if I was in shorts, why was he wearing a snowsuit? He was squalling to tell me that this was not a great idea. Funny early days of being a mom moment!

I personally think that every month should have at least one loooooong weekend. Seriously. There is something wonderful about anticipating the 1,000 ways I will spend an extra weekend day. And trust me, there always are 1,000 with me.

Last week, I mentioned that I was looking forward to escaping with reading over the weekend. I had manuscripts of upcoming books to read, all downloaded and ready to go on my iPad. Life was good until Saturday night when the iPad began to turn itself off every few minutes. This led to the kind of reading I loathe: message board trolling for how to conquer tech issues and outreach via Facebook to my “hive” for ideas. (Of course, my AppleCare two-year plan had expired). I did a backup, I did the network reinstall, the factory reinstall --- same problem. I was frustrated by being mired in tech issues instead of reading.

Yesterday, as the snow was falling, I was remembering the “olden days” when the boys' schools had a phone chain for snow days. The class mother would get the first call, and from there a chain reaction would happen...you bonded with the family who called you and the one you called. Later it was robocalls and the internet, but I took a moment to pause and remember the phone chain! Oh, and I also remembered the robocall that came in on my cell phone at 3am when I was on a business trip in Denver when the time on the east coast was 5am; not fun.

What a jam-packed week this was after a super busy conference at the American Booksellers Association’s Winter Institute!

I try to meet as many authors as possible at these events --- those who have books that I know will be getting all the buzz in the months ahead, as well as those who are debut writers. While it was impossible to interact with all 100+ authors, I treasured the conversations that I did have. As you know, I am wild about QUICKSAND by Malin Persson Giolito; she was in from Sweden where QUICKSAND was named the Best Crime Novel of the Year in 2016, which is Sweden’s official suspense literature award given by the Swedish Crime Writers’ Academy. Given the storied history of Swedish crime fiction, this was worth noting. I loved meeting her. The book will be out here on March 7th, and we are going to be running a contest for it in two weeks!