What's Going On?

I started having pain in my left arm this summer. I thought I had pulled a muscle, so I rested it for a couple of weeks. It didn't help, so I saw a shoulder specialist, who took X-rays and explained that it was referred pain from my shoulder. He gave me a shot of cortisone and sent me to physical therapy. Though the physical therapy worked to an extent, my second visit to that doctor showed me he didn't really understand what was going on with my shoulder.

My physical therapist recommended another specialist, whom I learned was in partnership with the shoulder specialist my husband saw a couple of years ago when he had trouble with his left shoulder. (He had had shoulder surgery shortly before we got married because his shoulder kept dislocating. Though his surgeon had long ago retired, he referred his patients to the specialist my husband saw a couple of years ago.)

Although I didn't know it at the time, it turns out it's my husband's doctor is the top shoulder specialist in the city. Luckily he saw me right away, looked at my older X-rays, and gave me a 2nd shot of cortisone, one which actually worked for a few days. Both my physical therapist and I noticed an immediate improvement in my shoulder, but a week later it had started to regress. So I went back to the doctor, who indicated that the shot had been as much for diagnostic purposes as it had been for pain. We talked about it, he sent me for an MRI, and after getting those results, scheduled surgery for a few days before Christmas.

Everyone in my side of the family has a very low threshold of pain, so after surgery when the doctor said my shoulder had been really messed up, I was actually relieved. Not only was there a tear in the rotator cuff, but the bone spur he had expected in my shoulder had actually broken off, leaving everything inflamed and disgusting. I had just started physical therapy again, a week after my surgery, when my husband, daughter and I went to see A Dangerous Method. I missed the last step going down a large flight of stairs and landed directly on my left wrist. After trying to ignore the pain through lunch, I noticed a huge blood clot had developed on my wrist, and we ended up at a nearby doc in the box. Two hours later I learned nothing had broken but that my left arm, hand, and fingers were badly sprained. They splinted my hand and wrist and sent me on my way.

When, a few days later I realized I kept re-injuring my hand, my husband suggested I see a specialist. He agreed that nothing was broken but I left his office with my wrist hand and fingers in a cast. I am supposed to have the cast removed this week, and I hope most of the swelling, pain, and general ickiness will be gone. I did take a break from PW duties for the last week in December, and have muddled through my last three reviews using DragonDictate, a voice recognition program I am using to write this very blog entry. I wish I had had Dragon Dictate back in November when I researched and wrote my 1st publishers weekly feature article, which required me to interview 20 authors, then writes eight hours a day for two days to complete the piece.

All of this explains why I've not blogged in months, but this weekend, when I went to look something up in my old blog, I discovered it was gone. Blog-city.com apparently went off line on December 31. I did not know they were going bye-bye, because all their e-mails to me must have been sent to my old AAR address, which has been defunct for 3 years.

This had a very disheartening effect on me; that's more than 6 1/2 years of writing, including probably 100 reviews. Even worse was discovering that I did not have complete archives for the blog. When I switched from PC to Mac this summer, I needed to jettison old files, all of which I had backed up. Unfortunately, the process of transferring files did not go entirely as planned, and not everything made it through the process. Among the lost files was a huge XML file containing the old blog in its entirety. I contacted blog-city.com's owners this weekend, and have requested they try to send me another backup. In the interim, I decided to upload here on blogger the files I did retain, which includes everything from the original blog's inception in 2002 to early 2007. There is simply too much good stuff for me to let go entirely, and it's a shame that all those links from AAR and Heroes and Heartbreakers are now useless. But by my uploading the blog here--each month is a single entry--I will feel better. I can only hope that those missing months can be accounted for. As for the password-protected portions of blog, I have no clue whether or not they were/are included in the archive files, but I'll soon find out. So far I've uploaded August, September, and October 2002.

As for my injuries, I plan to work through any remaining discomfort associated with my shoulder and arm in trying to get back into online writing. The hand may slow me down, but now that I know that anything I do to my shoulder cannot damage my shoulder, I'm going to grin and bear it.

See you here and there!

What's Going On?

Fresh Meat: Rhyannon Byrd's Rush of Pleasure

Online from me today at Heroes & Heartbreakers

Fresh Meat: Rhyannon Byrd's Rush of Pleasure (excerpted below)

***

At the conclusion of my Fresh Meat on Rhyannon Byrd’s Rush of Darkness, the seventh in her Primal Instinct series, I wrote about my hope for the series' end sooner rather than later. Turns out that Rush of Pleasure, the eighth in the series, is also the last...and now I don’t know how I feel about that. It’s true that I missed the middle three books in the series, and that there were problems with Rush of Pleasure. But now that it’s over, I kinda wish for more, and am glad that on Byrd’s website she mentions Deadly Is the Kiss, an April 2012 release from HQN about Ashe Granger, a secondary character in the series. It’s somehow a stand-alone, even though Granger figured in at least three of the series’ installments. After eight books in a relatively short period of time, August through April seems a long time to wait, but I can do it.

Please click here to read my new Fresh Meat in full. Feel free to comment on Rush of Pleasure, Rhyannon Byrd, and/or the entire Primal Instinct series at H&H once you've read it.

Click the label for Rhyannon Byrd below for more entries at Toe in the Water, including my review of Touch of Seduction, fourth in the Primal Instinct series.

Fresh Meat: Rhyannon Byrd's Rush of Pleasure

Fresh Meat: Janet Mullany's Tell Me More

Online from me today at Heroes & Heartbreakers

Fresh Meat: Janet Mullany's Tell Me More (excerpted below)

***

Knowing there's a difference between fantasy and reality is one thing, but having reality shoved in your face, even in a fictional setting, is something else entirely. Janet Mullany's Tell Me More is hilarious at moments because Jo Hutchinson is brutally honest, about herself and the people and situations around her. Unfortunately, that honesty, and the absolute explicitness of the author's prose result in a schizophrenic kind of read. The book went from LOL funny in one moment to squickishness in the next.

Please click here to read my new Fresh Meat in full. Feel free to Tell Me More over at H&H once you've read it.

Fresh Meat: Janet Mullany's Tell Me More

New at H&H: A Makeover of a Different Kind

I think that subconsciously, watching Will Farrell's hilarious appearance on Conan O'Brien's show in early May gave me the idea for my new article at Heroes & Heartbreakers. It reminded me of a joke I heard back in the day. The joke kicks off the article. Feel free to watch the clip below in its entirety, but it's between 1:20 and 1:55 minutes in that it all started to gel in my head.

Putting a piece out there of on a topic such as this (you'll see when you read it) was not something I took lightly. I mentioned last week that I had a blast writing it, but that it took a lot of effort on my part to get to and maintain just the right tone...to write about a delicate matter and keep it light so as to be funny yet not be prurient, and to be revelatory enough while not exposing myself too much in the text. Hopefully I succeeded.

Because of the subject matter's delicacy, I feel a little squirmy knowing that people will actually read the article. On the other hand, I'm kinda proud of myself for tackling the topic in a funny way. Did I succeed? Please let me know by posting a comment at H&H after you read it.

New at H&H: A Makeover of a Different Kind

New at H&H: LKH's Merry Gentry FTW

My newest piece for the Heroes and Heartbreakers blog just went online this morning.

Gee, a new article online and a huge birthday all in the same day. As my daughter asked me not to work today, this'll be it from me, although I don't think reading possible comments and maybe responding counts. She's not here at the moment for me to ask. <g>

Before the new Anita Blake book came out, Megan asked those of us who read her if we would write about our LKH experience. Hence, Laurell K. Hamilton's Merry Gentry Series: Merry Gentry For the Win, which is self-explanatory. I know the series attracts far fewer readers than Anita does, but then, I'm a natural born contrarian.

Hop on over to H&H and read it, and consider posting a comment. Hope you'll enjoy the visit!

New at H&H: LKH's Merry Gentry FTW

Some Interior Design

I got a wild hair yesterday and redesigned my blog using the same paisley background I created to use on twitter. Blogger redesigned its layout since I set up Toe in the Water last year, so it wasn't simply a matter of swapping out a background image for the black background, and adjusting text and link colors. Color blocking and new fonts were involved, widgets, moving things around, and basic tweaking by conventional means, followed by jerry-rigging to fix other minor issues. I'm still not quite happy with needing to move the "Share" widget to the side column from underneath the blog description, but I'm not skilled enough in html/css to handle transparencies from scratch. At least i managed to figure out how to use the same "AddToAny" widget for the blog as a whole and for each individual entry...that took some time. The real issue is that the tag cloud at the bottom of the page may not be as readable as it could be, but I hope you'll let me know if that's the case.

Sometimes you just gotta zhuzh, ya know? Particularly when it helps keep those mad skills developed over years, even for a blog nobody reads. <g>

Some Interior Design

Fresh Meat: Kristina Douglas' Demon

Online from me today at Heroes & Heartbreakers

Fresh Meat: Kristina Douglas' Demon (excerpted below)

* * *

I need to get this out of the way first: I think Anne Stuart, a.k.a. Kristina Douglas, is awesome. Four of her books sit on my all-time keeper shelf, and what I notice more and more is that as her heroes go farther in skirting the edge or going over it in terms of acceptable behavior, the more I seem to love it. She skirted the edge of it with her heroes in the four that I read of her five-book Ice series, and she took them over it in her 2010 historical House of Rohan series, culminating with possibly the biggest prick in my experience reading romance: Lucien De Malheur, the 'hero' in Breathless. So I had high expectations for Demon, the second in her Fallen series written under the pseudonym Kristina Douglas. Demon will not be joining Breathless, Ice Storm, A Rose at Midnight, and To Love a Dark Lord on my all-time keeper shelf because I'm stingy when it comes to annointing books and it's nowhere near her best work, but it offered plenty of nougaty goodness nonetheless. I'll focus on two nougats...

Please click here to read my new Fresh Meat in full. Would love for you to add a comment.

Fresh Meat: Kristina Douglas' Demon

Fresh Meat: Carolyn Jewel's My Dangerous Pleasure

Online from me today at Heroes & Heartbreakers

Fresh Meat: Carolyn Jewel's My Dangerous Pleasure (excerpted below)

Cupcake, anyone?

* * *

What stands out most after reading My Dangerous Pleasure, fourth in Carolyn Jewel's Immortal series, is this: The hero, while totally the alpha male you'd expect a demon to be, is also incredibly sweet to the heroine, a human with latent magic being threatened by a mage.

The typical urban fantasy/urban fantasy romance hero is usually pretty slutty, with a bad-ass attitude to match. He's generally pulled into helping/saving/working with the heroine, often begrudgingly, and...yada, yada, you know the drill. Iskander, Jewel's hero, fulfills the slutty part of the equation, but even though he never planned any sort of involvement with Paisley Nichols, he brings no pissed off, sullen, or I'm-the-boss-of-you attitude into their relationship...

Please click here to read my new Fresh Meat in full. Would love for you to add a comment.

Fresh Meat: Carolyn Jewel's My Dangerous Pleasure

Web Work

I spent a couple of hours yesterday afternoon creating a blog for my husband's family. I did it here on blogger, using their new template designer interface. I enjoyed the design process more than I thought, because one of the reasons I ended up not being happy as publisher at AAR was the result of all the design work I did, particularly for advertisers in creating ads for authors. I think working on my Heroes and Heartbreakers pieces, laying them out and considering which images to suggest, made the difference. What had become a chore is once again an outlet for creativity.

Speaking of which, my piece on clubbing it in paranormals, posted at the deadly hour of five p.m. Friday afternoon, has died an ignominious death. But I hope you all will be more interested in my next piece, which is, shall we say, on a very titillating subject. All my creativity the day I wrote it went into not being prurient and maintaining a high level of humor throughout. I won't say more until it's posted, but consider your appetites whetted.

Web Work

New at H&H: A Party to Die For

My newest piece for the Heroes and Heartbreakers blog just went online.

In A Party to Die For: Night-Clubbing in Paranormal Romance, write about various hot spots that appear in urban fantasy/urban fantasy romances, including Jean-Claude's Guilty Pleasures, the Blue Moon werewolf club in the Riley Jenson series, and the Rehv's ZeroSum.

Hop on over to H&H and read it, and consider posting a comment. Hope you'll enjoy the visit!

New at H&H: A Party to Die For

Fantastic Fiction Sidebar

...I simply turned to my favorite backlist website, Fantastic Fiction. If fantasticfiction.com isn’t on your radar yet, it’s the best source I know for sussing out backlist and series order information. Just last week I learned that Rose Fox’s (one of my PW editors) mother wrote romance. I looked Jennifer Rose up on FF and sent Rose the link, which she promptly included in her Twitter feed. (from Order of Importance, my blog piece for H&H, online May 5th.)

When I wrote the first draft of that blog entry, I took a "time out" smack dab in the middle of it for a sidebar about fantasticfiction.com. In my next draft I decided to pull it out as a full length companion piece, only it really didn't "fit" at H&H. So I talked about it with Megan, and decided to post it here.

For those who haven't used fantasticfiction.com before, it's well worth a detailed introduction. As talk of Christine Warren's new Others book kicks off my H&H piece, I captured a screenshot of her Fantastic Fiction page and broke it out into three more manageable images. If all of this is too elementary because you've used Fantastic Fiction forever, forgive me.

This first image shows the author's picture and provides a generally brief biography. I say generally because the bio for Julie Garwood is extensive. Photos aren't always included. Sometimes the author's birth date is included. If the author is dead, the date is generally noted.

New and forthcoming books are broken out, with dates attached, and clicking a cover/title link brings you to a separate page for an individual book. All the individual book pages include, when possible, synopsis information, along with purchase and issue/reissue information. Click here for the page to Black Magic Woman and see what I mean.

Below the new/forthcoming books section is the meat of the page. This part of the page provides the backlist and series information I use on an almost daily basis. I was thrilled when the computers at the bookstore were able to access the Internet because using Fantastic Fiction was often easier in helping to determine a series order than B&N's own system. Many customers walked off with a little slip of paper in their pockets/pocketbooks with "fantasticfiction.com" written on it for future use.

Christine Warren's Fixed series (with each of the six titles and their dates of publication) is followed by her Novels of the Others. The 11 already published books—in order and with dates included—and other titles in the series set to be published this year are listed. Stand-Alone novels follow, then anthologies. All of the titles are links to individual pages, and wherever possible, linked covers are shown.

The third part of the page features author recommendations and a set of links to other authors that may interest the reader. To be honest, I've never actually scrolled down far enough to pay much attention to this part of the page, but it's probably worth a look.

As with the individual book pages, Fantastic Fiction provides quick links to Amazon in the U.S. and U.K., and for those looking to find copies of perhaps hard to find books, those individual pages also provide direct links to various used copies.

---

Before signing off, I thought I'd also mention a site referred to in one of the first comments to my corresponding H&H piece: FictFact.com. While it's a free site, unlike Fantastic Fiction you need to register. Once registered, though, you click "follow" for the series you read, and it'll let you know when the next installment goes on sale. I registered and will be giving it a shot in upcoming weeks and months.

Let's see...I now use my personally designed database, honed and adjusted over the last six or so years to track my reading, goodreads, fantasticfiction, and now fictfact. How do I ever find the time to actually, you know, read?

Fantastic Fiction Sidebar

New Fresh Meat at H&H: Anna Campbell's Midnight's Wild Passion

My newest Fresh Meat for Heroes and Heartbreakers just went online. In it I talk about Anna Campbell's new historical romance, Midnight's Wild Passion. Please drop by and check it out, then post a comment over there. As for me, I'm settling into my newest book, with an idea (with a little help from Megan) on my next article...

New Fresh Meat at H&H: Anna Campbell's Midnight's Wild Passion

New at H&H: Fresh Meat: Rachel Gibson's Any Man of Mine

Fresh Meat: Rachel Gibson's Any Man of Mine

Wow, what a week! In the last seven days I've read and written about four books: one was literary fiction, another Steampunk, a third contemporary romance, and the fourth a European Historical romance. I have a reprieve for a few days as my next PW review isn't due until Monday of next week. I've got so many books that I'm dying to get to just for the fun of it that I don't know quite where to begin. Whatever I choose will wait until tomorrow as I need a break for the rest of today.

The online result of a portion of that reading and writing just started, with my new blogging at Heroes and Heartbreakers. Drop by and give it a read, then post a comment over there.

Look for another "Fresh Meat" from me, perhaps as early as tomorrow. I'll let you know.

New at H&H: Fresh Meat: Rachel Gibson's Any Man of Mine

Writing for H&H Is Fun!

I adore writing for Heroes and Heartbreakers! My Rhynannon Byrd "Fresh Meat" piece, which went online yesterday, was incredibly fun to write; the site, thanks to Megan Frampton, has a sensibility I find refreshing. It's modern and pop-culturey. I needed to entirely rewrite each of the first four pieces published so far, but that's because it's tough to go from PW "staff-writing" mode to "let's have fun with it" mode.

I actually don't mind the rewrites because the first draft is "just the facts, ma'am," and totally necessary. The second draft is when I get to morph the piece from impersonal to personal, from old media to new media. If I wanna write "fuck," I write "fuck." If I wanna write "wanna" instead of "want to," I write "wanna." I still limit dashes because I'll never get the "too many dashes are lazy" refrain out of my head, but I might even...gasp...allow myself to use more than one type of special punctuation in a sentence (like a colon and ellipses), something that I decreed verboten at AAR.

Writing for difference sources that require different sorts of writing challenges me. To be honest, I still don't think I've come up with a single "style" for this blog, but I'm going to try to do that in the future. I'm going to aim more for the H&H sensibility, but because some of my posts are more serious, that may be a tall order. We'll see.

Writing for H&H Is Fun!

New "Fresh Meat" at H&H, and the Art of the Review

Fresh Meat: Rhyannon Byrd's Rush of Darkness

My newest blogging at Heroes and Heartbreakers just went online (5:00 p.m. eastern time). My sub-title for the piece is Dysfunction junction...come on, gimme a little smile. Drop by and give it a read, then post a comment over there.

I thought I'd share with you why I don't seem to be blogging much these days. It's simple. I'm spending all my time reading and writing, either reviews for PW, or pieces for H&H. I've got another spec piece in draft status, with another just written yet not submitted, and in the last week, in addition to reading and writing about Byrd's book, I read and reviewed two books for the magazine (not including the review I turned in this morning). Never has it felt so good to be under such a time crunch, although having to write ten drafts (yes, you heard right, ten drafts) between last evening and my eleven o'clock deadline this morning for my most recent PW review was not exactly a barrel full of monkeys.

Why were ten drafts necessary for this particular review? Well, the book was nearly 500 pages long and had four sub-plots, three of which melded together. It's part of a long-running series that I've not read in its entirety, with a tremendous number of fans who are as unhappy with review errors as I am. If the facts in a review aren't right, the entire thing—analysis and all—lacks credibility. Because these are short reviews, there's no margin whatsoever for error, and with a book readers are ready to devour, the pressure is more keen than usual.

I write for two PW editors; my mass market editor requires reviews to be no more than 170 words, including page cites. My fiction editor allots up to 300 words (with page cites). This was a review for my mass market editor and the first draft was too long by half. By the time I'd cut it down enough, I'd not only gone through nine more drafts, I'd very nearly rewritten the entire review several times.

For me, the hardest part of self-editing to meet a word count is giving up ownership of my writing. In this review, for instance, I'd written a particularly brilliant sentence fragment. It lasted from draft five through draft nine. Ultimately I cut it because the sentence directly following it subsumed my point. I should have been able to let it go a couple of drafts sooner, but it took further editing to determine how I could cut the fragment and replace it with an entire sentence. Other writers, who are more skilled than I am, no doubt find this easier to do, but even after sixteen years of reviewing, I struggle.

I've got six books to review for PW between now and early May, and I've committed to writing at least two more Fresh Meat pieces for H&H. In addition to the spec pieces I've submitted or finished writing, I plan to write more. And, I'd like to fit in a little reading simply for the pleasure of reading. Not that I'm complaining; I'm glad to be busy and hope everything I write that's published pleases readers and my editors. While you can't update me on my success at PW (I can tell you that I had one review among the 86 published today, but can't be more specific than that), I hope you'll give me feedback on my H&H articles.

New "Fresh Meat" at H&H, and the Art of the Review

Now online at Heroes and Heartbreakers...

Fresh Meat: Wendy Soliman’s Of Dukes and Deceptions

My newest blogging at Heroes and Heartbreakers just went online this morning. It's all about the trope that wasn't...and the one that was. Drop by and give it a read, then post a comment over there.

Growing an actual readership after all this time is not easy; I'm trying very hard not to get as neurotic as I once was when a new piece is published online. It helps that I'm merely a freelancer over there, but old habits die hard. Meanwhile, have a great Sunday. Hope your loss of an hour doesn't make you sleepy.

Now online at Heroes and Heartbreakers...

That Was Quick!

By the time I finished writing tomorrow's blog entry for Toe in the Water, I received notification of a Twitter "@ mention" indicating my second piece for Heroes and Heartbreakers was live. And so, I can now reveal what primarily I will be writing for H&H: Short essays on new releases.

Through digital arcs made available under netgalley—unless the book is published under a Macmillan imprint—I will be writing about new books. These brief pieces are not traditional reviews; indeed, there is no synopsis given. Instead I will accompany back cover blurbs with a point of focus about the book from my perspective, something I liked...or did not like...about it, if that something is worthy of mention.

Because these are not traditional reviews and no grades accompany them, I've decided to omit grades on future reviews here on Toe in the Water as well so that I don't drive myself crazy. Also, I plan on using back cover blurbs in lieu of synopses as well, something I often did on my old blog. The difference between what I'll be writing here and what I'll be writing at H&H is that here, except for the synopsis difference, you'll be reading an actual review on the book in its entirety. Tomorrow's review, btw, is of the new J.D. Robb.

I'll be keeping up with all this new reading...all my reading regardless of the venue (if there's a venue at all) as well, on Goodreads, but if I write about a book at H&H, I won't assign a rating at Goodreads, although I will link to my essay.

---

P.S. Because I am required to rate books I review for Amazon Vine, I decided to keep grades here on the blog. The only grades that will not appear, then, are for those books I write about at Heroes and Heartbreakers.

That Was Quick!

Grumbly in my Tumbly?

I heard from my new editor at Heroes & Heartbreakers this morning about the second piece I sent her. She would like for pieces of this type to be my focus for now. Again, I can't reveal what type of piece it is because it will be the first of its kind, but that's not what I want to talk about here. No, I want to talk about something else, something that didn't even occur to me until bedtime last night. Once the thought struck, my stomach went to a very bad place for a few hours...hence my reference to grumbly in the tumbly. It's not related to a hungry stomach, just an angsty one.

This is the reason for my angst: Have I, or will people think that I've sold out by writing for and being paid to write for a blog sponsored by a publisher? Does this go against everything I stood for during my time at TRR and AAR?

At this point in my career, I consider myself a free-lance writer, one who focuses on mass market and other fiction. I occasionally pen pieces for the National Association of Book Critics, get paid to review books for Publishers Weekly, and when offered the opportunity to add another freelance job to my resume, I took it. Although the site is funded by a publisher, I take them at their word that they are "publisher-neutral in our selection of books, authors and materials for coverage and discussion." Indeed, my focus will likely include books published by the various Macmillan imprints only every so often; most of my energy will be spent writing about books released by other publishers.

I took this job because of the people involved in it. Megan Frampton, who heads up the blog team, once reviewed for me at AAR. She's now my editor and boss. Myretta Robens and Cheryl Sneed are both long-time online friends whom I've often turned to for advice. If the three of us sat in a room together rather than on a telephone, it would be a good, old-fashioned hen party, with lots of gossip, laughter, and most likely, liberal amounts of alcohol. Myretta and Cheryl help run The Republic of Pemberley. Myretta and Megan both published trad Regencies before the sub-genre went into that good night and Cheryl, who reviewed at AAR for quite awhile and also headed up the massive data entry project corresponding to the site's review database way back when, also writes at Rakehell.

I have a personal relationship with these women, none of whom have any difficulty differentiating between good fiction and bad. As my brief for joining H&H was all-inclusive where thumbs up or thumbs down are concerned, this looked like a win-win for me. I would be able to write again online where an actual audience could find me, I'd be paid for it, and could laud a book or criticize it at my discretion.

As I said, that was my thought process until last night, when the "Have I sold out?" thoughts began to niggle, then shout within my head. I don't think I have. What I'll be doing is no different from what I've always done, whether at TRR, AAR, Publishers Weekly, Amazon, my old blog, or this "new" one. I will continue to share my unbiased opinions, but won't act, as I did at AAR, as a reporter (although I may here on my personal blog). The only difference as far as I'm concerned is who's paying for the real estate.

I hope that doesn't make me a sell-out. I don't think it does. Do you?

Grumbly in my Tumbly?

"Werewolves FTW" at Heroes and Heartbreakers

It's official...my first blog entry at Heroes & Heartbreakers went online today. Click here to link directly to Sexy Beast: Werewolves FTW! and post a comment if you'd like.

"Werewolves FTW" at Heroes and Heartbreakers

I Take It All Back

I started graduate school in mid-January, and as a result of multiple learning curves—ie, technological, subject matter, and differences in "how college is done" these days—my seven credit hours turned into a 40-hour work week for me. Still, I pushed on, even though my husband and daughter increasingly wondered why I didn't seem to enjoy the work. I tried to respond thusly:

"Studying library science is not like studying political science or philosophy, where you learn about policies and ideas that effect humanity. Library science is the study of information; how to find it, how to use it, how to manage it. I can't get excited about that in and of itself, but that doesn't mean I don't like it."

Apparently, though, it meant just that.

Earlier this week, after receiving four A's out of four projects (three of the four of which were perfect scores), I realized that the only true enjoyment I'd had from either class was this past Saturday, when one of my professors lectured for eight hours. She'd missed the first session back in January (the second was cancelled due to snow and ice) and while online I wasn't sure what to make of her, in person she was amazing, and that alone was what I enjoyed. Alas, my work in my other, wholly online class, revealed something important to me. In that class we were required to focus on an individual library for the entire semester's worth of projects. I chose a branch library in the city of Garland, Texas. After working with library staff (they were great) and city government staff in Garland, Texas, I experienced horrendous flashbacks to my first career, in municipal management as a division manager for the City of Dallas. Listening to those refrains of "never again" in my head, I concluded I did not want to work in a public library, effectively shutting off the majority of librarian positions.

I pride myself in thinking things through the first time around so that when I make decisions, I don't need to rethink them later on.

Apparently, though, I did a piss-poor job in this instance.

A tremendous amount of soul-searching throughout the early part of the week, including a visit with a friend from class and phone calls to my academic adviser, friends from AAR who are librarians and totally "get" me, and a close family friend, as well as lengthy discussion with my husband, helped me put things in perspective. A chance email a week and a half ago from a[nother] close online friend about the possibility of a part-time, paid blogging position refused to vacate my brain even though I'd already sent her a "sorry, I've moved on" response. She too received a phone call from me, and after this exhaustive process—which also included going over the course catalog for the degree and finding little that interested me this time around—I decided it was better to realize early on that librarianship really wasn't for me. As I told my husband, being a librarian really isn't like "working in a bookstore except you get to sit down."

Yesterday I sent my official request to withdraw from my spring semester classes to UNT's registrar. I finished the book I need to review for Publishers Weekly by Monday and, after reading a blog entry by another close online friend at the blog I'm joining, decided my debut could well be a response to it, which I wrote up last night and sent to the site's manager for her to peruse, approve, or decline. While I finished up the spec piece during the evening, sitting on the couch with The Big Bang Theory playing on TV in the background, my husband said to me, "You look happy."

I believe I am. That said, though, the idea that I made a bad decision the first time around is tough for my over-sized ego to handle, not to mention the embarrassment I feel after making such a loud pronouncement about my Major Life Change a couple of months ago that now I must retract.

On the other hand, deciding to quit the program when I was succeeding is an entirely different proposition than leaving because I was not. Still, in the back of my mind the thought niggles that I gave up out of laziness. Nobody who knows me now believes this could possibly be so, but growing up I was lazy; just ask my mom. And yet, writing, and being paid for it, as I am at PW and now will be at this blog (which I don't want to name until my first piece appears online), fulfills something deep inside of me.

I continue to be a work in progress...and am back online.

I Take It All Back