Jan Harayda : My Diary...

July 12, 2006

It’s official: I’m a blogger. I’ll be blogging on www.amazon.com every Friday until Labor Day. Each week, I’ll be answering a different question from a reader or someone else, starting with “What’s your favorite Cleveland joke?” in the June 23 post.

You can read my blog by going to Amazon and searching my novels, The Accidental Bride and Manhattan on the Rocks. The posts appear at the bottom of the listing for each book and are available on an RSS feed.

June 24, 2006

Whee! I’m “Ms. June” in the invite-an-author series at the Bergen County Cooperative Library System (BCCLS), a consortium of 73 libraries in northern New Jersey. No, I haven’t had to pose naked with a library card in the usual place of a fig leaf. Instead, the BCCLS is encouraging libraries to have me as a speaker and to suggest that their book clubs read The Accidental Bride and Manhattan on the Rocks during my “reign.”

The trailblazing invite-an-author series is the brainchild of the amazing Arlene Sahraie, the director of library services for the BCCLS and a former New York Times librarian of the year. Arlene is also assembling the first comprehensive database of Garden State authors who are willing speak to libraries. Librarians, if you’ve ever wondered how to develop a stronger partnership with the authors in your community, Arlene has developed a model that could help. Get in touch with her now to find out how to bring more authors – and more patrons – into your library.

March 6, 2006

I can’t decide whether the novelist J.A. (Joe) Konrath deserves congratulations or sympathy. An article in the January 30 issue of Forbes says that Konrath spends 90% of his time and $40,000 a year, half his income, promoting his comic thrillers: “He signs and circulates cocktail coasters that promote the first two novels, Whiskey Sour (published in 2004) and Bloody Mary (2005).” He gets to know bookstore staffers, rewarding those who sell more than 20 copies of his novels with a mention in the acknowledgements of his next book. He’s also sending letters to 7,000 librarians, urging them to buy his books. His effort is apparently paying off: He’s received a six-figure advance for three more novels. But when does this man find time to write? Or sleep?

February 19, 2006

“Being edited is like falling face down into a threshing machine,” Margaret Atwood writes in an essay on her anagrammatically named Web site, www.owtoad.com. I wish I could say that her comment libels the profession of editing. But it points instead to the flip side of the Frey affair. Too much editing can be as bad as too little. And while critics often fault editors for doing too little, they rarely fault them for doing too much, because scorched-earth editing is harder to spot than inadequate editing. Who can tell when a book has been dumbed down because its editor thought that a smarter book wouldn’t sell? People tend to blame the author even when the editor was holding all the cards.

February 17, 2006

Into Manhattan to see Steve Beeson, the colorist at the Louis Licari Salon who gave me the blond highlights in the photos on this site. Steve is a one-man SWAT team for hair held hostage by too much 20-volume peroxide. Once he rescued my hair after a hairdresser in Cleveland had turned it green. So I skip the vodka-and-cranberry-juice cocktails that salon serves as he works on me. Who needs a Cape Cod buzz when you have the high of knowing that your hair no longer appears to have verdigris?

A few of us talk about the James Frey affair as my head blooms with foil packets. Somebody mentions that editors say they don’t have the resources to “fact-check every word” of their books. Who’s asking them to “fact-check every word”? I’d be happy just with a little more journalistic skepticism. In A Million Little Pieces Frey apparently claims that he had two root canals without anesthesia and that this exemplified the horrors at his Minnesota rehab clinic. I had a root canal without anesthesia, too, and it was painless. As my dentist explained it, by the time some people need a root canal, the root of the tooth is dead, so they feel nothing, with or without anesthesia. This is the sort of point that newspaper editors routinely raise with reporters even though they, too, lack the resources to fact-check ever word turned in by their subordinates.

February 6, 2006

9:30 a.m. Posted a comment about the James Frey scandal on the Literary News forum on www.readerville.com before church. It’s my first Readerville post in a year owing partly to irrational belief that Wife Swap and Skating with Celebrities are more important than literature. Feel certain I have made up for lost time with trenchant remarks that compare A Million Little Pieces to Enron and stop just short of calling the author the Kenneth Lay of literature.

1:15 p.m. Get back from church and log onto Readerville to read responses to my post. Realize that I didn’t correct two appalling typos in it. As a result, trenchant remarks are all but incomprehensible in some places. Can’t correct the typos because you can edit Readerville posts only within 30 minutes of sending them. Can there be any doubt about why the journalist I.F. Stone said, “Typos are worse than Fascism!”?

January 25, 2006

How can four months have passed since I last wrote in this space? Can’t entirely justify this gap by saying that I needed to watch all those episodes of Wife Swap and Skating with Celebrities. So here are some other things I’ve done since the last entry:

taught a magazine-writing course at Fordham University
moderated a panel on authors’ Web sites for the American Society of Journalists and Authors
given a talk on “Looking for God at Barnes & Noble: Christianity Fiction” to an adult-education class at my church
agreed to become a mentor to writing students at the New School in New York City
resolved that I will write in this diary more often in 2006

I also launched a modest campaign to convince myself that I am still a cultured person even though I regard Wife Swap the summit of television. This campaign has consisted mainly of reading Love in a Cold Climate, Nancy Mitford’s elegant satire of her family and its circle in twilight of the English aristocracy. Nonetheless, the effort has been a complete success. A little of Love in a Cold Climate redeems a lot of reality television. And when comes to braving the heights of wife-swapping, Mitford’s characters make others look acrophobic.

September 5, 2005

Just read Wolves in Chic Clothing, a comic novel listed on Amazon.com as a book bought by fans of Manhattan on the Rocks but in frighteningly larger quantities. It includes the line: “Lell meticulously squirted lime on her Perrier and paused to take a small sip.” Came away awed by the two authors’ grasp of the nuances of Upper East Side social-climbing: These are women who know that friends of the Greek royals refer to them as “the Greeces”! And that Perrier is still “in” among people who have Stark carpets! But cannot help wondering: Could I improve my ranking on Amazon if I slip the phrase “a small sip” into my next novel?

August 27, 2005

Spent part of day poring over Diary of a Provincial Lady, looking for inspiration for the diary page of Web site being created by genius art director Chris Costello. Have the perverse feeling that E.M. Delafield is the only person in the world who truly understands me even though she is dead. How can this be when Delafield was a) married, b) a mother, and c) a resident of an English village and I am a) single, b) childless, and) live in a New Jersey suburb with an X-rated video store? Must consider what this question would say about my social life if I had a social life (beyond occasional meals of curried goat at Jamaican café across from X-rated video store).