Today I feel like a real author – which doesn’t happen often – and not for any reason that you might imagine.

I’m not sure if other authors feel this way, but most days, I don’t feel like a real author.

Its ridiculous but true.

I’ve published three novels – two with Doubleday and one with St. Martin’s Press – and I have a fourth publishing in September. My last book was translated into more than 25 different languages and was an international bestseller.

   

All three of my novels have been optioned for film or television.

I receive emails and tweets from readers all over the world daily about my books.

And yet when I’m completely honest with myself, I don’t ever feel like a real author. At best, I feel like I’ve fooled people into believing that I’m a real author, and at any moment, the literati will discover the truth and my last book will be my last.

Someone recently asked me, “When did you know that you had finally made it?”

Without any attempt at humor or self-deprecation, my instant response was, “You’re probably the only person on the planet who thinks I’ve made it. I’m not even close to making it. I don’t even know what making it looks like. I don’t think I’ll ever make it.” 

I have no evidence, but I suspect that these feeling are true for many authors.

Thankfully, there are moments when this stupidity is challenged. Yesterday a reader send me a photo of her Book of the Day calendar. March 18 had been given over to my last novel, Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend.

Oddly enough, this tangible mention of my novel, sitting atop a reader’s desk on a square of paper, made me feel more like a real author than many of the moments that should’ve convinced me long ago.

And I have no idea why.

Sequel Protection Service: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (The Millennium) series

So many times in my life, I’ve wished that I had avoided one or more of the sequels to a book or movie. Spoiling the beauty of an original story with a disappointing or (even worse) destructive sequel is a tragedy that should befall no human being.

Thus behold:

Matthew Dicks’ Sequel Protection Service.

Having suffered through scores of horrendous and damaging sequels, I have thrust the mantle of Sequel Protection Champion upon myself in order to spare future consumers the pain that so many of us have experienced. 

I will tell you which sequels are worthy of reading or viewing and which should never be seen.

Quite heroic of me. Don’t you think?

Today’s subject:

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (The Millennium) series:

If you weren’t sucked into the literary frenzy of these three books a few years ago and are just starting to read them now, I urge you to stop with the first book. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a taut and unexpected thriller that I enjoyed a great deal. It was edge of your seat suspense, and most importantly, it was relatively believable.

As with many sequels, the ratcheting of action and suspense required to make the sequels successful also stripped the second book – The Girl Who Played With Fire – and the third book – The Girl Who Kicked Over the Hornet’s Nest – of any plausibility.

 

Lizbeth Salandar – the pseudo-protagonist – goes from a badass hero in the first book to superhero in the second and third, and she encounters villains with even more implausible super powers. The story becomes convoluted, and little is revealed by way of the character’s backstories in the two subsequent books to made their reading worthwhile.

Stop after reading The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. You won’t be disappointed.
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Also, I plan for this to be an ongoing series of posts and would like a logo or banner of some kind for the Sequel Protection Service. If you are so inclined to  design one and I like it (and I probably will since I currently have nothing), I will publicly recognize you here and be eternally grateful.

A student wrote something that made me cry while reading it aloud. And thanks to the rules of my “Make your teacher cry” contest, my tears were caught on video.

For the past five years, I have offered a challenge to my fifth grade students:

Write something that makes me cry.

The contest was born from Sharon Creech’s Love That Dog, a book I once read to my students but no longer do because I always get weepy at the end.

There is nothing wrong with crying. There’s nothing wrong with crying in response to something you read. There’s nothing wrong with crying in response to something you have read many times before. 

But crying in front of two dozen merciless fifth graders?

Not good.

Rather than reading Love That Dog, I’ve challenged students to write something that will make me cry in the same way Sharon Creech’s story makes me cry.

Here is how the contest works:

If you write a piece for the contest, I will read it aloud to the class while the writer records my reading on video. If I cry or get weepy in any way during the reading, I agree to post the recording of the reading to YouTube with a caption of the student’s choice.

For five years, dozens of students have tried. All have failed.

Until now.

Here is a recording of me, reading Julia’s piece aloud. Unlike previous contestants, Julia decided to write memoir rather than fiction. Clever girl. And in my defense, Julia begins weeping in the middle of my reading, which may or may not have contributed to my tears as well.

Regardless, I got weepy, so Julia wins. It’s a brilliant piece of writing, so she deserves the glory that comes with her victory. Enjoy.

Cat Heaven snuck up on me and made me cry.

If you’re a cat lover or a book lover or a person who suffers from an ongoing existential crisis or simply a human being, Cat Heaven by Cynthia Rylant is a book that you will love as you possibly weep.

My daughter, Clara, is named after a character in The Van Gogh Café – also by Rylant – and while I love that book for obvious reasons, I love this one so much more.

I picked it up and read it to Clara before bed, not knowing what was hiding between the pages. It snuck up on me, finding a way into my heart by the third page and sending me for an emotional loop.

Rylant also wrote Dog Heaven, but I’m almost afraid to read it. As much as I love my cat, I’ve owned dogs for much of my life, and I’ve buried more than I care to remember, oftentimes as a child as the result of my parents’ atrocious disregard for their safety.

I fear that Dog Heaven may be too much for me.

Cat Heaven is a beautiful book with beautiful images by Rylant herself. Buy it. Make it the gift that you give ever cat lover you know this year.

I won’t be reading my novel to my children. For a damn good reason.

My son asked me to read my novel, Unexpectedly, Milo, to him.

"Too long," I told him. "No pictures. Let’s find something else."

It also has an awkward and explicit sex scene in it (which I didn't bother to mention), so I think he'll be reading that one on his own some day.

Novelist Jose Saramago quit writing in 1953. Part of me wants to reach back in time and hug him. The other part wants to smack him.

Nobel Prize winning novelist José Saramago submitted the manuscript of Skylight – his first – to a Lisbon publisher in 1953. Receiving no response, Saramago gave up fiction altogether. His wife says that her husband fell into a "into a painful, indelible silence that lasted decades."

Saramago returned to fiction in 1977 and would eventually write more than 20 novels before his death.

In 1989, having published three novels, he was at work on a fourth when the publisher to which he had sent Skylight wrote to say that they had rediscovered the manuscript and it would be an honor to print it. Saramago never re-read it and said only that "it would not be published in his lifetime."

His wife published the book in 2014 after his death in 2010.

When I first heard this story, I felt great sympathy for Saramago. A publisher ignores his manuscript, not even bothering to decline the work, and an author loses 25 years that could have been spent writing. By all accounts, his first manuscript was excellent, and the book has received rave reviews, so it’s not as if Saramago needed the 25 years for his talent to germinate. He was already brilliant in 1953.

He simply lost a quarter century of work.

That sympathy for Saramago lasted for about ten seconds, then I was reminded of all the authors I know whose first, second, third, fourth, and even fifth manuscripts were turned down by literary agents and publishing houses. Yes, as far as I know, all of these people at least received some kind of response from the entities that received their work, but still, I know authors who struggled for decades with rejections before finally breaking through.

Saramago was ignored once and decided to quit. He took his toys and went home. 

My second reaction was decidedly less sympathetic.  

I’ve read four of Saramago’s books, including Blindness, which won the Nobel Prize in Literature and caused my wife to weep for a week while reading it. I’m not much of a fan of his work. I think he was an exceptionally talented writer, and I have enjoyed his stories a great deal, but Saramago forgoes the use of chapters and paragraphs almost completely in his books. His sentences can run on for more than a page. He goes pages and pages without the use of a period, preferring instead to use commas. He doesn’t use quotations marks to delineate dialogue. In Blindness, he stopped using proper nouns completely. I can’t stand any of it. I think it demonstrates a complete disregard for the reader and an unnecessary barrier to his stories.  

Still, a small part of my wishes I could reach through time and tell him to strengthen his resolve and try again rather than waiting for 25 years before writing again. I want to hug him and tell him that it will be alright.

Another part of my wants to smack him for acting like such a fool and not having the courage to stand up and demand acknowledgement.

Ironically, my friend, who has read Skylight, reports that Saramago was not using long sentences when he wrote it in 1953. Perhaps if he had found success with the book, he would’ve continued to write more conventionally and found a wider audience.  

The moment for which every author longs, experienced by my wife.

My wife was checking out books at the library when a woman stepped up beside her and handed Unexpectedly, Milo to the adjacent librarian.

“That’s my husband’s book,” Elysha said.

“What?” the woman asked.

“What?” the librarian asked.

“That’s my husband’s book,” she repeated. “He wrote it.”

“He did?” the woman said.

“He did?” the librarian said.

I can count on two hands the number of times I have seen one of my novels in the wild, and I have never seen Unexpectedly, Milo in anyone’s hands outside of friends and family. I see it on bookstore and library shelves all the time, but rarely in a reader’s actual hands.

I dream of the day when I step on a plane or walk across a beach or stroll by a row of treadmills and see a handful of people reading my books. For a few select author

The woman returning the book, it turns out, knows me. I attended her book club a few months back to discuss Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend, and she has since read my other two books. In fact, the library where the woman borrowed the book places a rating sheet on the back page, giving readers the chance to assign a numerical score and add comments about the book. She had been the first to take the time to fill out my book’s rating sheet.

It was exciting for my wife to see someone plop down one of my books right in front of her, and part of me is glad that my wife was able to experience that “in the wild” moment. I spend much of my life trying desperately to impress her, so a moment like this helps my cause.

Still, books in the wild are a tough thing to come by, and I was a little jealous that she was there to experience that moment and not me. Perhaps with the publication of my next book, set for the fall, my opportunities for seeing my books in the wild will increase substantially.

Fingers crossed.

Mystery behind this photograph solved, though the solution was fairly obvious.

Yesterday, I wished that I knew the story behind this photograph.

Thanks to a kind reader, today I know. It was a librarian, of course. Those fanatical zealots of books, always looking for a way, however crazy it may seem, to get a story into your hands. 

Honestly, who else could it have been?

The Kindle’s beta version, perhaps?

I really wish I knew the story behind this photograph.

Just when I start to become a cynical, entitled, unappreciative jerk face, Jenny Slate comes along and sets me straight.

My heart still skips a beat every time I see one of my novels on a shelf in a bookstore or a library. I’m so glad.

 

Never take good fortune for granted. Never allow something that once thrilled you to become commonplace.

Remember your roots.

If only I could take my own advice.

I was listening to Jenny Slate on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, and she was describing the moment when she was hired to work at Saturday Night Live. For Slate, this was a childhood dream come true. She began to cry as she told the story on the podcast and quickly apologized, explaining that she doesn’t cry often.

“It’s a beautiful story,” she said. “And sometimes I forget that.”

I loved that moment so much.

It was a reminder to never let your dream-come-true moment become anything less than that. Remember how precious and rare these moments are.

Over the course of this past weekend, I heard from readers in Malaysia, Mexico, Russia, Brazil, France, Australia, and Italy. They contacted me via email, Twitter, and Facebook. Some had questions about the book. Others offered kind words. One is a student of foreign languages at a Russian university. His class is reading my book this semester, and he needed some help with a class assignment.  

My most recent novel, Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend, has been translated into more than 20 languages, so I hear from international readers often. I probably average a couple a day.

     

When I saw the pile of emails on Sunday morning, I groaned. I rolled my eyes. It would take at least 30 minutes to reply to them all. I’d be answering questions that I’ve answered a million times and thanking people who I will never meet. Instead of writing, I would be corresponding.

Then I remembered Jenny Slate and how incredibly lucky I am. How this pile of email from around the world represents by own dream come true. How my dream-come-true story is also beautiful, and sometimes I forget it,

Five years ago, I just wanted to publish a book. Receiving mail from readers around the world would’ve been a pipe dream. How quickly I had forgotten.

I answered each one with joy in my heart. Truly.

As I did, I thought about my agent, Taryn Fagerness, who is my partner and friend in this dream. She’s the one responsible for sending my books around the world. Far better books than mine receive far less international  attention, and this is because I have Taryn and those other authors do not.

I thought about my wife, Elysha, who was the first person to tell me to write Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend. I had no desire to write that book. I thought it was a stupid idea. I thought it would go nowhere. Thank goodness she is smarter than me. 

And I thought about Jenny Slate. I thought about how important it is to remember how fortunate I am. And I thought about what a jerk I was for being annoyed about the emails that I had to answer.

Hopefully the next time I start acting like an entitled jerk face, I have someone like Jenny Slate to remind me how lucky I am and how beautiful my story has been.

I have 15 jobs. So you probably require my services in one way or another.

As the New Year approaches and the endless possibilities of the coming year loom on the horizon, I always like to take a moment and reset my current occupational status, in the event that you or someone you know will require my services in 2015.

While occupations like teacher and writer seem like fairly obvious inclusions on the list, there are also several less obvious jobs on the list that may seem a little silly at first, but let me assure you that they are not.

Many people thought it was silly back in 1997 when my friend and I decided to become wedding DJs, even though we had no experience, equipment, or knowledge of the wedding industry whatsoever. We simply declared ourselves wedding DJs, bought a pile of equipment that we didn’t know how to use, and began the search for clients.

Nineteen years and more than 400 weddings later, we’re still in business.

The same could be said about my decision to become a minister in 2002. Or a life coach back in 2010. Or a professional best man in 2011. Or last year’s declaration that I was a public speaking coach. Or last week’s announcement that I am now a presentation consultant.

All of these positions have either become profitable ventures or at least received interest from potential clients.

The lesson: If you want to do something, just start doing it.  

So here is a list of my 14 current occupations and an explanation of my services. I hope I can be of service to you in 2015. 
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Teacher. Sorry. I’ve got a job teaching already, and I love it.

But in about four years, a partner and I plan on opening a one-room schoolhouse for students grades K-5, so if you’re looking for a school for your child at that time (or looking to donate money to build the school), contact me.

Writer: In addition to writing novels, I’ve also written a memoir, a book of essays, a rock opera, a tween musical, and a screenplay. I’m also the humor columnist for Seasons magazine.

     

I’m always looking for additional writing gigs, in particular a regular opinion column and/or advice column, so if you have a writing job in need of a good writer, contact me.

Wedding DJ: My partner and I are entering our 19th year in the business. We’ve have entertained at more than 400 weddings in that time. We’ve cut back on our business in recent years, ceasing to advertise or even maintain a respectable website. Almost all of our business these days comes through client or venue referrals, as we prefer.

If you’re getting married and need a DJ, contact me. 

Storyteller and public speaker: I deliver keynote addresses, inspirational speeches, and talks on a variety of subjects including education, writing, storytelling, productivity, and more. I’m represented by Macmillan Speakers Bureau.

I’m also a professional storyteller who has performed at more than 60 storytelling events in the last three years and has hosted story slams for literary festivals, colleges, and more. I’m a 15-time Moth StorySLAM champion and GrandSLAM champions whose stories have appeared on The Moth Radio Hour and This American Life.

If you need someone to entertain, inspire, inform, or emcee, contact me.  

Founder and producer of Speak Up: My wife and I produce a storytelling show called Speak Up. We are based in Hartford at Real Art Ways with additional shows at venues throughout the region, including local schools and The Mount in Lenox, MA.

If you have an audience that would be interested in storytelling, or you’re a storyteller looking to pitch a story for one of our shows, send an email to speakupstorytelling@gmail.com.

Minister: In the past ten years, I’ve married 13 couples and conducted baby naming ceremonies and baptisms. I’ll be marrying two more couples in 2015.

If you’re getting married and are in need of a minister, contact me. 

Life coach: In the past four years, I’ve worked with four different clients, assisting them in everything from goal setting to productivity to personal relationships to career development.

If you’re looking to make changes in your life and become a happier and more successful person, contact me.  

Tutor: I tutor students in grade K-12 on everything from general academics to college essay writing.

If you’re the parent of a student in need of academic support, either regularly or occasionally, contact me.

Storytelling and public speaking coach: For the past two years, I’ve been teaching storytelling workshops and coaching storytellers on an individual basis. People often take my workshops in hopes of performing in storytelling shows and competing in story slams, but they also take these workshops to improve job performance, enhance communication skills, and get their friends and family to finally listen to them.

My real mission is to eliminate the scourge of PowerPoint from this planet, one story at a time.

If you’d like to improve your storytelling, public speaking, and/or communication skills, send an email to speakupstorytelling@gmail.com and get on our mailing list. 

Writing camp coordinator and instructor: Last year my wife and I launched Writer’s Abroad, a four week long summer writing camp for students ages 11-16. We had an outstanding inaugural season and plan on an even better second year in 2015.

If you are the parent of a child ages 11-16 who loves to write and/or could benefit from four weeks of intensive writing instruction designed to improve skills and inspire writers, this camp may be for you. Contact me.

Presentation consultant: Since posting about this position a week ago, I have heard from two people who have expressed interest in hiring me for their fairly new companies at some point in the future. I may also have the opportunity to take on a partner in this business.

If you are a person who delivers content via meetings, presentations, workshops, etc. and would like to improve your communication skills, contact me.

Professional Best Man: Since posting about this position on this blog in 2011, four grooms and two reality television producers have inquired about hiring me for their weddings and television shows that are wedding related. Geographical constraints forced me to reject all their offers thus far. I am still awaiting my first gig.

Productivity consultant: Since posting about this position on this blog in 2013, I’ve had one inquiry about my services.

If you would like to become a more productive person in your personal or professional life and are willing to make changes in order to achieve this goal, contact me.

Professional double date companion: Since posting about this position on this blog in 2011, I have had no inquiries. That does not mean the job is a failure. Just that it has yet to succeed.

If you’re dating someone for the first time or have been on several dates and need that important second or third opinion on the person in question, contact me.

Professional gravesite visitor: Since posting about this position on this blog in 2011, I have had no inquiries. That does not mean the job is a failure. Just that it has yet to succeed.

If you have a gravesite in Connecticut in need of visiting, contact me.

BJ Novak’s new children’s book is annoyingly brilliant, just like everything else he does annoyingly well.

Television writer, actor, director, producer, and the author of a book of short stores BJ Novak has written a children’s book entitled The Book With No Pictures, and damn it, it’s good.

It’s clever and poignant and hilarious and ingenious. It’s entertaining and it says something.

I hate that guy.

Not only can the jerk write a great children’s book, but he can read to children just as well.

BJ Novak. Star of screen and page. Love his work. Hate him for being so damn creative and productive.

Hunter Thompson once retyped The Great Gatsby just to feel what it was like to write a great novel. What a stupid waste of time.

Author Hunter Thompson once retyped The Great Gatsby just to feel what it was like to write a great novel. This fact is often lauded as a demonstration of his commitment to the craft and his desire for excellence.

I can’t imagine a stupider way to spend your time.

Want to write a great novel?

Try writing one. Then try again and again and again.

Thompson did this, of course (and with great success, in my opinion), but perhaps if he hadn’t spent so much time doing what amounted to a popular form of punishments from my childhood (copying definitions from the dictionary), he would’ve had time to write one more story.

Or spent a little more time polishing one of his manuscripts.

I have far too many stories to tell to spend a moment retyping someone else’s story.

Frankly, I doubt that Thompson even did this ridiculous exercise. It’s the kind of story that a great writer like Thompson would make up, knowing its inherent appeal to the general public.

I hope he made it up.

Hot Buzz About Books and Book Clubs

For those of you in the greater Hartford area (and beyond), I will be joining a panel of esteemed book lovers and professionals in the publishing industry to discuss book recommendations on Thursday evening at 7:00 at the West Hartford Jewish Community Center. This is an annual event that runs in conjunction with the JCC’s Jewish book festival.

It’s always a great night.

RJ Julia Booksellers President Roxanne Coady and Random House sales reps and Books on the Nightstand hosts Ann Kingman and Michael Kindness will be joining me on the panel to talk about books that we love. 

 

Prior to joining the panel, Elysha and I were regular attendees of the event, so you now it’s good. 

There will also be prizes given out throughout the evening and a book swap. RJ Julia Booksellers will also be selling the books that the panel recommends on stage. 

Details about the event can be found here. Hope to see you there!

Hot Buzz About Books and Book Clubs

I’ll be speaking on the panel below alongside RJ Julia Bookseller’s President Roxanne Coady and Books on the Nightstand hosts Ann Kingman and Michael Kindness.

If you’re a reader and a book lover, you should come. Before I joined the panel onstage, Elysha and I attended this event for years.

It will be fun. I promise.

My daughter received her first library card. Her father might be more excited about it than she is, and for good reason.

My daughter received her first library card last weekend. She was thrilled.

I think my wife and I were even more excited than she was.

She also checked out her first book with it: If You Give a Moose a Muffin.

   

I didn’t receive my first library card until I was ten years-old. There were very few books in my home when I was growing up, so my library card represented access to a world never before seen by me. I loved my public library, despite it’s miniscule size (a single room of books) and placement in the basement of our town hall. I would walk the aisles, staring at the spines of the books, unable to fathom how many stories were now available to me.

Today my hometown library is a beautiful building located in what used to be my middle school. It’s enormous, illuminated by natural light, filled with more books than my childhood mind could have ever imagined, and equipped with all the amenities of a modern-day library.

I’ve had the pleasure of speaking there on a few occasions, and while I adore the space, I still hold a special place in my heart for that small, basement room in the town hall where so many doors opened for me for the first time.

After some sleuthing by a clever reader, I even managed to identify and locate the first library book that I ever checked out, and a copy sits on my bookshelf today.

I have yet to reread it, fearful that it won’t be as spellbinding as I remember it to be, but I’ll crack it open soon.

Today copies of all three of my novels can be found in the same library where my daughter received her first library card All three can also be found on the shelves of my hometown library.

This astounds me. My heart still flutters every time I see one of my novels on a bookstore shelf, but seeing them on the shelves of these two libraries means more to me than I can describe.

I have wanted to be an author for as long as I can remember, but in my wildest boyhood dreams, I never imagined that my books would someday find their way onto the shelves of the library where the world of books and reading first opened to me.

And as a parent, the idea that my books are sitting on the shelves of the same library where my daughter received her first library card is equally indescribable.

My daughter was decidedly less impressed, and she is never terribly  excited about seeing her father’s books on library or bookstore shelves. That’s okay. My novels don’t have any pictures, and the endings aren’t always happy.

As long as she’s reading something, I don’t care.

This author found a way to sell books with sticks and leaves and a little bit of twine.

Last weekend I took my children to Winding Trails in Farmington, Connecticut, to a Fairy House Tour. I had never heard of such a thing and had no idea what to expect.

I wasn’t expecting much, to be honest. But it was brilliant.

Based upon author Tracy Kane’s Fairy Houses series, local organizations were invited to construct elaborate fairy houses from natural materials that were then placed throughout the woods for the children to find and examine. There must’ve been three or four dozen houses in all, each one more elaborate than the next.

The kids adored it.

At the end of the trail, the kids were given the opportunity to build their own fairy houses using materials provided by the camp.

The event culminated with a reading at the entrance to the trail and a book signing. A brilliant bit of marketing by the author, who sold many books.

     

It led me to wonder what I might do to similarly market my books.

Invite people to recreate life-sized versions of their imaginary friends and bring them to a Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend cocktail party?

Create a Something Missing book club game wherein each guest is sent into a room and tasked with stealing an item that would go unnoticed?

Design an Unexpectedly, Milo online game wherein players watch video diaries in order to determine the biography of the person speaking?

None are nearly as good as a Fairy House tour, I’m afraid.

    

My children visited a bookstore on the last day of summer. Their behavior was shocking.

We spent the last day of summer on the Connecticut shoreline. Among our choice of activities was a visit to our favorite bookstore, R.J. Julia in Madison, Connecticut.

 

Elysha and I once spent hours in bookstores, but when our children entered our lives, that changed. We tried for a while to do some tag-team parenting.  One parent relaxes while the other stops the monsters from ripping every book off the shelf.

It wasn’t fun.

But something happened on that last day of summer. I brought the kids upstairs to the children’s section of the bookstore, and within a minute, with no intervention on my part, this happened:

 

Not only did they plop themselves down and start reading, but they remained this way for a full 30 minutes.

Just imagine how much better it will be when they can actually read!

I probably couldn’t leave them unattended and descend to the adult section, but while my wife browsed below, I browsed the children’s section, which I sort of love anyway. I’ve written a few picture books that I am hoping to  eventually sell, and I missed out on these books as a child, so I still have lots of catching up to do. 

Even if this weren’t the case, this is a huge improvement over chasing them around, shushing them, and returning strewn books to the shelves.

This is good.

There is hope for the future.

PowerPoint presentations, game shows, skinny dipping, and now The Oscars: Quirks of the many book clubs I have attended

Last week I attended the meeting of Sheltering Trees, a book club in Wallingford, Connecticut. The members of the group (more than a dozen ladies ranging in ages from their twenties to their seventies) were kind enough to read Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend, so I joined them for their discussion.

As expected, it was great fun. Book club events always are.

After having attended the meetings of more than 100 book clubs over the past five years, I’ve discovered that every book club has its own traditions, rules, quirks, and eccentricities.

I’ve attended a book club meeting that opened with a game show created by the host, played by the other members, and was based upon the book they  read.

I watched a book club choose their next book via professional presentations that included PowerPoint presentations, heated discussions, and carefully chosen clips from New York Times reviews.

I attended a book club meeting where two of the women disappeared in the midst of the meeting, only to be later found skinny dipping in the pond.

The latter was my own book club.

I could probably write a book about my adventures attending book club meetings. I probably should.  

The book club that I met with last week ends their meeting by rating the book on a 1-10 scale, and these scores are averaged, giving the book a final score. These women  take this rating process very seriously. In addition to assigning a number, each person also gives a reason for their determination. Members not present who finished the book can email in their rating and rationale. One of their members was in Korea but still took the time to email a score and a paragraph explaining her thinking. 

As the author, it was both fascinating and a little terrifying to listen to these women, who pull no punches, rate my book. I offered to leave to allow them to be honest, but they insisted I stay. “Don’t worry,” one woman said. “we won’t be careful of your feelings.” Two of my ladies in the group assigned my book a perfect ten, which causes the rest to burst into spontaneous, uproarious applause.

These women take their perfect scores very seriously.

I also had my share of eights and nines from the group, and my book ultimately received an average score of a nine, which I was told is very good.

At the end of the year, the book club meets for an award’s night of sorts. The members vote on the books read during the year in categories like best and worst book, best passage from a book, best and worst male and female character, best discussion, best cover, and more. They run this awards gala like the Oscars. Members vote, and presumably one member (unless they also enlist the services of Price Waterhouse) collects the votes and places the winner’s names in Oscar-like envelopes for the dramatic reveal. 

No book is read for that December meeting. It’s simply a review of the previous year’s books.

The women were kind enough to invite me and Elysha to their awards celebration, and if the date is open, I’m going. This book club is comprised of an interesting cast of characters (they always are), and I suspect that the evening will be highly entertaining.

Maybe it will be the final straw that pushes me over the edge and makes me want to write that book.

Love the book. Hate the fact that it only took Bradbury 18 days to write it.

Ray Bradbury was born 94 years today. My favorite Bradbury book, and one of my favorite novels of all time, is Fahrenheit 451.

It took Bradbury just 18 days to write the book.

Jerk.

I realize how unlikely you are to watch an hour long video online, but this talk given by Bradbury in 2001 is fantastic.