Thursday’s Pre-Publication Post: The Week in Review

First, THANK YOU all for the amazing response to last week’s post, in which I solicited your feedback on author photo possibilities. You’re a terrific group!

I’ve now gone ahead and asked the photographer to retouch two photos (as I said, one retouched photo is part of the package I signed up for; I’m going to kick in the extra bucks for a second one). In the meantime, I want to share with you a useful post on author photos that I found. I’ve sent it along to the photographer, too, to explain my request for images with different resolutions.

Other pre-publication activities this past week have included going through a copy-edited version of my manuscript (and if you’re wondering about the use of the hyphen with “copy-edited,” you have a sense of some dilemmas I’ve been facing). I’ve also been following up with the Big Publishing House from which I have been awaiting a permissions response. Important (relearned) lesson here: Sometimes, you really have to pick up the phone. And progress toward a cover design, about which I’ve heretofore said little, continues.

So, that’s what’s been happening with Quiet Americans this week. Thank you all so much, again, for your interest!

Thursday’s Pre-Publication Post: Please Advise Me On My Author Photo!

So, when we last left our heroine (moi), Author Photo Shoot Day was approaching. It came and it went…well! I have so much admiration for photographer Lisa Hancock, who did some really nice work (I think so, at least!).

You’ve seen some of that work with my new profile picture right here on the blog (if you haven’t noticed it yet, take a look on the right sidebar). But here’s the deal: The photo shoot package includes one complimentary “retouching,” which means I can ask Lisa to retouch one of the 200+ shots at no extra cost. Presumably, that’s the shot I’ll use for the book jacket (and maybe elsewhere, though it’s kind of fun to have a choice of photos to post as a blog profile, Twitter thumbnail, etc.).

I’ve received some good advice from people close to me, but now I’d like to hear what YOU have to say. Here are a few more photos for you to peruse. Which do you suggest I ask Lisa to retouch and use for Quiet Americans? (Or do you think I should go with the one I’m currently using for my blog profile?) Thanks for chiming in–I look forward to your comments!



Thursday’s Pre-Publication Post, or What I Have in Common with the Real Housewives of New Jersey

Time for a shift in these pre-publication posts. Up to this point, we’ve been spending a lot of time on things like subject matter, permissions, and author websites. Serious stuff.

Readers, it’s time to talk about eyebrows. Mine, specifically.

Earlier this week, I went for my very first “brow sculpting.” What does this have to do with my book? Well, the publication of my short story collection, Quiet Americans, is an occasion for a proper author photo.

And that photo will be taken on Saturday.

Even my mom – who is so d.i.y. she not only colors her own hair but cuts it, too (I love you, Mom!) – thought that a visit to the “brow sculptor” my sister has visited from time to time was in order. So after work on Tuesday I hopped on the subway and trekked downtown for the “procedure.” It wasn’t quite as painful as I’d feared, and I was very interested to learn that the sculptor is also a practicing writer (and sculptor to the Real Housewives of New Jersey!).

The bigger issue, of course, is that I’ve never been particularly comfortable having my photo taken, and I have to say that this entire part of the pre-publication process is something I’ll be relieved to have finished. Any of you have tips to share on how you survived your first author photo shoot?

Thursday’s Pre-Publication Post: Thank You, Deborah Eisenberg

If you’ve been following my pre-publication posts, you already know that the material in my forthcoming story collection, Quiet Americans, has a great deal to do with my grandparents’ identities and experiences as Jews who escaped Nazi Germany in the late 1930s. And while only three of the seven stories in the book were written during the time I was an MFA student, suffice to say that more than just a few of the pieces in my thesis were similarly inspired.

This didn’t seem to worry two of my three thesis readers. But the third did express a reservation: “Too much grandparents and too much Holocaust.”

My faith in Henry James notwithstanding (recall the Jamesian dictum to allow the writer his/her donnée and criticize only what is made of it), that reader’s comment lingered (obviously!), and its impact wasn’t fully assuaged even when other, equally wise authority figures told me otherwise. During the past several days, however, the old warning has finally lost some of its sting. And for that, I am grateful to author Deborah Eisenberg.

Eisenberg, who has earned a mention here on the blog before, has a volume of collected stories out now. The release has prompted a profile on Tablet magazine, which begins as follows:

“I believe that people are what happened to their grandparents,” Deborah Eisenberg says…. “I’m not sure I can articulate this,” she continues, “but I’m in the generation that was brought up close enough to the war, the Holocaust, the camps, and yet was protected, to a degree that is amazing to think about now, in a world of synthetic safety. And I would say there was a current of anxiety that any child would have picked up on, probably continuing for several generations, underneath the very, very, very tense kind of perfect world in which I grew up.”

Thank you, Deborah Eisenberg, for somehow–in a way I’m not sure I can articulate–validating my book, and the path that brought me to it.

Thursday’s Pre-Publication Post: Meet My Grandparents (and the Rabbi Who Married Them)

As I’ve mentioned before, the animating spirits behind my forthcoming story collection, Quiet Americans, are my paternal grandparents, Jews who left Germany in the late 1930s. What seems to surprise some people is that rather than having immigrated to the United States together, my grandparents met and married here in New York. This photograph was taken at their wedding in January 1941. The bridal couple is toward the right side of the photo: Grandma is wearing a corsage and Grandpa is touching her shoulders.

I’m not sure when I started to imagine some of the emotions of that wedding day. Given the engagements and weddings I’ve seen in my lifetime, and given our own family’s closeness, it was, and remains, very hard for me to envision a wedding where not only are no parents of the bridal couple present, but none have even met or spoken with their child’s spouse.

But that was my grandparents’ situation. My grandmother had left her parents behind in Germany; they were eventually able to immigrate to South America and join her brother there. My grandfather’s biological parents were both long dead by the time my grandfather reached adulthood, and the woman he called mother was trapped in Europe (soon after this photo was taken, however, she did manage to get to New York, where she moved in with the newlyweds).

Not all of this has made its way into the book (some of it, frankly, seems more apparent in my abandoned novel). But now that you are sharing this pre-publication journey with me, I wanted to introduce you a little more fully to two of the “real” people behind Quiet Americans.

P.S. On the far left side of the photo you will see Rabbi Herbert Parzen, who officiated at the wedding (he also performed my parents’ wedding ceremony 25 years later). Rabbi Parzen was himself married to one of my grandmother’s American-born cousins–Sylvia–who was instrumental in helping to arrange my grandmother’s immigration. Part of “Uncle Herbert”‘s rabbinic life was dedicated to serving as a chaplain for Jewish prisoners in New York. Which may be why this call for Judaica items from Jewish Prisoner Services International, which I discovered via the Association of Jewish Libraries just last week, has resonated with me. My family and I will be checking our own collections to see what we can donate. Perhaps some of you can, too.