Former Librarian

August 14, 2017 |

“So what do you do?” is a question I get asked a lot. And it’s immediately followed with either a “why,” a “how,” or a giant facial question mark. It seemed like a prime opportunity in the sizzling center of summer to put together a quick day-in-the-life.

First: my job title. Working full-time for Book Riot, my title is associate editor and community manager. The fancy title is a way of saying I do a lot of writing and editing of my work and others, I am responsible for some social media stuff, and I take care of behind-the-scenes tasks, including being available for contributors to bounce questions and ideas off.

Beyond the full-time job, though, I also edit for myself and write for myself. I’ve always got other writing and freelance obligations on my plate because I like having a wide array of writing and projects to bounce between. Having one focus doesn’t work for me, and, as it turns out, working entirely from home all day nearly every day, so I’ve taken a (very) part-time position at my yoga studio, too. It’s a way to stay involved in a business I love, as well as get to know more of the folks who come to yoga who I don’t get to see when I’m there for my own practice.

My work schedule on the Book Riot side makes me the special snowflake of the team. Unlike the rest of the editors and ad/ops folks, I don’t work a standard 8-4/9-5/10-6 workday. I split my days, working some hours in the morning and some in the evening. I also have Sundays and Mondays as my weekend, meaning that Tuesdays are essentially my Monday and that Saturdays, I’m at the helm for everything. Having done this now for a number of years, I’m not intimidated…except when things fall to pieces on a Saturday, which, while rare, does happen. I like to think I am pretty good, though, at the Emergency Backup Plan To Solve Problems.

Here’s how the donuts get made on a typical day.

5 am: I wake up. For real. My husband works over an hour away and he’s started his days closer to 7 am recently, so when he gets up, so do I. I could stay in bed, but I do like getting up and started on my own business before most everyone else.

6:15 am: By now, I’m usually showered, dressed, and with tea in hand. I start my Book Riot days by reading through the posts that went up the previous day — I’m always a day behind on reading content because of my schedule — and then start scheduling pushes for those posts on Tumblr and on Pinterest. When I wrap up the social media coverage on both of those, I tinker with our Goodreads page. I can’t possibly keep up with the comments over there in our forums, but I peruse them to make sure there aren’t fires to put out. I also like to add some book recommendations (generally pulled from either our New Books! Newsletter or from our Riot Recommendation posts of the best books we read in the previous month).

8 am: I am also in charge of indicating some information about sponsored posts, so a small part of my every day work is going into the program we use and making sure everything is labeled appropriately. It’s not a task that takes a long time, but it gets tedious sometimes.

8:15 am: Check and delete the email. Almost all of our office communication is through Slack, so 95% of my inbox is pitches for books and/or updates from Goodreads. I don’t need to keep much, if any, of it.

8:30 am: My time for miscellaneous housekeeping. This might be responding to emails or reaching out for interviews or researching YA news for the newsletter. This is a time when I like to update any information I have about contributors or reach out to them with reminders for what they’re writing this week that’s part of an ongoing series. I’ll use any time in here to dig through general book world news for my weekend Critical Linking post on Sundays.

9:30 am: Writing. I write the YA newsletter, a weekly column, and other miscellaneous pieces. They’re all in various stages of done throughout the week, so I pick up where I am and do a bit of work. Depending on what day of the week it is, I may write for a couple of hours on all of these or I may do more research for future pieces.

On a “typical” day, I tend to stop working between 10:30 and 11 am. There are days it’s earlier, as well as days it’s later — we have staff calls every week which happen either at 12:30 pm or 2 my time, so on those days, I just work on through. It gets me a ton of quiet time for getting a lot done.

But we’re calling this a “typical” day, so let’s play it that way!

11 am: I’ve already put in half a day of work, and by now, I’m ready to work on my own projects. This might mean answering emails or editing pieces for (Don’t) Call Me Crazy. It might involve working on household projects or chores, and it might also mean working on homework for any of the online classes I’ve been taking. I use this time, too, to journal or to go out and take photographs and let myself have some creative freedom. It’s this time when I generally eat lunch in front of my screen and work on other freelance work. By this point in my day, I feel like I’ve been so productive that I’m able to ramp it up and get piles of work done in what feels like a relatively short amount of time.

1:30 pm: Usually by now, unless I’m out of the house, I relocate from my office to the living room. This is quiet time that I permit myself to use as I wish. I could work more if I want, but I can also read and feel no guilt for spending a few hours doing that. It took me years and years to permit myself time to just be and by also permitting myself choice during this time frame, I know that if there is work I have to do for a deadline or there’s something someone else wants of me (i.e., an answer to an email), I can do it here. If I choose. I don’t expect people who work normal hours to bend to me during their non-work hours, and allowing myself the same parameters within my odd schedule has been so good for my mental wellness.

4:30 pm: Three hours of me time in the afternoon is generally enough time to find the energy to get myself to yoga. My yoga classes are 90 minutes long, so by the time I get there and home, I’m nice and sweaty. Around 4:30 is when I also log back on to everything for work — Twitter, Facebook, and Disqus for website comments — and log on to Slack to see what I may have missed. Having this half hour of prep time before leaving lets me know what to prepare for when I get back home. It also is a great motivator for working hard on the mat, if necessary, to get the anxiety and stress out.

7:15 pm: I’m home and making dinner at this point. Depending on the day and what I need to get done, I may use this time to do more social media work and/or writing for Book Riot. But this is also the time I’m 100% available to contributors, which sometimes, can be what I do most of the night. Reading posts, brainstorming, doing research — I love that stuff. It’s nice and makes it easy to also monitor and respond to what needs addressing on our social accounts. At night when you see snark going down? Usually that would be me. My husband is home by this point, and I often am less sitting at my computer for work and more up-and-down with cooking, some cleaning, and a lot of playing with various animals.

9:30 pm: I love to use the last bit of time while I’m doing social coverage and community management to brainstorm what needs to happen the next day, to take notes for what to share in calls, to peruse Edelweiss for things I should have on my radar. It’s a nice cooling down, and it’s a nice prep for the next day. I like to know if I’m going to go into a day where I do a single day’s work…or a day when I need to make sure I cram in 3 days’ worth of work.

10 pm: This woman is in bed. No joke. Because the next day will be coming soon enough.

Tracking My Reading & Tracking Myself

May 9, 2016 |

I got a really interesting pitch email the other day. It wasn’t what was being pitched, but rather, one of the means in which I could highlight the book: I could share it on Instagram.

I’ve become a big fan of taking pictures of what I’m currently reading. I use it both on Instagram, as well as on Litsy (where I’m simply @kelly). Instagram because it’s available on the web; Litsy, since it’s a community limited for the time being to iOS mobile users. The photos are not just about the book. They’re also about where I am right now, in my life, in my space, and the entire atmosphere of reading. Photos capture something more to the reading experience than an update on Twitter or Pinterest or Goodreads or right here on STACKED could.

These images, these ways of sharing, are also very public. There’s intentionality in how I choose to share; I highlight things I like in images, talk about books on social media after I’ve finished them and mulled them over, and I am deliberate in the ways and hows. I like doing it, plan to continue doing it, and cannot imagine a reading life without it.

But despite the new technology and the fun there is to be had on each, I still track my reading in a very personal, private, long standing way: I keep a list of books I’ve read in a spiral-bound notebook.

The notebook on the bottom I began in 2001. That was my sophomore/junior year of high school. I picked up the habit of doing it after my mom began doing it herself as a way to remember what books she’d read. Rather than keeping a “to read” list, I began keeping a “read” list.

It’s weird to look at this list now, 15 years later. I don’t remember reading Harry Potter back then. It mustn’t have left a huge impact, since I didn’t pick up (most of) the rest of the series until well into college. But I do remember why I picked up Ishmael — it was sitting on a bookshelf of a friend’s when we snuck to her house between the end of school and badminton practice and I remember thinking a book about an ape sounded interesting. I remember picking up Innocence and then needing to pick up Mendelsohn’s other book immediately after. Fifteen years later, I still recall the visceral reactions I had to Innocence and how much I loved it.

And there’s no shaking the vivid memory of picking up Push and not just reading it, but being moved by it and immediately seeking the chance to talk about it with fellow book lovers (who, yes, at the time were on the internet — we had a whole teen community of book lovers and writers).

I lost this notebook for a period of time, somewhere between the end of high school in 2003 and the beginning of college in the fall of that same year. I picked up another notebook, same brand, same size, but with a pink cover. From the beginning of college until this very day, this is where I’ve written down every single book I’ve finished.

Between those lines are the memories of the books in some pieces, and in others, it’s the memory of the where, the when, and the why. I read so many debut YA novels in 2011, which is reflected; in 2015, my reading went a little broader, though was still mostly YA. I didn’t snap a shot of this year’s pages, but of the 40ish books I’ve finished so far, it’s almost an even mix of adult novels and non-fiction with YA.

I remember spending a long time on that first day of 2015 debating what my first read should be and choosing my all-time favorite book. I knew I wouldn’t be disappointed then.

I’ve cut back on reviewing here at STACKED, and I’ve also cut back quite a bit on Goodreads. But I still take notes on things, and I still keep my read list up. I’ve added new things to the mix, ways to talk about books with people in a way that will compel them to read it or pair it up with the reader who it’ll be the right book for. Nothing, though, no matter how fun and exciting, will ever take the private part of my handwritten reading notebook away from me. In no way are the stories of the books I read all the kind I need or want to share because they’re for me and me alone.

It’s a reflection of me, my growth, my thinking, a snapshot of time in my life, that I could never capture in any sort of digital world. What began as a simple way of making sure I don’t read something I’ve already read has bloomed into this incredibly personal way of seeing my life and my development as a thinker.

Tell me: do you keep a read list? Do you keep anything of your reading life private, just for you? I’d love to hear about it in the comments!

Exciting News & A Pep Talk To Readers

October 27, 2015 |

In between tackling some challenging social media related shenanigans, I’ve been working really hard lately on my anthology, as well as some other writing for work and non-work reasons. It’s been fabulous, all of this writing, as has been the incredible honor I’ve had to edit essays for Feminism for the Real World. I’m going to have a very exciting announcement soon with the second part of my contributors (!!) but in the time before that, I have my own exciting announcement which is this: I am now represented by literary agent of wonder, Tina Wexler at ICM.

I cannot express my excitement for how well Tina and I clicked from our first email to our phone calls. I have let her in on all of my secrets and it’s really neat to have someone who not only gets it, but who is excited about helping me find a home for the projects I’ve got in my pocket. I even shared some (gasp!) YA fiction I’ve toyed with, a project I have toyed with and put away because of more pressing work, and she was receptive and excited by it.

A little back story: I’ve done this entirely backwards, upside down, and in my own way on my own terms. Most writers begin with an idea, then they write the manuscript, then they query agents, then they work with the agent who sends their work off to editors who might be interested. I jumped around. I wrote and sold a book to VOYA entirely on my own, and I did the same with Feminism for the Real World with Algonquin Young Readers. One of my editors there suggested I think about agents while going through some of the paperwork aspect of the project, and her suggestion really made me sit back and think about what I wanted for a career out of writing — and it was and is clear to me there’s more than this in me. Suddenly, I had five million ideas and wanted to find an agent who’d be open to trying these things, as unconventional as they may be.

There’s little to nothing out there for writers who aren’t going into straight fiction or even narrative non-fiction in terms of what they should be doing to find an agent. So I asked around — I asked writers I knew who loved their agents why they loved them, what made them stand out, and whether they knew anyone else who might be open to talking. I had it in my head to just talk, and I had fantastic conversations with two great agents. After talking, I knew this was something I not only wanted to do, but that I needed to do.

I have been taking an online course about dreaming for the last four weeks. I did it for me and me alone, and it’s been about an hour a day I get to spend thinking about possibilities and ideas and making my life more creatively adventurous and fulfilling. I might write about the course in more detail when it’s done, but a few of the big takeaways from it so far have been really impacting my thinking. I can’t just sit on ideas. I have to let myself pursue them as I have them or at least write them down to pursue when I’m ready. In a lot of ways, this was “divine timing.” And this was a leap and a risk I was more than ready to take.

I’m thrilled to keep writing, to keep building this unconventional and exciting and fun and fulfilling career. Last weekend marked four years since I walked out of a job that left me depressed and miserable and feeling awful day in and day out. I had no plans when I left, just that for my own sake, I needed to get out.

Four years back, I couldn’t have envisioned how much that decision radically changed my life in the best possible ways.

If you’re reading this, take that leap. You and your life are worth it. There will be super crummy times. There will be things that truly test the limits of all aspects of your life and your relationships.

But you only get to do this whole thing once, so take the chances as you can.

“Yes” is just as important as “no.”

Getting Things Done with Bullet Journaling

April 30, 2015 |

Taking a day away from talking about books and reading to instead talk about the art and science behind how I get organized and stay productive. Part of it is being inspired by folks like Jane from Dear Author who talked about this at the start of the year, and part of it is that I’ve really taken to bullet journaling and have had a number of people talk about how they want to get into it and don’t understand how it works.

I’ve always been a list keeper. I have notebooks upon notebooks of to-do lists, stretching back to college and earlier. They’re still sitting in boxes and in closets around the house, in the event I need to do something like see where I was in wedding planning back in 2006. Just incase, I guess. I’ve kept a notebook of every book I’ve finished reading since 2000, which sits on the book case in my living room.

When I worked outside of the house, I kept numerous notebooks for lists. Some were for work. Some were for inspiration. Some were for random note taking. For a few years — recent ones — my list keeping and note taking got out of control. I not only had numerous notebooks going, but I also became an unabashed post-it note user. The great thing about post-its is how easy they are to move around, put into notebooks, rearrange, and, as it turns out, throw away. Where I cannot get rid of a notebook with lists, tossing a post-it of tasks I’ve completed away felt like an accomplishment. I enjoyed that.

The downside to throwing out post-its, though? Not being able to see at a glance what sorts of productivity I can achieve within a certain time frame. Am I getting ten things done a day? Three things done a week? What sort of long-term projects require weeks, instead of an hour? Quantifying productivity with post-its and numerous journals just doesn’t work for me.

Enter bullet journal.

If you’re not familiar with the bullet journal, take the three minutes to watch the video which gives an overview of the theory and system:

After watching this, I had more questions than answers. It felt overcomplicated for my own needs while also feeling too simple. Can I really keep numerous lists in one place? Why do I need multiple calendars within the journal? Do I need the journal AND a calendar? Will it make sense to mix up my work-related tasks with my personal tasks? Blog tasks? How will I make sense of all the little symbols and notations?

In short, I watched the video and felt like it was a lot to take in. But I wanted to try it anyway.

A little bit of backstory here: I noted being a journal and note book nerd, but I didn’t mention the level to which this exists. Back in the glory days of Livejournal, I was a member of numerous notebook and journaling communities, and even after, I connected with many folks who were into that, too. Is there something more nerdy than talking about how you journal or stay productive? About what kinds of pens you prefer? About where to score really great notebooks (…and yes, I have preferences on the note books I use and for what purpose)? I knew there’d be people out there showing off how they bullet journal, and while there are some great examples on Tumblr, I knew where the gold mine would be: Pinterest.

Here’s a quick and dirty set of search results for “bullet journal” on Pinterest. While many follow the formula of the original, many diverge. If you spend some time digging around through people’s posts, you’ll find so many variations on the standard bullet journal, and it was through a few hours of time, I was able to cobble together a system that absolutely, positively works for me.

Yes, I am 100% analog in my tasking and I foresee this being the case for a long time. I am better at remembering things when I write them down than I am keeping them in my head or on a digital calendar or document. I have no more post-it notes in my life, and I keep only two notebooks now. One is for almost everything I do (that’s the bullet journal), while the second is my notebook for keeping track of work scheduling of social media, meeting notes, and generally uncategorizeable note taking. I use a large Moleskine with a grid format for the journal, while I use a Chronicle journal for my note taking (this one right now). I am very, very committed and devoted to both of those products for those very specific reasons. It’s partially about size, portability, and quality. Likewise, they sit together neatly on a shelf when I am finished with them, which is important, since I refer back to many of the note-taking notebooks frequently.

This is how I organize my bullet journal, and as the year has progressed and my projects and work have shifted and grown, you’ll see my methods have evolved, too.

I began like the video does, by numbering my pages and creating an index at the front of the journal. This method lasted for approximately 15 pages and two days of January. I don’t care about being that organized. If I do, I can go back later and fill in those gaps. I did end up making a yearly calendar at the beginning of the journal, month by month, with key dates highlighted and marked. I haven’t referred back to this much since creating it, so it’s stayed blank. I’d probably ditch this in future iterations.

At the beginning of each month, I write out a rough events calendar:

This is nothing more than the dates of the month on the left, along with events or important things I ned to remember beside it. On dates with more than one event, I just separate them but put them all on the same line.

On the next page, I keep a single-page monthly task list. This is a list of things I need to do during the month that don’t necessarily have a due date or need to be done by a certain point. I refer back to this every day when I’m working on my daily task lists (getting there in a minute) in order to build those daily to-dos.

Following those pages, I like to make myself a place to track my monthly workouts. Some people do things like Fit Bit or Polar Vortex (which isn’t the real name, but that’s what I call my husband’s fancy tracker). I think I’ve made it clear I’m a paper person.

Following those three key pages, I then flip to the following page for a two-page spread which becomes a place where I keep track of two things during the month: blog post ideas, as well as books I’ve read and books I’d like to read that month. I don’t get to everything on the “to read” list, but that’s become a way for me to keep up with what I’ve been thinking about or wanting to read so when I do finish something and wonder what next, I have a place to turn.

After that, I give myself 3-5 pages which I’ve so creatively titled “miscellaneous.” This is where all of my monthly catch-all to-dos, lists, and other things I can’t forget or want to refer back to end up. Sometimes it’s literally a note about something I need to mention in an email or it’s an address. Something I don’t want to lose or misplace and would want to maybe refer back to at some point. I didn’t include pictures because all of those pages have personal stuff on them, but the important part for me is they exist and they’re there before the daily task lists.

One of the key features of bullet journaling per the video is that people can use a special key to track their events and tasks. This…does not work for me. Instead, I make a running agenda for every single day and mark things off as I go. For important things, like an appointment or call I have to attend to, I usually put a star to note that to myself. Otherwise, it’s a straight list, and I keep the daily task lists to half of a page. That’s all I can reasonably do in a day. Or rather, it’s all I expect myself to try to accomplish in a day that needs to get written down. Some things are so routine, I don’t need to mark them.

Generally, I write out a week of dates at a time. Sometimes I’ll go further. I don’t usually put the day of the week beside the date, but I have done that to keep track periodically. What’s been key for me here is this: I list things I need to do, or a memory cue for them (like “Pinterest” and “Goodreads,” which are things I do for Book Riot) and I mark them off as I accomplish them. When I see there are things being unmarked and unaccomplished, I move them to the next day.

Some people believe in very specific tasks being written. I alternate between specific tasks (“Write a Tumblr post for work about this event doing this”) and cues (“Goodreads,” which simply means do a few things on Goodreads that need to be done that day). It works for me because some things require specific information and other things do not.

If things don’t get done within a week or so — depending on what the task or memory cue is — I reevaluate the task. Do I need to do it? Will I do it? Or is it taking up unnecessary space in my life and it’s time to let go? If something isn’t on my monthly task list and has just been taking up space on my calendar, it’s time to either do the task (like go to the post office, which is a notorious one I hold over) or get rid of it and not think about it again.

By keeping my daily task lists to a week or so planned out, I force myself to make these decisions regularly. I don’t have time to waste writing things down again and again if I’m really not going to do them or if it’s a thing I just need to do and finish.

I keep all of my to-do list in one space. I do not separate out work tasks from personal tasks. I am very good at budgeting my time and energy during the day, so I know how to proceed with those multiple sides to my daily life. I practice energy management as opposed to time management, which I know is a touchy-feely way of getting things done, but it works for me. And since I work from home with an unconventional schedule, I find this method of taking care of things every day really works for me. Basically, I don’t plot things out in time chunks. I plot them out by energy. I know I am more likely to get certain things done in the morning and other things done mid-day. So I look at my lists every day and go from there. (This also tends to be why I am generally very fast at responding to emails or messages I get: as soon as I have the energy for it, I’m tackling it, rather than planning to go at it in one period of time.)

And that’s all.

I don’t do anything else with my bullet journal. I have no fancy secrets or knobs or gadgets. I use the same black ink Pilot pen on every single page. I reevaluate the monthly task lists as I go, and sometimes things get knocked off when they’re accomplished or I know it’s not going to happen.

I’m sold on this method of tracking my life because it’s analog and because I love having both the feeling of accomplishment that comes with marking things off and seeing how much can and cannot get done. More, I have a lot of opportunities to make choices with my time more regularly now that I see how my energy works with me, rather than against me. As a person who has to have control in her life, this is the biggest benefit. I know when and how I can get things done when I see it like this.

Keeping a record of books read, workouts finished, and blog post ideas keeps me motivated. I like seeing those pages full visually. And it’s always nice to know there’s a pile of blog post ideas sitting in line when I feel like I have nothing to work with when I sit down to write.

My bullet journaling came from trial and error, looking at what other people were doing and what would work for my own life. If it’s something that appeals to you but feels overwhelming, I cannot emphasize looking around at how others adapt them and then doing the same for yourself. I started with some idealistic notions on what I’d do with this, but then I let them die away as I realized the key component of bullet journaling for me, aside from organization, was decision making. Where do I invest my time and where do I let things go?

Other resources for getting started in bullet journaling:

Maureen wrote about her own personal methods of bullet journaling earlier this year. As you’ll see we all have methods that work for us. The beauty of bullet journaling is the adaptability of the format.

There’s also a Facebook group for bullet journaling. You can hop in and show off, ask questions, and get ideas for how other people use their journals here.

Bullet journal ideas and examples from Pinterest to get you started.

Opening Up a New Shop: Critique Services

September 8, 2014 |

We’ve got two announcements this week at Stacked and this is the first. The second will be later this week.

Since I’m working from home now and have established a daily routine, I’m excited to announce I’m pursuing something that’s been on my mind for a couple of years now. I’m opening up manuscript critique services to young adult writers. I’ve been asked about this in the past, and I’m finally at a spot where I’ve got the time and energy to do this.

All of the details about fees, time tables, professional background (if my work here at Stacked isn’t enough), and what I’m eager to work on can be found over on my professional site. My contact information is there, too, if you have questions or want to be in touch.