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Life and Reading in High School: Jen

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Well, I guess I have to admit this. I was a huge goody-goody in high school. The honors-and-AP-classes taking, do practically every activity in order to pad my college applications, love learning type. But honestly, I write for a book blog, so who didn’t suspect that just a little bit? But even though I was so busy, I really loved all of the activities that I did do. I swam for the high school swim team all four years, and even though I definitely wasn’t the best of the bunch (I swam on a year round team but still struggled to qualify for the end of the year championship meets), I loved every minute of it. Swimming allowed me, a lowly freshman, to enter high school and instantly have a dozen senior ‘friends’ watching out for me. I have fond memories of Friday afternoon swim meets followed by group pizza outings, after which we would all troop over to the high school football game to freeze in the stands with our still-wet hair.

I wrote sporadically for the school newspaper, but I mainly loved being part of the yearbook staff, and was the Assistant Editor in Chief my senior year. (Fun fact: my inscribed copy of our senior yearbook had the lovely typo of ‘Assistant Editor-in-Cheif’). One of my best friends and I used one of our elective periods to do ‘Independent Yearbook Study,’ aka “We spend an entire period goofing off, drawing on the Yearbook Room walls (we were allowed to do this, as each year’s staff repainted), and watching the movie version of Anne of Green Gables to swoon over Gilbert Blythe.” You can slightly see our lovely wall messages in this picture.

Starting sophomore year, I got pretty active in the music/theater side of things, too, and was involved with a few different chorus groups and the school musical for the last three years of high school. Even though I never got a starring role, I was quite proud of my featured vocalist role in Oliver! as the illustrious Strawberry Vendor. Here I am during rehearsal of Barnum, performed my sophomore year.

Even though I’m not very religious now, a huge part of my life in high school was our church Youth Ministry group, and I loved spending a week each summer volunteering for Habitat for Humanity. A huge group of us traveled to a construction site a few hours away, we camped out in a church basement and basically built a house–foundation, beam, insulation, painting and all. I am NOT very handy (hell, I don’t have common sense half the time–there’s a reason I’m blonde, and I often demonstrated this during high school), and these trips really increased my confidence when it came to basic household skills. Below are two of my best friends and I during a rare moment of Habitat downtime.

So I basically bounced between a bunch of groups. I was never the most popular girl in school (by far), but I knew lots of people. And my core group of best
friends stayed fairly constant. We dressed up as devils for the senior
year Halloween Dance, were all inducted into the National Honor Society
together (see below),

and did that “we live in a small town so what is there to do on Friday night? Oh yeah, let’s go to the ice cream stand that our other friend works at and hang out there all night!” Yep, we ate ice cream a lot. The benefits of growing up in New England.

Perhaps the funniest story about my friends is the fact that my best friend and I talked so much and so often that we somehow thought we had each told each other about our senior prom dress.

Needless to say, we did not.

When it comes to reading, I had not yet ventured into the YA territory that now occupies so much of my shelf space. Although when I was in high school, the YA market had not really been developed yet, not as it is today. I spent most of my reading time on bestsellers and classics. I think I somehow thought that since I was in high school, I should be reading ‘upwards.’ I read a lot of the ‘literary fiction’ that spent its time on the bestseller lists and read other works by the authors that we read in English classes. This is definitely not to say that I didn’t enjoy what I was reading, of course. I spent my time with Francie Nolan in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, visited Manderley with Rebecca, and teared up for poor Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities.

It’s strange to look back and realize how little I actually read back then, compared to my consumption now. It’s almost as if I went through a lull in high school, caught between my obsessive love of Sweet Valley Twins and The Babysitters’ Club in elementary school (along with The Fabulous Five, Boxcar Children, and Sleepover Friends, of course) and my fascination with chick lit in college. Which then led of course, to the mainly YA and middle grade reader that I am now. Perhaps I thought I was too busy to read with the furor that I do now. But I definitely still read back then; it was just that the books were more substantial, and took a bit longer to complete. And it’s amazing what I thought “busy” was then, as opposed to what it is now, where I’m truly learning the definition of the word. I even remember feeling so crazed with schoolwork my senior year that I may or may not have employed the Cliff Notes study method for such fine works as Crime and Punishment and Madame Bovary.

But you didn’t hear that from me.

Life & Reading in High School: Kimberly

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Unlike Kelly, who must be an incredibly fortunate person (!), I hated high school. I wasn’t picked on or otherwise treated horrendously by teachers or classmates, but my self-esteem was in the gutter and life was just so, so awkward. I was painfully shy and didn’t know how to grow up in the ways that I saw my peers doing: dating, addressing adults with confidence, and even just simply knowing how to look and act put together. (Your tiny violin is playing for me right now, I’m sure.)

Considering all this, it’s not surprising that fantasy was my go-to genre in high school, and it remains that way now. I wanted to read about anything but what I was experiencing: constant embarrassment, extremely low self-confidence, and just a feeling of not knowing anything useful about life. Above all, I wanted to read about young women who had power or somehow gained power during the story, since I felt so completely powerless in my own life. I read about girls who could do magic, who became warriors or knights, who were smarter or prettier than everyone else and used it to get what they wanted. Even girls who began the story trapped in some way went through some sort
of transformation where they gained both outer and inner power. I still feel that the fantasy genre provides this in spades, and it’s still something I need.

A few friends of mine and I went to the Texas Renaissance Festival at least three years running. This photo may actually be from middle school. We made our own dresses, which got better each year. I must have had a lot of help, because I was not a good seamstress then and I am not one now.

Induction into the French National Honor Society (I’m the one without the whited-out face, in case you were wondering). The girl in the red is still one of my very good friends. I went to her wedding and the curly-haired friend’s wedding a couple years ago (separate weddings…). French was by far my favorite subject in high school – I was reasonably good at it, my friends were in the class with me, and the teacher was wonderful. She would let us eat lunch in her classroom AND nap in there using her huge blankets before school started. She also listened to me gripe about my parents, which endeared her even more to me. After we took the French AP test, she held a dinner at her home, where we built a huge bonfire and threw all of our old French papers (and papers from other classes) onto it to watch them burn. There are so many awesome things about her. She was at my friend in the red shirt’s wedding and I still keep in touch with her on Facebook. She’s one of my good memories.

When I was 16, my French teacher took her classes on a Spring Break trip to Paris. This is me in the airport waiting to board the plane. I think everything in this photo is a sign of the times: the sweater, the zig zag part, and the portable CD player.

We had dinner in the Eiffel Tower. It was pretty terrific.

My friend and I in Paris. This is by far the best photo of me from high school, possibly because you can’t see what I tried to do with my hair. I have very good memories of this particular friend, who is still one of the genuinely nicest people I know. She was the only person I really knew on the trip, and although she quickly made friends with everyone else, something I wasn’t really capable of doing, she always made sure to include me. Another really great memory of her involves a little bit of misbehavior that she encouraged in me. If you know anything about standardized testing in Texas, you know it’s a mess. I was in high school just as they were transitioning to a new test, but this test didn’t actually count for my grade level. Instead, we were the guinea pigs, and our scores wouldn’t go on our records, but they would help the test-makers make a better test (supposedly). She and I decided this was bogus, so we skipped one of the subject tests (science or social studies) and saw X-Men 2 instead with a couple of other people. I should have done things like that more often.
The summer before my senior year, I went on a trip with my dad and my sister out West. We visited Zion and the Grand Canyon, among other places. This is me riding an ATV for the very first time at the Grand Canyon. I was just a year older than the minimum age required to drive the vehicle on my own, so the instructor made me do a couple laps to prove I could handle it. My own memory tells me that he was very impressed with my ability. This was the best part of the trip; it made me feel like a badass, and we came back covered in dirt that didn’t seem to ever go away.

This is me riding a horse in Zion National Park. Also a very fun time. I felt surprisingly comfortable on the horse, even though I hadn’t been one on very much previously. The flatiron was my friend on this day.

Looking back on all this about ten years later, I realize I shouldn’t have been so hard on myself. Going through these old photos has made me understand that I was not nearly as hideous as I thought I was, nor was I as friendless or alone. That doesn’t change the fact that I felt that way, though, and the books I read during that time still resonate. Most of my favorites today came from this period in my life.

Cynthia Voigt’s Kingdom series was a huge influence on my reading life. I actually read the second book, On Fortune’s Wheel, first, and I instantly fell in love. There’s no magic, but there is a young girl in a made-up land who escapes from a life where she feels trapped to explore the world. I loved how atmospheric Voigt’s writing seemed to me at the time, and I especially loved the surprising but deeply satisfying ending. Once I learned that there were others in the series, I quickly read them too. The series is a bit different from most written today in that the books are only loosely connected to each other. Usually, the “sequel” takes place several generations later and previous protagonists are only mentioned briefly. With their (mostly) Vermeer covers, they all seemed intensely romantic to me. I re-read On Fortune’s Wheel every once in a while and still love it. 

As a younger teen, I also ate up all of Donna Jo Napoli’s fairy tale re-tellings. Zel in particular was a favorite, but I also enjoyed Sirena and Spinners. Aside from fantasy, I loved historical fiction, and Ann Rinaldi was my go-to author there. I’ve already bored you to tears with my fixation on Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, so I won’t do anything other than mention it here. Biting the Sun also bears mentioning as an example of a novel featuring a young woman who has both incredible power but who still felt very powerless – and what she does to fix it.

I will be forever grateful to my red-shirted friend for introducing me to Tamora Pierce. While my friend loved the Song of the Lioness books most, I was more drawn to the Immortals series. That preference is unusual, since I disliked animals and the books are about a girl who can speak to and influence animals. I think I liked them more simply because the girl had brown hair and that just made it easier for me to see myself in her. I also loved the romance, which was a bit spicier than anything I had read previously. I think I read both Immortals and the Kingdom books first in middle school, but I kept coming back to them throughout high school.

That same friend introduced me to Anne Bishop’s Black Jewels series in high school. These books were a revelation when I first read them. They were sexy and violent in a strange kind of way, which very much appealed to me. They seemed so fresh to me at the time, like I hadn’t read anything like it before. The magic system was completely unique and fairly complex, and the characters were so fascinating – equally light and dark, good and bad.

I ate up the mass market fantasy as a teen, something I’ve gotten away from a bit as an adult. Favorites included Anne McCaffrey, George R. R. Martin, J. V. Jones, Juliet Marillier, Jennifer Fallon, Holly Lisle, James Clemens, Sara Douglass, Melanie Rawn, and Elizabeth Haydon. And then there was Marion Zimmer Bradley: everything except Darkover, which I never could get into. I never did read Goodkind, Jordan, Brooks, or Eddings. One of my favorite things to do was to visit the used book store and pick out a full trilogy (or quartet or quintet…) of books and dive in when I got home. The quality was erratic but I found some gems that way.

Reading for English class was always a chore, since the books I really wanted to read usually weren’t in the curriculum. That changed slightly my senior year when the teacher gave us a list of books to choose from. You wouldn’t find any of the above titles on the list, of course, but I read The Handmaid’s Tale and The Color Purple that year, and I loved them both.

Like Kelly, I was always writing as a teen.  I was good at English and spent a few years on Yearbook staff, which actually turned out to be a huge mistake, since it necessitated me talking to people, something I avoided at all costs. I wrote much more just for myself. I wrote what I liked to read and most of it was pretty derivative, but I kept it all and go through it every now and then when I want to torture myself. I never shared it with anyone, a habit I keep. I’m trying to change that, but it’s hard!

Life & Reading in High School: Kelly

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I may be in the minority, but I liked high school. I went to a huge school — we’re talking my graduating class had over 1,000 kids — and because of that, there were very few cliques or other social issues that other people seem to experience. We were just too damn big!

I had very few problems in high school, though the first semester of my freshman year was very trying. The first week of school, I broke three bones in my ankle and ended up in a cast that required the use of crutches for the first couple of weeks. Imagine a school with as many students as mine had and trying to navigate the hallways on crutches. Not easy! But don’t worry. I didn’t let a broken ankle keep me from attending my first high school homecoming dance. This is a post-dance picture, and I’m posing with Buzz, the fattest cat I ever owned. Yep, my kitchen had carpet.

My best friend for a good chunk of high school was Melissa. She was a foul-mouthed, terrible influence and I loved every second of it. This picture was right before we spent the day at Milwaukee Summerfest and did something kind of mean to a group of obnoxious drunk kids sitting next to us. No I will not tell you what it was we did, but I will tell you we saw Lifehouse and 3 Doors Down (that was my first concert). 

Here’s a confession I’ve never told anyone, though: I once cheated on a quiz (and this was the only time I ever cheated on anything in school). And I have Melissa to thank for it. We took the same class one hour apart, and once in a while, the teacher would spring a pop quiz on us. But rather than grade those quizzes himself, he’d have students grade them. When we figured this out, she wrote down the answers to the quiz and slipped them to me in the hallway. I then copied them the next hour. I didn’t NEED them and didn’t NEED to cheat. We did it simply because we could. Okay, second confession: that same teacher kicked me out of class once for being a snark. Then weeks later when I was teetering on the edge of two different grades, he gave me the higher one because he liked my attitude. It later turned out the year I had him, he was having sex with another student and was charged for it my senior year.

I don’t think I fit into any particular “group” in school. I floated among a lot of different social groups. I was heavily involved in my school’s newspaper, the school band my freshman and sophomore year (first playing flute, then playing tenor sax which was nearly as big as my 5’1 self!), and I played badminton. Yes, badminton.

In Illinois, where I went to school, badminton was an interscholastic sport, not just a backyard activity. Our season lasted for the bulk of the second semester of school. I played both singles and doubles, though I specialized in doubles. My partner Ashleigh and I even took home a medal our junior year for placing second in one of the big matches (that’s the picture in black and white). We made it to semi-finals for state that year, too.

The first and second picture showcase my braces, too. Most of junior high and much of high school for me involved almost non-stop orthodontic trips. I can say with authority that anyone who only had braces got out of their teen years easily. This was the worst physical pain I’ve ever experienced (but let me tell you how grateful I am for it now).

I never worried about fitting into a certain style, though I look back at some of the things I wore or did and wonder what I was thinking.

I used to carry a lunchbox instead of a purse, as you can see in the top photo. The middle photo was from one of my favorite high school activities: going to White Sox baseball games. Melissa’s mom worked for them, and she always hooked us up with fancy pants tickets and free food. The catch was we’d end up sitting in the field parking lot for 4 or 5 hours before game time. The last photo doesn’t even make sense to me. I think it was dress weird day. I think the bikini top over a striped shirt with my mother’s work vest qualified as weird.

My musical tastes ranged from Reel Big Fish to Dave Matthews and Blink 182 my freshman and sophomore years, and then I moved onto Tori Amos, Ani DiFranco, and a slew of male acoustic singers. Being that I lived fairly close to Chicago, when I was a junior and senior, I was able to get out more and go to live shows. I had the chance to see Tori Amos, Howie Day, Ari Hest, Lenny Kravitz, Pink, and, as pictured above, Matt Nathanson — I think I saw him 7 or 8 times in high school. Loved (and still love) his music, but the banter is where it’s at.

Junior year I took my first job, working at a Hallmark store. It was a good experience, though it wasn’t ideal. When I had the chance to apply for a page job at the local library, I took it and interviewed. But, I didn’t get the job. I was bummed about losing out on the opportunity since it would have been great. That was in November. A couple of months later, I got a phone call out of the blue from the library offering me a page job because the person they’d originally hired wasn’t working out. I spent the second half a junior year through August after I graduated working my way from page to tech services. I loved it.

Here’s my mom and I on my graduation day! I was so tired because we’d had practice in the morning and I just wanted it over. Random fact: I didn’t go to prom. I was going to go with my best guy friend, but after we crunched the numbers, we decided we’d instead have his dad take us to a White Sox game and treat us to tons of hot chocolate and baseball with a fireworks show after. I do not regret a thing, despite what all of my co-workers said (all were convinced I would be sad about this down the road, and here I am, almost 10 years later, and I’m still not regretting it).

When it came to the whole life-after-high-school thing, let me tell you how my college selection stress went. I spent the night at a college in Iowa that sounded cool because it didn’t have a traditional schedule (you did one class at a time, instead of 3 or 4 over a semester). That night, I met a lot of fun people and broke a lot of rules. I put in an application when I got home, got accepted, and decided that was good enough. I could have probably gotten into a lot of schools (if I may brag, I was ranked 7th out of over 1,000 kids academically) but really, I was lazy. And I liked my sanity. It ended up being a good school for me socially, even if it didn’t challenge me a whole lot academically.

The other thing I spent a lot of time doing in high school was reading and writing. I worked on the school’s newspaper and wrote not only news and feature stories, but I wrote a lot of book reviews. I also worked for a forum on AOL called I Was a Teenage Writer. I can’t explain how much this community influenced me not only then but continues to influence me now. Many of the people I met through writing there are people I still talk to now. We all grew up with each other, and we continue growing with one another. It’s bizarre and comforting at the same time. Without doubt, it was through IWTW I developed my passion for talking about reading! A bunch of us not only talked on the forum about books, but we kept LiveJournals and wrote about the books we were reading (yessss, I was one of those kids who had a blog back in 2001 and STILL goes back and reads through it and cringes once in a while — the internet never forgets!). Talking books has been in my blood for a long time. Which brings me to the real point of these posts — what I was reading in high school.

I went through a huge Stephen King phase. But of all the King I read, I remember loving Rose Madder and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon pretty hard. I haven’t read King since high school, but I’ve always harbored the interest in rereading these two titles since they stick out to me so much from that period of my life.

Two of my favorite books in high school were Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate and Kamala Markandayas Nectar in a Sieve. I read both on my own for fun, not for a class. I loved the cultural influences of both titles. I think Esquivel’s novel might have been my first real experience with magical realism, a genre I really like.

Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World was the first “big” book I read. It’s a long story that I remember as little more than a long discourse on philosophy and philosophers. I hated every second of reading it (again, one I read of my own free will for fun) but I refused to give it up because it was such an investment.

I was a bit of an Oprah reader! This was before her reading club went crazy. I remember picking up and falling in love with Wally Lamb’s She’s Come Undone and I believe I read this sucker three or four times. Dolores was a trouper throughout all of the crap coming through her life, and I remember really liking her, despite her not always being the most likable of characters.

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath was a book I picked up only after devouring plenty of her poetry. And as much as people loved this book, I simply liked it. I much preferred Plath as a poet as opposed to a novelist.  

If I had to pick one favorite from high school, it would be Jane Mendelsohn’s Innocence. I haven’t read it since and I keep forgetting to bring it back from my mom’s house whenever I’m there because I think it’ll still have the power it did. This is a story about a teenage girl in New York City feeling like an outsider in the social world. It’s told through a less conventional narrative style, with broken snippets and snatches of story (rather than more fluid prose). I remember it being pretty dark and I remember this being my first real experience with magical realism. It’s funny now looking back at high school reading and seeing the themes that still resonate with me as an adult.

I mentioned IWTW playing a huge role in my reading in high school, and I remember specifically picking up Sapphire’s Push on a recommendation from more than one person I worked with there. I fell in love with this story: it was heart-wrenching and painful to read. I would make the statement it may have been the first contemporary, dark book I read. Even though it was marketed as an adult novel, it read so much like a teen novel.

Megan McCafferty’s Sloppy Firsts was also one of those reads I had in high school that was marketed for the adult audience, even though it reads like a teen novel. This still remains one of my favorite stories, and I will always see a bit of myself in Jessica Darling. Have you ever read a series where the characters are the exact same age and in very similar spots in life as yourself? That was this series for me. Jessica’s 16 when this book starts, and I read it right after I turned 16. I related to her on so many levels, even through to her finishing college and navigating the working world in Perfect Fifths.

When I started high school, and even when I graduated, the YA market was pretty tiny. But there was this little book by Laurie Halse Anderson called Speak. You bet I read it when it came out and you bet I still remember how powerful it is.

I won’t lie: I was one of those kids who read every single book assigned in high school. I fell in love with the traditional classics and read a ton of them on my own. But rather than list all of those, I thought I’d talk about the one book — the only book — I never finished reading in school.

I read every other Dickens novel I was assigned in high school, but Great Expectations was not worth it for me. I didn’t even bother watching the movie, either. I hated this book and wanted nothing to do with reading it. Fortunately, I did a good job of taking notes in class when we talked about it and despite not reading this, I managed to ace the test.

Even though I was a huge reader in high school, I bet something that’ll surprise people is I was also a mega math geek. More specifically, I was a statistics whiz. When I was going through my yearbooks trying to find a photo to scan for this post, a pile of my stats notes fell out. I scanned one of the pages because now, 10 years since taking those notes, I have absolutely, positively no idea what they mean. And as much as they claim we’ll use this stuff in our real life, I can’t remember the last time I needed to make any of those charts or work out any of those complicated formulas.

At least reading and the passion for books never goes away that easily!

Lexapros and Cons Winner!

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The winner of our Lexapros and Cons giveway is….Tamara Cox!

Congratulations, Tamara! I’ll be emailing you shortly and have sent your information on to Farrar, Straus, and Giroux!

Tips & Tricks on Blogging

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Over the last three years — and maybe the last year in particular — we’ve been asked a lot of questions about the logistics of blogging and making it happen. We’re not experts, but we’ve learned some things that have worked really well for us (and some things that haven’t). To kick off our anniversary week, we thought we’d offer up our insights on keeping this a fun thing that we really like and look forward to doing. We’ve taken turns sharing our thoughts here, so sometimes you’re hearing from all of us and sometimes, just one of us.

  • You don’t have to review everything: We get this question a lot! We do not review everything  read, nor do we read everything that we get. Sometimes a book doesn’t interest us or sometimes we read something and don’t, for one reason or another, find it worth blogging about. It’s okay. We tend to take this philosophy not just toward the physical books that we receive or pick up, but we take the same approach with Netgalley titles.  
  • Read what you like: (Kimberly here) This is a little bit of a personal elaboration on the first point. Just as you don’t have to review everything you read, you don’t have to read everything you’re sent, either! This was a small revelation for me at first – I was a bit overwhelmed by the unsolicited books I got, and a bit grateful too. I felt that if someone was kind enough to send me the book, I should darn well read it! I feel differently now. If the jacket copy doesn’t interest me or I start reading it and lose interest, I put it down. If I request a book or pick it up at a conference, I’ll certainly read it, but if it shows up on my doorstep unannounced, I’ll give it away to someone who will enjoy it. There’s no need to feel obligated to read something you know you won’t enjoy.
  • Do what you want: This is our biggest thought on book blogging — there aren’t any rules about what you can and cannot do, so take chances. Write what you want to write. For a long time, we were reluctant to blog about “big issues,” thinking we should stay completely on topic with reviewing books, sharing book lists, and talking covers. But some of those “big issue” posts end up bringing about great discussion. They’re freeing and they serve as great reference points. More importantly, they help give your blog a voice. We’ve learned in the last year, too, sometimes being completely objective in blogging isn’t necessary. Sometimes talking about your own vulnerabilities or talking about the personal reasons why a book resonated with you is a good thing for both you and for people who read your blog. 
  • Promoting your blog: All three of us use Twitter, but none of us uses it solely to promote our blog posts. Kelly’s general rule of thumb (personally) is to have the blog post tweet out automatically when content publishes, and depending on what the content is, she’ll tweet it once in the morning, once around lunch time, and once at dinner time or later. And that’s generally when we see spikes in our blog hits. If there’s a post we really want to draw attention to, sometimes she’ll tweet it one or two more times a day. Same with Kimberly and Jen. But otherwise? We use Twitter to develop relationships and to discover new things. Sometimes Kelly uses Twitter as a filter for what articles are worth reading, worth looking at again, what blog posts she should spend some time thinking about. Sometimes Jen uses Twitter as an extension of her Google Reader, as other bloggers can stumble upon articles of note in blogs she doesn’t follow. Mostly, though, we’re just us on Twitter. If people want to read what we write via Twitter or they want to share it? That’s just bonus. Our thought is it’s more important to be yourself and let people learn about you/what you’re doing on their own terms than to force yourself on them. 
  • Exploit Your Resources: (Kelly speaking here) I hate e-reading, but I do it. (Jen piping in: I feel the same way, but eReading is often  much more convenient in certain situations, and often eGalleys are the only copies of a certain title that I can get.) It keeps down on having print books in my house, helps out the environment, and allows me to be much more selective in what I’m reviewing/reading/spending time with. Most people know about Netgalley already, but many people don’t know about another really worthwhile resource, which is Edelweiss. You can request review copies through Edelweiss, but that’s not why you should use it. You should use it for the simplicity of having (most) big publisher catalogs all in one place. I find this so helpful not only to know what’s coming out in the next 6-9 months, but I like checking them out and looking for what those big titles will be — and more importantly, what the midlist titles will be. The other thing you can do on Edelweiss is update titles with your reviews. I’m not sure the impact it has, but I do like copying those reviews on books I really enjoyed. It can’t hurt. Another thing I do is read a lot of industry news. Shelf Awareness has a great daily newsletter (they have three I read — the general one, the one for readers, and the “maximum shelf”), and Publisher’s Lunch is another daily read of mine. I also subscribe to a few of Publisher’s Weekly’s newsletters and School Library Journal’s.
  • Read how you like: (Kimberly here) I hate e-reading, so I don’t do it. For some people, such as Kelly and Jen, it’s the lesser of two evils: you either read the book electronically or you don’t get to read the book at all. For me, reading a book on a screen is so unpleasant that I’d just rather not read it. I feel this way for a variety of reasons: I need to curl up with a book in order to become engrossed in it, and a computer doesn’t let me do that (I don’t own an e-reader); I need a page that isn’t backlit because it gives me a headache; I need the feel of the pages in my hands; and so on. This all may sound a bit backward or like I’m just echoing one of those annoying people who says “Oh, but it’s just not the same,” and it is a little bit of that. But I will tell you that part of the reason I love one of my favorite books is because of the way it smelled when I first cracked it open, so there you go. In this way, e-reading is something that I believe impacts my assessment of the novel in an unfair way. If I read your book in book form, I’m more likely to enjoy it, and I want to give every book I read a fair shake. Because of that, it’s important to my blogging that I read the book in print. But I think my point here is that no matter which side of the fence you fall on, it needs to work for you.
  • Be “on” even if you’re “off”: A lot of times people ask how we keep ideas flowing or how we come up with things to write about. (Kelly talking) Mine is pretty straightforward: I not only give myself periods of time during the week to brainstorm, but I always have a notebook around me (or maybe my favorite — I keep my email open to write up draft emails). Whenever an idea strikes me, I write it down, even if it’s completely undeveloped. If I read something that gets my mind going, I make a note of it. And this goes along with the last point: keep your eyes peeled for what’s coming. It’ll help you figure out if you have something to say. Jen: I work similarly, even keeping a pad of paper next to my bed to jot down notes that may occur to me before bed or first thing in the morning.
    • Staying organized and motivated: I think I’m lucky in that I blog with two ladies I love working with and with whom I share a lot of similar beliefs. We keep each other motivated, and we have a system where if someone’s too busy to write something, someone else will pick up the slack. (Jen adds that Kelly and Kim were quite accommodating during my blogging maternity leave!) It’s not a big deal. If you’re curious about logistics/the behind-the-scenes stuff at STACKED, here it is: usually on Friday, we email one another and decide what days we want to claim for our own posts. Then we write them and schedule them for whatever days we claimed. We don’t read one another’s posts before publishing them and we don’t usually run topics by one another (unless we’re brainstorming). Once in a while we’ll ask for someone to read something we’ve written to make sure it makes sense or is well-written, but otherwise, we tackle our own ideas on our own. As far as personally, I tend to write my week of posts on Sunday mornings, carving out a few hours early in the day. It takes the pressure of writing something the night before, for me anyway! That’s not to say I don’t blog during the week; I’d guess I probably blog a little bit of something every single day, even if it never actually makes it to a final post. It keeps me fresh and keeps me engaged and passionate. Jen: I tend to plan out on Friday what post(s) I’ll be writing the following week. I used to write them up on Sunday morning, as Kelly mentioned, but now, with a baby, it’s more that I fit in in when I can find the time! Kimberly: I blog in bits and pieces throughout the week, usually in the evenings after work. It’s rare that I sit down and write an entire post in one sitting. I like to jot a few sentences down, let it percolate, and then come back to it.
    • Maintain control: It’s our blog and no one else’s, and we make all of our decisions through that lens. We don’t worry about participating in the latest or greatest promotions, even if we feel pressure to. We allow ourselves to make review decisions based on our feelings and on nothing more objective. Does it mean we might miss out on traffic? Sure. But we blog because we enjoy doing it, so we’re going to do it the way we want to do it.
      • Build and cherish relationships: Something I never expected with blogging was actually developing some pretty meaningful relationships. Part of making this happen is putting yourself out there, going to events, introducing yourself to people. Part of making this happen is being a good member of the community and taking the time to talk back to people who talk to you (and I will forever be grateful Blogger finally let us have threaded comments for this very reason). Part of this is conversing on Twitter, promoting other blog posts, and sharing ARCs. Part of making this happen is having a voice and being less-than-objective in what you do. In exploiting your resources. In doing what you want to do. In being on even when you want to be off.  In being passionate. You don’t have to make your world your blog, but sometimes your world gets richer because of the relationships you make through it. One of my big rules of thumb about this, though, is keeping those relationships separate from the blog, unless it’s necessary to mention it. Why? Because they matter more to me than content. My friendships are more than a book or a blog, and I know that those with whom I’ve forged real relationships with feel the same way. I feel lucky everyday having found this community, but I feel more lucky in having established relationships that help make me a better person.

      Stay tuned the rest of this week to get to know the ladies behind STACKED . . . but maybe not in the way you’re expecting. We’re taking you back to our high school selves, our teen experiences, and what we were reading back then.