Luck

The book began with Phillip's death.

It was not a dramatic death. He slipped away in the night, not making enough noise to rouse his wife, Nora, slumbering peacefully beside him.

But Nora's scream when she found him, dead, the next morning woke the whole house. Sophie and Beth soon joined Nora in the bedroom.

Luck by Joan Barfoot is the surprisingly fast-paced story of the three days after Phillip's death, and its effect on the lives of the three women he lived with.

As his wife, Nora was obviously grieving. She didn't really know what to do with herself, but she had a very clear idea of what she wanted to do with Phillip's remains. She wanted him cremated, and she wanted to turn his ashes into paint. She left the execution of her unusual request to Sophie.

Sophie, as a house manager of sorts, was in charge of funeral arrangements and calling everyone to inform them of Phillip's untimely demise. Unbeknownst but suspected by Nora, she was actually sleeping with Phillip as well, so she was going through her own grief but doing her best to hide it.

But Beth? Beth felt light. Phillip's death was certainly a surprise, and although she never harbored any ill-will towards him, she never quite liked him either. As Nora's model, she spent countless hours being adjusted and posing for Nora. This intimate relationship had given Beth a false sense of connection, even love, between herself and Nora. She was gleefully awaiting the day when they could be together.

I really enjoyed this book. It's not my typical read, but you know I love well-written female characters, and this book had three. Three complex, interesting, flawed women with fleshed out backstories. Three women who came together to live in this house for vastly different reasons. Three women whose worlds changed overnight. Honestly, I would have read a whole book on the backstory of each woman.

I like that the end of the book flashes forward to the 1 year anniversary of Phillip's death. Books that have a flash forward to wrap it up (outside of an epilogue) often seem like lazy storytelling, but this felt necessary. So much happened in the first three days, but those changes needed some time to breathe so each woman could individually grow from them. One year down the line, so much has changed, but they still feel so genuinely themselves.

I Got The Job

I got the job.

I got the job.

I did it!

I'm at a loss for words.

I found out mere hours after I posted my blog about going to Arizona. I'm on the couch with my mom, testing out the new TV.

I read the email out loud. My mom screams and hugs me.

As if on cue, my sister walks in from work. I tell her too.

I try to compose a coherent reply. Yes, September 5th sounds like a reasonable start date. (Why did I say that? That is so soon. There is so much to do. What. How.)

My mom starts crying that she's going to be all alone in this house. My sister films it and puts it on Snapchat.

I'm filled with excessive energy. My sister tells me I need to start packing NOW. (Who is she to talk? She leaves on the 20th and has barely started packing.)

I get a message from a guy I matched with on tinder when I was in Arizona, telling me not to worry, I'll get the job. I tell him he's right, I just got it.

My mom says we should tell my dad. My sister and I look at her like she's crazy. He's been dead for two years. She explains we should visit the bench we dedicated to him. She then concedes that his ashes are in the room. He heard.

She texts her friend. We call two of my aunts. I text Claire. I still have too much energy.

My mom and sister leave, off to their own plans for the night. I am left alone, not knowing what to do with myself.

Tash Hearts Tolstoy

So here's a funny story. Once upon a time, I started working at Barnes & Noble. I became friendly with some of my coworkers, and told them about my passion for LIW, and about Merry Maidens, the one I was working on at the moment. Several months later, one of those coworkers, Alaina, finds a new YA book, in which the protagonist is working a LIW and accidentally gets mildly internet famous. Since she'd only ever heard of something like that from me, she told me about it.

That was enough to pique my interest. No one even knows what LIW is, and now there's a book about it. Then I read the description. Tash, the protagonist, also happens to be a heteromantic asexual.

You read that right. Asexual representation. In teen fiction. Hell freaking yes.

That sealed the deal. Screw the massive To Be Read pile in my room, plus my long-ignored book list that I've been going through and adding to since high school. We have a loan program at B&N for employees that I had yet to take advantage of. Tash Hearts Tolstoy was my next read.

The best part is that I'm not even out to Alaina. She had no idea the effect this book would have on me. How much it would mean to me.

I have never felt so represented in literature. I felt like, for the first time, I saw someone like me in a book. I never really thought representation was an issue for me personally; as a white-ish middle-class cisgender straight-passing jewish girl, I could usually see someone who was kind-of like me. Before I figured out I was on the asexuality spectrum, I always wondered why characters in books always wanted to have sex. They'd be 15 or 16, in their first relationship, and they'd want to have sex already. And they would. And I always wished there was a character who didn't even have their first kiss until they were 18, 19, even older maybe. I felt like YA novels made it seem like sex and romance were the be-all-end-all, and most people had their first kiss at 13 and sex by 16.

God, I needed an asexual character in high school. I knew what asexuality was, in theory, but I couldn't separate sexual and romantic attraction. Because I had never experienced sexual attraction.

So anyways, this book is really important to me. Because even though I don't identify as completely asexual (demisexual is much closer to my experience), I found so much comfort in being in the mind of someone who gets it. Someone who never understood why people like porn or are motivated by sexual ads. Someone who likes the idea of snuggling up to someone and being kissed on the forehead more than sex. Even though I know I'm not alone in this, and even have a few friends on the spectrum, it's not something we talk about a lot. Seeing the world though someone else's eyes, when their view is remarkably similar to yours in a way that most peoples' just aren't, is incredibly validating.

It's not all sunshine and roses. Her identity is questioned multiple times; by friends who she did a poor job explaining it to, and by (SPOILER) a potential partner who thinks she's too young to know and doesn't think that sexual and romantic attraction are different. That one, in particular, was painful to read. It's one of my biggest fears. Who wants to date someone that isn't sexually attracted to them? At least I know that I could, theoretically, one day be attracted to them, but it's not guaranteed. And now that I've actually experienced sexual attraction, I don't know if I'd even want to be in a relationship without it.

Tangent: I actually tried outing myself to a guy before I went on a date with him, because I was starting to wonder if he was looking for more of a hookup. He didn't like break off the date or get mad or try to invalidate my identity or anything, but the date was SUPER awkward and platonic, when normally when we hung out he was flirty in a formal-ish kind of way. I think he might have been a little freaked out.

I've been very fortunate to not be exposed to much acephobia since I came out. There was one 'only plants are asexual' from a friend arguing that asexual is a stupid name for it (before I was out to him, but after I was out to his girlfriend), but a year later he came out as demisexual too. It's mostly been a lot of confusion because no one really gets it, but I think I've gotten pretty good at explaining it. Way better than Tash at the very least.

Anyway, I know this wasn't really about the book itself, but about why it's important to me. I know a lot of people who read this blog are LIW fans and creators, and thus I highly recommend it to you. A huge part of the book is Tash and her best friends Jack and Paul making a webseries, figuring out how to deal with the surge in fans, and excitement over being nominated for the Golden Tubas, which is an awards show and convention that seems like a step above the LIWAs but still a step below the Streamys. Ace or not, I think you'll still get a rush because they wrote a book about us!

Arizona

Sometimes, the best of opportunities come about in the strangest of ways.

A while back, my mother's friend, Pauline, mentioned that she had a friend who worked in publishing and gave me her contact info to set up an informational interview. When I gave her a call, she steamrolled me. She (without even seeing my resume or asking about my experience) told me that I was under-qualified and needed to do a lot of freelance work to be taken seriously. She introduced me to a website where I could get freelance work, although I never actually used it with everything else going on in my life.

But a few days after the informational interview, she sent me a link to the internship program at PR by the Book. Intrigued, I applied. Shortly thereafter, I was informed that they were not, in fact, hiring interns at this time, but would keep my resume on file for when they were.

So I moved on with my life and more or less forgot about it.

A few months later, I got an email. They were once again hiring interns and were wondering if I was still interested. Of course I was. I did a phone interview. It went well.

A few days later, I got an email. They had decided they did not actually need another intern, but really liked me. Was I interested in an internship at the magazine they also work for? Sure, why not?

That is how I came to work at Texas Lifestyle Magazine, but the story doesn't end there. I kept applying for jobs. ICM Partners asked me to fly out to NYC for an interview (you can read about that trip here). I decided to post on Facebook asking if people had recommendations of what I should see and do while I was there, since I ended up making a mini vacation out of it. Marika, the travel editor at TLM, saw my post and happened to be in NYC the same few days. So we met up for breakfast.

I told her about my book publishing aspirations and she offered to start sending me work for PR by the Book so I could get some more experience under my belt.

Our trips overlapped with Book Expo America, which she was attending. While there, she had meetings with many publishing professionals. One of which was Brooke, the publisher at SparkPoint Studios. Brooke mentioned that she needed someone new to help take on clients. She wasn't really sure what the role would be yet, but she knew she wanted someone passionate and driven and looking to get into book publishing in some capacity.

Since I had just told Marika about my ambitions in book publishing, I was top of mind. She mentioned that she knew someone who might make a good fit and offered to introduce us.

Dozens of emails, two months, and a Skype interview later, I found myself being flown out to Arizona to meet the team and do final interviews.

Everyone was so lovely. It's a small staff of loud, vibrant women who want to do great work. It reminded me a lot of my internship with the Les Turner ALS Foundation in that way. Most of them are also really young, especially on the publicity team. They all seem to be 22-26, which is something I wouldn't have even dreamed of.

If I were to join SparkPoint Studios, I would be on the publishing team, managing authors and their titles as they go through the entire publishing process. It's an amazing opportunity, because it would allow me to be involved in so many parts of the process, and give me direction as to what part of publishing I want to pursue.

I should be hearing back soon, so wish me luck!

Bonus: The office looks like it came straight from Pinterest.

Blackbird Fly

I am so stoked about the protagonist in Blackbird Fly.

Analyn "Apple" Yengko is a twelve-year-old Filipino girl. She's passionate about music (although her mom won't let her have a guitar), especially the Beatles.

I'm not so stoked about her situation. When she gets put on the Dog Log, a list of the ugliest girls in school, her friends drop her like a hot potato. People bark at her in the hallways, say her family eats dogs for dinner, and she is accused of theft.

It really feels like middle school. And like middle school, the only way Apple gets through it is with the help of some friends.

I enjoyed Blackbird Fly. I know it was meant for much younger readers, I'd guess around grades 3-7, but that just meant it was a really quick read. I read it on the train downtown and back, and finished it before I got off the train.

The book wasn't particularly groundbreaking, but I'm just so excited for a canonically Filipino protagonist. And she isn't a Mary Sue either. She has very specific interests and struggles and and has a unique but complicated relationship with her mother and makes poor choices that follows her own logic. So not everyone will see themselves reflected in Apple. They're not meant to. But chances are, most will be able to relate. They might see slivers of themselves in other characters. But it should be a window into someone else's world.

And if you're long past your middle school days, Blackbird Fly by Erin Estrada Kelly will remind you of why you're glad middle school is behind you.