The other day Nyel came home from Physical Therapy with the news that there is another writer ‘out there’ named Sydney Stevens who lives in either California or somewhere on the East Coast. A friend of Victoria’s (the Queen of PT on the Long Beach Peninsula) is reading a book by her (or possibly, him).
So, I Googled Sydney (and Sidney) Stevens (and Stephens) in various combinations, but didn’t come up with the right (write) person. There are several of us who share this name and who surface when Googled – among them a singer from Los Angeles, a physician from Palm Desert – but no other writer that I could find.
However, I did find several sites about myself that weren’t on the web the last time I checked. (If you’ve never Googled yourself, it’s an interesting experience. It’s a little bit like listening to gossip about yourself; sometimes you’d like to correct ‘the record’ but you realize the futility of such an endeavor.) Most interesting was a review of my 2007 book, Dear Medora on a site called “Book This” which bills itself as “Assisting Northwest authors, book stores, libraries and book clubs to promote and interact with people who love to read.”
The review was fabulous – the best I’ve ever seen! It was posted on March 4th of this year purports to have come from Coast Weekend. If it’s the freebie insert Coast Weekend that comes with every week’s Chinook Observer, I certainly missed the review the first time around. In any case, I commend it to my readers and fans. It can be found at: http://bookthis.eomediagroup.org/2013/03/04/book-reivew-oysterville-author-resurrects-a-slice-of-local-history/
The part of the review that especially caught my eye was the next-to-last sentence of the final paragraph: Ask the author and she will speak to that strange relationship that often skips the natural arbitration of time to bind distant people together. Certainly this is the case for Stevens. She is more than a caretaker of family memorabilia. She has brought back beloved Medora. Getting to know the young lady is the greatest strength of the book. Stevens has brought us home to a goodness so often lost or overlooked in the current charge of modernism. This book is a must for teenagers. For the rest of us, it is a joyful rendezvous with our pioneer ancestors,
It is the “teenagers” comment that strikes a resounding chord for me. When WSU Press was planning their initial marketing strategy for Dear Medora, they suggested that it should be presented as a book for Teens or Young Adults. I adamantly (and, in retrospect, no doubt wrongly) insisted that it be marketed for the general reading public.
Dear Medora has been anything but a run-away best seller. I wonder if things might have been different if I hadn’t been so headstrong. And is it way too late to be eating crow?
I’m surprised at the number of people who have asked me how my book signing at Adelaide’s went on Saturday. It never occurred to me to ‘report’ about it afterwards but, for all of my kind friends who have inquired, I will say, “It was great!”
’m excited about the book-signing in all the usual ways. It’s kind of like holding an open house. Will anyone come? What should I wear? Will there be familiar faces? I go through the same angst each time a new book comes out and I always wonder if other authors do, too.
Yesterday I ran into Jimmy Kemmer in Ocean Park. “I hear I’m on a Wanted Poster at Jack’s!” he laughed. He was referring, of course, to his picture on the cover of my just-out book, Legendary Locals of the Long Beach Peninsula. The cover has been reproduced as a poster of various sizes and this end of the Peninsula seems to be papered with them! Hooray!!
Yesterday’s mail brought the unwelcome news that my book about Willard Espy “in its current form is not one that fits the current WSU Press publishing goals.” The letter, while disappointing in the extreme, contained good news as well as bad. Or at least it seemed so to me.
My intent (and the main reason for submitting the book to this particular publisher) was to write Willard’s biography in such a way that it would become a companion piece to Dear Medora: Child of Oysterville’s Forgotten Years. That book was published by WSU Press in 2007. Unfortunately, it has sold sparingly; it hasn’t flown off the shelves. It is definitely a “niche book” and, no doubt, was an unusual choice for an academic press. Perhaps the fact that they had a different editor then had bearing on that decision.
When I made my ‘great big noisy fuss’ á la Ramona Quimby ten days ago, I earned myself a second set of proofs for my upcoming book Legendary Locals of the Long Beach Peninsula. They arrived in a pdf (portable document format) file via email late Wednesday and I have until Tuesday morning to make the final corrections and return it. No Pressure.
Fortunately, the most blatant errors of the first proofs have been taken care of. But there are still some whopping mistakes, to say nothing of the subtle inconsistencies of style and weird grammatical imponderables – sometimes a matter of my way or theirs. (And we all know who will come out on top in those instances. As my first publisher told me back in the 1960s, “Sydney, writers are a dime a dozen. There’s always another author available if you can’t do it our way.” Not that I think that applies directly in the current case, but…)
My article about Greg Rogers and his ideas for the “new” Oysterville Store ran in yesterday’s Chinook Observer. I was pleased to see that it began on the front page – right on the fold, to be sure, but still attention-getting with its headline, “Back to old business in Oysterville” and “Greg Rogers reopens the Oysterville Store” as the sub-head.
When I asked Cuzzin Ralph to do a little research about Josiah Crouch, I had no idea that I would be presented with the seeds of another book… maybe. It all came about because of an ongoing discussion I’ve been having with singer/songwriter Larry Murante.