(YIKES, sorry I’m late…)
A few days ago, there was a big hullaballoo in my neighborhood, which is normally a pretty quiet place. We’re spread out against the backdrop of a wilderness park area where there is plenty of wildlife–from beavers to raccoons to opossums to deer.
The deer, it turns out, had decided to jump a fence into someone’s backyard and munch on the flowers there. The family watched them from their living room, enjoying the sight of so many deer milling around… until one of the deer decided to stick its neck through the fence to munch on flowers in the neighbor’s yard. And got stuck.
The fire department had to come cut the fence apart in order to set the deer free.
Lots of fire departments apparently got into the act. (It was a very slow Sunday.) The deer was set free, the fence slated for repair. I have no idea how they’ll keep the deer from getting back into the yard and starting the process all over again, now that the deer have found good munchies. Deer are not terribly bright when it comes to putting themselves in danger for munchies, or else the entire salt-lick industry would’ve gone belly up a while ago.
A couple of years ago, when I first sold Bobbie Faye, I wrote late at night, every night, and on that first night of the sale, I was a bit terrified because there wasn’t a book done, yet. I had to finish it, and my adrenaline may have been on overdrive a wee bit, because I kept hearing a noise up in the attic and it sounded like some critter was up there erecting a stadium for playing their own version of football… and instead of my first thought being, “Critter… alive… wake husband…,” I thought, “I am going to go up there and see what the hell that thing is.” Actually, if I were telling the truth, it was more like, “That &^*#* animal is &$*# keeping me from focusing and I’m going to go up there and give it a piece of my mind.” Clearly, I have very few mind-parts working well enough to share, but I have never let that stop me in the past, and so I marched up that ladder in my pjs and no shoes, and when I got up there, I was determined to have words. So at three in the freaking morning, I am straddling ductwork and crawling over electrical conduit, tip-toeing rafter-to-rafter, when I get about half-way across the attic and my brain kicks in gear and says, “Hey, stupid, if you corner a live animal up here, odds are he’s not going to exactly have a quiet discourse on the perils of driving a writer batty… he’s probably going to have TEETH and GRRRRR and RUN AT YOU and you’re BALANCED ON THE RAFTERS ON YOUR TOES, YOU IDIOT and you could FALL THROUGH and BREAK YOUR NECK and could you just SEE the headlines for the next day? ‘NEW AUTHOR COMMITS SUICIDE BY JUMPING THROUGH ATTIC… PRESSURE TOO GREAT.’ ”
There were some seriously pissed off noises coming from the dark corner of that attic and I just skedaddled my ass back down that ladder and woke my husband up with hysterical, “MRRRWWAARRRs and GRRRRS and ATTIC,” and he patted me on the shoulder and said, “Okay,” and fell promptly back to sleep.
I would’ve killed him, except I needed him to get the animal out of the attic, first.
It is very hard to fall asleep while staring up at the ceiling overhead, aware that there are still noises coming from up there, like a condo being completely furnished by tap-dancing bears, and no one will WAKE UP AND BELIEVE YOU. Of course, by the next morning, the tap-dancing whahoozie was all quiet and shit and my husband thought I might’ve been just a wee bit over stressed from the new sale and was, perhaps, hallucinating. Or that it had been the wind. (The wind is a favorite excuse around here. “How did that stain get on the carpet?” “The wind.”) I had to threaten to get a professional in here to get the critter out before my husband agreed to put a humane cage up there to catch the critter. (If there is one thing a man in the deep south will not admit to, it is an inability to catch critters in his own house. I don’t know why.)
My husband borrowed a cage; he agreed to get the bigger cage, even though he was convinced I’d simply heard a squirrel scampering across the top of the roof, if there’d been an animal at all. I pointed out that it wasn’t a squirrel, because squirrels aren’t nocturnal and this was at three a.m. Sure enough, that night, we heard a loud banging sound as something got trapped in the cage and my husband told me to “go look at the squirrel you caught.” I poked my head up in the attic, saw what we had in the cage and hurried back down the ladder.
A raccoon. A very very pissed off, how-dare-I-stop-him raccoon, whose fury nearly melted the bars of the cage.
My husband brought “The Wind” down and agreed that yes, it was not just a tiny little runt of a critter, but a BIG one. It was all fur and teeth and claws and hissing when I tried to give it some water and it didn’t exactly accept my apologies. My husband agreed that he would take it to the wilderness across the river and set it free over there so that it didn’t end up trapped again or getting hurt.
I was quite proud of myself.
And then, when I went to the master bathroom at the back of the house, I heard noises again. I was starting to wonder if I hadn’t just stepped into my own story about a sort of crazy southern-fried woman, when I realized the noises were coming from the shower. When I opened that door, and it was empty, I realized… no, not in the shower, but above the shower. My husband couldn’t hear them at all, and I think he only went up there to shut me up because I was going to talk about those noises forever, and he knew it. So up he goes… and then he calls for a box… and rummages and rummages and rummages and then down he came with…
Four raccoon babies.
Whose mother we had set free in woods several miles away.
They were about palm-sized, like these:
(Not my photo, but they were almost exactly this size.)
Mine didn’t even have their eyes open yet. [I named them Eeeny, Meany, Miny, and Mo.]
Let me tell you, I learned real fast just exactly how to bottle feed four baby raccoons, and I can still recall the wonder of watching their eyes open the first time, or the first time they got to play on grass in the backyard. It took me a couple of weeks to find them room at a raccoon adoption location–there are people who have large yards who are set up specifically to integrate animal rescues like these back into the wild. Meanwhile, they bonded with me as “mom” and would immediately come running to me if they sensed me or heard me coming toward their box.
It was very very hard to hand them over to the rescue woman a couple of weeks later, but I knew I couldn’t keep them here–vets won’t vaccinate raccoons and you can’t have them spayed or neutered and four raccoons all having babies… would not have worked in my backyard. (Though I had to think about that for a while to accept it.)
What amazed me about the raccoons was how fast they adapted to me as “mom.” They never knew anything else, really, and that worked for them. They still got fed, they played, they bonded with each other, but they seemed perfectly happy to have a human giving them a bottle rather than nursing from some furry creature.
Which brings me to publishing. (I’ll wait while you recover from the whiplash….)
One of the things discussed at the PASIC conference this past weekend was how the Kindle and Sony e-reader are becoming more prominent and are changing some of the buying habits of the general public. There was an estimate that in a couple of years, there will be a million e-readers of some sort out there in the public’s hands, and that doesn’t include applications for phones like the iPhone. Amazon’s market share is increasing, and while it grew slowly in the past, it’s growing exponentially now, so there’s an anticipation of it capturing a larger market share. (There was an assertion that Amazon will be selling instead of other booksellers, not in addition to, which means the same number of books, but a shift in power of who’s selling.)
There was another assertion made that I disagreed with, and that was that people who are purchasing online are not “browsing.” They are going straight to whatever it was they wanted to purchase, buying that item, and then logging off. So “online” purchasing eliminated the impulse buying that going into a bookstore would net. I disagreed with this because I do browse the online stores. I actually find them easier to browse than a lot of bookstores because I can put in keywords and subject matter and things which I wouldn’t have necessarily seen in the store will pop up there for my perusal. I’ve purchased dozens of books this way.
My question, then, was this: Given the growing popularity of the e-reader, isn’t it logical to suppose that in the very near future, all college and high-school kids will be downloading their texts and workbooks and study guides and assigned novels… to their e-readers, which will be much much easier to carry around than the backpacks which weigh a ton now? And, given that as inevitable, wouldn’t it be logical to assume that those kids coming up in middle school and grade school will get to a point where holding a book is a foreign thing–they’ll have grown accustomed to having their books (many of them) in the palm of their hands. They’ll be smart and savvy about how to find things online, between their e-readers and their iPhones and their laptops–and they’ll probably make the majority of their reading purchases from downloadable files. And, given that, what is the publishing industry going to do to target that whole new crop of readers with their books? Targeted marketing? Implanted suggestions, like blog ads we have today?
There wasn’t a satisfactory answer, and I got the distinct impression that the publishing industry is thinking that if this happens, it’s years down the line. I don’t think they’re thinking about the current exponential growth of technology. (“Twittering” was a brand new thing to several of the editors there…)
More important, what are the publishers going to do to cultivate these new readers and keep them interested in reading? The popularity of books like TWILIGHT and EVERMORE and, of course, HARRY POTTER, demonstrates that this group will read in large numbers, but it’s short-sighted not to grant that they will also be mostly reading online in a few years. They’re spending their entire lives online right now, reading tons of material–from blogs to surfing the internet. Sure, it’s smaller bites than a novel, but what generation do you remember in the past which has done as much reading as the one we have coming up now?
Just like the baby raccoons adapted to me as their mom–and didn’t even seem to mind–so, too, will the next couple of generations adapt to e-reading as their primary source for material, and if the publishing industry as it stands does not adapt now and start thinking about marketing to that audience and cultivating more of that audience, someone else will. Whether that means Amazon creates a publishing arm or someone else does as the need will become more and more obvious, the future will change how we get our material out to the new audiences.
We’d better adapt…
So how about you? Have you used an e-reader, ever? Purchased online? Is this something you’re doing more of now? And what about the kids around you? Do they like reading on their computers?
And CONGRATULATIONS to our own RITA NOMINEES!! Allison and Rocki are nominated in the ROMANTIC SUSPENSE category…. YAY!!!!!!
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