THE NO ME GUSTA/ME GUSTA POST

Tonight, friends, I was out celebrating the release of Girl At Sea. This is something I usually don’t do. Not Girl At Sea, specifically, but book releases in general.

Book releases are strangely ninja-like. The books just appear. No one wakes you in the middle of the night to let you know that they’re stacking them at Barnes and Noble. They just show up, sometimes over the course of a few days. So, it can be kind of easy to slide over the whole thing. Sure, I like to blog, and send out Free Monkey, and give away books, and talk to you guys! But me, personally? I tend to just go about my business.

Besides, the last time I really tried to do anything on the release day was when my first book, The Key to the Golden Firebird, came out. And that something basically consisted of:

1. almost getting arrested in the HarperCollins building
2. falling into Sixth Avenue because the heels I was wearing destroyed my feet (see below for details)
3. sitting on Daphne Unfeasible’s couch all night because my feet hurt so much, and eventually putting on her comically inflated flip-flops and stumbling to the corner to buy ice cream

I told John and Sarah Green that I generally don’t do anything big for myself when my books come out. They said, “No way, mj. You must do something!” So we met tonight and had drinks at the famous Algonquin Hotel, home of the Algonquin Round Table. I have an unabashed fascination with the Algonquin’s literary history. Anywhere that Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker had drinks . . . it’s good enough for me.

Then John and Sarah took me to a breathtaking fancy dinner, where I got to watch John Green try to pick out wine, which was kind of like watching a cat pick out a television. (To be fair, the wine list was easily seventy-five pages long, and all we had really figured out was that we wanted white, and that we didn’t want it to cost $3500, which was what several of the bottles were going for.) We were somewhat baffled by the total fancitude of the menu, as it did seem to be going out of its way to be confusing. In the end, I had plain old spaghetti, because the waiter recommended it so warmly that he almost wept. And you know what? It was some of the best spaghetti I ever had—with a smoky, spicy sauce—rivaled only by the spaghetti I had in Sorrento when researching Girl At Sea. (I work hard for you guys.)

In any case, it was a fantastic evening.

Many of you working on book reports write in and ask me what I like. I like so many things, I find this hard to answer. But I can tell you what I don’t like, because those things are less numerous, and I dislike them in enough detail that I can go on and on about them. And what else are blogs for, if not to go on and on and on?

Plus, these things are very relevant today.

I’ve included some things I do like as a counterpoint, just to keep things balanced.

NO ME GUSTA: READING AT READINGS

I don’t like reading passages from my books aloud, in front of groups. Which is a massive problem right now, as I face down what is pretty much a month of doing nothing but.

I don’t suffer from stagefright. It’s not that. I’ll happily sit in front of a large audience as long as you make me and do pretty much whatever you want, as long as it doesn’t involve me reading from one of my books. I think this is because the monologue in my head goes something like this, whenever I am forced to read:

Okay, Johnson, what was the point of that last sentence? You could have skipped it. In fact, you should have tied that sentence to this next paragraph, which cuts way too early. Just skip. Skip! Skip to the . . .

Oh, now you’ve skipped and it makes no sense.

Wait . . . wait . . . Oh God. It’s a typo. This book is ENTIRELY MADE OF TYPOS! I’VE WRITTEN THE FIRST ALL-TYPO NOVEL!

It’s not said in a terribly self-critical, everything-I-do-is-bad voice. It’s more of a crisp editorial voice that wants to go home and start rewriting. Which I can’t do, because the book is out, and I am reading it in front of people. And the process of revision (blog entry coming soon) is not a pretty one that you would want to watch, anyway.

No amount of cheering makes this better. I am 100% NO ME GUSTA on this. Which is why, if you’ve ever seen me read, you may have watched:

- me rambling about whatever comes to mind
- me trying to start a Q&A immediately after my name is announced, even if the audience has no questions because they don’t know who I am
- me doing imitations of John Green, even if the audience does not know who he is
- me doing an improvised dance (everyone speaks dance)
- me asking questions of the (now slightly alarmed) audience
- me reading from books that I did not write
- me quietly trying to escape the room via an alarmed exit

ME GUSTA: MEETING READERS

However much I don’t want to read my own book to you, I love coming out and seeing you and doing all of the above things. In fact, if you guys have any ideas for things I can do instead of reading aloud, PLEASE PUT THEM IN THE COMMENTS!

NO ME GUSTA: SHOE SHOPPING

You know how girls are supposed to love shoes and shoe shopping and how we’ll do anything for shoes? Not this girl. This girl thinks shoe shopping should be outlawed by the Geneva Convention. Shoe shopping is something I do under extreme duress.

The why behind this one is anatomical.

I made out fairly well, in the generally healthy, normally formed body department. I am one of those people who can be heard bragging, after a glass of wine or two or when sitting in front of an audience expecting me to read from my book, that I have better than perfect vision. No one ever cares, but I go on about it anyway.

But it all falls apart with the feet.

I have horrible feet. Seriously horrible feet that should be cut off at the ankle and stored in carefully sealed jars, which should be locked away and guarded at all times in case they reanimate and become evil zombie feet. (I have, in fact, long been working on a musical based on this premise with my friend J. Krimble. It’s called FOOTZAPOPIN!)

They are flat. Not just a little flat. Very, very flat. So flat that I have caused at least one doctor to let out a low whistle and say, “Wow, those are profoundly flat feet.”



My feet are flatter than these.

The result is that I can never seem to find shoes that don’t feel like tiny bear traps clamped to my feet. This rarely stops me from buying heels, but the pain I suffer can go on for days.

The truth is, I’d just rather go barefoot. Or have my feet cut off, jarred, and have a hoverboard attached right to my legs. But since no one will do this, and since I have to go out of doors, and since hoverboards don’t exist, I have to shoe shop.

Everyone I know loves to shoe shop. Daphne Unfeasible swoons at the idea. I wish shoes would just show up in my closet, placed there by elves. I get so bored, looking for shoes. I can see that many of them are pretty, and I like pretty things as much as the next person, but mostly, they just all look the same. Especially summer flat sandals, which I definitely can’t wear, because the flatness of it all would become so overwhelming that I might actually start evolving on the spot into some new kind of flat human.

I needed shoes to go and do the readings. You can see the problem here.

ME GUSTA: I CAN HAS CHEEZEBURGER

After I come hobbling in, I like to put my feet up and do a little internet research at my favorite site, I CAN HAS CHEEZEBURGER. I could look at this site for hours, because it has pictures like this:



Foot pain, forgotten!

I am already waiting for your brilliant comments about how to deal with this reading situation. You guys are my only hope. And if you want to bring be shoes, or if you are cobblers . . .

And you’re still coming out, right? I mean, I may make puppets or something. Trust me, you’ll like it!