Josh Hanagarne's Blog, page 8

News! Updates! Apologies!

Hi all, today officially ends my blogging hiatus. I had no idea I’d been so MIA until someone said “When are you going to blog again?” Then it hit me: I haven’t been blogging, pretty much at all.

But there’s a good reason. A few, in fact.

I’ve been working on some new books, in addition to prepping for the paperback launch of The World’s Strongest Librarian this May.

Over the summer (probably late summer, things always take longer than I think they will) I will also be releasing:

A novel
A young adult novel
A short story collection
A surprise that I’m not going to talk about yet.

No actual dates. This isn’t a promotional push (yet) and I won’t be reminding you all of it. But that’s why I’ve been gone.

I’ve had my head down working on these, and have found that very enjoyable spot in my writing where sleep, eating, blogging, and breathing all seem like annoyances. All I’ve wanted to do is write and write and finish these stories. But now I’m back, because I’m at the point where I’m tightening these books up and working on production details. The creation of new material is complete enough that I can come back to the blog and not feel like I’m neglecting the long projects.

I’ve had so much fun. More to come. If you’re still here, thanks for sticking around!

 

The Best Book Dedication I’ve Ever Seen

Tell me I’m wrong!

Bookworm With Michael Silverblatt

Hi all, for you podcast freaks and book obsessives, I hope you’re listening to Bookworm. Michael Silverblatt is one of the best interviewers around, and he’s a reader’s reader. He’s also one of the finest interviewers I’ve ever heard. He and Studs Terkel are my favorites.

So far my favorites have been his conversations with David Mitchell and John Barth.

Check out Bookworm here. Enjoy!

Me and Dr. Ruth

Associates, this weekend past, I spoke at the Mohegan Sun Casino in Connecticut. It was disgusting and tacky. However, the Big Book Getaway, which I was part of, was a great event.

And the best part of it all was that I got to hang out with Dr. Ruth for a while. If you only know of her as that little sex therapist lady, there’s much, much more to her. She has an incredible personal story and she was so happy and brilliant. And tiny. See for yourself.

Someone said, “I don’t know which of you looks giddier.” I think it’s me.

I’m 36 and I feel like my ears are about 90. I get more deaf every day, so I couldn’t even hear her unless I was kneeling down. And that’s when we realized that I was still taller than she was.

Such a fun weekend. Thanks to the Twain House for bringing me, and thanks to Mohegan Sun for being such a smoky nightmare. I’m not at all sure why you kept turning us away at the restaurants when all the tables were empty. Perhaps you failed to recognize an author who has sold like three copies of a book!

Upcoming Speaking Events

Hi all, in my quest to meet all of you who read, I wanted to let you know where I’m going to be in the next two months, just in case you’re nearby.

Some of these events are private, but I’ll be in the area regardless and could possibly slip away for a bit if it made sense. There will probably be some additions around the time of the paperback launch, and new speaking offers come in almost every day, but this is pretty accurate as of now!

March 9 – Austin Texas, speaking at SXSW

March 29 – Minneapolis, Minnesota

April 9 – San Antonio, TX

April 11 – Tarrytown, New York

April 18 – Salem, Oregon

April 24 – Islip, New York

April 25 – DC Area

April 26 – TEDx talk in Sandy, UT

Sometime between June 26 and July 1 — ALA Annual in Las Vegas, NV

May 2 – ULA in Provo, UT

Somewhere between October 5-8 – Hot Springs, AR

October 16 and 17, Eau Claire, WI

Somewhere between October 29 and 31, Wichita, KS

I think that’s it for now!

Escape From Camp 14, Garbology, Etched In Sand, and However Long The Night

Hi all, I got back from San Diego late last night. Was speaking at the First Year Experience Conference. I was lucky enough to speak in the same block as two of my favorite authors.

First up. Edward Humes, a Pulitzer Prize winner and author, most recently of Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash. A fantastic read.

Also: Blaine Harden, author of Escape From Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey From North Korea to Freedom In The West. This is one of the most fascinating, wrenching, and important stories I’ve ever read. 

There were also two authors speaking with whom I wasn’t familiar, but who were dazzling, I can’t wait to read their books.

Regina Calcaterra wrote Etched In Sand: A True Story of Five Siblings Who Survived An Unspeakable Childhood In Long Island. 

And:

Aimee Molloy, author of However Long The Night: Molly Melching’s Journey To Help Millions of African Women And Girls Triumph. 

These were all people who cared about others for the right reasons. It was an honor to be there with them. Here’s a washed-out terrible photo of the five of us, with me looking all wild-eyed:

Also! My talk went great, and then I bumped into Colum McCann, who is pretty much the greatest writer around.

 

His charming accent alone was worth the trip. Now that I’m looking at these pictures, I’m realizing that I have a huge grin that I never get out unless I’m meeting authors.

Such a good weekend!

It Began With Babe. It Ended In Flames

You are about to unlock the secret to all human interaction. I’m going to teach you how to improve any situation, instantly. It is a story almost twenty years in the making. It changed my life. It will change yours, and whether that becomes your blessing or curse will depend upon your moral fiber. It involves a corkscrew and a bonfire.

Be advised.

 It was 1995 and I was a junior in high school. During a trip to the Costco in Twin Falls, Idaho—we often drove from Elko, Nevada, more than two hours, just to get the big bags of chips—we took a break in the movie theater. What was playing? Babe.   

 At the climax, the little pig trots to the feet of the taciturn, kindly Farmer Hoggett. The farmer looks down at him, smiles, almost smiles, and says…

 But no. Not yet.

 The lights came up, we went to Costco and got the big chips, we drove back to Nevada, and nearly two decades passed before Babe would show me the path, showering me with clarity and light.

 I was working in a different library system that the one where I currently hold sway (I’m in Salt Lake City). I was twenty eight years old. I spent my days listening to a malcontent employee yammer away about all and naught. One day, he began to yowl. The offense? Someone asked if he could possibly turn down the volume on the Black Sabbath song that was playing on the stereo behind the desk. He refused, and then held forth for some time about injustice and hate.

He also liked the books of Nicholas Sparks.

 I don’t claim to be a mystic. I don’t even claim to know what mysticism means. But as the diatribe ramped up and the sun began to set, I floated out of my body. I watched him talking to my body from a great height. Then I descended, dragged back down into myself. I watched his mouth move. I watched his hands wave. He may have even stomped his little foot. And the voice of Farmer Hoggett, James Cromwell, filled my brain with a tripartite-plus-contraction-with-apostrophe solution:

 “That’ll do pig.”

 He had said it to Babe, and now he was saying it to me. I heard those words. I thought them. I did not yet know that I would soon be living them.

 The fussy man in front of me ceased to exist. I smiled. I laughed. I did a little soft-shoe and skipped to my truck when my shift ended.

 En route, someone cut me off. They yelled at me when we stopped together at a red light. “Learn how to drive!”

 That’ll do pig. I thought the words. I said them aloud to myself. When the light turned green, my truck rumbled forward, but his car stopped with four suddenly, inexplicably flat tires.

 The next day at work I would get a less-than-incandescent performance review. Josh seems content to be adequate.

 That’ll do pig I thought at the Arial font. By day’s end, the entire Human Resources Department begged my forgiveness, but I fired them all with vindictive glee.

 The next day I was out in the sun for too long. My skin began to burn and peel. I stared at the sun.

 That’ll do pig.

 The next day my skin wasn’t burned, but a pleasing shade of Firefox orange.

 I opened my copy of How To Avoid Huge Ships by John Trimmer, fully aware that I’d never successfully internalized its lessons, and my schooner’s prow had paid the splintery price for my inattentiveness.

 That’ll do pig. I read it in nine minutes, flung the sails up into the masts, and not only did I avoid all the huge ships, I calmed the seas entire.

 I turned on my television and saw that Roadhouse was on. There was so much feathered hair that it was like an aviary. “Nobody wins a fight,” says Patrick Swayze. Sneering ensued from the hoodlums.

 That’ll do pig. They all started fighting. They all won the fight. The feathering of each hairstyle increased by several orders of magnitude.

 At the mall a beady-eyed deviant detached himself from a kiosk and tried to put dead sea salt on my hands.

 That’ll do pig. Several thousand gallons of the actual Dead Sea washed through the building. He would eventually alight upon an atoll comprising striped Johnny Cash onesies from Hot Topic and Samurai swords from a weird little boutique that also sells frog-shaped collanders.

 When I left the building, Nicholas Sparks was standing there on the hood of a car trying to get everyone’s attention. “I am a genre of one,” he said. “I write what is called, by me, “‘love tragedy.’”

“Bah! That’s not a thing!” That’ll do pig. Every romance novel Sparks has written tore through the air, landing at my feet in the parking lot. A bonfire blazed, its source unknown to all but myself. As Sparks crawled away, several children grabbed curbside garbage cans and upended them over his head. He whimpered, shriveled, vanished…

 That night, I felt as though I’d been there at the world’s creation. And I had said, “Here’s how it’s all going to go.”

 That’ll do pig.

It works. It is the Law of Attraction, but real. It is Anthony Robbins, but short and sweet.

PS: Pigs, and we must include Babe in the data set, have corkscrew-shaped penises. This is a question I actually answered at the library.

What Not To Read

Hey gang, I wrote a post for Bookriot about an unusual book club I ran once. We all brought books we didn’t like and tried to talk the others out of reading them. It wasn’t mean, it was more like Mystery Science Theater for books. It’s been a fun discussion.

Come help out!

Get That Nickel, Player

This morning I was in my truck with my son. His eyebrows shot up. “Hey!” He held up a dirty nickel, retrieved from the floorboard. “Can I put this in my bank when we get home?”

“Of course,” I said.

A few blocks later we stopped at a red light. He turned to me and said, with all possible gravitas, “You and me are pretty lucky.”

“We are,” I said. “But tell me exactly why you think that you and me are lucky.”

He was very solemn. He held up the nickel. “We’ve got wieners and money.”

Barbara Kingsolver, “The Other One”

I overheard someone today. A woman. She said, in a loud, clear voice:

“No, I mean Barbara Kingsolver. Y0u know. The other one.” 

Do any of you geniuses have the faintest idea of what she might have meant? The other what?