My health has kind of sucked lately, which unfortunately means I haven’t written anything in a while. My ideas for my next book are sort of suspended in amber right now while my body is being an ass. But, I got another blurb for 13 rue Thérèse and it is totally huggable, check it out:
13 rue Therese is a wildly imaginative, multifaceted, confection of a novel. Like a master magician, Elena Mauli Shapiro gently introduces the beguiling Louise, and asks us to participate in solving her many mysteries. Louise’s story, we are warned, has ensnared many great minds. By the novel’s heady conclusion, we too have fallen captive to this most mischievous and provocative heroine.
–Maria Semple, author of This One is Mine
What a lot of great adjectives! I eat them up. Nom nom.
Meanwhile I got a confirmation e-mail for my reading at Litquake’s Lit Crawl on October 9th in San Francisco and I am very excited about it. Not least because the e-mail included stuff to paste on my blog. Because I am a big dork, I love to paste stuff. Witness:
If you click on that cute little sticker, it will take you to the Litquake site listing all the cool events for the whole festival. The specific event I will be reading at is listed here. I also put it on my Events page. Lit Crawl looks like a ginormous literary progressive, like bar-hopping with stories. After the whole shabang, I have been invited to this party for which my name was put on a list. Whoa. I am also having business cards printed (a couple of people at the Sacramento panel asked me for one, which totally confused me, until I realized that I look like a grown-up, and technically maybe even a professional, and that I should have one). Plus I finally broke down and acquired an iPhone. All these things are harbingers of definite adulthood but I refuse to pay attention. (Adults have great toys though. Did you know that the primary function of the iPhone has nothing to do with telephone calls and everything to do with Pacman and taking goofy videos of your cats?)
Speaking of adulthood, when signing up for the iPhone, I had to go through this big security rigmarole during which I was asked about my mortgage and car loans. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Real people with real grown-up jobs at which they have to wear real grown-up clothes and use hilarious words like “synergy” and “productize” and “thinking outside the box” have mortgages and car loans! I am not real people; I like to tell stories and sleep a lot. I know: I am a bad, bad American. Maybe it is because I am a native speaker of French but I cannot hear the word mortgage without being overly reminded of its etymology, which comes from the French “mort” and “gage,” literally: DEATH PLEDGE. Oh dear. Why would I want to sign up for one of those?
While we ponder that, here is another sticker for the road:
Elena Mauli Shapiro 
Okay, your experience with getting your iPhone seems odd. I didn’t have to do any of that when I got mine. Is that because I’m not an adult, yet, or is it because I already had an account with AT&T, but I never remember having to do that the first time, but, then again, I’ve been an AT&T customer since I had to become an adult when I began living on my own at the tender age of 18. I only got the 3GS, so maybe I didn’t need to go through high-tech security, and maybe you bought the 4G and that requires more security…who know? All sounds a bit wacky to me….have fun at your literary festival!
I don’t know why the security alert came up, but it was a big pain. Maybe it is precisely because I’m *not* an adult and I never really make major purchases so The Establishment was like WAIT IS THIS REALLY HER?
Blurbs about your book–now that has to be a great feeling!
And this interrogation business about signing up for iPhone has me a bit rattled. As someone who has gone through the process of a MORT GAGE (love the translation–my French escaped me for a moment), I don’t know that I had that sort of interview–but then, I can’t play Pacman on my house. Maybe if I could, I would feel differently…