Developments!
(1) This blog now has its own pimptastic domain name! Welcome to elenamaulishapiro.com. Aw yeah. If you click on the link, it will take you… where you are. I know. Life is like that.
(2) I just got my very first review ever for 13 rue Thérèse, on Library Journal. It is here (you’ll have to scroll a bit to find me). I had a tiny heart attack when I got to the word VERDICT in red all-caps like that, as if they were going to take me out back and execute me. But, the verdict is positive, so, huzzah! And with a comparison to the awesome Nick Bantock! Huzzah x2! And I can finally say I’ve had press. Oooooooh I’m going to put it on my Press page right now.
Sweet.
(3) I printed out what I have of my next book so far, about 20,000 words. (Somewhere around 80 pages) It felt good to see it on paper, because when you’re just typing away on a Microsoft document, it doesn’t feel like you’re actually making any progress. Also I got terribly stuck and needed to read it through, to see if I could see any semblance of structure emerging from my pile of fragments. I realized today that a lot of the stuff I’ve been writing lately actually belongs way in the beginning, so that’s nice. After I’ve finished marking it up, there will be much shuffling.
(4) You can make colors! All over your text! Wheeeeeeeee! Doing this repeatedly would not at all get annoying!
(Sorry, I just discovered this making VERDICT all scary and red to mimic the typesetting on the Library Journal site… I will attempt to contain myself in the future. But I can make no promises.)
Elena Mauli Shapiro 
Cogratulations on this review–Library Journal is a biggie–that’s really, really fantastic.
I am a big fan of reviews that offer a summary at the end–(and in BOLD and color!) and, of course, when it’s personal, oh, yeah–get me to the bottomline, STAT! And I didn’t realize that reviews can come out several months before the book is released–good to know the suspense won’t be quite as long as I feared…
Thank you!
Newspaper reviews come out after the release date, but reviews in industry pubs like Library Journal and Publishers Weekly come out before the release date to guide booksellers and libraries and such. (Handy, too, because the latter are often quoted as blurbs on the cover! When they’re good, that is…)