Another positive review for Swallow from an Amazon top 500 reviewer! (Scroll all the way down until you see the reviews; the newest is at the bottom.)

This is my first novel and I really value people’s thoughts and reactions — what affected people the most and what affected them the least (because it’s definitely not always what I’d think). I’m so grateful to everyone who’s supported me by buying it and reading it and thinking about it, and then commenting or writing on the Amazon page. So grateful!

SLSG has been named a top law blog in the criminal law category by Attorney.org, likely for my previous coverage of the Sean Bell shooting trial and some other related posts. This is particularly exciting because my soon-to-be-published novel is in part about the life of a young female criminal appeals attorney. I also plan to write more about the Sean Bell case. So I’m very honored!

And apropos of criminal defense attorneys, the movie Disturbing the Universe is a must-see. It’s a documentary about the life of civil rights / criminal defense attorney William Kunstler, made by his daughters. Since he was involved in practically every major trial of his time — disorderly conduct sit-ins protesting racial segregation, the Chicago Seven, the Attica Uprising, the standoff at Wounded Knee, the Central Park Jogger case, the trials of those accused of the 1993 WTC bombing — it ends up being, above all, an immensely informative history of late 20th Century race-relations in this country.  See it!

Just as I was about to send the final version of my novel off to the publisher my computer crashed. My wonderful friend Mika allowed me to use hers for the day. But since I don’t know how long my laptop is going to have to spend in the hospital, blogging might be intermittent for the next few days.

In the meantime, I’ll try to tweet via my cellphone.

As soon as I return, more on this year’s Fall For Dance Festival, as well as my thoughts on William Forsythe’s Decreation which I recently saw at BAM. I normally really like Forsythe, but I felt you had to have read the Anne Carson essay (of the same name) that the work is based on in order to understand it. Did anyone in NY see it? (photo by Andrea Mohin from NY Times review.)

Sorry posting has been kind of lame over the past week. I’m working really hard on finishing the final read-throughs of my novel and, as always, it’s more involved than I expected. I have several exciting Fall For Dance programs still to write about — a puppet-performed Petrushka, Bronislava Nijinska’s Les Biches, the fabulous Trocks, Dance Brazil’s unique capoeira / samba / modern blend, Tiler and Gonzalo , the best Afternoon of a Faun (involving two fauns actually) I’ve ever seen — this is by far the best FFD Festival I can remember — and I plan to write about it all at the end of the weekend or early next week; after, hopefully, I’ve finished my rewrites.

In the meantime, above is my final cover. Took me forever to okay something I was happy with. At first I was going to go with this one:

But then I had dinner with a gay male friend, who said of this bottom one, “Okay. This looks like it’s about a girl who goes around New York giving blow jobs.”

Which my novel is NOT about! I sought others’ opinions — nearly drove all of my friends crazy — and most people agreed that, since it’s about a young woman with a disorder, the cover should indicate that. It’s just that the disorder she develops is due in part to her moving into the city — a city she feels largely alienated by — and so it’s partly about her ability to make her own home here. Which is why I thought an arty cityscape would work.

But apparently not with this title!

I’d gotten the idea for the arty cityscape cover from my favorite Breakfast at Tiffany’s edition.

I also love this cover, for Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend:

This is as large as I could blow it up, but it’s one of my very favorite covers. I’d asked my design team to come up with something similar (with a woman looking into the abyss), and they couldn’t. I showed a friend and she kind of burst out laughing and told me I’d need to hire an artist to make me something wholly original if I wanted something approaching it. I have that Lost Weekend edition (which I found at a rare bookstore in Durham, NC) and the cover is an actual piece art — it’s actually painted onto the cover, which is made of a sturdier material than regular covers — the result being that once the years go by and the cover ages, you literally can’t open the book without breaking it. So, the irony is that that book is unreadable; it must simply sit on my bookshelf facing out, to showcase the piece of visual art that it’s now solely become.  In any event, even if I did want a book that could only be enjoyed for its cover, I don’t have the money to hire my own artist.

But I think my design team came up with something that works anyway.

My biggest problem with having a photo of a woman on the cover is that I was afraid it’d be taken for Chick-lit, a moniker I think every female writer has some kind of issue with, or at least thinks about. I thought an illustration would make it look like it’s about art — which it partly is: one of the protagonist’s friends is an artist and he’s an important character. And I thought a photo of a woman would alienate male readers. But then a friend who works as an artistic director of a magazine said illustrations don’t sell; you gotta have a photo, which she insisted was pertinent to books as well as magazines (and she has two published books of her own out). She’s one of four or five people (as I said, I drove all of my friends stark raving nuts) who helped me come up with the idea for my final cover.

…which I’m happy with — I think it hints at what the book is about and is dramatic and somewhat provocative without being over the top. I just hope it doesn’t alienate potential male readers. But then, as practically everyone I know (of both sexes) have told me ad nauseam, men don’t read anyway — especially fiction; women read and Chick-lit sells. So just embrace it.

Anyway, there are many other issues involved in the whole Chick-lit quandary, and in book cover art, but I’ve blabbered for too long. Have to get back to my rewrites… And I need to go out for my Friday cupcake.

Have a good weekend everyone!

Last night I read from my new novel (which is still VERY much a work in progress) with the Writers Room at the Cornelia Street Cafe, and it actually went okay! Better than I expected! Several of my wonderful friends showed up to give me much-needed encouragement and support (maybe someday I’ll be confident enough actually to post here ahead of time when I’ll be reading…) and they all seemed genuinely to like the piece I read. And several people I didn’t know came up to me afterward — including a filmmaker who gave me her card! — to tell me how much they liked it. One woman said she wanted to read it as soon as it was out! Though she told me the way she didn’t want it to end. I assured her it didn’t So, I just have to write the rest of the book now…

But I was so worried because the subject matter is kind of controversial and the character whose piece I read from is a young black man with a certain kind of voice that my face and body certainly don’t in any way fit, so I worried I just wouldn’t be able to pull it off. And I am a horribly sucky reader and always will be — I’m just shy and I’m not an actress and that’s just that. But people still got what I was trying to convey through the actual words, so I am extremely happy about that. That’s all I can ever ask for!

Anyway, funny thing is that there was this guy sitting up front who looked just like Christopher Wheeldon. Seriously, just like him except about 10 years younger. And it really freaked me out because then I started thinking of this. And then I started thinking what if someone reacts to me like that! I mean, you can’t please everyone of course, and there are always going to be people who don’t like you, but, well, all I can say is that the more I write (and the closer my first novel gets to publication), I am feeling a lot less critical, at least of new works

Anyway, now that this all-too stressful event is over, I’ll blog about the Natalia Osipova / Herman Cornejo La Sylphide at American Ballet Theater Monday night. She was good, he was insanely excellent. It’s like with Kathryn Morgan the other night in NYCBallet Dancers’ Choice — I don’t know if there are words to describe him. If you want to see sheer perfection, go see him in something — anything. I can’t imagine anyone better in all the world. I mean, every great dancer brings something to the stage, and he simply brings perfection, in the Webster Dictionary definition of the word: “an exemplification of supreme excellence.” One of my Twitter friends (who’s a very established ballet dancer) told me he’s a “dancer’s dancer,” which I can totally see. He’s a non-dancer’s dancer too

Anyway, more tomorrow, I mean later today. I have to sleep now.

(Photo from TVGrapevine)

Yesterday afternoon, I received some shocking news: that a reader and frequent commenter here, Sharon Balik, had passed away that morning suddenly and unexpectedly. She commented here under the name BDC_Sharon and had just left a message over the weekend on my most recent SYTYCD post.

I’m still in shock and can’t stop thinking about her. She found my blog a couple of years ago and we’d become very good friends. She became enamored of ballroom dancing after Dancing With the Stars premiered. She began taking lessons with her husband, Tim, and when DWTS pro dancers Maks Chmerkovskiy, Elena Grinenko, and Tony Dovolani founded the Ballroom Dance Channel website, she began to work for them, researching and writing articles about various aspects ballroom dance, writing recaps of the dance shows on TV, leading discussions about such issues as whether DanceSport should become an Olympic sport, and helping to promote the website’s online ballroom dance lessons. She kindly linked to my blog and my HuffPo reviews, and brought me a load of new readers. She really became a tireless promoter of all things ballroom.

When she began writing for BDC, she’d email to ask me questions about the ballroom competition scene since she knew I had experience with that. And we just became friends. She was one of those people who’s so easy to befriend, who’ll listen to you go on and on and will end up offering you all this really well thought-out, sound advice. Whenever I had a problem with dance or with a heckler here or an angry artist writing me nasty emails about a critical review, she naturally became one of the people I’d send my “Help!” email to And of course she always had such funny, clever, thought-provoking, opionionated things to say — both in response to those emails and here on the blog. I am going to miss her so much.

It’s funny how close you can become to someone you’ve never met in person. People who say you only make superficial connections on the internet are so wrong. I am really going to miss you, Sharon.

Read the tribute to her on TVGrapevine, where she posted frequently as well, here.

Woo hoo — Gary Vaynerchuk just gave the big thumbs up to my friend’s wine. (That’s the Esporao one; the middle “pansies on the nose” one he tastes).

Can you imagine someone setting up a table in front of the Met and podcasting about ballet with the (slightly crazed) enthusiasm of this guy? Do you think people would go for it?

I’m not sure what exactly is wrong with my blog lately, but it seems to be doing some rather odd things. For one, it’s inexplicably placed the sidebar at the bottom of the main page (though on all other pages it’s normal). So, if you’re on the main page and need to find something on the blogroll or do a search, please scroll all the way down. It’s also doing other crazed things like not allowing me to properly categorize new links (so, all links that I’ve added in the past few weeks are under “Other” all the way down at the bottom, even if they should be under “Dance: ballet,” etc.) It’s also inexplicably publishing posts before I hit the “publish” button, so sorry if something looks half done (it probably is). And, finally, comments are weird — some are going to spam without me sending them there and some are just not posting. Hopefully everything will work out. I apologize for the inconvenience which is hopefully only momentary! Methinks WordPress 2.7 is great in theory but has some real kinks…