Tag: Hoboken

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Sexy Kindle Party Reading


Broadcasting Live with Ustream.TV

So, my reading Thursday evening is now archived on the Reading is Sexy Kindle Party ustream; I embedded it here. I’m the sixth reader on the list – out of eight. The readings were so diverse. The only similarity between us is that we all happened to be women (though the event definitely wasn’t excluded to men)! Each of the books seemed to be of very high quality – really the quality of self-published books is not at all what those in traditional publishing seem to want to make it out to be – and the authors were quite adept at reading from their own work, which surprised me – usually authors don’t make such good readers 🙂 Many of the authors have won awards for their writing (either for their books or short stories), some have been published in anthologies, some have MFA degrees, and some are Amazon bestsellers.

The authors I read with were:
Karen Cantwell, reading from her comical mystery, Take the Monkeys and Run (A Barbara Marr Murder Mystery)”
L.B. Gschwandtner, reading from her literary novel, The Naked Gardener
Lisa Leibow, reading from her women’s novel, Double Out and Back
Laverne Thompson, who writes romantic suspense and erotic romance novels
Cathy Wiley, reading from her cozy mystery, Dead to Writes
Misha Crews, reading from her literary novel, Still Waters
D. A. Spruzen, reading from her literary suspense novel, Not One of Us (The Flower Ladies Trilogy, Book 1)

I think the event was really a success. The live audience was packed – I’d say there were about 50 seats set up in the reading room, which was completely full. And we had an internet audience as well, actively asking questions of the readers. So a big huge THANK YOU if you were one of the online participants!!!

Someone asked me if my next novel (the legal / urban drama about the group of men who witnessed a shooting) was based on a true story. I’ve been kind of working on two novels simultaneously – that one, which is taking a while because I needed to take a little writing break and do some research, and a sequel to Swallow, that will include dance. I thought the second might have more sales potential, which is why I was working on it as well, trying to get it out as soon as possible. But several people (mostly outside of the dance world 🙂 ) keep telling me they’re eagerly awaiting the legal drama. So the person who asked that question prompted me to work hard on that one, because there is interest, and in my heart that’s what I want to write about. So, thank you person who asked me that question!! The answer to the question is yes, but I’m taking a lot of liberties with the actual event it’s based on, completely creating new characters, etc.

Also, three of the authors happened to be lawyers or former lawyers, and someone asked the third what was up with that! What’s drawing lawyers to a profession that’s so much less lucrative than their original career? Leibow, the last lawyer to read, laughed and said it just so much more creatively rewarding. I’d strongly second that, adding, in my case, that it’s also far more rewarding to write for intelligent, open-minded readers, than for judges, most of whom are conservative, jaded and cynical.

I had such a good time doing this and am so glad I went down to Virginia for the day. I realized though, in doing so, that I’m not as young as I once was. Funny though, because I got carded ordering a rum-based Hurricane with my lunch at the Pizzeria Uno in Union Station. I always seem to get carded when I order alcoholic beverages down South. So, apparently to some I don’t look as old as I feel 🙂 Anyway, such a long one-day trip there and back really kind of took the wind out of me and it took me most of yesterday to recover. I should have stayed overnight in DC and gone to the AWP (Association of Writing Programs) conference yesterday, but for some odd reason I decided to catch the 1:40 a.m. bus back to NY.

I always travel like this and, I know, I’m weird. My third year in law school I had an interview for a federal clerkship, down in Albany. Not Albany, NY, but Albany, GA, about two hours out of Atlanta. I was living in Hoboken, New Jersey at the time. I left my apartment at 6 in the morning, bussed to Newark airport, flew to Atlanta, caught a connecting flight to Albany (one one of those 10-seater planes, which I don’t think I’ll do again…), took a long cab ride to the courthouse, had my interview, then went back all the same way, arriving at my Hoboken apartment nearly 24 hours after I left it.

And, during my first dance competition, which was in Miami, I decided last minute I just had to see Key West. I only had one day until my first day of competition, and then my flight back to NY was the evening of my last comp. So, I took a day trip from Miami to Key West the day before the comp. It’s about 3 1/2 hours each way. I spent about six hours out on the island, and I still managed to get a full night’s sleep (part of it on the bus) and was up early and ready for morning practice the following day. I don’t know how I did that…

Anyway, I had a wonderful time in Vienna, met so many wonderful writers and readers. The Soundry, a multi-room venue kind of like the KGB Bar in NY, was an excellent place to have a reading. Thank you so much to the Soundry’s Jennifer Crawford for including me in the roster at the last minute. Thank you so much to Karen Cantwell for telling me about the event in the first place (on the Kindleboards), and for carting me between the Soundry and the Vienna metro station! So nice to meet several Kindleboards authors I’ve been chatting online with for months now. Can’t wait for the next event!

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JUDGE PRESSLER HAS DIED

 

Oh, I’m so sad. The judge I clerked for following law school, Sylvia Pressler, just died. She was only 75 and had only retired a few years earlier. Of course, she worked until the last possible moment a judge could until mandatory retirement under New Jersey law.

She was head of the Appellate Division (New Jersey’s intermediate appeals court), and had a reputation for being very intelligent, very formidable (but sweet!), and very liberal. She’s responsible for a good many important civil rights decisions, involving mainly gender equality, sexuality equality, and the death penalty and due process. Apparently, if I’d been born a New Jersey resident, I would only have been able to play Little League (as I did in Phoenix) because of her. (Btw, New Yorkers just love to condescend to New Jerseyians, but Hoboken, you know, is the birthplace of baseball… and Frank Sinatra. And, New Jersey law tends to be far more progressive).

I remember the year I was there our flashy, press-attention-heavy due process case involved a high-school’s extreme last-minute decision to prevent a student from graduating because she’d gotten into some kind of vague fight with another student earlier that day. The appeal was emergent (since it needed to be decided right then, the graduation ceremony being just about to happen), and Judge Pressler determined in a few precious moments that since the school had failed to give the student a hearing beforehand, they’d violated her due process rights. The student graduated. Her photo was in the paper the next day waving about her diploma, wearing a huge smile. The school board was not happy, but the student and her family sure were. Judge Pressler was always a champion of the underdog.

The several judges who shared our Hackensack building would often take all of us law clerks out to lunch together. Judge Pressler was one of only two female judges (I think I remember her saying she was the only woman in her entire class at Rutgers Law), and by far the most liberal, and she managed to be both sweetly likable, and formidable (she was the head of the entire Court after all). She’d start going off on some conservative politician (usually Giuliani :)) and the male judges would sit there biting their hands, dying to say something but too intimidated to speak up. It was great — we were in awe!

According to the Times, she died at her summer house in Sparta, which I remember from our end-of-the-year judicial panel party (and which I always thought sounded very balletic). It’s out on this beautiful lake, where there were many swans. I remember approaching one (which I’d never seen in person before) and realizing they’re beautiful and elegant, but if you get too close and they get threatened — especially if they have babies around — they can be very aggressive, which I guess makes sense.

Anyway, I was very honored to have clerked for her. Below is a photo of her swearing me into the New Jersey Bar — one very cool thing she’d do for her law clerks (as did most of the other New Jersey judges; in New York, I got sworn in along with about a thousand other people in a gigantic room by a nameless, faceless someone).

She has a son, Noah, and a daughter, Jessica, who is a writer. I think Jessica writes for New York Magazine.