The Italian Job

Deadlines. You know the drill.

Editor Charlie forwarded me the cover art for the Italian edition of Mom's Cancer, which is being published next month by Double Shot-Bottero Edizioni. Looks a lot like the English edition, which is fine with me--although I also don't mind when a foreign publisher changes things up to fit their perception of the audience, as the French did. I find that very interesting. I'm surprised the Italian editors didn't translate the title.


I guess some writers demand painstaking control over how their work is presented overseas. I certainly understand that need but don't necessarily share it. My publisher Abrams has my foreign rights (which, as I've explained before, I voluntarily and happily assigned to them) and our understanding is that the pictures and words of Mom's Cancer remain as unaltered as translation allows. As long as I get that, I'm pretty flexible about format, cover art, soft or hard cover, etc. Of course I want it to look its best, but I figure the foreign publisher's job is knowing what appeals to their market. Since selling books is in our mutual interest, I don't mind investing some faith in them.

I got a very nice note from the Italian editor about a week ago, telling me that they debuted my book at a big national book fair and got a lot of positive response. They seem enthusiastic about it, which feels great. As always, I'm a bit befuddled and bedazzled that people I don't know halfway round the world are reading my story in a language I don't speak. Don't know if I'll ever get over that. Hope not.

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I Feel the Earth Move Under My Feet

I live in Earthquake Country and we had a fine little one yesterday: a nice, sharp boom-shudder that sounded and felt like a fully loaded cement truck had run into our living room. Somewhere in the house, something I still haven't found fell off of something else and hit the floor. My wife and I looked at each other, our attention quite engaged, and flinched through that fraction of a second of waiting to see if it stopped or got worse. It stopped.

Our sport is guessing whether a temblor is small and nearby or large and distant. This was certainly the loudest one I can remember but it left nothing swaying, so I guessed it was a pip-squeak magnitude 2 directly underfoot. My wife was more impressed and guessed a magnitude 4 farther away. The U.S. Geological Survey has a nice website that within 10 minutes told us it was a magnitude 3 whose epicenter was four miles beneath a high school less than a mile from our house. We called that one a tie.

Magnitude 3 is nothing, a trifle. My personal best was of course the magnitude 7 Loma Prieta quake of 1989, which knocked a section out of the Oakland Bay Bridge and interrupted the Giants vs. A's World Series. I was working as a supervisor in an environmental chemistry lab at 5:04 p.m. on October 17 when the earth broke 110 miles away. I suddenly felt dizzy and thought it was just me until I saw everyone else reeling, too. Now, the official advice is to stay indoors and ride it out under a sturdy piece of furniture; in 1906, a lot of people were killed when they ran outdoors and got clocked by falling debris. All I know is that everyone in the lab simultaneously realized they did not want to be inside a concrete slab building filled with hazardous and flammable chemicals and gases if it decided to come down. I got behind my co-worker Ken, who is about 6-foot-7 and 250 pounds, and followed him out like a running back on the heels of a blocker. Out in the parking lot I saw the most amazing sight: asphalt rippling like waves on the ocean, with parked cars bobbing up and down like boats. It was, frankly, both deeply disturbing and really cool.

(I imagine my friend Sherwood, whose home I reckon was right on top of the Loma Prieta epicenter, has a much scarier story to tell, assuming he was in the area at the time.)

There's a kind of irrational, fatalistic insouciance that goes with living in Earthquake Country. I think you either get used to the idea that the world can shake itself to bits at any second or you move away. I have a friend who grew up near my neighborhood back when it was a plum orchard and remembers how the neat ranks of trees were split and offset by the faultline that ran through them. I always laugh when I tell people that, although it's not really funny. But the fact is that, although some locations are better than others--bedrock beats alluvial plain--almost nowhere on the West Coast is safe.

I don't believe in fate but I do trust probabilities and statistics. Big quakes happen on scales of decades to centuries, while major quakes (like 1906) happen on scales of centuries to millenia. Modern building codes give me some confidence that my wood-frame home will survive anything short of total disaster. We take the prescribed precautions. All in all, I'll be here a relatively short time (geologically speaking) and like my odds better than if I resided in Tornado or Hurricane Alley. For us, living here is worth the risk. Still, it's interesting to get a little kick in the pants once in a while. Makes you think.

My Little Earthquake, all over in
about half a second (courtesy USGS)
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Nobody Tells Me Anything

A quick note to mention that Bill Reed at the Comic Book Resources blog "Comics Should Be Good!" named Mom's Cancer one of the "365 Reasons to Love Comics": specifically, Reason #133. It's a good write-up and I appreciate it. Bill made his selection on Mother's Day (last Sunday), which some might question but I think is entirely appropriate and touching. Nice comments, too. Thanks.

Recommended by the NY Public Library

Happily continuing the theme of much-appreciated recognition, I just learned that the New York Public Library recommended Mom's Cancer as one of its 2007 "Books for the Teen Age" earlier this month. The library's 78th (!) annual list of recommended books is 19 pages long and comprises probably a couple hundred titles, with a few dozen graphic novels scattered among them (available online as a huge pdf; I'm on Page 10).


As I've written a few times before, I didn't set out to create a book for teens--nor would I consider many of the library's other selections primarily teen reading--but I'm honored. I deliberately wrote Mom's Cancer to be accessible to all ages, from little kids to grandparents (I think I actually said something like that in my initial book proposal). Since that includes teens, I'll take it.
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Mom's Cancer Wins the Blooker

More than a word that sounds as if it were made up by Mel Brooks, a "blook" is a book that originated as a blog or similar online content. Such as mine. Lulu is a print-on-demand publisher that each year awards Lulu Blooker Prizes to blooks in fiction, nonfiction, and comics. Such as mine.

As announced this morning, Mom's Cancer has won the Lulu Blooker Prize for comics. Judge Paul Jones said, "Mom's Cancer takes web comics beyond science fiction parodies and fan boy remixes of superhero comics. The story telling is engaging. The story is important, as well as fun, surprising and rewarding to read. Well-drawn and a real winner." The other judges on the panel were Arianna Huffington, author Julie Powell, philosopher/writer Rohit Gupta, and journalist Nick Cohen.

The nonfiction and overall first prize winner is Colby Buzzwell's My War: Killing Time in Iraq, which began as a series of blog posts from the front. The fiction winner is Andrew Losowsky's The Doorbells of Florence, whose subject appears to be exactly as described--photos of ornate Italian doorbells accompanied by short stories about the people or events behind them. That sounds just odd enough to check out.

This is terrific recognition that I appreciate very much, and not just because it comes with $2500 (wow, that's like ten college textbooks for my kids!). Blogs are increasing in literary, cultural, and journalistic importance at the same time print-on-demand publishers such as Lulu have the potential to transform the publishing world. It feels like a vital, interesting place to be tangentially connected to, even if my book was not self-published (which was not a prerequisite for the prize).

All my thanks to the judges and others involved with the Blooker, I'm very grateful. This is nice.