School Picture Day Redux

 

Picture-taking last week was as traumatic as it was nearly fifty years ago when I had my picture taken for the high school annual. I still haven't learned to use more than a dash of mineral powder and lip gloss. I still have mostly bad hair days. Teen-aged acne has persisted long into middle age. I still usually look like the 'before' picture in a book on what not to wear. At least the braces were off my teeth.

 

I tried to prepare better this time, though. Rather than just blow-drying my hair, I scrabbled to the back of the bathroom cupboard for rollers, and while my hair dried, I sorted through all the clothes I'd put out as possibles for the shoot. With five minutes before I had to get on the freeway to Seattle, I carefully untangled my hair from the rollers and brushed. Uff da! The comb-out was a wispy retro pouf, but I didn't have time to wet it down and start over. Maybe it would settle down between Everett and Seattle. Since I still hadn't decided what to wear, I grabbed as many clothes as I could carry out to the car.

 

Although Susan Doupé had said her studio was in a community center, I was surprised to see the center was in the old (1902) University Heights School. This would really be a trip back to my klutzy school days. It was a lovely old building, though, with mellow fir bead board paneling and large arched windows.

 

I had taken Susan's suggestion to have her artist friend (Rhonda) on hand to do my make-up. As she sorted her tackle box filled with a hundred vials, jars, tubes, and brushes, I pulled up a stool and offered my face for her canvas. At the end I still looked like me, but with eyes you could see behind the glasses, a brighter mouth, and well-camouflaged zits.

 

Susan Doupé is the most thorough photographer imaginable. With her high-tech digital camera, she must have taken a thousand pictures: against carved stair railings, on worn wooden steps, upstairs and downstairs, seeking the best light. I was a challenging subject. With the exception of Liv Ullmann, most Norwegians (even third-generation ones like me) don't emote on cue. I stretched a smile a thousand times. Out of so many snaps, surely one will make me look better than I did in my mirror this morning. If I can figure out how to get pictures from a disc to my blog, I'll share some results.

 

An ISBN of My Own

An ISBN of My Own: 978 06 1899 983 5

While searching the internet to see if I could easily bring up my blog yet (nope!) I stumbled on Clarion's draft of the catalog description for The Year We Were Famous. When I reached the fourth line I forgot for a moment to breathe. My book had been assigned it's very own personal unique one-of-kind ISBN number!

I suppose no one but another librarian-turned-writer would put an exclamation point after that last sentence. After all, it's just a 13-digit number, and like most of us, I already have too many numbers and codes to keep track of. But getting an ISBN was a milestone as momentous as the first handshake with my acquiring editor, Jennifer Wingertzahn, and signing the contract in New York. For a big publishing house like Houghton Mifflin Harcourt it was just paperwork. For me it meant officially crossing the line between fanatical reader and debut author.

An ISBN—or International Standard Book Number—is the number assigned to each book as it is prepared for publication—sort of like putting an ID tag on the wrist of the new baby in the hospital. You see it by the barcode on the back cover and it's the number book suppliers and bookshop owners use to keep track of what's where. It's the numbers libraries use when ordering books. The first three digits of my book's ISBN (978) mean that it comes from the publishing industry. The next two digits (06) mean that the book is in English. The next seven digits (1899 983) link the book to its publishing house, Clarion/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and title. The last digit (5) is a check digit which helps identify transpositions or mis-keying by anyone entering the ISBN number in orders and inventories.

A new ship gets a bottle of champagne across the bow as it is named; a baby gets a christening party. My book's new ISBN number was assigned without celebration, except by me.

Adventure in the name of research

My husband and I were sailing to Alaska to visit our son's family, but once we reached Skagway, the pull of research was too strong. I had to take a little detour, a four-hour antique steam engine ride across the Canadian border to the Yukon. After all, one of the main characters in the sequel I'm writing to The Year We Were Famous goes to the Yukon, and how could I write about it if I hadn't been there?

Okay, I know I could have read some books about the Yukon, and I'm doing that, too. And if this research-as-an-excuse-for-an-adventure followed the pattern of the last fifteen years, nine-nine percent of what I learned would never make it into the book. But how could I not go when I was so close? And those books might never have yielded such delicious factoids and sensory impressions as these:

Each passenger car on the old trains was heated by a coal-burning stove in one corner, and the train rocked so heavily side to side I had a hard time walking down the aisle to get warm.

One house of ill-repute, "a house of negotiable affection," in Skagway was known as a B&B (as in Bakery and Brothel).

Because of glacial rebound, the land around the lakes on the way to the Yukon is ten feet higher than it was at the time of the gold rush of 1898.

Ale or tea made from Sitka Spruce needles wards off scurvy; the ale is still being made seasonally by a brewery in Alaska.

A couple weeks before we left home, White Pass had several days with temps in the 90's, and I had hoped to take a short hike on part of the trail 35,000 miners took back in 1898. The night before I arrived, however, it snowed and the wind and driving rain-almost-snow when I arrived was so heavy that the guide wouldn't take us. Oh, well. I got close.