“Run quick, they’re behind us, didn’t think we’d ever make it, this close to safety in one piece.”

I wish to interrupt my Top 10 movie list with an important announcement: In seven days I will be seeing my favorite band Coheed and Cambria at the National in Richmond, VA. I do not think I have been this excited for a show before, save maybe Bruce Springsteen. In honor of my first Coheed concert in almost three years, I am going to write a little piece on Coheed every day, complete with my Top 7 songs, why they are my favorite, why Coheed is just so darn awesome, and little tidbits about Coheed.

First, let me tell you about Coheed and Cambria. They are a progressive rock band from New York, and they formed in 1995 under the name Shabutie. They dropped their first studio album under the name Coheed and Cambria entitle The Second Stage Turbine Blade in 2002. Four more albums followed, the most recent being Year of the Black Rainbow on April 10th, 2010.

Here’s why I love Coheed so much: every album, every song they write and perform, tells a story. Each album is a concept album, and all five comprise a single over-arching science fiction epic. Claudio Sanchez writes the story, and along with each album Coheed publishes a comic book, graphic novel, or novel telling the part of the story told on each album in more detail. Few recent bands have attempted this, Green Day, Thrice, and Mars Volta, but none with such ferocious attention to storytelling.

Folks, I love this  concept to death. I love looking at how people tell stories, and the fact that Coheed can tell a story while making excellent rock music is an impressive and amazing feat. I love the music and I love the story. I can remember the first time I started listening to Coheed in high school and realizing that these songs had to have an over-arching meaning. There were too many repeated names, events, and places, but each song was not repeating details, but rather telling a narrative. After I realized what the guys in Coheed and Cambria was doing, I was hooked and there was no going back.

The first album I listened to was In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3, and among the myriad of amazing songs on that album was “A Favor House Atlantic”. In this song, The story’s protagonist, Claudio Kilgannon, and his crew are trying to escape House Atlantic, the stronghold of their foe, Wilhelm Ryan. A sleazy and psychopathic ship captain named Al the Killer turned them over, but at the last minute, helps them escape. The chronicles the conversation between Claudio, his crew, and Al before Al is apparently killed in the escape. This was the first song I really felt a connection to, story-wise and musically. It is one of Coheed’s more well-known songs, and many consider it to be a “fanboy song”, but I love it all the same. It’s quick, simple,  and to the point, but I can never help turning it up when it comes on the radio or my iPod.

Listen to it below, and I’ll be back tomorrow with more Coheed tidbits, their story description, and more.

As I came out of Inception, I heard a certain phrase many, many times: “Oh my God, this is my new favorite movie EVER!!”. While Inception was a fantastic movie, I thought to myself as I was walking out of the theater, it does not make my favorite movie list, not yet at least. That thought prompted this one: “Well, what ARE my favorite movies?” Thus, after a great deal of internal debate, this list emerged. I want to note that this list changes frequently with mood. I also want to note that these movies are in no particular order, except for the first one. This is not a list of the movies that I think are the best made films in the history of forever and ever, just the ones that I feel the most connection with. I will try to describe this connection in the following paragraphs.

Good Will Hunting

Real loss is only possible when you love something more than you love yourself

This is my favorite movie of all time. I could write multiple pages on why I love this film, but let me break it down simply. This is an amazing story, one that Ben Affleck and Matt Damon wrote together.

A brilliant but small cast. We have the dynamic duo of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, plus Robin Williams in what I consider to be his best role ever. Robin Williams is great when he’s funny, but I think his true power and depth as an actor is when he holds his antics and eccentricities down and concentrates on a dramatic role like the one of Sean in Good Will Hunting. The small cast helped too. There wasn’t a big ensemble to tangle up the film, just two major characters and three supporting ones to balance the film out.

The Dynamic Duo’s movie prowess. One of the things that impresses me the most about this film is that it was written by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, it was their first film, and they won and Oscar for it. An Oscar for their first film, how intense is that? It give me something to inspire towards. When you watch this film, think about it being made by new-comers to the movie business and think about how well its written, acted, and put together, and it will give the film a whole new light.

Chasing Amy

I love you Holden, I always will. (Smacks him) But I’m not your f**king whore.

I firmly believe this is the best piece of cinema that Kevin Smith has produced. Is it horribly and flagrantly crude? Most of the time, yes. Does it tackle difficult subject matter that might be hard for the viewer to stomach? Yes. However, does it do this in a real, down to earth fashion, along with a great, twisted love story, a talented cast, and a signature Jay and Silent Bob appearance? Definitely. The best part about this movie is that every character is flawed. They are jealous, insecure, gratuitously sexual, liars, convoluted, and Smith doesn’t hide it at all. That’s what draws me to this Kevin Smith film the most: It’s real, entertaining, and unassuming. Plus, it’s also partly about comic books, which is awesome.

I also like Ben Affleck in this film. I think this is the kind of film where Ben Affleck excels: when he acts in roles that are not meant to be blockbuster roles. Like Holden in this film and Chuckie in Good Will Hunting, Affleck is greatest when he can be a down to earth character with flaws and sparse wisdom. His character’s power is understated, and Affleck harnesses that delivers.

American History X

Hate is baggage. Life’s too short to be pissed off all the time, it’s just not worth it.

This is such an intense and significant movie. I have yet to see a movie that rivals it in it’s gritty and vivid portrayal of race hatred in modern-day America. The way that Edward Norton portrays the redemption of a former skinhead is riveting; we see exactly how a mind is conditioned to hate others of a different race, creed, religion, or sex, and the consequences for doing so.

If I ever have children, as soon as they are old enough to handle this movie I am going to show it to them. It will teach them how hate and intolerance is just poison in your heart and soul. That is how much I believe in this movie. The story drives you and the characters into a whirlwind of hate, mayhem, suffering and ultimately, heartbreaking redemption. And of course, you can’t forget the first time you saw Edward Norton tell another guy to “bite the curb”. (An interesting tidbit–This was made right before Fight Club. Norton had to lose all that muscle (about 30 lbs) to play the wimpy character in Fight Club)

Stay tuned for the second part!

Meh.

Now for “Inception”. After the trip to the movies fiasco that was M. Night’s “Airbender”, I wasn’t expecting much. Yes, this was the guy who directed “Dark Knight”. Yes, Leo DiCaprio has had a string of good movies recently and seems to know his way around a mystery-thriller. Yes, Ellen Page has so much indie cuteness it’s almost overwhelming. But still, movies aren’t have as good as what they used to be, now that they’ll give anyone $100 million dollars to pump out and underwhelming movie.

That’s the thought process, that is, until you sit down and experience the mind bender (literally) that is “Inception”.

I’m not exactly sure which element to pull out of “Inception” to extol, because each part of the movie came together perfectly. The story and plot were complex, developed, and easy to follow; the character development was spot on and each actor did a great job in melding into their role.It operates at a brisk pace and leaves enough mystery at the end to make you gasping with surprise. It risks adding too much complexity that might confuse viewers, but it wins in spades and is easy to follow if you are paying attention.

The special effects were impressive as well. In the manipulation of dreams, if the dreamer begins to reject the dream, then the physics of the dream start to fall apart. Outside environmental forces intrude on your dream as well. For instance, if you get wet, then it starts raining in your dream, or something similar. You know how you feel that falling sensation right before you wake up from some dreams? Christopher Nolan incorporates this, as well as many other aspects of dreaming that we subconsciously experience everyday into “Inception”, and he does it with master storytelling.

Really, Nolan knows how to tell a story using film; I am quickly becoming very impressed as I research his past films, many of them with absolutely memorable and individualistic stories. “Memento” (with his brother, Johnathan Nolan). “The Prestige”. The recent Batman movies. Nolan has become one of the preeminent directors to watch.

Of course the film wasn’t perfect, there were minor details that caught me off guard, irregularities and such, but I choose not to focus on those. They were minor blemishes on an overall superb thriller that leaves me begging for more Chris Nolan and solidified Leo DiCaprio as a above-average actor.”Inception” has finally made me believe in Leo,and I am confident that Chris Nolan’s “Dark Knight” sequel is going to blow us out of the water.

Side note: after you see “Inception”, do you think Michael Caine’s role could be called a cameo? Discuss.

Every college student who takes freshman Comp is taught the quintessential rule for storytelling: show your readers what to believe, do not tell them. Apparently M. Night forgot this rule, as the movie is just one long telling of a story, instead of showing us a story that has already been proven to be a compelling tale. A friend I was with likened it to the “What you missed” portion at the beginning of a show. It would have worked better if M. Night had just walked onto the screen to tell you what happened, because at least that would have given the audience something to laugh at.

Many of the key aspects of the original cartoon, like Ang and the gang’s irony and humor, the developing relationships between the characters, and any form of Uncle’s comic relief is absent. Those who haven’t seen the cartoon can’t get a sense of who these characters are; when something grave happens to them, the audience just doesn’t care.

The kids playing these roles must have been given a day to rehearse and a day to shoot. There are several glaring scenes where the acting is utterly unconvincing and, at times, laughable (and people in the theater did indeed laugh). Even if you are a fan of the cartoon (which I ardently am), you still feel that these are not the same characters, but imposters.

M. Night tries to take a comedic drama and turn it into a solid, dark drama, but a drama only works if you give the audience something to care about, something to make them concerned about the events happening on-screen. The overwhelming feeling in the air above the audience as the lights come up is “okay…so what?”.  It is a shame such beautiful special effects (the movie’s only light saving grace) were wasted on such an untalented movie.

Here comes the point where I invoke the cliché of “M. Night Shyamalan has lost his touch and should not make movies.” I would feel bad about using a cliché if it were not irrevocably true. As this latest addition to M. Night’s failed movies proves, M. Night should take a serious look at hanging up his camera equipment and putting down his pen, at least for a good long while.

• “Will Grayson, Will Grayson” by John Green and David Levithan
• “Let the Right One In” by John Ajvide Lindqvist

The reasons I am taking extra time to write reviews for these books is that I really want to do John Green and David Levithan’s book justice: trying to capture what made the book so great for me deserves a great deal of detailed attention. Also, “Let the Right One In” was disturbing. I am trying to think of a way to review it without making people want to avoid it. It’s going to take some time.

So any way, here is an update on what I have read, am reading, and want to read over this summer.

Books Already Read and Books In Progress:

• “Dune” by Frank Herbert
• “Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck
• “Will Grayson, Will Grayson” by John Green and David Levithan
• “Let the Right One In” by John Ajvide Lindqvist
• “Blockade Billy” by Stephen King
• “World War Z” by Max Brooks
• “Picture of Dorian Grey” by Oscar Wilde (in progress)

Books I want to read this summer:

• “American Gods” and “Neverwhere” by Neil Gaiman
• “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley
• “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

If you have any suggestions for books to read, no matter what genre, please post them below, I would love to hear your suggestions.

When I saw the cover for Stephen King’s newest novel “Blockade Billy”, I have to say I was instantly pumped to read it. With a very old-school feel, it features a baseball catcher, the novel’s title character, as he tags out a runner trying to slide home. The cheering and whooping players and the crazed fans can be seen in the background, along with a moustached umpire calling the runner out. The entire scene is beautifully painted, made to feel like a painting you might find in your old uncle’s study, trying to relive the “glory days” of ‘50s baseball. The title is emblazoned on the bottom of the cover in a flowing script. A banner at the very bottom informs you that this book contains the bonus story “Morality”, first featured in Esquire Magazine.

The publishing house (Cemetery Dance) did an amazing job of designing a book to get the person primed for reading. It’s a shame, then, when the reader opens the book and finds out that the stories do not match up with the beautiful cover. “More of the same”, “So what, big deal”, and “fluff piece” come to mind upon completion of the 80 pg “Blockade Billy” story and the 52 pg “Morality” tale. You realize that the book is very light; you look at it from the spine and realize that, even with a “bonus story”, the novel is the same size as the books that kept you entertained in middle school.

“Blockade Billy” is a framed narrative: King writes it as if he is being told the story by a retired baseball coach who is past his prime, languishing in a retirement home. The coach is the very same one who coached William “Blockade Billy” Blakely on the now defunct New Jersey Titans. “Blockade Billy” is the only player in the world of the Major League who was removed from the entirety of recorded baseball. He has a dark past; one that if you are no stranger to suspense novels becomes easier and easier to predict as the short story moves along.

The story is meant to entice baseball fans (I am, in fact, a burgeoning one) but really gets tripped up when it tries to become suspenseful way too late in the novel. Even the little hints dropped in the beginning aren’t enough to go back and make you exclaim “oohh, that’s what that was!”. The ingredients to a successful suspense novel were cut down in order to make way for a fancy cover design. And as we all know, no cover can make up for a tasteless main course. The fact that they had to include a “bonus story” to entice hesitant buyers is a big indication that maybe they are trying to make up for a lack of stimulating material. A lack of substance, both in length and general storytelling from the book’s “narrator”, is abhorrently apparent from the beginning.

Now let me make this clear: I am a Stephen King fan to the nth degree. I firmly believe that he is one of the most accomplished, suspenseful, prolific, and inspiring writers of the modern era. He knows what he does best, and what he does best is scare the piss and vinegar right out of you with down to earth storytelling. He invests you in his novels, leaves you breathless for more, and makes you marvel at the multitude of layers behind his writing. I can remember dancing like J.R.R. Tolkien’s Gollum as I picked up each King novel when I was younger, just like it was The One Ring itself. I can remember marveling when I noticed characters making guest appearances and nuances in different stories and books, and gasping as it finally dawned on me that King is such a good writer and storyteller that his stories are one huge universe, all intertwined by ink, words, and imagination.

That being said, King’s “Blockade Billy” was lackluster at best; I even enjoyed the ‘bonus story’ “Morality” more than the main tale. Stephen King hasn’t lost his prowess, not by any stretch of the imagination. It just seems that this novel was rushed out without much thought or review. I even noticed a few run-on sentences and typos throughout the texts that did not match up with the surly narrator’s diction, riddled with baseball slang and off-beat, sometimes vulgar, humor. Maybe I have trumped-up expectations, maybe the cover, the forward press I read while monitoring Stephen King news (with a useful Google application called “Google Alerts”—check it out) all pumped me up for a book that wasn’t supposed to make huge waves, just tiny ripples. In any case, the book popped my bloated expectations like a pin to a tiny kid’s balloon.

The inscription in the front of the book reads “This is for every guy (or gal) who ever put on the gear”, but maybe it should have read “This is just for the hell of it”. Stephen King’s love of baseball is not being pulled into question here. What is, however, is the idea that he wrote a story about a strange baseball player with a twisted, dark past, and he felt like he should put it out as a standalone story with a “bonus story” after it. It really belongs in a collection like “Bag of Bones” or the newest tome, “Just After Sunset”.

A framed narrative is great, but if the narrative is stagnant and two-dimensional, lacks detail, and leaves you begging the question “so what?”, then a bonus story is not going to make up for the feeling of disappointment, no matter how big of a Stephen King fan you are. Even though this story disappoints, I am still waiting with bated breath for Stephen King’s next masterpiece, hopefully it will be just as good as his recent “Duma Key” or “The Dome”.

Since there are approximately 17-18 weeks of summer, I am going to try to read at least 12-15 books by the start of the fall semester. I have a variety of books lined up; I’ll be reviewing classics like The Picture of Dorian Grey and, today, The Grapes of Wrath, the foreign award-winning thriller Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in (Swedish)), and John Green’s newest book Will Grayson, Will Grayson, co-written with David Levithan.

So far this summer I have finished three novels: The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck, the sci-fi epic Dune, by Frank Herbert, and Max Brook’s World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, which I enjoyed so much I read it over again.

On a separate note, I love reading books over again. Some people scoff and say that it is a waste of time; that your time would be spent reading new material and broadening your horizons, but I reverently disagree. What is better than enjoying a story that you love again and again. It is the same reason why people look at photo albums over again, why people watch the same movie multiple times, and why people love to ride merry-go-rounds.

Over the next few days I’m going to be posting my reviews on the blog, and I invite you to read them and comment on them if you please. I will then try and review each book as I finish it and post my fresh thoughts. Without further ado, I present my review of The Grapes of Wrath.

I find it oddly fitting that the first book I read and review this summer is one that is seemingly impossible to review. I mean, it’s The Grapes of Wrath….what can I say that hasn’t already been said by the millions of critics across the years who have labeled it one of the most definitive pieces of American Literature to date?

Well I suppose I can say this much: it has been a long, long time since I have read anything that was so irrevocably stirring and profoundly sobering at the same time. I feel like I should be able to physically reach into the novel and pull out my hands dripping with such luscious physical and emotional description. The complex story of the Joads’ migration west brings together the chapters of Steinbeck’s description of the national thought process and history of a group of suffering people.

John Steinbeck’s novel is the epitome of Pulitzer Prize-winning material. Not only is it a well written novel, but it also functions as the most colorful lesson on the history of a brutal period for hundreds of thousands of Americans. It drips with beautiful description of the changing American countryside as well as the way the definition of the elusive American dream changed for Americans moving west to California: it was molded, torqued twisted and so tightly that it shattered, and the pieces reflected an America forever changed in the eyes of suffering people trying to climb out of the Dust Bowl.

Steinbeck uses the fictional Joads as the vehicle for illustrating this change, and the ride ends fairly abruptly. We watch as the Joads lose family members, pick up members of the newly collective migrating family, change the family dynamic (as one of my favorite literary characters might say, “subvertng the patriarchal paradigm”), and create a new breed of Americans. We are left without a definitive ending, but that is for the best, I think, because it shows the true nature of the ever-evolving struggle of Americans, and more simply, American families, to survive and create new lives.

That’s about it. I can’t say much more than: GO. Stop what you are doing, stop reading my blog, stop watching T.V., whatever. Go grab a copy from the library or your favorite book store, preferably independent so you can get a nice used copy. Find a shady tree, a quite place in your house or the library, wherever you like to read, and READ THIS BOOK. You really need to. Forget that it’s a book that you probably Sparknoted for your high school English classes and realize it for the necessary part of the literary American paradigm. Now that you’re all growed up, it’s time to get down to business.

SIDENOTE – I’ve come to realize that I enjoy reading the books I hated in high school because I come to them now with the open mind that a college education and age has given me. I hope others get to experience this new-found epiphany as well.

I first heard of Boudreaux when I interned for James River Writers, a fabulous nonprofit group that provides an incredible variety of services and caters to writers both in the Richmond area and on the mid-Atlantic coast. I was compiling background info on writers and editors who were going to be attending their Fall Writer’s Conference, and Lee Boudreaux was schedule to speak. I was really intrigued by her quick rise to prominence in the editing world and with the information about breaking into the publishing business she had to offer.

Unfortunately, Boudreaux had to drop out of the conference, and I never got a chance to meet her. However, I kept her name in the back of my head of someone I should pursue a conversation or an interview with.

My chance came a few weeks ago when I was assigned a Q&A with someone who was a “captain” of my industry — book publishing. I gave Lee a call and was immediately bombarded with so much information, so quickly, that any conception  I had about the New York fast-paced lifestyle was put to rest.

Boudreaux was willing to share her entire story and thoughts about the industry, and I am extremely grateful for her time and experience.

Here is the 2nd part of the interview with Lee Boudreaux. If you did not read the first part, do some scrollin’ down to the previous post.

Q: I saw in the Boston Globe that you guys (Ecco) published the “The Story of Edgar Sawtelle”, and I wanted to know if you pulled for that book, to acquire the rights, or did you start working with it after Ecco acquired the rights?

Boudreaux: I acquired the rights. It was a humongous manuscript, and it came in right before Christmas, and I remember I got the flu and I had the manuscript at home with me and was able to read through like, all 900 pages, in a very short time. We were in an auction with four other houses, we all spoke to the author on the phone, and we won the auction and he also sort of chose to go with us because, I think, he liked the idea of being published by a very small imprint who would not make him feel like he was part of big corporate publishing, despite the fact we are part of HarperCollins, a very big and powerful entity in the publishing world.

We treated it as our lead fiction title from the moment it was acquired. It was always one that we shown the spotlight on and said ‘this can really do something’.

Q: Many people are surprised that this first novel by an unknown author is climbing best seller charts and selling so many copies. In your experience how rare is an event like that?

Boudreaux: It’s rare. Well (pauses), it’s rare when you look at the number of books that are published every year and how many good books get completely lost in the maelstrom. That happens every day of the year; great books that just don’t get notice and never reach the audience that they should. So, it is a real hallelujah moment when a good books starts getting the attention that you have believed in your heart it should and would get.

When “Edgar Sawtelle” was coming out, it had an effect on people. So as an editor, the first people you have to get excited about it are the people in your own publishing house: the people in your own sales team, your own publicity team, your own marketing team, the higher-ups in the corporate suites who may or may not take a special interest what projects seem to be attracting the most heat in their companies.

We got the manuscript ready early so people could read it and talk about it amongst themselves. That is still the best thing to make a book into a success that there is. You can buy all the ads in the world, you can spend a lot of money-making a bright shiny glossy cover, you can pay the stores—it’s called co-op money, it means the display space in front of the stores which the publisher does have to pay for—all these things have to happen, but nothing works like having people read the book, then tell the people sitting next to them “Oh my God, I read the best book there is”.

Q: How much does marketability come into play when publishing a book? You love a book, you think the author has a great sense of writing, a great voice, but there is no market for it.

Boudreaux: I am in the business of doing books for which there is no discernible market ever. You’re never going read a news story that’s like, “You know what they really need out there? They need a novel about a 14-year-old mute kid growing up in Wisconsin” (the plot of the best seller “Edgar Sawtelle”). When you do non-fiction there is a market for your book…you can identify why there would be a market for it. Now when “Edgar Sawtelle” came along, I can tell you it had these remarkable dogs as characters. This had [with dog enthusiasts] a certain type of audience. You do see fiction every now and then that you can identify why it will be found relevant or why it will be found particularly appealing by people… So, marketability with fiction is a much fuzzier concept. A book will come out that blows everybody’s minds…it didn’t work as a two sentence pitch but it works when you do a book that is a beautifully crafted piece of fiction that delivers on a very interesting premise.

Q: How much of your time is trying to market a book to other people versus editing a book?

Boudreaux: All of the evaluating and the editing take place on your own time; you never have time to do any of that in the office. So when you are in the office, you are publishing books you already own, you are meeting with the marketing people on a book your thinking about doing an expanded e-book on, you’re having a meeting with publicity about a book that just came out…all those things happen all day long then you go home at the end of the day and there you sit until your poor little eyes close of their own volition, reading things to decide if you want to buy them or not. And then, you get to wake up on Saturday and Sunday, and you get to pull from your bag the 500 page manuscript that you have to trim down to a 400 page manuscript. And you do that all weekend long, with a pencil in your hand, line by line, editing, changing, suggesting, asking questions. You actually have two different jobs: one which takes place in the office all day and one of which takes place where other people are having their lives.

Q: When you’re doing this reading at home, do you still read for fun, or is it totally eclipsed by what you read for work?

Boudreaux: It gets very hard to read for fun. I find that, as you’re keeping up with your own submission pile and your own editing, it gets categorized like this: I should read other books by that author I just bought. Before I do the edit on his new manuscript, I should know these other three novels that I haven’t had a chance to read before. Or, you feel that you should read other books that relate to something you are going to do. And then you try and keep up with other things your colleagues are publishing that sound like they are going to be good, and then, after these layers of books, you get to “Huh, I always meant to read so and so when it came out five years ago, I think I’ll take it with me on vacation now”.

Q: Whenever you’re reading at home and you’re going line by line, is it hard to get a sense of the story as well?

Boudreaux: No, and I have to say, that line by line reading is my absolute favorite part of all of it, I LOVE that. I love reading submissions for the first time and falling in love with it, that is super fun. That is just reading a great book and knowing that you’re going to get to come to work the next day and tell everybody about it.

But I have to say, reading something for the third for fourth time, if you love it, it is just as enjoyable as it was the first time. The thing about editing is it’s a logic game. You get to a word and you just stay there with it for a second and you say “is that absolutely the right word to use?”… It’s fascinating, it’s fun, and it’s what every single editor loves to do more than anything else.

Now, I told you that story to tell you this one: I am published online again. This time it is an event coverage I wrote on the Westboro Baptist Protest at Virginia Tech in April. It is published on Planet Blacksburg. Feel free to check it out!

Now, for the interview:

Lee Boudreaux is a fiction editor in New York. In 15 years she has climbed the publishing ladder, from being an unpaid intern at Longstreet Press, to being an assistant editor, to being a senior director at Random House, one of the largest publishing houses in the world.

She currently works for the HarperCollins imprint Ecco Publishing as its editorial director. An imprint is a smaller division of a larger publishing firm. It is usually a smaller publishing house that is absorbed by a larger one.

Boudreaux has helped to publish novels by several noted authors such as Adriana Trigiani, Stephen King and David Wroblewski, author of the recent bestseller “The Story of Edgar Sawtelle”.

Here, Lee Boudreaux explains what got her into the publishing business, what that business consists of, and why you have to love the job in order to stay dedicated to it.

What follows is an edited selection of a Q&A with Lee Boudreaux.

Q: When you graduated from William and Mary in 1990, did you know you wanted to enter into the publishing world?

Boudreaux: It…No. I didn’t. I was an English and government double major, and I thought I was majoring in English because that’s just what I loved, and the government was somehow going to be the more practical of the two, I guess I thought I might end up in Washington doing something, sort of…I don’t know what I thought it would be, really (laughs). I mean, publishing would have been a dream but I didn’t know anything about it, I didn’t know how you got a job in New York, I didn’t know how you just packed your bags an move up here and found a place to live and found a job, I didn’t know anyone who worked in publishing, I didn’t know anyone who had ever lived in New York, probably.

My mother happened to be old college roommates with somebody who was an author, I think I did write her a letter at one point and just ask a bunch of totally stupid questions and she very sweetly wrote me this eight page response trying to fill in what she knew as an author, and then it took me a couple years to figure out how to get to New York. I actually did this thing called the Radcliffe Publishing Course, now it’s called the Columbia Publishing Course, which was this six week program in book and magazine publishing, but I was out of school for probably, gosh, three or four years before I even discovered that.

Q: So, after you took the Columbia Publishing Course, that’s when it clicked for you?

Boudreaux: It did. I was working as a paralegal in Richmond, Va, right out of college, and then I moved to Atlanta and worked for a very small publishing company called Longstreet Press and worked at a bookstore, thinking I was getting my feet wet, and I didn’t know what it was going to turn into. Then I heard about the Radcliffe course, and I applied and I went, and I thought, well, I’ll go back to Longstreet, and they’ll hire me full time instead of, I think I was like an unpaid intern for the year I was down there, and then worked at the bookstore. I think I worked at Longstreet at 9 in the morning until noon every day for free, and then I worked at the bookstore from 2 o’clock in the afternoon till 11 p.m., and then in my spare time actually, because book stores certainly don’t pay too much money and the Longstreet work was free, I summarized medical records and depositions for the law firm that I had worked for when I first got out of school. Everyone who worked anywhere in the south, their dream was to end up in Algonquin, which was a terrific small publisher. But, obviously, jobs were not going to be opening up there all the time, so we were all going to be sitting there in Georgia waiting for somebody at Algonquin to drop (chuckles), so we could get the job of our dreams.

So, I went to the Radcliffe Course, thinking I was going back to Georgia, went back, and about a month later I said “You know, I have got to take a stab at New York.     I now know these 90 other people who went to the Radcliffe Course, they’ve all got entry level jobs in publishing, I know these three people who are living in a house in Brooklyn, they say they’ve got an extra room if I want to move up there and give it a try, I’ve got to go for at least a year”. And I honestly thought I’d be here [New York] for a year or two. I got on the train with two suitcases, and I slept on the floor in this house in Brooklyn for six months (laughs), and I got somebody to sell my car for me, back in Virginia, and I finally got a job. And again, I thought I would be an editorial assistant and go back to Georgia, or maybe my dream job at Algonquin would open up at some point. And then, I just loved my boss and loved my job, and I moved with her from one publishing house to another, and stuck around for a couple years, and got promoted a couple times, and here it is 15 years later.

Q: And now you’re the Editorial Director for Ecco Publishing. Can you describe what you do as an Editorial Director?

Boudreaux: Well, the imprint I work for, Ecco, does about, I’d say 45 new hard covers a year. I only do fiction; I’d say my list is about 90% fiction 10% non-fiction. So my job, in a managing capacity, it’s over a very small list. The imprint is still headed by the person who founded it 36 years ago, so I don’t do a great deal of managing. I would say my job here is like a highlighted collegial position, I will read other people’s submissions, be it fiction or nonfiction, and weigh in with my opinion but my opinion is no more than the opinion of somebody with 15 years experience. I would not put it on a higher pedestal than that. I don’t have veto power over anyone else’s acquisition, I don’t want to be voting with that strong of a voice, I like just weighing in on things. I will weigh in on cover designs, of other people’s books, I will weigh in on balancing a list…by being at a small publisher, which is what I like, there isn’t as much managing to do as just participating in the pool of about, six or eight of us that comprise the whole imprint.

Q: You had to work your way up to being the Editorial Director, all through the different levels of an editor, did you like any particular one better than the rest, or were they all different beasts.

Boudreaux: You mean the sort of ‘rungs on the ladder’? Well, yeah, it starts: editorial assistant, then you get to be an assistant editor, and then you’re an associate editor, and then you’re a full editor, and then they start adding things on like executive editor, senior editor or what have you. Every step up the ladder it gets more fun. I mean, you start out and you do a lot of Xeroxing, you answer phones, and you read along with your boss, and if you’re lucky you have similar tastes to your boss, and if you’re lucky there’s a lot you can learn from your boss even if you don’t have similar tastes. But, if you hated and knew nothing about science books, and you ended up working on science books, it could either be very educational experience for you or you could totally blow it. I probably would have been terrible if I ever had to work on sports books, for example, I don’t know if I ever would have gotten the knack, so I was very lucky that I worked for a fiction editor as my first job, and then got to be a fiction editor.

So you work your way up and you get to acquire your own books and that’s very exciting, but it’s also exciting when you’re a young pup when you inherit some book, and it’s yours to take care of for the first time. You know, if your boss gets busier and busier you take on a bigger share of managing the authors you have, that can be incredibly exciting, because you’re essentially doing the job, learning how to do it, and when you get to launch on your own as a full editor you have a lot of experience and you can handle anything that comes along. So, every step of the ladder, it’s like getting through college, your senior year is a lot better than your freshman year (laughs). And thus it is in the professional world also, it’s kind of fun being a senior editor instead of being an assistant, but there are things you learn at every step of the way

It’s a long…low paying apprenticeship, so there is a long period of time when you’re living in New York and you’re not making much money. The publishing industry is not the most robust right now. When I went to the Radcliffe Course, 90 kids graduated every summer; they all got jobs. Now it takes months and months and months of incredibly hard work on the director’s part to get people hooked up with jobs.

You have to be really committed to the job. We had an intern one summer at Random House who said to me at the end of the summer “It dawned on me; I could be making more money anywhere else”.  And I said, “You are surrounded by people who would be making more money doing their job anywhere else”. Book publishing is not where you go to get rich, as an author, as an agent, as an editor, as a salesman, as a publicist, none of it. But that means it is staffed completely by people who are committed to the idea of books, and getting them out there in the world to be read, and making those books as good as they can be, and making them reach as many people as they can. So it’s a great world to be in, but it is not for somebody who would just as soon be a lawyer in Kansas City.

The next part will follow in a couple of days. enjoy the new content!

The second video is from, well, Justin Bieber himself, discussing…well, just how awesome he is and the reality that we are living in Bieber’s world: http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/cd12846553/bieber-takes-over

Enjoy this moving and philosophical discussion. Feel free to discuss via comments!
Jrad