I think of myself as something of a connoisseur of procrastination, creative and dogged in my approach to not getting things done. Right now, because I have written approximately half of my book, I have tracked off onto those sorts of book-related procrastination reveries that have the great advantage of looking almost like tasks that urgently need doing. For instance, the dedication: Who should it be? Mom? Son? Husband? Or how about some set of initials that will keep people guessing? This is a good day’s work at least. And the title? Good god—this requires months, even years of preoccupation.

The irony of worrying over a book title is that worry as you might, it almost always ends up as an eleventh-hour decision. Every single one of my books had its title changed almost as we were going to press, for all sorts of different reasons. My first book was called “Saturday Night in America” until the person designing the cover thought it would look better with fewer words; ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce you to my first book, “Saturday Night.” (I have an ISBN number for both titles.) “Homewrecker” became “My Kind of Place.” “The Millionaire’s Hothouse”—a title I loved dearly, although no one else on the planet did—became “The Orchid Thief.” “Shiftless Little Loafers” became “Lazy Little Loafers” because some individuals in an executive capacity at a bookstore chain that will go unnamed didn’t know what the word “shiftless” meant. (Yes, the opinion of bookstore chains are accounted for in some of these marketing decisions, and if that shocks you, I am sorry to have caused you pain.)

So now, between moments when I’m really writing, I’m drawing little books on a notepad next to my computer, trying out different titles and fonts. It reminds me of how, when I was a kid, I would write my initials and then the initials of whatever boy I was then madly in love with, and see whether it looked good as a towel monogram or written in icing on our wedding cake.

In further hashtag news, I got an e-mail today from someone reporting a new, inventive use of the form—in text messages. He offered this example: “You looked cute today. #notgonnalie” Genius! I had never considered using a hashtag anywhere other than on Twitter, but now I’m inspired. Text messages have always seemed a little flat to me, so the murmuring Greek chorus of a hashtag might be a perfect way to liven them up and give them a bit of dimension. And from there, who knows? Books? Newspapers? Tattoos? As we move into a future in which no human being ever physically encounters another human being, hashtagging could become even more of a portmanteau, a nice little travelling case into which we can pack ironic asides, description of facial expressions that give away our true meaning, and stage directions, to use not only on Twitter but everywhere in life.

Yes, writers are (usually) paid by the word. This fact seems to fascinate and baffle anyone who is not a writer; I guess I’m just so used to it that I have forgotten how peculiar it must seem. After I mentioned it in mixed company recently, someone gasped, “Like the way you buy meat—priced per pound?” I had never thought of it that way, and later that day, when I was out feeding our cattle (who were priced per pound, too, even though they are not yet meat), I felt like we had a new kinship through metrics.

I’d like to say that I don’t care about LeBron James’s decision to leave Cleveland for Miami, but I really do. I grew up in Cleveland and still feel the usual protective defensiveness about it, and I’m always rooting for the city to get a lucky break. I am also entirely cynical about professional sports, but I can tell you that when I’m back in Cleveland and one of the local teams is doing well, there is a decided lift in the air. Until the very last minute, I thought—hoped—that LeBron would do the ultimate switcheroo and stay with the Cavaliers, especially because it would offset the creeping sense that he was turning into a big jerk (an hour-long television program devoted to his choice of teams? Come on!). The only good outcome is that Cleveland might now rally around this sense of injury and abandonment. After all, the only thing more invigorating than a good friend is a good enemy.

If it weren’t for the astronomical heat this week, I would have never seen the pretty actress, Maria Bello, expressing her breast milk to feed an injured pigeon. What can I say? Heat makes me desperate. I’m currently in residence at Yaddo, an artist community housed in a magnificent, gloomy, turn-of-the-century mansion in upstate New York. To say the mansion is without air conditioning would underplay the point. The air in the mansion, even in moderate heat, is almost sludgy; in the last few days, it has taken on the qualities of a solid. Most of the other Yaddo residents spent yesterday, the worst of the heat-wave days, at local bookstores and libraries, grateful for the chilled air and the free WiFi. But then evening came, and after dinner in the stifling dining room at the mansion, several of us decided the only option was to head for more air conditioning, which meant going to a movie in a mall. For the first time in my life, I headed to the movies with no idea of what was playing and not even caring, as long as the theater was cool.

As it happens, the section of the Rin Tin Tin book I’m working on right now concerns the nineteen-twenties and the astonishing growth of the movie business. By the middle of that decade, Hollywood was selling a hundred million movie tickets a week; the entire population of the United States in 1925 was only a hundred and fifteen million. Of course, there weren’t many other forms of entertainment available—television was still decades away and the circus came to town only once or twice a year. What’s more, the movie-theater industry was one of the first in the world to install air conditioning, thirty years before home air conditioning became common. My guess is that a good portion of those hundred million tickets were sold to people who were sweltering in city apartments and were happy to see anything as long as they could get out of the heat.

The offerings at the mall were that vampire-virgin-love movie, “Eclipse,” and a comedy called “Grownups”—movies that in ordinary circumstances and ordinary temperatures none of us would have ever considered seeing. It was something of a Hobson’s choice: A terrible movie or heading back to the inferno at home. Somehow we ended up at “Grownups,” which stars Adam Sandler and Salma Hayak and the aforementioned Maria Bello. To single out one scene as the most offensive and stupid seems almost churlish—so many offensive, stupid scenes to choose among!—but the pigeon breast-feeding, because of its originality in commingling a breast gag, the degradation of an attractive woman, and a cutaway to a cute animal, would have to be my choice.

The air-conditioning, though, was divine.

July sightings:

• A porcupine, quills bristling, shuffling down a path with its legs spread wide, as if he were wearing a pair of too-tight pants.


• Last season’s fawns, now filled out and grown up, their baby spots faded to a copper sheen.


• Snapping turtles, as big as hubcaps.


• Spring tadpoles, now July’s bullfrogs, as wide as a man’s hand, happy to stay up late, burping and thrumming.


• Swallows, diving and careening like drunks.


• Squirrels, so fat they have the beginnings of double chins, yet still capable of a front flip in the pike position—and a stuck landing!—at the bird feeder, where they can enjoy lunch and laugh at the squirrel proofing.

The semiology and phenomenology of hashtaggery intrigues me. From what I understand, it all began very simply: on Twitter, hashtags—those little checkerboard marks that look like this #—were used to mark phrases or names, in order to make it easier to search for them among the zillions and zillions of tweets. For instance, if you wanted to make a comment about Sarah Palin, you could include her name in the tweet, or you could make the comment and follow it with her name marked by hashtag. That is, you could tweet,

“I would rather have a moose for President than Sarah Palin!”

Or, making good use of a hashtag,

“I would rather have a moose for President! #SarahPalin”.

The tweet with the hashtag was more likely to come up in a search for tweets about Sarah Palin, as well as being punchier and more exclamatory. The practice is now a Twitter standard.

Hashtags have also undergone mission creep, and now do all sorts of interesting things. Frequently, they are used to set apart a side commentary on tweets, sort of like those little mice in the movie “Babe” who appear at the bottom of the frame and, in their squeaky little mouse voices, comment on what you’ve just seen and what you’re about to see. A typical commentary-type hashtag might look like this:

I live in one county but pay property taxes in another, and have a cell-phone number that shows up, on caller ID, with the name of a town to which I have no connection. My mailing address is in a town I don’t live in. For a long time, I kept my car registered in the state where I grew up, so that’s what I had on my license plates. My husband’s phone has an area code from a state we moved away from three years ago. My son goes to school sixteen miles from our house, in what happens to be yet another state, so we now get mailings from local businesses that are not the least bit local for us, that are in that other state. I know where I live but I sometimes have trouble explaining it. Recently, I noticed that Google Maps, usually a reliable and comforting touchstone when one is feeling lost in the universe, had wiped our address out of its database. “DO YOU MEAN…” it would ask, confused by my address, and then would offer some suggestions—perhaps I meant the Goodyear tire store in Poughkeepsie, or a small museum near Danbury, or a bad restaurant many miles away from me, in a neighboring state. What? I tried to convince it of my address over and over, and then gave up and hit the “report a problem” button, and have done this now several times. I’ve received many e-mailed responses from Google, each saying, in what seems like the friendliest tone, “Guess what? You were right!” I should certainly hope so: It’s my address, after all.

This is a true story:

My first book was acquired by two people I will call Editor A and Editor B, who ran a small imprint at a big publishing house. We had a great lunch to celebrate. A few months later, Editor A left book publishing to become a newspaper writer. Editor B became my primary editor. She and I had a nice lunch to talk about my book.

A few months after that, Editor B was promoted to publisher of the larger house—let us call it Publisher W—that owned the small imprint. Because Editor B—that is, Editor/Publisher B—now had too many duties to edit my book, I was assigned to Editor C.

Editor C and I had lunch. A few months later, he got a new job at another publishing house. I was assigned to Editor D.

Editor D and I had lunch. It was a pleasant-enough lunch, but Editor D had no actual interest in my book or me; he was just taking it on because Editor/Publisher B, now his boss, had asked him to.

A few months later, Editor/Publisher B was fired.

A few months after that, Editor D, now freed from his promise to Editor/Publisher B to oversee my project, asked me if my book was done because according to my contract, it was due.

My book was not done.

I paid back my advance to Publisher W and sold my book proposal to Publisher X. My editor at Publisher X—let’s see, that would be Editor E—had been a magazine editor, and was brand-new to the publishing world and full of crazy excitement about it. I was starting to get a little sensitive about all this change, and I asked Editor E if there was any chance that the publishing world would not always seem to her worthy of crazy excitement; that is, I asked Editor E if she thought she would ever leave. Editor E assured me that this was simply not possible.

Editor E and I had lunch. A few months later, she called me and said an incredible opportunity had presented itself in the newspaper world and she was leaving.

I was assigned to Editor F. I was very scared of Editor F, and I don’t think we had lunch. I finished my book. I had the longest acknowledgment section in the history of the written word.

I could go on, about how I left Publishing House X for Publishing House Y because I was still scared of Editor F, and how at Publishing House Y I managed to get three books written there working with Editor G—who assured me that he would never leave, and this was almost true, except for a brief period when he did, in fact, leave, but then he came back—and then the head of Publisher Y got fired, and eventually I left and then Editor F left, and then I was working with Publisher Z, and then the head of Publisher Z left, and then I left Publisher Z to go back to Publisher W, because the person now running it was an old friend from the magazine world, who I knew would never leave, but you might think I was exaggerating. But I’m not.

Anyway, the head of Publishing House W and I had lunch to celebrate my return to Publisher W. A few months later, he got fired.

My new publisher, at Publishing House W, is Editor G, who left Publishing House Y for the job. As some great philosopher once said, it’s like déjà vu all over again. This time, though, I am going to suggest we skip the lunch.

I woke up thinking about Ron Hansen’s majestic, mournful book “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.” The book had gotten into my head the way some songs do, repeating its rhythms and tones over and over. On a whim, I mentioned it on Twitter, added the searchable hashtag #booksthatchangedmyworld, and sat still for a moment. About three seconds later, the flood began—dozens and dozens of other people started listing books that had changed their worlds. They kept listing for hours, even after I had toddled off to bed; by midnight last night, I’m told, there were over nine thousand hashtagged replies. I woke up to discover that #booksthatchangedmyworld was a trending topic on Twitter—that is, it was flagged as one of Twitter’s most popular tags, an honor more often reserved for, say, Justin Bieber or Lady Gaga. At a moment when the publishing world is having profound self-esteem problems, when writers are worrying whether they need to learn programming code in order to keep pace with wherever it is that book publishing is going, it is marvellous to be reminded that it is still all about stories, and about feeling that something you read changed the way you look at life.

As it happens, I was recently talking to a depressed publisher friend, who told me that this year, for the first time, his company sold more of its books virtually—either as e-books or through orders on Amazon—than in bookstores. Besides worrying about the fate of bookstores themselves, my friend wondered where we would get word-of-mouth recommendations for reading if bookstores were to disappear. To cheer him up, I said that I thought social media might step in; the few times in the past that I had ever asked for a book suggestion on Twitter or Facebook, I got scores of replies, all well-considered. I’m rooting for bookstores to prevail and endure, but #booksthatchangedmyworld was encouraging evidence that we all love to talk about the books we love, and we love being the matchmaker between a book we love and someone who hasn’t yet discovered it. Even if books become microchip implants or streaming Bluetooth torrents, I believe, and hope, that impulse will never change.

UPDATE: My full list is up at the Book Bench.