I’m still here.  Just writer’s blocked and crazy busy.

Here’s a video about Kamchatka:

Links:

1. Please learn to write
2.  The book of my enemy has been remaindered
3. Stephen Fry on the art of swearing
4. Spy pictures from the Prague police (the actual pictures)
5. building early music instruments
6. The question of Israeli citizenship
7. What are the most intellectually stimulating websites?

Now that even us Hunchback of Notre Dame peons can access Instagram (I’m @veekaybee), all I do is sit in my belfry hunched over my phone and look at the pretty pictures from around the world. Sometimes I take some, but mostly there’s something about seeing everyday life in far away places that is the billion-dollar appeal of Instagram for me.

Of course, this is all a huge bubble and we’re going to hell in a handbasket, because, really, who buys hipster Polaroid for a billion dollars? but in the meantime, here are some of my favorite recent pictures. (BTW, I use Pinstagram online for this ish)

(Moscow) by nastyrudenskaya

(Delhi) by  @lucido22

(Kuwait) by  @doctorfun

(Israel) by  @abaroz

(Paris) by  @parisbug

(Jaffa, Israel) by  @nivcalderon

(Italy) by  @andycarvin

(Baku, Azerbaijan) by  @mizojist

(<3<3 Edinburgh) by @dededobler

(somewhere near the ocean) by @dubphonics

(Saigon, Vietnam) by @vanishedsky

It’s been a month-ish since I’ve released my ebook. (direct link to Amazon/Pulley here)

I’ve spent over 100 hours writing seven and a half drafts, and thirty hours creating a cover.  I’ve gone through six WordPress templates before I finally found the perfect one to market it.  I spent days researching the best way to distribute my book,  formatting dozens of files for Amazon and EPUB, and reading lots of travel books to better understand the market.  I’ve sacrificed my dignity and pimped (or “self-promoted”) my work on blogs and in forums . I’ve been curled up in the fetal position on the floor in my office more times than I can count (5).

The result:   I’ve sold 50 books. And I  made $20.10.

That’s about eight cents an hour earned.  Well, technically,if you count expenses,  I owe myself money, but more on that later.

But the money isn’t the end-goal, because, thank God, I don’t need it.  This process has taught me more than I’ve ever thought possible about what it takes to be both a writer and an entrepreneur, and that itself is worth thousands of dollars to me. The thousands that I’m already paying for an MBA.

I wrote Scotland because being published has been my life dream for forever. I just wasn’t doing anything about it, except complaining.  A couple of things came together to make it happen for real.

First, Mr. B gave me the iPad for my birthday.  At first, I didn’t think I’d ever switch from paper books because I’m old-school like that. Then, I started reading books on the Pad via Kindle.  And reading. And reading.  I’d never purchased and read this many books in my life. Somewhere around October, I realized that people were self-publishing via Kindle, busting the publishing model wide open, and the idea began to dawn on me that I could also ostensibly do this.  Never before did I think I could do anything other than go through the agonizing maze of the mainstream publishing industry.

Second, I started my new job last August.   I work with data on the bleeding edge of tech, and one of the things I really love about my job is that I get to see products go live frequently. We’re not a startup, but we are agile, and it’s the closest you can get to the fast-paced bootstrappy atmosphere of a startup without having to sell your house for equity.  I realized I wanted to use the software development processes I was learning about to discipline myself during the launch of my own release.

Third, I started my MBA this spring. I’ve learned nothing, other than how to make my own coat of arms, and I wanted to see how real businesses worked from the ground up. The reason I went back for the M.B.A wasn’t for the knowledge about how business works. The MBA is really all about the piece of paper.  You can’t rise up through job titles without one, even though having one doesn’t give you any more concrete skills than you had when you were going in.

So, one day, I was sitting with my boss in his office.

“How’s school,” he asked.

“It’s ok,” I shrugged.  It wasn’t too bad, but it wasn’t too great.  I wasn’t learning anything.  I knew the MBA was going to be useless knowledge-wise when I opened my statistics book in January and it said, “You may wonder why you need to learn statistics. After all, you will be able to hire people to do this complicated math for you.”

“The MBA is useless,” said my boss.

“But YOU have an MBA,” I protested.

“But I got most of what I got from my program by making connections and doing important stuff outside of class,” he said. “So keep that in mind.”

So I did.  And the result of that, as well as all of the other things coming together, was this ebook.

Here are my takeaways from the process.  I’m hoping they help anyone that wants to start any type of money-generating side-project of their own.

Sometime during day 4. 

The beginning is HARD.  If you don’t actually commit to doing something, you’ll never even start it.  Anne Lamott, a favorite of writers, but also of all creative people, talks about shitty first drafts. Just get it down there.  Shitty first drafts are the only thing keeping you from your second draft of anything-a novel, a web app, a painting, a photograph.   And oh God were my first drafts terrible.  But I just kept writing.  What made this time different from the previous times is that I knew for sure that at the end I’d get something that was good. I just had to keep whittling away. And I reread Bird by Bird at least five times.

Support in the form of Asti. 

Have someone who supports you.  This is really important.  Almost everyone around me thought my book was a whimsical and friviolous pursuit.  There were only a couple people who understood that I had to write this book, or I would die, and who actually wanted to discuss the process with me.

Mr. B was my biggest supporter.  It’s possible that he has Stockholm Syndrome. But I never felt like he wouldn’t listen to me talk about the problems I was having with the book, or not proofread a chapter, or help me pick a title, or root for me. He made tons of tea, took care of household chores, and generally held down the fort while I was in crazy mode.   If he didn’t get it, he would have become very resentful that I was spending whole nights locked up in the office writing.  And when I launched the book and we were drinking champagne, he was just as happy as me. Probably because I was going to start cooking dinner again.

The other part of this is that you need support because there is still infinite loneliness in individual business/creative pursuits. Paul Graham talks about the startup curve:

I wasn’t launching Instagram here, but I still felt it, and it takes place exactly like this.  There is an initial spike of elation when you’re sure you’re on the right track, then you start getting to the wiggly part where everything is ugly.  Everything SUCKS. Your writing is terrible, you don’t understand what you’re doing, you should just scrap the whole thing and call it quits.  These were the fetal position moments, and they usually happened around 11:30 PM.  This is the hardest part, but it’s also the most important, because if you can weather that storm, you’re going to finish what you started and smooth out all of the rough patches.   You just need to have someone to anchor you through the storm of crazy, to tell you that . For me, it was Mr. B. And the last stanza of this poem. Also, Stuart Smalley.

The closer you are to producing it yourself, the more money and control you keep. And, give your customers choice.   I had a couple choices for publishing: Amazon for Kindle, Smashwords for everything else (Sony, Nook, etc.), and self-hosting (you pay via Paypal, download all the filetypes you need in a zip file). The first two mean you don’t have to deal with administrative overhead, which includes managing people’s money. As an amateur businessperson, I wanted to stay far, far away from ever handling money online.  It’s just a deathtrap legally if you don’t do it right.   But I also wanted at least some degree of control.  Once you submit the file to Amazon and Smashwords, you have no control over how it goes through their formatting grinder.

So I decided to test both.  One version would be on Amazon via Kindle so you could download it with one click, the other version would be through Pulley, where you pay through Paypal and get the EPUB+PDF file, DRM-free. It was really important to me not to have any DRM as much as possible for a one-person business who was completely in control of the factors of scale of Amazon and PayPal.

If your book is priced less than $2.99 on Amazon, you only get to keep 35% of each sale. So, that’s .35 cents if your book is .99.  If you do Paypal,  they takes 33% of each dollar. Plus the $6 monthly cost for Pulley, the distribution system.  The upsides with Amazon are that everyone trusts Amazon. When’s the last time you’ve bought a book not through Amazon?  And what do you immediately look at? Amazon reviews. The downside is the painstakingly long editing process, and the blackbox that is KDP where you format your book one way and it comes out another.

The downside of Pulley is that no one wants to buy and read via PDF/EPUB then have to transfer it themselves to their device of choice, but you know every single person who’s purchased your book, you can change the file just like that, and you have a minute-by-minute track of your money. Amazon doesn’t give you that.  The split for the book so far has been about 60% Kindle, 30% Pulley.

And then there are also taxes. But I don’t want to think about those yet. But Basically, with 50 sales, I should have made $50.  I made $20.  Painful, and something they don’t really teach you in your MBA.

Launch strong, but iterate constantly (and admit mistakes). Sites and web services constantly launch in beta and then make changes on the fly as users suggest them or they see errors.   Books work a little differently, because every word has to be perfect the first time, otherwise you’re going to lose the reader’s interest right away.  So I went through it myself six times. Then I had Mr. B read it. Then I edited once more. Then I read through separate paragraphs. The first chapter was the critical one, because that’s what’s in the Amazon book preview. I was sure I caught everything.  Then I was sure. And I published to Amazon.  Once you publish to Amazon, you lose all control of seeing how the finished product looks and there’s a 12-hour turnaround time for iterations.

I beta-tested on Mr. B’s mom and my mom. Mr. B’s mom downloaded on Kindle on her iPad and my mom downloaded through Pulley on Saturday.  The distribution system worked well. Now they were reading it, but not saying anything.  I assumed everything was kosher, so I launched on Monday.

Real People started buying the book and reading it.

Two days later, my mom sent me an email saying she’d found typos and repeated paragraphs.  My blood ran cold.  Because I hate typos, and I hate people judging me for typos.  I frantically searched the Amazon Q+A section to see if you republish the book, whether the changes iterate on the reader’s Kindle. They don’t.  But I had upwards of 8 people that bought it on Kindle already.  I died a little on the inside.

I talked to a couple people who I knew had already bought it, and asked how much the typos bothered them. They said it wasn’t a huge deal, but I couldn’t tell whether they were being honest or trying to save me from a meltdown.  I didn’t sleep all night. I couldn’t figure out what do to.  Do I try to find out who bought it on Amazon and give them another copy?  Too messy, too unprofessional.  What about the Pulley people? How do I get the word out?  Does this mean I’m done as a writer?

The next day, I sat down at the computer and edited the book again, and I made Mr. B look at it, too. By this point, I was so sick of it that I didn’t care if I ever read another word I wrote about Scotland again.  It was just nauseating to look at. I now understand when writers say they know when it’s time to let something go.  Because you can’t look at it anymore, no matter how many loose ends still need to be tied up.  But I forced myself to do it. And I fixed everything I could find.  Then I decided to resend the file to the people who’d bought it on Pulley with a huge apology.

In retrospect, I should have hired a copyeditor, but it was only my first book and I didn’t want to incur crazy costs. Next time, I’m definitely doing it.  My reputation is worth more to me.

And, another thought on launching and iterating:

Timeboxing. Do it.  I started working in the middle of January and gave myself a finish deadline of April 16th, aka the Battle of Culloden (relevant to my book!). Then I hyped it up on the blog.  If you don’t pressure yourself to finish, you’ll never do it.

Marketing is dirty and gross, but someone has to do it.  The first day I released my book, there were a lot of visits to the site.  I know because I was constantly monitoring outgoing links on my blog and incoming links on my ebook:

 The big bar is the day of launch.   The one after that is the next day, but the majority of visits aren’t coming from my blog or my Twitter or my Facebook, where I tried as tactfully as possible to announce to people who might be interested that Hey! I have a fun travel book about Scotland out! It’s really cheap! Come check it out.  They’re coming from Reddit:

Why?  Because I wrote a post on r/Scotland about how awesome Scotland is, and how I decided to write a travel book about it.  I thought it was going to be well-received, because who doesn’t like hearing about someone enjoying their country?  The problem is that I included copy that alluded to a mildly anti-Semitic experience I had on the trip. It was pretty humorous, but I exaggerated it for comedic effect on my book site, and  I guess the Scots don’t like being portrayed as anti-Semites? Who knew! This spawned a pretty hostile thread:

I wanted to die.  However, this Reddit link did generate lots of traffic to my book site, really reinforcing the “there’s no such thing as bad publicity.”  Marketing was my least-favorite part of the whole process. I’ve always regarded it as bullshit, but it turns out there’s a lot in how you present yourself.  I just hated presenting myself.  I knew I had a good product at a good price, a light, funny travel read for a couple of nights for anyone interested in Scotland, Russia, Jews, or just travel narratives.  I just didn’t know how to present it without being grating or LOOK AT ME.

I’ll have to do a little more research, because marketing honestly does boost blog traffic.

And finally:

Do something that gives you joy. Otherwise you’ll kill yourself in the process.  I LOVE WRITING. I love travel. I loved Scotland. I love travel essays. I loved researching Scottish history.  I love writing stuff that makes people laugh.  I love reading travel books.  So it was awesome.  If I hated all those things, I wouldn’t have been able to work on this book in a month where I was working 11-hour days, doing class on Mondays and sometimes on weekends, and generally trying to deal with the real world as well.  If you do something you love, it’s really not work. It’s an accomplishment.

This is all really good advice for anyone who wants to do anything creative.  Especially for me, because I started working on Book #2 last week.

1. “The culture of Wall Street is pervasive and contagious. While there are Wall Street employees who are able to ignore it, or block it out, I was not one of them. I drank the Kool Aid. I’m out of it now. But I’d like to tell you what it was like. “
2. “Name a style of music you dislike and it’s up to fans of said style to find artists that could change your opinion.“
3. Driving school teacher (and a really cool cause, Razistan)
4. I promise this is the only Scotland-related link. And it’s not even that Scottish.
5. “If money doesn’t make you happy, you probably aren’t spending it right.”
6. Moving on
7. PhD Movie: Well Worth the $10. (especially if you love the comic)
8. How to really survive the world

Writing a book (I wrote a book,  you might have heard something about it?)  has made me very sensitive to criticizing other writers. Because it’s hard, and it takes guts to expose yourself to the entire world.

But, by God, I cannot allow the praise of Discovery of Witches to go on. I cannot allow any more innocents to fall prey to this book.

I read this book a couple of months ago and I’ve been trying not to write this review because, like Vogon poetry, this book is not something I want to subject you to.

Reading Discovery of Witches is like feminism never existed.  Reading Discovery of Witches is like someone browsed all the current hot teen paranormal romance books at Barnes and Noble and smushed them together in a blender.  Reading Discovery of Witches is like being in a room with a really pretentious Princeton professor who loves to hear himself talk.  Reading Discovery of Witches is like one of those leg rashes you get sometimes in the summer if you’re allergic to maybe poison ivy or pollen and you know you shouldn’t scratch it because it’s bad but then you do scratch it and it’s terrible but then it’s really great. But then your leg swells like a balloon.  Reading Discovery of Witches is like rain on your wedding day.

If you love life and reasonable literature, you will love to hate this book.  Let me spare you reading it and recap it for you, with spoilers.

Somewhere in the center of my soul, a rusty chain began to unwind. It freed itself, link by link, from where it had rested, unobserved, waiting for him. My hands, which had been balled up and pressed against his chest, unfurled with it. The chain continued to drop, to an unfathomable depth where there was nothing but darkness and Matthew. At last it snapped to its full length, anchoring me to a vampire. Despite the manuscript, despite the fact that my hands contained enough voltage to run a microwave, and despite the photograph, as long as I was connected to him, I was safe.

Be yourself– Matthew Clairmont. Complete with your sharp vampire teeth and your scary mother, your test tubes full of blood and your DNA, your infuriating bossiness and your maddening sense of smell.

This weekend, I was in search of a couch. Well, I’ve been in search of a couch since January but this weekend is the first weekend life’s slowed down enough for me to be able to focus on the house again.

We want to create a reading/TV-watching nook in our office/library  on the third floor, and we need a really comfortable couch to put up there.

American furniture is 100% ugly, and Russian furniture is 98% ugly, AND Mr. B  and I don’t agree on anything, so I was extremely lucky that we found one couch we agreed on:

The only problem was that I kind of wanted to see a couch I was going to spend more than a grand on, and the closest CB2 store is in New York.

And the house was a mess. And I had homework to do. And I was lazy.

But hey, it’s only spring once a year, right? And we love New York. So we decided to go to Manhattan to see a couch.

I’m so glad we went.  It was fun.   The weather was beautiful, the couch was perfect and we decided to buy it, and we spent the rest of the day wandering around the city.  I think we walked 6 miles.

There’s a certain vitality that New York has that not even my beloved DC can match.  Just being in New York, you feel that everyone is hustling, doing something, and even sitting in a coffee shop observing people feels somehow more productive than it does anywhere else.

At Pearl River Mart.

 A store selling Britannica.  But nothing Scottish whatsoever.  Racism!  I did almost buy a very beautiful teapot.

We tried to go to the 9-11 Memorial, just like we’d done at the Pentagon before, but there are annoying lines and you have to pay, which, WTF? By the way, if someone can tell me how this monument depicts or comforts survivors of terrorism, and does not instead commemorate maraschino cherries, I will pay you $100.

Lunch as at Taim Falafel. OMGSOGOOD. We sat and watched hipsters go by.

Then we spent an hour or five at The Strand, where I got this.

By the way, If you’re interested in a 100% legit Chanel/Louis Vuitton purse, I found this great spot:

On our way to the car, I bought some strawberries for a dollar a container in Chinatown. As we drove away from the city, I took my shoes off , we ironically put on the Russian rap, and ate strawberries all the way to Hoboken.

Life is good.

Carnival Duet 2, Andrei Shwidiky

Elif Batuman, one of my favorite writers (who else has the Twitter handle Banana Karenina?), wrote in semi-defense of Mike Daisey‘s blatant lying of his portrayal of his investigation at the Foxconn Apple factory in China last month.  Since she herself wrote a memoir about the quirks of being in a Russian Studies graduate progrma that was beautiful and odd precisely because it was true, she had some thoughts about Daisey’s lie:

But I think the critique Mike Daisey got isn’t quite the critique he deserved. I think his offense is less the misrepresentation of truth than self-aggrandizement. It’s important that he didn’t invent the stuff out of nowhere. He just said that he was there when he wasn’t.

Somehow, to me, the labeling isn’t the most important thing here. I guess I’m not that disturbed by the liberties that Daisey took with the facts. He set out to tell a story about working conditions in Chinese factories, in a way that would affect public opinion and eventually maybe public policy. And he did tell such a story. And This American Life checked that story, and it checked out. I don’t feel betrayed or manipulated. The phenomenon he described, and got people to care about, was real.

One of the things the Tao of Travel shows is how unforthcoming most travel writers are, how most travelers are. They don’t tell you who they were traveling with, and they’re not very reliable about things that happened to them. For example, everyone loved John Steinbeck’s book Travels With Charley. Turns out he didn’t travel alone, his wife kept meeting him, yet she was never mentioned in the book. Steinbeck didn’t go to all the places he mentioned, nor did he meet all the people he said he met. In other words, Travels With Charley is fiction, or at least half-fiction.

I hate women-only conferences and networking groups.

The reason is that while all the women are together at one conference, all the men that make decisions are at another, and the women don’t have acces to them.  You also start to get scope creep, like where you have panels called “Social Media Magic: A Woman’s Touch.” Then,  women start talking to other women about clothes instead of their industry.

So it was with hesitation that I signed up for the Women in Tech Summit. I did so for a couple reasons: one, it was at Wharton, which, as you may recall, is my mother ship. I was really hoping if I stayed there long enough, they’d take me.  Two, it was part of Philly Tech Week on a weekend, and I didn’t know if could make any of the other events due to my crazy work/school schedule. And three, well, yeah, I was interested to see other women working in technology.  I’m one of just a few at my job and I wanted to catch a glimpse of my species in the wild.

I was expecting the worst when I saw that the website was pink.  Because women are pink, right?  I also braced myself for impact when I saw women entering Huntsman in full-on business suits. No one ever goes to regular tech conferences in business suits unless they’re trying to sell you something.   The third sign was when, as soon as I got in line to find my name badge, I overheard one woman telling another, “Oh, I like your necklace.” I realize this is the female equivalent of, “Oh wow, that’s a really cool [insert gadget here].” But why can’t we be complimenting each other on our gadgets instead of our necklaces?  I love your browser. It’s so sleek and sexy.

Luckily, the conference went way uphill from there:

Once I registered, I wandered around.  Most of the women were already talking in groups, and I HATE, HATE, HATE having to but tinto conversations.  But I did it anyway, and I ended up meeting someone who’s starting her own coworking space with childcare in Philly (this is really cool), someone curating women writers online, someone who’d just launched a digital branding startup with her husband.

Like most introverts, I HATE networking with a passion.

After forcing myself to be social, I went to a couple of sessions that were really interesting: one about test-driven development, led by Audrey. (Here’s more detail if you’re interested)

and  one about working with open data, led by Dana.  Here are some pictures from that workshop.  These were both really interesting, especially the second one, because I work in data, and it was fun to complain about data issues:

What was more interesting was the twitter feed of the sessions I wasn’t in.  At the workshops, I was pleasantly surprised to see that we were not covering anything related to equality, or why there aren’t enough women in the workforce, or work/life balance.  The women presenting and attending were women were actually just…doing it. There were Android developers, project managers, and, in the case of Audrey, new moms.  They were  leading by example.

The generalist sessions focused more on how it felt to be a woman in the workplace and what to do about it. Well, I already know how it feels to be a woman in the technical workplace. I’m sure most of the women at the conference did, too.  Since my boss hasn’t taken me aside and told me, “Gee Vicki, we’re really going to need you to ramp down being a female because it is just affecting your work in crazy ways,” I think I’m doing pretty well.  In fact, 90% of the time, I don’t think about being a woman at work because I’m….working.

So you could easily tell the tweets coming from the generalist and the non-generalist sessions apart:

This is one of my other favorite tweets:

Probably my favorite session was Joanne Lang’s.  She’s the CEO of AboutOne, which just launched at 5:30 the morning of the conference, but she didn’t skip a beat in talking about how funding and running a start-up works. Start-ups as portrayed by the tech media always seem so glamorous and cool.  Joanne broke it down for what it was: hard work, and having enough business savvy to understand where to cut costs, and constantly not knowing if you’re on the brink of succes or failure.  Her session was really great for me and, in forty minutes, taught me more about business than my MBA has all semester. Hey-o!

Although there were a few “pink” moments, and unfortunately as of now I am still not a Wharton student, I did enjoy the conference.  It was helpful to see some of the career paths in technology that women had mapped out for themselves, and it was fun to see people into data as much as I am.  One of my favorite parts was meeting Marina, who’s currently an artist of pretty stuff, but is making her way into the tech sector. There’s not a lot of guidance for people that want to transition into tech (as I found out recently,) so this conference served yet another purpose.

I came away with two prevailing thoughts that wrapped the whole thing up:

and, most importantly:

Thanks to everyone who organized the conference for making it happen.

P.S. I also  really liked tech conference organizer Yasmin’s post about becoming an American citizen recently.

So, the other week, Mr. B and I were trolling around in the local Russian bookstore. It’s actually very cute because it’s called “Knizhnik,” which loosely translates to “Booker,”  from the word for book, knizhka. It’s named after the owner, whose last name IS actually Knizhnik.  With a last name like that, I can only imagine you’re destined either for book store ownership or tax evasion.

Anyway, none of that was  relevant to the picture I’m about to show you. Brace yourselves.

This book is titled “Magical Riddles,” but the only riddle I have is why the hell the wolf on the cover of a book targeting the 3-7 age group is dressed like Tupac Shakur? With his own bling, which reads “волк ” or wolf in Russian.

When I first Tweeted this picture on Instagram, a couple of Concerned Citizens pointed out that, even in English, it looked like the wolf was up to no good:

I have no explanation for this cover illustration and why it’s appropriating American gangsta rap culture.

 Are Russians hoping to corner the hip-hop marketing segment of children’s literature? Do they think the wolf (W-Dawg) appeals to those 4-year old toddler girls who are dreaming of someone sexy and dangerous, yet safe, to escort them to Grandmother’s house? (Yes, that is little Red Riding Hood, but in Russian she’s Little Red Riding Cap, because, you know, communists)

More importantly, if the wolf  can afford bling, why can’t he afford a nice pair of Prada pants without patches, like Kanye? Is it because the illustrator is trying to show that, while daddy has a Boomer and a 14-k gold nameplate he’s still relatable to the proletariat?

We many never know.

But while you’re puzzling over that, there’s another Russian children’s series I’d like you to check out.  It’s called Tanya Grotter and it has no resemblance at all to anything in English-speaking culture whatsoever.

This pacticular book is called “Tanya Grotter and the Hammer of Perun,” Perun being the Slavic pagan deity of fire, mountains, and plagiarism.

I can just imagine a marketing meeting where the publishers of these books got together.

“How can we sell our own rich literary culture, spanning back hundreds of years and including such beloved Russian children’s authors as Marshak, Barto, and Nosov?” One suit says to another.

“We can’t.  Now that everyone has the Internet, Russian culture is boring. America, America, America, they all want.”

“So what are we going to do?”

“We will plagiarize and appropriate everything, by God.”

“ALL of American and Anglophone culture?”

“Yes, all of it.”

“But it’s so overwhelming! Where do we start?”

“How about you draw a Hip Hop wolf, and we’ll go from there?”

“But even if we develop a hip hop culture, we don’t have the ‘hood. How do we rap without a ‘hood to objectify?”

“Are you looking around you?  You have a whole country full of rusting post-Soviet machinery that hasn’t been maintained in over 40 years  just waiting to give you tetanus, and you’re complaining that we don’t have a ‘hood? Get back to drawing that wolf, bratan.”

Can I just gloat for a second that the most-read article in The Economist this week was on my beloved Shotlandia (which would be an excellent name for a vodka, by the way)? So if you are buying my book, which contains a brief but maybe kind of inaccurate history of the issue, you will be all the hotness at your suave cocktail parties this year as you wow people with your expertise.

“Did you know, Mittsy,” you’ll say to  your fellow chatterer holding an appletini, “did you know, Mittsy, that Scotland has been trying to become independent for the last three hundred years and that its future now lies in hydroelectric energy? ”

“Really,” Mittsy will say and adjust her Lilly Pulitzer purse.

“Oh, yes, quite,” you’ll say.  ”Did you also know that people almost get shanked there on a regular basis?”

“What,” Mittsy will choke on her olive.

“According to Vicki Boykis, it’s true,” you’ll say smugly.  ”If it’s in a self-published book being advertised on a blog read by four people, two of whom are the author and her husband, it must be 100% legit.”

Links:

1. “Positively Ageless: A Tribute to my Grandmother”
2. Life in the US Foreign Service
3. The Arabic breakfast
4. Russian caricatures
5. An interview with Dorie Greenspan
6. Is Facebook making us lonely?
7. Cool new Philly site
8. The winner of the Pulitzer isn’t and more about it
9. If I know someone on Twitter and they become awesome and famous, am I also awesome and famous?