2012

birthday!

Today is my birthday! I am thirty-four years old, which also means that this blog is four years old and flax-golden tales are three years old, and three is of course the magic number. My continued & eternal thanks to the multi-talented Carey Farrell for allowing me to make things up to accompany her fantastic photos.

We celebrate all of these things with the meta-wonderment that is a balloon covered with balloons.

 

Also there is wrapping paper featuring a very dapper cat.

 

And my favorite part, the birthday pony.

Thank you for all the birthday wishes both in person and via Twitter and comments, my day so far has been balloon and kitten and pony and pancake-filled, and later there shall be ice cream cake. Thirty-three was a strange, wondrous, roller coaster of a year. I’m curious to see what thirty-four will bring, and I’m going to assume a balloon covered in balloons is a good birthday omen.

By erin, ago

flax-golden tales: the bunny business

the bunny business

We moved the table to the back of the store years ago but once in a while interested customers still come in and my dad points them toward the end of the long polished oak counter and around the corner and then he presses the button that lights up the fading fancy-lettered Lapins sign and dings a bell by my desk so I can unlock the case.

I sometimes wish we could just leave the sign on and the case unlocked so I could do something productive, since most of the time the potential customers are only browsing and they get grumpy when I inform them that they can’t handle the merchandise without displaying what they have for trade.

No one has lapins for trade anymore. Not nice enough ones to trade for our stock since all our lapins are in prime condition for their age, still shiny and mostly in the pale green the official catalog calls “celery” and silver, which is just called “silver.” Once we had a pink (“amaranth”) one but a woman I’d never seen in the store before swooped in with a wide-brimmed straw hat and a huge purse the day after we got it in stock and traded three green ones and a still-wrapped cerulean for the single pink. After she left my dad grumbled and suggested that we could have held out for a better deal, but there was no way I wasn’t letting that lady have that pink bunny, not with the look in her eyes under the shadow of that hat.

But most of the interested customers we get aren’t as serious, even though we’re the only store in this part of the country that deals in lapins anymore. I’ve mastered the headshake of disapproval when people produce lapins for trade that have clearly been tampered with, serial numbers illegible and ears crudely reattached.

“The lapin business is still a noble trade, son,” my dad says, even though I’m a girl (he always calls me son anyway) and both of us refer to it as “the bunny business” on a regular basis.

Sometimes I suggest we crack them all open and be done with it, but I never really mean it and I’m always relieved when my dad shakes his head and pats the display case, aiming a tiny smile down at the lapins safely locked under glass.

 

About flax-golden tales. Photo by Carey Farrell. Text by Erin Morgenstern.

By erin, ago

flax-golden tales: pocket taxi service

pocket taxi service

We always gave each other thoughtful gifts, it was our rule. They didn’t have to be fancy or expensive, they just had to mean something, for birthdays or holidays or just-because.

So I was a little bit surprised when my going-away present was a piece of chalk.

I did that stereotypically girly thing and assumed jewelry when the ribbon-wrapped box was so small, but sitting on the velvet cushion inside was a single piece of chalk.

“I thought you might need it,” he said, but he didn’t explain. I knew better than to ask so I just said thank you and kissed him on the cheek like always only we knew it would be the last kiss for a while and we said our goodbyes.

I put the box with the chalk in my bag and almost forgot about it.

Tonight I found it again while I was looking for a pen and opened the box to take a closer look.

It’s a regular stick of white chalk, the velvet is all chalk-dusty from it, but the chalk itself is embossed with text: Pocket Taxi Service.

I wasn’t sure how long I’d have to wait, but the car pulled up almost as soon as I’d finished writing on the wall.

 

About flax-golden tales. Photo by Carey Farrell. Text by Erin Morgenstern.

By erin, ago

this is not a proper ALA recap because I’ve lost all concept of time

This past weekend (how is it Thursday already?) I was in Anaheim for ALA. I have not yet reacclimated to east coast time, not that I ever acclimated to west coast time, since I kept waking up at odd hours of the night while I was there.

I would love for this to be a proper long photo-filled recap but I’m still in denial about this whole “Thursday” thing and the whole weekend is basically a book-filled blur that I shall recount in a non-linear flurry of paragraphs and possibly sentence fragments.

I was attending my very first ALA to participate in two different events, both for library-based honors The Night Circus had received. The first was for RUSA which designated it as the Fantasy pick on their Reading List. The event was a fabulously eclectic “Literary Tastes” panel bright & early (I think it was early, again with the not knowing what time it was) Sunday morning which involved me babbling followed by Russell Banks, Candice Millard and Mark Adams speaking engagingly and coherently about their books.

After signing shiny new paperbacks for librarians I went directly to my other event which was for the Alex Awards, an honor given to ten books a year that are written for adults but have special appeal to young adults. That panel featured me, Ernest Cline, Rachel DeWoskin and Brooke Hauser. I babbled again, but that appears to be what I do. And it was great to see Ernie again since we keep running into each other as we are on similar publishing roller coasters. Someone at Random House should organize some sort of Ready Player One/Night Circus mashup event, that would be magical geeky goodness.

Other than that I was mostly wandering the event floor, rarely getting recognized but often being complimented on my shoes. I met lots of wonderful writers (including all my delightful co-panelists) and also people I have known through the magic of the internet but hadn’t had the opportunity to meet in person as well as writers whose books I knew but hadn’t met the people behind them. I saw my friend Lisa Brackmann read and got a copy of her new book which I haven’t read yet, and later I went to see Deb Harkness read and got to meet her and she was absolutely lovely. Really, I met so many fabulous people I would name-check and link them all but then this would turn into a sea of links.

Instead I will just tell my favorite meeting people story of the weekend, which came about because I got to spend some time with the fabulous Lisa Brown and as we were walking around she asked if I’d met Daniel Kraus and I said no but I remembered he tweeted that he wanted to give me his book, so she introduced us and he’s fabulous and I got a shiny copy of Rotters which has a fantastic cover and also everyone who saw me holding it gushed about it. And then he mentioned that there was some pre-Newbery award Random House cocktail party thing and I should go, so I asked other Random House lovelies about it and ended up crashing and then one party-crashing led to another and I wound up invited along to the Newbery Caldecott banquet, though I am told it does not count as crashing if you have a nametag, though mine was handwritten:

Overall I had a fantastic time and could probably fill lots more paragraphs with names and links and books and babbling, but I’m running out of Thursday already. I’d been a bit worried about having so much extra time but time surrounded by book people is always time well spent.

Really the only negative was that I could hear but not see the Disneyland fireworks from my hotelroom, ah well.

By erin, ago