To launch Books & Shovels, research was needed.  Blogging was something I already had become familiar with over the years, but I needed to brush up on my skills prior to launching.  You guys want great and relevant content, right?  To make Books & Shovels’s campaign a success, I dived into the internet to wipe away the rust.

Here are the results:

11.  Concise Titles Are Gold

Concise is defined…

1)  Caffeine is a needed drug.  No one ever told us we’d be smashing our skulls against the internet, and success meant staying up all night answering emails.

2)  When our book comes out, we still have re-writes we want to make.

3)  We are never sure if the book we just finished is good or not.  We are our own worst critics, and cut deep into our “writer Ego”

4)  People think you are strange.

5) …

1. she loves greek mythology, and by the time she learns to love anything more than herself, it is long dead
2. she is 9 when she realizes she’s got the blessing of being brought up in a contemporary concept, she is the first on her block to get a stay at home dad! rad. he plays barbies, and dominos and he cooks y’all! we got enough baking soda in my basement to open 10 bakeries! my daddy is a baker of the cakes that sell so fast you never see them, just the customers looking some kind of hungry like they got a sweet tooth only my daddy can yank, and I swear, we gon be rich
3. none of her friends believe her until they all turn training bra and things start disappearing and reappearing in her house. first, tanyas television set. her older brothers attention. danielles four fingered ring and her fathers retirement fund and finally danielles whole mother.
4. a girl and her father and their family disappear into a new neighborhood, the drug dealer, the father, he never misses a play, a pageant, a slam, and they ain’t rich, but they ain’t in the projects either.
5. by the time I realized what we are, it was too late. we are an urban novel you skim over at walmart, a four minute smirk on fox 8s face, if spike lee and quintin terrentino made a film under easy Es direction to question black america. I am a bakery, with nothing sweet left in it.
6. my father is killed. my father is shot point blank range through the back of the left ear one night, but you probably knew this was going to happen. saying this out loud makes this more real, this less magic, makes this poem more 10 things you didn’t know about siaara freeman and less 10 things about a cliche. you can take your fuckin teeth back
7. some nights I put on my fathers chalk outline and I teach it how to walk. my face is a haunted house, my mothers screams are from habit, not fear, most days I am an alley that no one will enter alone.
8. he is found with no jewelry, just his pocket watch. my baby tooth is snuggled inside, after his autopsy, is returned to me chipped.
9. I disappear into my old neighborhood. the suburbs, I got an itch that the suburbs just ain’t got nails for. I find danielle, she asks me did I inherit any of my daddies magic. I shake my head. she abbracadabras something into her arms and says “you know the drug dealer is supposed to die, right…?”
10. I know the stories. how magic will turn black men into mist, that the hood will turn a black man into a monster, that zeus made an exit wound big enough for his daughter to walk out of fully armored, and athena, like most goddesses, never learned to love anything more than herself.