Ten Things I Did Today While Trying to Work Off Nervous Energy for Tonight's Event with Nathan Englander.

1. At the moment, I am just about to set up chairs for Nathan Englander's event in conjunction with the release of his acclaimed short story collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank. Someone called and asked when the talk about Anne Frank would be. Here are some other things I've been working on.

2. Writing an advance recommendation for Natalie Bakopoulos's first novel, The Green Shore. As is the practice, I will not be saying what I said so far in advance of the book's release, but I can say that I liked it a lot. I was just explaining the hold-for-publication practice of reviewing books, but how the more public presence of trade reviewers like Publishers Weekly and Kirkus has shaken up that model.

3. I've been confirming several events. We're hosting another round of kids' events this spring, capped* by Kate DiCamillo's appearance at Centennial Hall on Tuesday, April 17, 7 pm. We've got several suburban and neighborhood library events lined up as well, at Franklin, Greenfield, Shorewood, and Bay View. If you're an area library with the energy to help promote an event, you should be in touch with me. I'll have the schedule in a future blog.

4. We need supplies! I turned around and we're almost out of our Dunder Mifflin copy paper. We need more Boswell Benefits sign-up sheets and Boswell's Best bookmarks. And we needed to go back to our supplier of pricing gun labels. We ordered replacement labels for the Avery Dennison 210, but they sent us ten rolls fit for the 216.

5. Amie's paying bills. I started signing checks today, but tomorrow bodes for a big pile of signatures.

6. We've got four big conferences in March, and I've been frantic, collating authors, recommended titles, and in some cases, notable new titles. I think everything is open to the public. There's the Green Energy Summit on March 7-9, UWM Spring Writers workshop on March 9-11, the Wisconsin Restarant Show on March 12-14, and the UWM Spring Leadership Conference on March 30. When I take a breath, I'll come back and link to tickets for each.

7. We needed more journals from Paperblanks, and for some reason, address books. I thought you weren't buying any address books any more, but as is the case in these things, you need the right address books. The Paperblanks ones are too pretty to pass up for technology. Alas, some of my frontlist order cancelled without being filled from last year and I was missing many of the newer baroque styles. Never fear, they are reordered.

8. And greeting cards too. We have no overstock of wedding/anniversary/baby. An order just came in from Compendium. Alas, they are cards that need to be price stickered and we can't do that, due to item #4.
9. Print event signs for Stacie! For some reason, our extension cord stopped working for our break room printer. We can't seem to get the wifi to work either. So everything needs to be put on a stick and moved to my laptop. The only problem with that is that my connection also doesn't always work. Oh, and sometimes I'm not here.

10. Oh, and there are something like 648 emails I haven't quite replied to. Someone asked for a photo of the store's interior. Done! Apologies in advance to everyone else (except for the 50 or so emails I did reply to).

*By capped, I sort of mean highlighted, whereas Stacie thought it meant last. It is almost our last kids' event of the season, at least so far.