OK, enough on the dreaded P-subject now. With a little help from my friends (thanks a million, Pepper!) I’m doing my level best to condemn as few books as possible to the shredder. Charity donations are top of the list. I’m investigating the phenomenon known as the Oxfam Bookshop, and the charity we supported with our short story collection Criminal Tendencies are going to take most of the remaining copies off our hands.
As for the rest – well, it’s clearly such an emotional subject that I think I’ll steer clear of it from now on, lest people find out where I live and bring the rough music to my door.
Meanwhile, life moves on. Loose ends continue to dangle, and I seem to spend at least part of every day tying a few up or snipping them off.
Latest, and biggest for a month or three, is my cremedelacrime e-mail address. Since the takeover it's stayed in place and I've continued to use it, but now the new owners have begun to refurbish their website, and by some technological wizardry my old one will be incorporated into their shiny new one, and I won’t be connected to it any more.
You’d think letting people know the new address would be straightforward. Just send a round-robin to everyone in the address book, yeah?
No.
For a start, not everyone in the address book has that address anyway; some of them relate to different parts of my life – see below. And for another thing, you simply wouldn’t believe how many people you get to know in the course of running a small publishing company for seven years – people who never found their way into the address book, but may well decide to get in touch at some point over the next few months, and could get the wrong idea if their message bounces back.
And then there’s the other side. Call me sentimental, but losing that e-mail address feels like severing the last link with the past. Someone once pointed out that most people have something in their world which forms a centre, a retaining wall if you like: something which, over a period of time, begins to be more than what you do, and becomes part of what you are. Well, for those seven years, Crème de la Crime was a huge part of what I was.
Do I hear cries of Get a life, woman! ?
I had one. I have one. My entire existence was not totally defined by a small publishing company; I have a family, and a freelance writing career that never went away and now seems to be expanding again to fill the available space. But Creme did take up most of my waking hours – running a small business will do that, ask anyone who does it – and it did mean I went to a lot of places and met a lot of people which/who would otherwise never have figured in that life at all.
So the moment that e-mail address switches off will be sad, and kind of symbolic. The end of a significant episode, if not quite an era.
Happy to help.
In case you're wondering what she's talking about, you can find it here:
http://speedbump.peppersmithbooks.com
Go have a look.
Posted by: Pepper Smith | January 19, 2011 at 12:43 PM
It is amazing how a your writing...an email address...a telephone number...can define a chapter in your life. If you put a married name on an email address and are now divorced. If you used a business name in your email address or phone number, and it is no longer there. If your identiy was swiped by some lovely thief and you had to rearrange your life because of that. If you moved, moved, moved around the state/country/world.
Good luck as you close a chapter of your life.
Avery
AveryAames.com
Posted by: Avery Aames | January 20, 2011 at 10:22 AM