August 18, 2010

Lustre Locks

My hairdresser Courtney just jumped salons! Check out Lustre and the fabulous fringe she cuts.

July 28, 2010

Biking In Fashion

I typically bike in a skirt, which can present certain challenges if the city where you live in freezing in July. When I went out this week I wasn’t wearing a hat and just about caught an earache. I slapped on my crochet beret tout suite.

I should be wearing a helmet, you say. Didn’t the popular summer read One Day make you realize that it doesn’t really matter in life whether you wear a helmet or not? Well, I conformed and got a helmet anyway. The only even remotely cool one I found is actually a skater helmet by Bell.

Besides dresses, I branched out and now wear rompers (Read: Sort of like a Skort) with my old safari jacket and a scarf or the cut offs that I’ve spent countless hours destroying and distressing this summer, and generally taking my frustrations out on—work stress, sexual and otherwise. Biking helps alleviate that stress, too, plus now I have killer arms.—Michelle

July 21, 2010

New Series

One thing I’ve gained an amazing amount of gratification from this summer is picking up a project that I started in January 2008. I followed through with writing an incredibly tough scene I was too scared to write before. It began as a cell phone novel I worked on everyday while riding the Cable Car to and from the office. It was all going fine until reality got in the way. The scene was too dark and at the time, I was not able suspend belief and write around reality.

Cut to June 2010. I’ve come to a point where the pull to go back to this story was natural and it was okay to return. People are afraid of feeling too much when there’s nothing wrong with being emotional. People need to get more emo if you ask me. Writing all that you feel times a hundred just makes sense. The book is the first in a series, and it’s great fun to write a noirish story for teens set in a place I know so well.—Michelle

July 14, 2010

In the Stacks Featured on GalleyCat

Librarian Uses Kickstarter to Fund Video Book Reviews

The video book review site In the Stacks is using the community fundraising site Kickstarter to raise $5,000. Here at GalleyCat Reviews, we are very interested to see if Kickstarter can help raise money for criticism.

Author Michelle Zaffino founded the site while earning her Master’s degree in Library and Information Science. Money raised through the project will be used to upgrade the site, hire a developer and help pay the graphic designer, illustrator and a few other librarians working on the site.

Here’s more about the project: “Last year I created the program In the Stacks video book review, which features 60-second long reviews of recent books. The reviews are done by one of the most authoritative sources on the topic: Librarians. In the Stacks is meant to not only be intellectually provocative but also features tastefully sexy librarians, and asserts that women can be both sexy and smart. The 32 60-second spots currently on the website are meant to run like ads, with longer episodes in the works.”

Thanks to Laurel and Jason for the amazing publicity! xoxo - MEZ

July 7, 2010

Rainbow Gathering

Every ten years since I was a teen, the Rainbow Gathering has set up camp for a week in the Allegheny National Forest. These international meetings draw thousands of people. I’ve checked it out a couple of times, which requires some effort. The drive into the forest on paved road is an hour, then another half hour on a gravel road. After parking, the hike into the main circle takes at least an hour depending on what shoes you’re wearing (Note to self: Birkenstocks are not meant for hiking a ravine). I arrived at dinnertime, when a community kitchen was feeding the entire gathering.

The Rainbow People’s main ethos is to practice living in a green, eco-friendly way and the meeting lets them create a completely self-sustaining society, at least for a couple of weeks. Of course, there’s always an element attracted to counterculture because of the drug use, and that tends to give the entire group a bad reputation. People in my hometown were unkind to the Rainbow People this year, and spread rumors that were half-true at best, peppered with personal bias. You can read some of the fair and balanced coverage in the local Warren newspaper here, a refreshing exception from the opinions of the general population.

When you grow up in a town of ten thousand people in the middle of a forest, you expect some lack of progress because of the sheer isolation and size. I moved twenty years ago and have always gone back. The more I see of the world I realize that Warren may have wifi but what has really changed?

I have always tried to give the people in my hometown the benefit of the doubt but I’m really disappointed with the closed-heartedness I sometime witness there.—Michelle

June 30, 2010

The Bike I Covet Publicly

My dream bicycle in my favorite color: The Public Bike in Chartreuse. Maybe someday. Now that I started biking again, I recently brought my old Trek that I rode 10 years ago in Shelter Island back with me to San Francisco as my second piece of checked luggage. For now, I’ll have to settle for that.—Michelle

June 23, 2010

Kickstarter Fundraiser for In the Stacks

If you love books, please consider donating to my In the Stacks video book review project. I’m doing an official fundraiser on Kickstarter, where your donation is tax-deductible AND goes toward a good cause: Librarians!

For more information and to watch the promo video, click on the widget at the right.

Many Thanks—Michelle

June 16, 2010

Get In the Stacks In the Mail

Sign up for the In the Stacks mailing list here to receive weekly email updates whenever a new video is posted. Just go to the In the Stacks website and enter your email address and soon you’ll receive a worldly, smart and cultured dose of the best new books out there in the stacks!—Michelle