my novel goes on sale today

I'll admit, when I started writing a book (um, ten years ago?!) I had no idea how difficult it would be, nor how many people would need to become involved in the making of it. I guess I'd thought a novel would be sort of like writing a veeerrrrry looooonnnnng commercial or print ad. And indeed, my first draft probably read like that. The agent I sent my first draft to mailed it back with a few kind words and also (kind) harsh ones, "A novel needs to tell a story. Yours doesn't." Back to the drawing board--er, keyboard--after some crying and gnashing of teeth. The next draft came a few years later (I was also, you know, writing for actual pay) until I had piles and piles of scenes and plotlines and my husband (tired of carrying the piles out to the car when we went upstate on weekends) suggested I devote a summer to finishing the novel, just to get it out of my system. And now, thanks to the interventions of him and a few others (which I'll save for more posts) I have a novel coming out today from Simon & Schuster. It's called Making It: A Novel of Madison Avenue. A story set in (where else?) Adland from the POVof an older, wiser, married Peggy Olson. (The book is not affiliated with AMC's Mad Men, need I say?) Feeling morose on a Monday? Cheer up by doing an adbroad a solid. Buy the book here. Each sale improves my ranking on Amazon by at least a thousand. Thanks!

twestival

Seems all New Yorkers who twitter were at Twestival last night. (Or had at least sent in $20 for the charity it supported.) It was a club-like venue that was already packed when I arrived with Peggy Olson a few minutes after it started. As soon as people entered, they pulled out their iphones (i hate my centro) and began tweeting to find out if they had friends there. If you coded your tweet with #nyctwestival, it appeared on a giant screen showing n a continuous scroll of posts like @ me if you are here and @adbroad, I am near the yellow jerry cans in the center. Which is how I had the good fortune to meet Alan Wolk in person. No, he's not the breakdancing astronaut. That's Mat Man who was a finalist for a Shorty Award in the, um, Weird category. For an event inspired by a platform for conversation, odd that the music was so LOUD you couldn't talk except directly into someone's ear. Which made conversation so exhausting, lots of people gave up and stood silently sipping $16 drinks, tweeting people who weren't there. 

who the hell is adbroad anyway

When I was a kid, I was fascinated with the movie Three Faces of Eve. Incredible to me that three people could exist in one. Back then, it was called Multiple Personality Disorder. Now it's called Convergence. I'm finding it takes way too much energy to keep up separate identities. And doing so no longer seems important. I advise brands to aggregate their identities across platforms. Now I'm taking my own advice. Along with Peggy Olson, Betty Draper is "coming out" at the Shorty Awards. Spoiler alert: she looks nothing like January Jones.