New job
So, I started a new job. I'm a tour director now.
It's not quite the same as tour guide. I work for a company that organizes school group tours, mostly from out of state. I meet up with a bus full of kids when they get to town and stay with them for the whole time, taking them to museums, restaurants, plays, etc, and point out neat stuff and tell Chicago history stories along the way.
It can be stressful; there's always the chance some place will lose our reservations, or we'll be short a ticket, or we won't be able to find a place for the bus to park. Have to think on my feet a lot. In some ways it feels like my first real, adult kind of job. But I'm good at it. I go home exhausted and proud.
And it's a BLAST. I get to go to all sorts of cool places (boat rides, museums, Medieval Times comes up a lot), meet cool kids, and show off my awesome city. I spend good chunk of every tour marvelling over the fact that I get paid for this.
The kind of kids I meet are very different from the ones I meet as an author sometimes. Maybe 5% of them actively read YA novels outside of a couple of blockbusters per year; this year no kid has asked me about any book besides Divergent. If they find out I'm an author, they start asking about George RR Martin and Nicholas Sparks, not YA authors. YA is a much smaller bubble than we think it is. Sure, it seems like a big community online, but the community of people who talk about their "headmates" and stuff on tumblr seems huge, too.
Next week I get to spend four days with a group of theatre kids, doing the kind of stuff theatre kids would do on a trip to Chicago. Jazz, improv, art.
Meanwhile I'm revising my next YA book, Kill Me Now, and copyeding my next nonfiction, Ghosts of Lincoln. There'll be a book signing for Flickering Empire: How Chicago Invented the US Film Industry, on Saturday at Centuries and Sleuths (a history/mystery book shop, 7419 W Madison in Forest Park) at 2pm. I wrote that with Michael Glover Smith.
I've also been on WGN a lot lately; this sunday I'm going in very early in the morning to talk silent film in Chicago on one show, then very late at night to talk about baseball history on another! I was last on the Pretty Late with Patti Vasquez show the other night; I sat in and chatted for the whole three hours. Patti's awesome; I climbed 70 flights of stairs with her in Tribune Tower a month or so ago. You can hear the show from the other night here!
It's not quite the same as tour guide. I work for a company that organizes school group tours, mostly from out of state. I meet up with a bus full of kids when they get to town and stay with them for the whole time, taking them to museums, restaurants, plays, etc, and point out neat stuff and tell Chicago history stories along the way.
It can be stressful; there's always the chance some place will lose our reservations, or we'll be short a ticket, or we won't be able to find a place for the bus to park. Have to think on my feet a lot. In some ways it feels like my first real, adult kind of job. But I'm good at it. I go home exhausted and proud.
And it's a BLAST. I get to go to all sorts of cool places (boat rides, museums, Medieval Times comes up a lot), meet cool kids, and show off my awesome city. I spend good chunk of every tour marvelling over the fact that I get paid for this.
The kind of kids I meet are very different from the ones I meet as an author sometimes. Maybe 5% of them actively read YA novels outside of a couple of blockbusters per year; this year no kid has asked me about any book besides Divergent. If they find out I'm an author, they start asking about George RR Martin and Nicholas Sparks, not YA authors. YA is a much smaller bubble than we think it is. Sure, it seems like a big community online, but the community of people who talk about their "headmates" and stuff on tumblr seems huge, too.
Next week I get to spend four days with a group of theatre kids, doing the kind of stuff theatre kids would do on a trip to Chicago. Jazz, improv, art.
Meanwhile I'm revising my next YA book, Kill Me Now, and copyeding my next nonfiction, Ghosts of Lincoln. There'll be a book signing for Flickering Empire: How Chicago Invented the US Film Industry, on Saturday at Centuries and Sleuths (a history/mystery book shop, 7419 W Madison in Forest Park) at 2pm. I wrote that with Michael Glover Smith.
I've also been on WGN a lot lately; this sunday I'm going in very early in the morning to talk silent film in Chicago on one show, then very late at night to talk about baseball history on another! I was last on the Pretty Late with Patti Vasquez show the other night; I sat in and chatted for the whole three hours. Patti's awesome; I climbed 70 flights of stairs with her in Tribune Tower a month or so ago. You can hear the show from the other night here!