I was glad Amanda invited me to her book release party. I met her years ago at a peace vigil or something like that in Palo Alto. At the time she was getting into the blogging thing to push her "funny yellow car", a Corbin Sparrow. I got onto her email list then, and it is one of the very few it has been a pleasure to read for all these years. Her day job is being an organizational consultant. When she writes about that I learn a thing or two. One time she had a post in which she suggested having a "launching pad" near the front door where you put things you want to pick up on the way out. Never has an email given me a more useful idea. Her passion is environmental sanity, and the posts on that are fascinating to. And every now and then there is something about personal events in her life. Anyhow, I wanted to see what the world of her friends looked like. I got there fashionably late, or at least that's when I was trying to get there.

     

The first person I ended up talking to was this green MBA. She'd gotten it so that when she wanted to change things she would have the heft of official credentials to make her more worth listening to. That was the tone of the crowd, able, elegant, and sophisticated. Many polite women among them.

     

I was just finding out that this woman and her husband plan to settle on a farm in Montana once they get a grub stake together when the hostess pulled us into the living room with her speaking voice. The listening part of the afternoon was starting.

Our hostess talked about meeting Amanda when she joined the Monday evening writing club. They had met many times in the living room where we were now gathered, sharing their writing and the give and take of feedback. Apparently it had worked, because Amanda is now the fourth among them to become a published author.

  

It was then her great pleasure to introduce the star of the event, Amanda Kovattana. She would be speaking about and reading from her new book, Diamonds In My Pocket.

     

Amanda began by remembering how she had become a writer. She decided to write a book about her childhood in Thailand so that her friends who were going to visit Thailand would have something to read. She didn't know how to write a book, so she picked up the Foothill College catalog to look for a writing course. There she found an autobiography class. Taking the course as a 29 year old, she was surprised to find out that most of the other students were much older. One thing had led to another, and a few years later she was writing in the Monday night club. She used her writing to work through her feelings about how being a half Thai half English Californian fit together. She had found the questions and suggestions about what the writing needed from the other members of the group extremely valuable in making the reading accessible.

Her body of writing had been an unfocused set of stories until her Thai grandmother died, and then she realized that the story of going back for the funeral worked as a framework to tie the rest of it together with. Once she had a good manuscript, she tried shopping it around, but none of the usual publishers were interested. She did things like attend a writers workshop in Hawaii, but that turned out to be a party where you commiserated with other wannabe writers about not getting published while drinking. Finally a Thai cousin's husband from Ceylon that loves to read was starting a publishing house named Blue Toffee read her book and decided to publish it. He did a very good job on the production.

Having received a shipment of her books, Amanda had decided to draw inspiration from Obama, another biracial figure. She was calling her publicity efforts "The Audacity of Hype Tour." At this point she has gotten Kepplers in Menlo Park to carry her book, and it is also now available at Amazon.com and a few other places.

Amanda is also doing some order fulfillment herself. If you order a copy from her, she will send it out in a cereal box, cut down to just enough to contain the book, with just enough extra at the ends to protect the corners from being banged in shipment. (I got one directly from the author, and I was very impressed by the packaging. It really was about half of a cereal box, and it really was just want was needed, no more and no less.) All of her consulting clients are saving their cereal boxes for that. That's the best way to get Diamonds in My Pocket. You can do it clicking the buy now button on Amanda's blog. Click here for that.

Then she read a few passages from the thing, maybe a page or so each. You can read one of them I found interesting by clicking on the picture of her reading above.

     

We gave her a big hand when she finished her presentation.

     

Then we lined up to get our copies autographed. There was a pleasant murmur of conversation all through the party.



The Thai food was delicious and attractively presented. I wish I'd thought to take a picture before most of it was gone.

     

     

It seemed that the end came all too soon.