Forthcoming Beaufort author Patricia Sexton writes about her love affair with New York City, and how difficult it was to finally leave in her latest blog post.

As a native New Yorker, I fully understand how simultaneously exciting and disheartening it can sometimes be to live in the city that never sleeps. You’re surrounded by visible proof of the best and the worst humanity has to offer: glittering marvels of modern engineering, museums and galleries on seemingly every street, and five star restaurants offering cuisine from every corner of the globe versus homelessness and poverty, crime, and air pollution. Sometimes, I’m tempted to pack everything and move far, far away.

Forthcoming Beaufort author Patricia Sexton did just that. In her upcoming memoir, LIVE From Mongolia!, she talks about her decision to leave a Wall Street career to follow her dream of becoming a news anchor in Mongolia. In her latest blog post, she discusses how difficult her decision to leave New York City “for good” was, and what helped her make the final push to go. Check out this, and the rest of her blog, here.

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Forthcoming Beaufort author Patricia Sexton is campaigning to raise funds for her documentary project, The Reindeer People: A Dream’s Last Chance.

The Reindeer People is the story of a mother, her daughter, and two very unusual dreams. A tale of love and loss, survival and death, a Mongolian mother and daughter face nearly insurmountable obstacles to pursue what’s most important to them. And in the end, what’s important to them just may save the fabric of an entire culture.

A few years ago, in the north of Mongolia, in one of the most remote inhabited regions on our planet, a Mongolian mother had to make a choice. She had to choose between letting her young daughter pursue her dream, or pursuing her own. As a parent, she knew what she had to do. So, along with her daughter and husband, they moved the family to the Mongolian capital. This would have devastating consequences: poverty, sickness, and even her husband’s murder (he’d left home only to earn enough money to buy his daughter an outfit and was robbed and murdered). Eventually, the daughter achieved her dream, and the mother had never been more proud. But it also got her to thinking – about that old dream she’d left behind all those years ago. Could she pursue it? Was she willing to return to her homeland and all that she’d left behind?

This summer, the mother will return to her home in the Taiga to pursue her old dream to teach Tuva, the native language there. Tuva is spoken by a very small community of Reindeer Herders, and without a teacher to support it, the language will fade away. Without language, the community itself is in danger of fading away too. It’s the mother’s dream to go home and fight this, to save the very fabric of her culture.

Won’t you help us tell her story?

Find out more about Patricia, her team, and how you can help on their indiegogo page here.

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Some of you may know that yesterday, March 4^th, was National Grammar Day — a day dedicated to speaking well, writing well, and being generally grammar conscience. For those of us in book publishing, National Grammar Day is everyday – no exceptions. Seriously, I find myself thinking about grammar so much throughout the course of the day that I often over-think even the most basic grammatical situations and end up confusing myself.  However, it’s nice to know that there’s a day dedicated to making sure the rest of the world is taking grammar as seriously as we do.  It’s a day to say to people, “You may think you know English but you don’t!” or, “You think you understand comma splices and hyphens? Well, guess what? You don’t!” Even if March 4^th is just a day to remember not to say “aint,” it still begs us to take a minute to reflect on the complex system that is the English language and how we interpret it.

Even as a person whose brain-space is taken up with grammar for 90% of my day, I still make common grammar mistakes. For example, I still often have to think twice about ‘effect’ vs. ‘affect’ and I have a tendency to use the word ‘literally’ a tad liberally (although there’s a fun article about this on Galleycat today).  Whether it’s further vs. farther, lay vs. lie, or drunk vs. drank, there are always those little grammar mistakes that I’m sure all of us are guilty of having made at one time or another – and let’s not even talk about punctuation. Are you aware that there are no less than three types of dashes and that each one has a unique purpose? Granted that unless you’re a writer, editor, or someone who prepares press material for a living there’s hardly ever any reason to dwell on these grammatical nuances in the day-to-day.

Luckily, if you’re the type of person who is concerned with this kind of thing, help is available and you can become the kind of person who uses correct grammar everyday, not just on March 4^th. Consider a grammar book, like our very own Beaufort Book The Big Ten of Grammar by William B. Bradshaw, PhD which is subtitled Identifying and Fixing the Ten Most Frequent Grammatical Errors. In this book, Dr. Bradshaw discusses the ten most frequent grammatical errors and how we can learn to a) be conscious of them and b) correct them.  It’s basically a condensed version of all the chapters in the Chicago Manual that I flip to at least once a day which is really handy because Dr. Bradshaw’s book is small and light enough to bring around with me or stash in my desk and the Table of Contents makes it really easy to find what I’m looking for quickly.

What are your favorite grammar/style books? I’d love to know about any other resources you guys use to keep your grammar in check. Do you find grammar important, and if so, to what degree?  What about this debate over the Oxford comma? How could one little punctuation mark have caused so much controversy? Well, whether you’re the type of person who cares about this kind of thing or not, Happy National Grammar Day! Because everyone needs an excuse to celebrate a random day in March….

Madame Beauvary

There’s a scene in one of my favorite love stories, Anna Karenina, in which Kitty, the wealthy debutante, admits her love for Levin, the reclusive farmer who has been pining away for her even after suffering the shame of being once rejected by her. The two meet at a social event, Kitty having been recently thwarted by the dubious Vronksy, and Levin having resigned himself to a life dedicated to agricultural research, and all of their feelings towards each other come rising to the surface. They realize how much they love each other. Naturally, their passion must remain below the surface for the time being lest a scandal ensue, so they make their declaration to love each other in code: they write each other messages in chalk, on a napkin, using only the first initials of the words they want to say.

‘“Well, read this. I’ll tell you what I should like – should like very much!” She wrote the initial letters, i, y, c, f, a, w, h. This meant, “If you could forget and forgive what happened.”

He snatched the chalk with nervous, trembling fingers, and breaking it, wrote the initial letters of the following phrase, “I have nothing to forget and forgive; I have never ceased to love you.”’

It may seem like a silly game for two adults to play. You may even find yourself asking, why don’t they just say what they want to say and stop all of this ‘will we, won’t we’ nonsense?  And yet, there’s a certain charm to playing games, to being elusive, even talking in code. It’s something that courting lovers have playing at for ages and even though the art of courting is much different in today’s world, it wouldn’t be a stretch to admit that coded messages and secret signs are still a big part of flirtatious behavior – just in a different way.

Take for instance Gary Shteyngart’s epochal novel Super Sad True Love Story in which emails and text messages account for a large part of the dialogue between the two protagonists. The point is that so much communication is centered on unconventional language, language that leaves room for interpretation and draws the recipient into a volley of deciphering coded terms. Poetry especially is a good example of this and haven’t people been writing poetry for centuries upon centuries? What is more romantic way to court your love than to write her a poem? Even modern poetry, the words of e.e. cummings, for instance, requires deciphering. His love poems especially involve an amount of playfulness that works around language instead of through it to get the message across.

In the game of love, it would seem as though the challenge of working around language is maybe even more necessary than actually saying what you mean. It’s the intrigue, the desire to keep guessing, that keeps it interesting.

I’m sure many of you remember Ezra Jack Keats’ adored children’s book The Snowy Day.  This book, which chronicles a day in the life of a boy on the first snow day of the season, is a classic. It is a favorite of adults and children alike  in past generations and will be, undoubtedly, for generations to come.

Unfortunately, real snow days aren’t half as glamorous as the one depicted in The Snowy Day. In reality, especially for us city dwellers, snowy days often mean messy commutes, pools of black slush in the streets, and suspended subway service.

Luckily for us here in New York the blizzard that hit this past weekend, Nemo didn’t cause too much damage compared with other states further North. We got lucky considering the amount of snow that got dumped on New England and caused a considerable amount of damage to homes and businesses along the coast.

Hello there! My name is Claudia and I’m the newest intern here at Beaufort. I’m honored and excited to be here! I guess I’ll start by providing a few facts about myself to help you paint a more vivid picture of who I am and hopefully I won’t scare you away… Let’s see, I’m an avid reader, aspiring writer, and after a whirlwind post-graduate year abroad I’m more than ready to carve my niche in publishing and am psyched to make Beaufort my first stop.

My nom de plume — Madame BEAUvary — isn’t so much a testament to my character, but, rather, a tribute in memoriam of my beloved dwarf hamster who was named, lovingly, Gustave Flaubert. Am I seeming a little crazy? I kindly ask that you reserve judgment until you’ve seen a dwarf hamster. They’re adorable, in a “That’s a rodent, isn’t it?” sort of way…

Anyway, I’m greatly looking forward to sharing my words and thoughts with you lovely readers over the course of my stay here and hope that I can provide if nothing else just a little bit of entertainment to brighten up your day. I also hope to shed some light (my perspective, anyway) on some of the day-to-day news in the publishing business from time to time. I know how much I enjoy reading the blogs of my favorite publishers and fellow bookworms and am honored to be able to be a contributing voice to the wonderful one offered here at Beaufort. I will not take this opportunity lightly, I assure you! To provide evidence of my dedication to this cause, here’s something fun: a link to a very serious quiz(the result of which will astonish and amaze): http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=343

Unfortunately it’s too cold in New York City for me to think of anything more poignant or relevant to share with you today…

See you next time!