After a full week of trying my best, Goodreads still refuses to acknowledge that the author known as Kathy Giuffre is me and Facebook refuses to acknowledge that I am a human being at all. It's disheartening.

On the up side, the boys at the pub are teaching me to play scopa, the rosemary in our garden is flowering and I'm having fun making promo trailers for my book. Here is the one I made this morning:

Regal House Press has a very thorough and extensive (139 pages) Author's Guide that they sent me once I had signed the contract. It is supposed to help me work through the process of having my book published. It is basically a 139-page (single-spaced) To-Do List with headings like "Obtaining Copyright Permissions: Written Works" and "Obtaining Copyright Permissions: Song Lyrics." Take a tip from me: never quote song lyrics in a book you write. Trust me.

I started with the section called "First Steps" because I am a methodical kind of girl. Yesterday, I worked on First Step #3: "Do you have a fully developed author profile on Goodreads?" and First Step #11: "Have you joined the Regal Author Community on Facebook?"* I started with Goodreads, thinking that would be easy.

But no.

Goodreads informs me that although there is clearly an author named Kathy Giuffre, they don't believe that I am her.

It is unclear why they don't believe this. I can't imagine that there is a hot global market in Fake Kathy Giuffres with people paying big money to nefarious Russian cyber-criminals to pretend they are me. I can more easily imagine people paying to ensure that they are not accidentally mistaken for me. But here we are.

But while Goodreads was irritating, Facebook was existentially devastating. They say that they don't believe that I am human at all. That really hurts.

My numerous attempts to prove my humanity were so unsuccessful, in fact, that I inadvertently angered the Facebook gods and have now been told that I am prohibited from trying to prove that I am human ever again. That is, quite frankly, not how I thought things would end up when I started my day yesterday morning. No one expects that.

So I am making vegetable soup and hoping the internet eventually forgets that I exist.

It is very quiet in the house just now. The birds seem to have gone further south since autumn has come. The mosquitos, alas, have not followed the birds and, in fact, have taken full advantage of the recent rain to breed like rabbits and rampage around in giant clouds of ravening bloodsuckers. At night, we scratch ourselves and listen to the owls (the only birds left, it seems) riot in the woods.

Jonathan goes three days a week now to the University of Pisa where he is enrolled in law school. This was an unexpected summer development, sparked by a casual comment made by the official Italian translator while she was officially translating some of my citizenship documents into official Italian. And, since this is a civilized country that recognizes the benefit of having an educated populace, higher education is fantastically cheap (especially compared to the exorbitant cost in the US) and readily accessible. Jonathan just had to prove that he has an undergraduate degree -- which he does -- and then he started going to classes ten days ago.

The best things (besides the actual education and fascinating information gleaned, of course) are that 1.) he takes his bike on the train with hm and then bikes past the Leaning Tower of Pisa on his way to class every morning, and 2.) in one class there is only one other student and Jonathan is older than the student and the professor combined.

I am still riding the incredible high of having my novel under contract with a publisher, which really says something given that I spent the day yesterday changing all the n-dashes in my manuscript to m-dashes and reformatting my paragraph indentations. Today I begin my dance with the endlessly fascinating Chicago Manual of Style. It has hidden depths.

So many hidden depths.

But I also made a book trailer. It can never be used because I don't have rights to the music. But I went ahead and did it anyway just for the fun fun fun of it.

 

We will have no olive harvest this year. All up and down the coast, the crop has been devastated. There was the blazing summer heat with no water and then the rains so hard that they were almost floods. And then the flies arrived to lay eggs in the green olives so that now every single olive in our grove has a worm hole in it where the fly larvae have been.

Valerio says his whole crop is gone, but he thinks there may be a few groves somewhere around that, because the wild terrain makes so many micro-climates, might have been less hard hit. Gilda says her grove has some surviving olives -- not all are lost -- but everyone else sits silently on the terrace of the pub and looks at their shoes when the subject of the harvest comes up. Times are hard.

But Alice brings Celeste to work with her these days and she is a sweet baby who doesn't cry much, but sleeps in her stroller under a mosquito net in the shade or looks around her with dark curious eyes to see what everyone is doing.

"She is growing," Alice says and we are all happy to hear this.

My novel, Armadillo Massacre Number Three, has won the Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction and will be coming out from the amazing Regal House Publishing, one of the best presses in the US, in Fall 2027. I can almost not believe it.

I got the email while we were sitting in the departure lounge at Dulles Airport waiting to fly back to Italy. At first, I kind of couldn't take in the email -- I was just sort of confused by what it seemed to be saying. Then the light dawned and I started to cry sitting right there in the middle of the crowded airport. (For the record, no one around me even batted at eye. Except, of course, for Jonathan.)

My friend Jessy says I should have gone and had myself paged: "Will Kathy Giuffre, award-winning author, please pick up a white courtesy telephone for a message..."

I have been away from lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea for a while, but I'm back now. After a long, hot August working almost every night in the pub and then sleeping as late as we could in the cool mornings with all the windows open and all the sheets pushed off the bed onto the floor, we left to go to the US and visit our new baby grandchild.

We have decided not to rate him with regard to beauty ("the most beautiful baby ever") because my own two tiny sons were, of course, breathtakingly gorgeous. But we have agreed that this child is definitely "top five." He is laughing now. Baby laughter is my favorite sound in the world.

But the US seems like a scary, angry place now -- a place where everyone is on the edge. With Putin's lapdog sitting in the White House, it is looking more and more likely that there will be a war here in Europe, but it is still not as frightening as daily, violent life in the US.

When we got back, I left again almost immediately to go to England to see Fiona, who had a health scare a couple of weeks ago during which I bought a plane ticket. But she had recovered by the time the visit actually happened. (Which is, after all, the best outcome.)

While I was gone, some of the ladies from the village came over to show Jonathan how to find the wild porcini mushrooms in our woods. They waited for him on the terrace while he was inside putting on his boots. When he came out, Gilda said to him, "So, we're here to teach you how to hunt porcini mushrooms?"

"Yes," Jonathan said.

"Well, we might start with this one," she said and pointed to a giant one growing straight out of the mossy wall of the terrace, smack in plain sight. "Shouldn't be too hard around here, apparently."

It's good to give your neighbors a source of amusement. Makes you more part of the community.