Finishing Up
In the past few weeks, it’s been a hectic whirlwind of finishing my internship, applying to other internships, and getting ready to go back to school on very uncertain terms. Not to mention the struggle of returning to campus early to drop off my stuff in a dorm building I’d never even stepped foot in before. It’s been a lot and updating with the final blog did slip my mind.
My supervisor and I agreed that it would be best for me to finish my internship at the end of July given that my return to school had been pushed up and I would have less time to get ready to go back than I thought. I didn’t have much of a to-do list in mind with finishing up, but I did have a list of books and I wanted to work through as many as possible before everything came to an end.
As I mentioned in previous blogs, my supervisor was starting to run out of YA books to give me, so by the end we had developed a focus on adult fiction. This also branched out into a lot of different genres, especially areas of adult fiction I hadn’t really experienced yet, so it was great experience for things I probably would never have considered working with before.
For instance, the beginning of the adult fiction list focused on thrillers, something that I’m not typically a fan of in my free time. Honestly, the only “thriller”-like fiction I’d read before the internship was Angels and Demons by Dan Brown, and even then it was for my Bad Lit class in school (and trust me, it was bad). To be perfectly frank, I had mixed feelings about the thriller books I was given. Two of them I enjoyed even if they weren’t my favorite genre, and one specifically stood out to me as it revolved around 9 women plotting (successfully) to take down the capitalistic patriarchy completely on their own — something you don’t see much in thrillers since it’s such a male-dominated genre.
The other two books, however, just weren’t my thing. One I hesitate to even call a thriller as it was more of a memoir a man wrote about his father who was a lawyer for a lot of mob bosses in New York. The last “thriller” only qualified for the genre if you only had a vague concept of the plot — I found that most of the book centered around the characters talking about the thrilling things that happened as the preferred method for the reader to follow the plot. As for any glimpse of the actual action… that was pretty minimal.
My job isn’t to like every single book, though; I just had to find the marketable qualities and spin them into a convincing pitch letter. Which, with the help of the praise sheets my supervisor gave me, isn’t a difficult thing to do. My supervisor often thought I adored several of the books I really didn’t care for just because I could edit the pitch letter into something that made me sound very passionate about it, but that’s the whole goal anyway. If the recipient doesn’t feel that passion come through, why would they want to even consider investing in the story?
Regardless, I was happy to move past thrillers and finally take on my first fictionalized memoir. This book stood out to me mainly for being a very wholesome, light, family-friendly read that I found genuinely touching and amusing. I had never even considered fictionalized memoirs as a genre (or maybe sub-genre?) before, and especially not in this sense. The closest I’d ever come to something similar to this genre was Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Alison, and if you know that book you know it’s incredibly dark and heart-wrenching. The book for my internship — which, as always, I’d love to recommend but am unsure if I have the freedom to do so — was much lighter in content and was really a quick read.
To finish out my internship, I read something I never would have imagined simply because it was quite possibly the wackiest book I’ve ever read. It was a comedy that mixed reality cooking shows with conflicts in Israel. There was enough violence and threat that it had a small sense of also being a thriller, but the outrageous stunts pulled by the reality show contestants made it distinctly satirical. The use of fake terrorists on the set of a cooking show somehow managed to comment on the ridiculousness of the entertainment industry and American society’s caricature-like perception (and outright obliviousness) to people and cultures outside the US. I’m not sure what to say about this except that it was purely unexpected and a big way to end out the internship.
As a whole, I loved this experience and greatly appreciate that I was able to carry it out even while at home. The amount of marketing and editing experience I’ve gained from my time working there is incredibly invaluable and I can’t express enough how much I appreciate all the people who contributed to me being able to do this so I could stay in my bedroom and read books all day (and pitch them of course).
