You all turned out in FORCE today. THANK YOU.

The Wisconsin State Journal reviews the book. Better than I thought they would, considering we had a somewhat hostile relationship while I was a student. And much, much, much love to my good old paper, the Isthmus, for giving me a nice shout-out in their weekly guide.

There’s a new excerpt up, this one at Sirens, about women and power:

During World War II, hundreds of women became journalists in newsrooms suddenly barren of staff. Female cops reporters and foreign correspondents, ad sellers and paste-up experts, photographers and rewriters, all replaced their male counterparts who’d traded notebooks for rifles. In Washington alone, nearly a quarter of the 400 congressional correspondents during the war years were female. Student newspapers were no exception in those years. Male students departing for the draft left jobs that were filled by co-eds previously confined, even in student journalism, to society pages and receptionist duties.

The women who took on those new roles went on to become the first wave of post-war women journalists, the norms rather than the exceptions in newsrooms across the country. At the Cardinal, the half-dozen women who put out the paper during the war years — despite overwhelming difficulty — became friends for life.

Working in those offices, under those circumstances, was a test for the women who did it, the first test of their strength and ability to improvise, of their dedication to a chosen path, and of their love for an institution which sustained them when other societal mainstays seemed to be crumbling around them.

And now for the picspam!

The poster outside A Room of One’s Own.

Today was special not just because Madison’s my favorite place, the first place I really felt at home and a place I love to get back to any chance I’d get, it was special because I started writing this book in the place I was reading the finished thing. Good cheap coffee and an uncrowded café will do that to a girl.

Mr. A being sneaky with the camera.

Thanks for coming out and saying hello. If I didn’t get the chance to talk to anybody as much as I wanted to talk to everybody, I apologize, and hit me up via e-mail, because I think (though I’m by no means sure) crazy crazy time might be coming to an end.

A.