The miracles of modern medicine

Sunday night my hands began to swell and by Monday afternoon I was trading off holding one and then the other on a full ice tray to keep the itching and aching at bay. By Tuesday my face began swelling and I soon was covered in rash. Went to the ER this morning and two shots later, I'm on my way home and by noon all the rash is gone and my botox face has pretty much returned to normal. Now to the Sherlock Holmes task of figuring out what I'm allergic to: The sheep skin that friend brought me from New Zealand that I was trying to get the spot out of? A change in the amount of laundry soap I had used to do clothes and towels? A tick bite from taking a dog to the dog pound Saturday morning (which was a very emotional outing for me, not to mention the dog), The pomegranate seeds I had in a salad Saturday? Or that I was spraying all the dog spots out of the carpet with Spray & Wash Friday night and then in the middle of night awakened for some ungodly reason,went out and absent-mindedly sat in one of the spots on the carpet to flip the TV for a half hour?
We rewashed everything. At sixteen, I discovered I reacted to strong detergent by putting to much soap into a cleaning vat for root beer mugs at an old A & W Drive-in where I worked. My feet swell up when the
carpet is shampooed.
I 've always blamed my one summer bout with hay fever on the break-up of my first marriage as well as the hay field in front of our house that they mowed three times that summer.

So maybe its all of the above.

How it works

In this week's New York Times Book Review there is an ad for Spooner by Pete Dexter and on page 10 there is a review of the same book. In the September issue of The New York Review of books there is a long article on Clarice Lispector and on the last page an ad for one of the books mentioned. Does the publisher call the review and ask them to review the book that they are planning to run an ad for, or does the review call the publisher and tell them they about to run an article about their book and do they want to run an ad? Almost every issue of every review I've looked at has a similar pattern.

I ran an ad for my novel in a review this spring for three issues. I had also sent them a copy of the book to one of their editors. The book did not get reviewed, because self-published books NEVER get reviewed and probably it wasn't read or even looked at, or god forbid, the editor hated it. When the ad guy contacted me to renew the ad I told him if they could review the book I'd order another three months. He acted like I had told him his mother just died.

I wonder if it's driven by dollar amount? If I had a huge advertising budget, would I get the book reviewed?

What to expect if you self-publish (wish I had someone to tell me these things before I did):
1. No one will review the book.
2. Bookstores will not carry the book.
3. Services for foolish self-published writers will call and write you endlessly offering you everything you could possibily want to advertise and market your book as long as you have the money.
4. And even if you hire them, and spend lots of money, the book still will not be reviewed and it will not appear in bookstores.