Publishers Weekly arrives in my mailbox each week, as its name says, which seems too often sometimes. I’m apt to groan when I see it because I know it will likely contain some depressing news about the publishing world, and because I also know that I must read it, for it is my link to what’s going on in this world. But I subscribe because I consider it one of the tools of my trade: writing. And after settling down with a new issue of PW, I am always enlightened.

I wanted to write my own memoir, but I’d get stuck with every try. If I dug up my childhood demons, my parents would be devastated. Besides, what if my story was boring? I preferred the safety of reporting on other people’s lives for magazines and Web sites. I also write young adult novels (I’ve written seven), gleefully stepping out of reality instead of diving into it.

Talking with the lower echelon employees of publishing reminds me of a description I once read about the mutual embarrassment of Western and Soviet biologists when they talked about genetics. Soviet-era scientists were required, on pain of imprisonment, to endorse Lysenkoism, a discredited theory of inheritance favored by Stalin for ideological reasons.

I have always loved making stories, and by that I mean the process of making them, taking the words in my head and giving them physical form. A gift of a blank notebook for my eighth birthday inspired my first attempt at a novel. I only got six pages into it, but I took great joy in ruling pencil lines for my sentences. At 10, I spent a year’s worth of pocket money on a typewriter. I still remember the satisfaction its smart click against the page gave me. But in the end I did not love my typewriter. My inability to achieve perfection with it often made me cry. I was too stern for erasing fluid, and I didn’t like processions of errors across a page. At 15, a computer seemed the answer. My parents made me take a typing course, which taught me a great deal about the dating situations of the other students (mainly young women in their 20s) and also how to type fast.

Resolutions! It’s the first column of the New Year, and we all know that with new years come New Year’s resolutions. If you had a chance to make literary, library, or publishing resolutions for 2012, what would they be?

When exactly did Amazon become the generic for bookstore? When did it become accepted, standard policy to fill in the “available @” with only its name and not with the name of a particular bookstore? When did the letter go out to journalists at newspapers, magazines, blogs, commentators on public radio, and other radio and TV shows that Amazon deserved to be given hundreds of thousands of dollars of free advertising through the invocation of its name as the “go to” place from which to purchase books? The irony is that you cannot actually “go” there.

Would you like to read a PW review that went something like this? “The butler turns out to be the murderer in the latest cozy from Jessica Fletcher. In a classic gather-the-suspects-in-the-parlor ending, the modern Miss Marple again IDs the culprit, this time by realizing the significance of the depth of sprinkles sunk into an ice cream sundae on a hot day, after several other characters—the pastor, the chiropodist, and the actuarial student—come under suspicion for a couple of chapters each.”

Everyone knows publishing is in the process of deep structural change. As Richard Nash observed, those who are waiting for all the technological/e-pub­lishing dust to settle and for things to “return to normal” are going to be intensely frustrated. There is no final state of rest in view. Change from here on out will be continuous, creating both the greatest possibilities and the deepest instability in the publishing industry.

Not since Hester Prynne walked out of prison with an infant in her arms and “a rag of scarlet cloth” in the shape of the letter A has there been such public hue and cry as Amazon has provoked in the past few weeks. But one small publisher commends Amazon for being a key partner.

If you’ve ever had to board up the windows of your home and run for the hills because a monstrous storm was headed your way, you’ll understand what I faced last August. In a bizarre turn of events, it was also the moment I received an offer for my first novel.