Dot Dead Diary

Fork in the Road

"When you come to a fork in the road, take it."  Yogi Berra

Twenty-five years ago today, I started my first job in Silicon Valley.  I had few qualifications for it.  My last job had been counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee.  (No jokes about that being an oxymoron, please.  I've heard them.)  I had a job offer to go to work for the newly elected mayor of San Jose, but the very day I was going to accept it, I was talking with Ken Oshman, the CEO of the late, great ROLM Corporation who offered me a job out of the blue.  Ken took a chance on me and I took the fork.

So from that decision came a business education, firm friendships, meeting my wife (and thereby #1, #2, #3, and #4), a house in Palo Alto, the idea to start a company, and writing Dot Dead: A Silicon Valley Mystery.  For good reason Ken was the first person thanked in the acknowledgments of the book.

Two Crime Flicks, A Visit to Kate's, Good Food & Lots More

#1 did not come home for Thanksgiving.  My godson was having an engagement party five miles from #1's dorm this past Saturday night.  Time to hop on a plane, don't you think?  There was a small logistical problem.  Of course, I had to be in town for Thanksgiving at my sister's.  And I didn't want to skip out early on my brother, sister-in-law, and two nephews who were in town for the holiday.  The upshot was that, despite vowing to never take another red-eye to the East Coast, after shabbat dinner Friday night, I drove to Oakland and left on a JetBlue flight at 11.45PM.  I did manage to sleep for a few hours.  Good thing, too.  #1 and I had a busy Saturday.

We breakfasted at a local diner and then checked out the art at the Gardner and MFA.  #1 loved the sense the Gardner gave her of being in a villa.  As always, I feasted my eyes on the Sargents including the MFA's wondrous "An Artist in His Studio."  We then made it to the Brattle to see the William Powell-Myrna Low 1934 mystery classic, The Thin Man, one of #1's all-time favorites.  I think I caught a fifteen minute catnap which was the freshening I needed before heading to the country club for the engagement party.

Couper and Julia's wedding is in just a few weeks, which means they're in the home stretch.  The party was great, especially toward the end when we had time to catch up with   Couper and Julia (on the left with me) and we had a chance to meet Julia's parents.  I knew a fair amount about them since I'd read Julia's mom's witty, nostalgic, and perceptive memoir.  Couper's mom regaled the attendees with the true story of how the couple's paternal grandfathers had lived on the same block as grad students in the 1930's.  BTW, it was Couper who generated the all-time busy day for this blog when he linked my posting on Mel Gibson and Hebrew National to defamer.com.  Julia's blog attracts plenty of hits on its own.

Sunday morning #1 and I did the crossword puzzle over breakfast in a cafe and then strolled over to Kate's Mystery Books in Cambridge.  Proprietor Kate Mattes and I shmoozed about books, California, publishing, and such for an hour or so.  I walked out with two mysteries set in Turkey (The Janissary Tree and Belshazzar's Daughter) with nary a clue that her store would be named a winner of MWA's Raven Award the very next day.

Monday and Tuesday I checked out three of #1's classes including the Cuban Revolution (the Castroites were not nice to the opposition), Introduction to History of Science (heard a lecture on Darwin), and Introduction to Comparative Politics (learned lots about how countries regard their constitutions -- I think the professor said Bolivia has had 18).

I ate awfully well, too.  For dinner we hit the extremes from Oleana, a yummy and not cheap Mediterrenean restaurant where I had fish in a claypot, to Mr. Bartley's Burger Cottage, whose fare was called out in a Wall Street Journal article last spring as among the best in the nation.  I made friends with the server at Hi-Rise where #1 and I had breakfast one morning and I met Couper's parents, Bill and Susan, my treasured friends from grad school days, for tea another afternoon.

#1 and I also managed to fit in another mystery film, Gone Baby Gone which, like last year's Oscar-winner The Departed, was set in South Boston amidst police corruption. It was also the better movie.  Critics must not have noticed or perhaps been a little reluctant to say a film directed by Ben Affleck is superior to the one Martin Scorsese finally won an Oscar for.  Monday and Tuesday we checked out other museums and other cafes.  Along the way, I met a lot of #1's classmates. 

All in all, one great trip. It did end on a bit of a sour note, though.  The winds were blowing so hard that our plane (manufactured by Airbus) could not make it all the way across the country.  We stopped to refuel in Denver which meant I got home at 1.30 AM.  I'm looking forward to a good night's sleep tonight.

40 More Thank Yous

We're off for a family Thanksgiving in a few hours.  There'll be a couple of dozen of us all told at my sister's across the Bay.  My #1 did not come back from school, but is instead enjoying turkey with the family of lapsed mystery writer (and college friend) L.M. Vincent, author of Final Dictation and Pas de Death (both unfortunately out of print).

Anyway, I was cataloguing all the things that I had to be thankful for, and, along with everything else, I came up with a bonus 40.  Stephen King once said:  "Read four hours a day and write four hours a day. If you cannot find the time for that, you can't expect to become a good writer."  I'm trying to follow his prescription.  Soon after I enlisted in the Facebook army, I started keeping track of the books I've read.  I'm spending more time reading than I have in the past 18 years (i.e., since #1 was born).  Below is a list of the books I've read (or listened to) in the last three months or so.  I'm thankful to each and one of the authors for enlightening, entertaining, and educating me.  Happy Thanksgiving and happy reading!

	The James Deans by Reed Farrel Coleman
	Precinct Puerto Rico (Luis Gonzalo) by Steven Torres
	The Namesake: A Novel by Jhumpa Lahiri
	Protect and Defend: A Thriller by Vince Flynn
	The Colorado Kid (Hard Case Crime) by Stephen King
	Leave the Building Quickly: True Stories by Cynthia Kaplan
	The Cleanup by Sean Doolittle
	The Overlook (Harry Bosch) by Michael Connelly
	Murder in the Marketplace (Liz Sullivan Mysteries) by Lora Roberts
	Act of Treason by Vince Flynn
	Still Life (A Three Pines Mystery) by Louise Penny
	The Orange Curtain: A Jack Liffey Mystery by John Shannon
	The Debut by Anita Brookner
	The Dead Don't Lie: An Abe Lieberman Mystery (Abe Lieberman) by Stuart M. Kaminsky
	I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman by Nora Ephron
	Exile and return: The struggle for a Jewish homeland by Martin Gilbert
	California Girl by T. Jefferson Parker
	Death of an Englishman: A Marshal Guarnaccia Investigation by Magdalen Nabb
	How I Got Published: Famous Authors Tell You in Their Own Words by Ray White
	Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling, The (Bernie Rhodenbarr Mysteries) by Lawrence Block
	The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World by Lucette Lagnado
	Murder in a Nice Neighborhood (Liz Sullivan Mysteries) by Lora Roberts
	Beating the Babushka: A Cape Weathers Investigation by Tim Maleeny
	Jack and Lem: John F. Kennedy and Lem Billings: The Untold Story of an Extraordinary Friendship by David Pitts
	Jews and Power (Jewish Encounters) by Ruth R. Wisse
	The Secret Servant by Daniel Silva
	Bad Girls: 26 Writers Misbehave
	Let Us Eat Cake: Adventures in Food and Friendship by Sharon Boorstin
	Songs Without Words by Ann Packer
	The Burglar on the Prowl by Lawrence Block
	Book Doctor by Esther Cohen
	Misfit:: The Strange Life of Frederick Exley by Jonathan Yardley
	Anatomy of a Murder by Robert Traver
	Letter to an Atheist by Michael Patrick Leahy
	Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson
	When We Were Bad by Charlotte Mendelson
	The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani
	The First Counsel by Brad Meltzer
	The Backup Men by Ross Thomas
	Necessity by Brian Garfield

Mysteriously Delicious

Norman Mailer, who died this week, aimed to write the Great American Novel. When I’m writing, nothing could be further from my mind. I want to write a book that can be enjoyed on a beach chair or airplane seat. A major thrill comes when people say they read my Dot Dead: A Silicon Valley Mystery at one sitting because they couldn’t put it down. One friend sent me an email whose subject line was “Damn You.” Apparently, she’d started reading the book just before bedtime and stayed up till three or four in the morning to finish it. The result was a bad day at work. Forgive me, but I loved it.

Of course, a second reason to put my ass in a chair and rap away at the keys is the cash. Despite the psychic satisfactions mentioned above, this author gig – well, it’s a business. As Dr. Johnson said, "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."

Have you read about the Jessica Seinfeld’s new cookbook, Deceptively Delicious? She explains how to slip vegetables into kids’ meals without them noticing. You know, some puréed cauliflower in the mac and cheese or sweet potatoes in the pancakes. Well, I try to sneak some good-for-you “vegetables” in what I write, too.

When Dot Dead starts, the hero is obsessed by making tens of millions from those stock options he's been granted by the start-up where he works. After all, who are the avatars of Silicon Valley if not the billionaire entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs or Larry Ellison? In the course of the narrative, I try to “slip in” the notion that pursuing justice, belonging to a community, and establishing a loving relationship just might also be goals worth striving for. Now, I explained all this to one bright friend and she said, “I loved the book, but I didn’t notice.” Perfect! She probably wouldn’t notice zucchini in her oatmeal either.

A version of this posting also appeared at the Inkspot blog.

Writer in Disguise

When I was a boy, my mother was always going to "luncheons" and I wondered what kind of secret rite was involved.  In a manner reminiscent of Sir Richard Burton's trip in disguise to Mecca, I flew across the country and slinked into a book luncheon in Ft. Myers, Florida disguised as an author.  The gathering was small but enthusiastic.  My own disguise was good enough that I was asked to expound on the writing process for thirty minutes or so.  Thoroughly enjoyable, all the more so since I was joined by my friend Cynthia Kaplan, an echt author, previously seen by me in San Antonio last week.  (I read her Leaving the Building Quickly on the plane ride home.  The book consists of personal essays that manage to be acerbic, poignant, and funny all at the same time.  After finishing Cynthia's book, I turned to Sean Doolittle's The Cleanup.  Damn.  The flight was over too soon.  I still have 75 pages to go.  I plan on finishing it in the next hour.  IMHO, Sean is this century's answer to Elmore Leonard.)

Anyway, tomorrow I'm going to continue the charade.  At 4 I'll be at Congregation Beth Am in Los Altos Hills, California discussing Jewish mysteries with Rabbi Larry Raphael, who has edited two collections of Jewish mystery fiction, and the omniscient Ellen Bob of the Bob & Bob bookstore.  Should be fun and it's open to anyone.

Where to Find Interesting Bibliophiles

I signed books at Kepler's in Menlo Park yesterday and, as always seems to happen, a gaggle of interesting and interested bibliophiles streamed by.  Among the many I got a chance to chat with were:

• Douglas Engelbart, arguably the man most responsible for the way personal computing works today.  He invented the computer mouse and groupware, hypertext (that's when you click on one word or phrase and it leads you to another), bit-mapped screens, and networking all can be traced to his lab at SRI.  Hope he likes Dot Dead!
• Greg Stikeleather, an entrepreneur backed by Alloy Ventures, as was the software company I founded.
• The daughter of one of my mother's sorority sisters at the University of Illinois whom I had not seen in decades.
• Paul, a college dorm-mate of Edgar-winning Naomi Hirahara.  Naomi seems to have friends everywhere.
• A writer for oy-bay.org, the Bay Area Jewish blog.

A pleasant way to spend a Sunday afternoon and, as a bonus, sold 44 books.

Remember the Alamo

I’m tapping away on my laptop while cruising at 35,000 feet above the arid southwest on my way from San Antonio to San Diego.  My plan is to take advantage of the free WiFi offered by the airport in San Diego and post this entry before boarding the connecting flight back home to the Bay Area. 

Yesterday morning I rolled myself out of bed on the early side and hopped on a Southwest plane to start my journey to the San Antonio Jewish Community Center’s 25th Annual Book Fair.  (The flights went fast as I read Louise Penny’s marvelous Still Life on the way.)  The energetic and charming Aliyah Kuchinsky had invited me to come on down even though her first name means to come on up.  Last night then, I spoke for a few minutes about the reluctant hero caught up in big event and cited Hitchcock films as an inspiration for Dot Dead.  Given the audience, the place, and the time of year (it’s Jewish Book Month), I also mentioned the ur-reluctant hero, Moses, who told God to find someone else to lead the Israelites out of slavery.

Aliyah had come across me in New York last June as she endured the hundred two-minute spiels from Jewish writers to decide whom to invite to the book fair.  On the night I was "auditioning," Cynthia Kaplan stood out for her funny, Nora Ephronesque musings on her life.  Cynthia was on the program last night with me (and as acerbic and laugh-engendering as ever), and two writers I hadn’t met. 

Michael Lowenthal, who was introduced as a Dartmouth valedictorian, stumbled on a little-known, dark corner of our Republic’s history and wrote a novel on it.  Who knew that during World War I, young American women were forcibly tested for venereal disease?  Those unfortunate enough to test positive were put in camps to ensure they would not infect our doughboys.  Interesting, huh? 

Jonathan Tropper was playing poker one day with two buddies while their wives were out of town together.  He’s the kind of guy who would wonder out loud what life would be like for them if their spouses’ plane went down.  The result of the musing is How to Talk to a Widower, which, judging from the excerpt Jonathan read, sure sounds funny.  After he was done reading, he had quite a crowd around him – of course, he’d let slip that Brad Pitt had optioned his first novel.

After the event, we drove around San Antonio looking for a restaurant that was still open after 10.  More nice conversation with the other writers and with Aliyah, her husband Cory, and two delightful committee members, Susan and Mindi.  In honor of the occasion, I had a smoked salmon wrap and a local amber beer, which was very smooth. Cynthia and I started comparing travel schedules and figured out that that next week we’re the two speakers at a “luncheon” at the Jewish Community Center in Ft. Myers, Florida.  (My mother used to go to “luncheons” all the time.  This might be my first.)   

The plane this morning left in time.  A good start.  Cooking Shabbat dinner tonight is on my list of responsibilities and a late flight will mean a very late dinner.

Update.  Good news from bad news.  When I came out of the gate in San Diego, I saw my connecting flight was delayed.  But I managed to catch a flight to San Francisco that was just leaving (they closed the door behind me) and got home two hours earlier than scheduled.  The kugel is in the oven and I'm going downstairs to put the apple pie and chicken in right now.