Dot Dead Diary

Ann Patchett on Book Touring

I have 27 appearances to make between October 14 and November 21.  The prospect is both exhilarating (meeting the readers!) and daunting (27!).  Just read an article by Ann Patchett, author of Bel Canto, on the highs (a mom drove her teenager 4 hours on a school night so she could hear her favorite writer speak) and lows (changing clothes in a McDonald's bathroom).  Click here to read the article.  And click here to see the events on my tour schedule where I'm talking.

"SFO-BOS-NYC-SFO" or "To ThrillerFest and Back"

Monday, July 13, 2009

My voyage to ThrillerFest and back this year took a week all told.  I left on July 5 and didn't come home till last night.

 The Kennedy Library

 

#1 is spending the summer in Boston.  So on the way to NYC for my third ThrillerFest, I stopped by to spend some quality time with my oldest and say hi to old friends.  The way I said hi was telling Larry in Manchester-by-the-Sea that #1and I wanted to stay with him for two days and then Bill and Susan in Belmont we'd by stopping for -- two days again.  All great hosts.  #1 and I did a few tourist-y things, but also stopped by the JFK Library where we spent an afternoon sifting through archives exploring an idea for a thriller.  She served as my research assistant, but also snuck a look at JFK's Harvard report cards.  I know there's been grade inflation but I don't think a D+ in European History was a sign of genius even back in the 1930s.

 

I left Boston Thursday morning on the #1-recommended the Bolt Bus which left the train station in Boston at 10.30 AM Thursday and delivered us to Penn Station in NYC four hours later. I really lucked out by sitting next to Hallie Ephron, who is as good a conversationalist as she is writer and reviewer. I also managed a few pages of the terrific Prime Time by Hank Phillippi Ryan. The time whizzed by. (Did I mention the ticket cost $10?)

 

With Sophie Littlefield, Alex Sokoloff, and Jim Rollins at ThrillerFest.

(I'm drinking regular iced tea. Honest.)

 

Thursday night the opening reception at ThrillerFest was sponsored by Writers House, my literary agency. While everyone else was imbibing, the other Writers House authors and I (I was next to fave M.J. Rose) were signing books. That night my agent Josh took me and James Phelan, who is plotting world literary domination from his base in Melbourne, Australia, out for sushi.

 

The next morning I met with Carol Fitzgerald and Erin Quinn of The Book Report to discuss revisions to http://www.keithraffel.com/. Good things are coming. From there I toddled over to see old pal Rick Wolff of Grand Central Books. Friday afternoon I managed to hit a couple panels, one with Simon Lipskar of Writers House acting as a family counselor between authors and editors and the next with Hallie, Doug Preston, and more on creating great villains. After, I bought Joe Moore, co-president designate of International Thriller Writers, a drink, but one without the umbrella that I thought he favored. Two beers with tip ran $23. That's the downside of NYC. Joe and I finished our brewskis at 5.45 at the bar in the Grand Hyatt at Grand Central. I was supposed to meet friends Ian, Lexa, and Sam, my much put-upon hosts when I visit to NYC, at Telepan at 6. God bless the subway. I was seated at 6.04, although there was the incident when the subway doors shut on my glasses along the way. Great to spend some time with them and enjoy that sublime smoked trout appetizer.

 

Saturday morning I had the best of intentions. I got to the Grand Hyatt with the panels I planned on attending all picked out. But I sat down for a minute in the lobby with homegirl Sophie Littlefield, whose Bad Day for Sorry is out next month, and with old bud Alex Sokoloff, who would win a Thriller Award later that night. Then came Sophie's Shamus-winning brother Michael Wiecek and then Maggie and Sheila.... Well, you get the idea. Never quite made it to any morning panels. I did sneak in to hear most of Doug Preston's interview of Sandra Brown, who is charming, beautiful, and articulate. She sold me. I'm going to give one of her 57 New York Times bestsellers a try.

Any hope of making it to the afternoon sessions started to evaporate when I ran into Becky Cantrell, whose A Trace of Smoke has been garnering praise everywhere. We gathered up Andy Peterson, Bobby Rotenberg, Pam Callow, C.J. Lyons, Shane Gericke, and more and found a place that would serve us sandwiches. Shane's theory about thong underwear and female police officers was pooh-poohed by the women at the table. Just as we were going to split up, Jim Rollins strolled by. Jim's The Doomsday Key is #2 this week on the NY Times bestseller list (not shabby). (#4 loved the autographed copy of Jim's Jake Ransom and the Skull King's Shadow that I brought home for him.) We retired to the hotel bar with Jim, his partner David, and Sophie. We managed to stumble across Alex again and ITW co-founder Gayle Lynds whose terrific The Last Spymaster I read just last week. Gayle and I compared notes. She's busy writing about the tunnels underneath Moscow while I'm writing about what's under the streets of Jerusalem. We got so caught up in the conversation, I almost missed my own panel.

The panel was scheduled at 4, in the last slot before the pre-awards banquet reception. Other panels we were up against boasted writers like Eric Van Lustbader, Karin Slaughter, Joe Finder, David Hewson, David Liss, Brad Meltzer, and M.J. Rose. I was amazed to find 30 people ready to listen to us prattle on about "Do We Need Another Hero?" Under Tony Tata's expert guidance, Andy Harp, Ward Larson, Paul Wilson, and I talked about what writers needed to do to make their protagonists shine with appeal and originality. My first suggestion was to make them bald. Anyway, I did voice my opinion that we don't need another protagonist who is consumed by work, is divorced but with strong feelings toward an ex, and has problems with alcohol and a precocious child.

At the banquet I was at the Writers House table with, among others, agents Simon Lipskar and Dan Conaway, James Phelan, Charlie Newton (whom I'd interviewed about his Calumet City, nominated for both an Edgar and Thriller Award, but never met face to face), Josh Gaylord whose Hummingbirds will be out this fall and whom I'd met on the phone without knowing who his wife was, and that very wife, the brilliant Megan Abbott. I was so tickled with Alex's win for best short story.

Last year, after the banquet I found myself in a midtown Irish bar with Dusty Rhoades, Tom O'Callaghan, Tasha Alexander, and Sean Chercover, among others. When I suggested to Sean we do it again, he was up for it, but I was bluffing. Home by 1.30 this year

 

Liz Berry, Kathy Antrim, Shane Gericke. Shirley Kennett, Steve Berry, and the whole ITW team did an amazing job. In the face of this economy, attendance was up.

Display at airport bookstore

 

At the airport on Sunday went to the book stall to pick up a paper and saw the display of Jim Rollins' The Doomsday Key. There it is above. Terrific. Not a nicer guy in the biz. On the flight itself, I was on American to SFO, seat 37G. Guess who were in 37 H and J? The effervescent, Bruce Alexander Award-winning Kelli Stanley and partner Tana. I read the Sunday Times, did the crossword, discussed the previous three days with my seatmates, and listened to some of the compelling things Kelli had turned up in her research. Also promised Tana that Dot Dead wasn't too dark for her tastes and that no dogs were hurt in the book.

Home now. Beat but with a pile of to-dos as high as an elephant's eye.

 

A condensed (but still too long) version of this posting can be found on InkSpot.  Lots of comments there, too.

Input and Output

I keep track of my output on an Excel spreadsheet.  What do you expect from a Silicon Valley nerd?  (I've shared the template with my old friend Larry and he credits it with propelling him to finish an 80,000 word opus in less than three months.) 

My weeks run from Wednesday to Tuesday.  From book to book, Fridays tend my most productive (verbose?) days even though Friday night is the Sabbath so I knock off early.  Saturday then is my least productive. 

In the week I finished yesterday I wrote 10,132 words.  A 10K week.  I think that's a record for me.  Going into yesterday I was pretty confident about hitting 10K, but next to me in the cafe where I write were three women interviewing candidates for their dating service.  Like any novelist, I'm an eavesdropper and listening to the ups and downs (mostly downs) of a couple dozen women's dating histories was better than any TV reality show. 

Okay then back to the subject.  I measure output, but what about input?  Where does the inspiration come from?  Can that be measured and managed?  I don't think so.  Ideas just come from...  well I don't knw from where.  Often I'm as surprised as anyone with what happens.  If a reader compliments me for a plot twist in something I've written (yes, it has happened), I say thank you, but have the sense that I am taking undeserved credit.  I don't know where the ideas come from, so why should I get credit for them?  My friend Karen MacInerney posted this video featuring writer Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat, Pray, Love fame.  Her ideas about apportioning credit have some appeal.  Take a look.

Cure for (a) Depression?

One friend who lost her job told me she couldn’t really face the world just now. She wanted to hide from decisions on what to do next or where the money needed to support her family would come from. So what did she do? Take to her bed with a stack of crime fiction.

Perfect. In an age when malefactors abscond with millions stolen from charity while hard-working souls get laid off, why not escape into the world of crime fiction? In that world criminals get their comeuppance and the innocent triumph. As we turn the pages, we move from balance to disequilibrium and back to balance. Ah, if 2009 America (and Canada and the U.K.) were only that simple.

Not only can a piece of good crime fiction provide the escape we need, it can do so for almost nothing. I sold books at the LA Book Festival alongside my friend Cara Black, who writes the bestselling (and terrific) Aimée Leduc series. She’d say to passersby, “Do you want to go to Paris for $13?” What a pitch in these depressed times!

So bookstores must be chock-full of eager readers, right? Judging from a few recent conversations with bookstore proprietors here in the Bay Area, I don’t think so. They're complaining about the business lassitude like the rest of us. Here’s my real question then: Why aren’t crime fiction sales picking up during this Great Depression II?

P.S. A version of this post also appeared on the Inkspot blog.

I'm Back

Hi everyone,

I'm awakening from hibernation.  It's been five months since my last real posting on Dot Dead Diary.  The decision to take a break was never a conscious one.  As my kids say, "I didn't do it on purpose."

But I'm back.  I wish I could think of a way to tie this resumption to the bicentennial of Lincoln and Darwin, but no can do.

Perhaps the real motivator in getting me blogging again is the expected(?) publication of my next book, Smasher.  More news as soon as it's all final.  (Readers of this blog helped me name it.  I am expressing my gratitude by inflicting you all with more postings.)

I'd welcome a few comments so that I'd know I'm not screaming in an empty desert.  More soon.

Happy birthday Chuck and Abe,

Keith

P.S. This morning I was over at Los Altos High School where I discussed writing.  Try teaching four classes in a row and being "on" the whole time.  We definitely don't pay teachers enough.

Authors and Politicians -- Kindred Spirits?

It's only words, and words are all I have, to take your heart away.
The Bee Gees

Words are the primary means of communications among us humans. By definition, we writers believe in the value of words and count on getting paid for how we put them together.

So why so philosophical? The Democratic governor of Tennessee says presidential candidate Barack Obama should stop “giving big speeches at big stadiums.” He’s not alone in his belief. Words that inspire are under fire in this campaign.

My daughter and I went to see Barack Obama last night in San Francisco. He started slow, but by the end of a thirty-minute speech he had everyone there shouting and clapping in support of his vision of a better America.

Saying a politician is too good with words is like saying a writer is. (You know, that William Shakespeare can sure turn a phrase but what else is he good for?) Words are the tools of a political leader. Without words a politician cannot do great things.

Would the British have stood alone against the most grievous evil the world has ever known without the rhetoric of Winston Churchill? After the fall of France in June 1940, he said:

Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may more forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, "This was their Finest Hour."

Churchill’s speeches were not sufficient to stop Hitler. They didn’t conjure up aircraft, ships, and rifles. But without them, we might well have slid into the abyss.  His words inspired the British people to fight long and hard to win.

Politics is indeed the art of the possible. Programs are needed, votes must be traded, and compromises made. But the first step to real change is inspiration, painting a word picture of where we are going and why we are going there. Senator Obama wants us to imagine a country again respected for its moral authority, a country where all children get the opportunity for a first-class education, and a country that does not send our wealth to other countries who misuse it. When he’s done talking, I believe it’s possible. My cynicism after decades of broken promises in Washington diminishes.

It’s no surprise that Senator Obama is a bestselling author. His memoir Dreams from My Father was written well before he started his political career. Writers and politicians are kindred spirits who both use words to accomplish their aims. Bravo!

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

How Old Am I?

This past weekend I went to a reunion of my class at Palo Alto High School.  The committee did an amazing job in tracking down members as shown by the fact that 40% of the class showed up.  I myself live half a block from where I did when I graduated so there was none of that "you can't go home again" feeling.  Still, as I looked around, I wondered what I was doing hanging with a bunch of men and women who were twenty years older than I am. 

Eventually, I figured out the solution.  I'm spending too much time living as an alter ego in the alternate world of my fiction.  Virginia Woolf said, "I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again - as I always am when I write."  In other words when you're writing, you can be whatever age you want to be.  In my own mind, I'm about twenty years younger than what the mirror reports. When I am writing, more hair sprouts from my scalp, my midsection tautens, and wrinkles disappear.  My work is in the first person and I become that person as I type away on the laptop.  I'm Ian or Sam or Alex or whoever.  I don't outline and so I experience what they do with a freshness that not only rivals real life -- it oftentimes trumps it.

Here's what I wonder.  How old are you when you write?  Or when you read?

Self-Absorbed Writers of the Silver Screen

I watched Starting Out in the Evening on DVD downstairs last night while my wife, #3, and #4 watched No Reservations upstairs.  Any serious flick about a novelist gets bonus points from me.  Funnily enough, the film starred Frank Langella as a mostly-forgotten, self-absorbed writer living in an apartment on the Upper West Side.  (Of course, the place looks great.  Real estate porn.)  Into his life waltzes a grad student who wants to resuscitate his reputation as a way to make hers.  Why funnily enough?  Because the first movie I remember Mr. Langella in was Diary of a Mad Housewife where he again played a self-absorbed writer.  Somewhere in the 37 years between the two films he moved from dashing to decrepit.  Anyway the verdict on the movie?  Intelligent and thought-provoking.  See it for what it has to say about aging and the writer's compulsion.  I'm going to track down the novel by Brian Morton that the movie's based on.

As a sidelight, I laughed when Langella's character approached an editor he had known.  The editor tells him that no one prints literary fiction anymore.  In real life, my manuscript was turned down by an editor at a very large publisher who told my agent I'd written "a gripping book that kept me turning pages from the very start," but that what I'd written was "too firmly rooted in the genre world" for her house.  Can't win nowadays.

 

Chairman of the Board

I really admire versatility.  I'm so impressed with the way so many crime fiction authors juggle a day job as a lawyer or doctor or executive or what-have-you with their writing.  Jim Fusilli has written the terrific Terry Orr series and at the same time is music critic for The Wall Street Journal.  Impressive?  He has a piece on Frank Sinatra in today's paper which is both insightful and elegaic.  I listen to Frankie (and Ella, Tony, Sammy, Doris, Dino, Rosemary, etc.) on AOL Radio's Sinatra Style station while doing any boring, mindless task -- usually paying bills. 

A Helluva Thriller That Ought Not Be Forgotten

Some thoroughbreds not only race fast themselves, but have the ability to pass talent along to their foals.  Maybe authors work the same way.  Patti Abbott is a fine writer who recently garnered a Derringer Award for her story "My Hero" and is the mother of this year’s Edgar winner for best paperback original, Megan Abbott.  Anyway Patti is asking some of her friends to recommend “books we love but might have forgotten over the years.”

Now I don’t want to brag about a memory which can’t always recall where a car was parked thirty minutes ago.  But....  if I love a book I don’t forget it.  I cherish the memory.  Still, the thrust of Patti’s request makes sense.  Who’s overlooked nowadays?  My first inclination was to name a book by Ross Thomas, maybe Briarpatch.  Still, I’ve blogged about him before as have others.  So I went for a stroll along the bookshelves in my office and bedroom.  I cradled this book and that one.  When I came to an old British Penguin paperback of Lionel Davidson’s The Sun Chemist, I stopped.  Now that wasn’t my absolute favorite of his books although it was terrific.  Davidson’s premise was that Chaim Weizmann, the British chemist, first president of Israel, and distant cousin of yours truly, came up with a formula for synthetic oil that had been lost and the hero of the book tries to track it down.  Wonderful.  As were The Menorah Men, The Rose of Tibet, and The Night of Wenceslas (a Gold Dagger winner).  Davidson won a second Gold Dagger for The Chelsea Murders published in 1978, wrote a children's book that saw the light of day in 1980, and then went dark for years.  Finally, like the swan whose last song is its sweetest, Davidson came out with Kolymsky Heights in 1994, one of the two or three greatest thrillers ever. 

There’s more derring-do and adventure in Heights than is typical in Davidson’s oeuvre.  Johnny Porter is not exactly your everyday kind of guy – a Gitksan Indian from British Columbia who happens to be a Rhodes Scholar, too.  A melding of the ancient and the new.  He goes on a mission for the CIA, which he distrusts, to discover a secret inside Russia of inestimable humanitarian value that had been hidden under Stalin's orders.  (As with the missing formula for cheap oil in The Sun Chemist and the original Temple menorah in The Menorah Men, something of tremendous value has been lost and our hero races to find it.)  Porter stands apart, an outsider in his own country and in Siberia an outsider again.  He falls in love or does he?  There’s arcane technological and anthropological lore, a beautiful doctor to fall in love with (or not), and an incredible chase across the frozen tracts of the far north.  In the end Porter proves his loyalty not to a country but to individual people and to humankind.  Read this book.  (You can read the New York Times review here.)

We can’t expect another book from Mr. Davidson who turned 86 in March.  But what a way to leave ‘em wanting more Kolymsky Heights is.