Sprechen Sie Deutsche, baby?

Here's the cover for the German translation of Eat the Dark, due out in June of this year. And what exactly does Besessen mean? Babel Fish says it means "Possessed."

Well, all right then.

Mad Panic

So I just got an email telling me that there are almost sixty people registered for the talk that I'm giving on Monday night at the Hershey Public Library. This is great news, by far the best turnout for any event that I've ever done. At the end of the email the librarian casually mentioned that I should make sure to bring plenty of change for selling books -- the library doesn't have very much change on hand.

Wait a minute, I said. I'm the one selling the books? Like, I'm supposed to bring them myself, to sell? In a moment of absolute candor, I asked the librarian how many of those sixty or so people do you think might actually buy a book?

Oh, she said, at least half of them.

It might sound silly, but every signing and talk that I've ever done has either been at a bookstore (where my books are already on hand, sometimes in embarrassing abundance) or at a library working in conjuction with a bookstore, who is there to supply and sell my books. Not once have I actually been in the position of having to bring them and sell them myself. It's just never occurred to me.

After several harried phone conversations with my wife, wherein she climbed up on a chair and counted how many author's copies I had leftover on the top shelf of the closet, I was calling Random House's customer service having the overnight ship two cartons of Eat the Dark and Chasing the Dead to my doorstep. They'll arrive tomorrow morning, in plenty of time for Monday's program.

Now if I can only get that case of small-batch bourbon delivered on time...

Not Dead Yet

But not exactly alive either.

It's been a busy week.

Finished my newest Black Wing revisions sometime after midnight last night. As of this morning my agent has forbidden me to do anymore work on it. It's cold out. I haven't been sleeping too much lately. I dream of dead authors, most recently Ira Levin, running with him across Broadway in heavy traffic while I tell him that Stephen King once described him as "Mr. Mainstream." Levin laughs. Peculiarities in barometric pressure have given everything the slightest air of the unreal. Outside, I thought I saw the neighbor's house starting to melt and sag, just a little, around the edges.

I think I'm getting sick.

Sixer

My son turns six tomorrow.

We spent the morning making little gift bags for everybody in his afternoon kindergarten class. He's all about Pokemon right now. It was my idea to make a handwritten Pikachu note for every bag, and so at ten AM I found myself at the kitchen table, drawing and cutting out sixteen yellow card stock Pikachus for sixteen gift bags, and passing them onto Jack so that he could color their cheeks and stripes. At the time I found myself wishing I hadn't volunteered for this job -- by Pikachu number nine or ten, they weren't even looking like Pokemon to me anymore -- but I'm glad I did. Because afterward, in the hours before I was going to drop him and his big bag of birthday stuff off at school, I slunk upstairs to write.

Almost immediately after Jack went through the door into school, I started feeling bad about the time I'd spent locked up in the study, working back and forth between Black Wing edits and the script I'm consulting on. I wouldn't even call this feeling guilt, but more a kind of heaviness, a sense of missing him and losing an opportunity that I shouldn't have passed up. By the time I got to work this afternoon, the feeling had hardened into a kind of emotional peanut butter in my belly. When I see him again in the morning, he won't be five anymore. He'll be six. While he was busy being five, I was busy writing.

I interviewed Scott Turow once when I was in college, and he made a remark along the lines of, "In America, there's a sense of the world tugging men away from the bosom of their families." At the time I thought the comment was maybe a little overwrought, but now that I have kids of my own, I couldn't agree more.

So I think back about our hour together this morning, sitting next to my son, cutting out yellow Pokemon shapes and passing them to him for coloring in the cheeks and the stripes, and I chip away little by little at that bolus of guilt peanut butter in my gut.

It's still there, but it's getting smaller, one Pikachu at a time.

Deal

So the Directors Guild has cut a deal with the AMPTP in what seemed to take about twenty minutes at the nearest Starbucks. This is an innately good thing. The Strike has accomplished what it set out to achieve -- it prevented us from having to watch the Golden Globes -- and now we can all move on to make scads of money with movie options and the forthcoming spec script bonanaza. If the WGA is willing to use the DGA's contract as boilerplate -- which basically everybody with a brain and a Final Draft CD is hoping it will -- then America's dream factory can get back to work sooner rather than later, drinking coffee and producing diluted but lucrative turds o' genius.

Meanwhile I continue to consult on scriptwork and frankly, there's no way that any kind of lingering left-coast standstill can be good for anybody. So, before I dive back into my own little project at hand, let us raise our glasses to David (ALIEN 3) Fincher and the rest of America's fine, fine directors and hope that their clear-minded fairness and sense of balance will extend itself over to the alcohol-sodden self-loathing masses of writers everywhere.

Cheers.

Kid Stuff

My mom emailed me this picture today saying she found it in the basement and wanted to know if she could throw it away.

Of course, I said, "NOOOOOOOOOO!"

Family Matters

The guy in this picture is happy. You can tell because he's acting like a dork. He's wearing what he would never confess to anybody is one of his favorite shirts and standing next to his kid sister, whom he hasn't seen in three years. There's no particular excuse for this lapse except the usual banal ones of geography and the normal chaotic disruption of events otherwise known as life.

Margie was in Philly this last weekend with her boyfriend for a librarians' conference. The family and I met up with her at a surprise birthday party for my sister-in-law's boyfriend where, surprisingly enough, everything worked out without a hitch. My kids loved seeing their aunt (Veda hadn't seen her since she was a baby) and everybody had an excellent time.

Going back over pictures of me and my sister over the years, my favorite ones are invariably silly. The vocabulary of our relationship has always been total ridiculousness. I'm going west next month and we're planning to get together again.

I hope it happens.

Reading Lovecraft Today

I couldn't finish it

I was reading another writer's blog the other day and there was comment from some anonymous poster, off-topic, about why he couldn't finish that author's most recent novel, and actually returned it to the bookstore where he bought it because of "lazy writing." Besides the weirdness of returning a book half-read, and then going on to read the author's blog -- not to mention the fact that the book in question was categorically excellent, the writing not the least bit lazy -- this post caught my attention.

I'm always interested in why people give up halfway through a book. Almost all of us have dropped out of novel midway through it for one reason or another. For me there's always a vague sense of shame -- I've been meaning to finish Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell for the past two years -- but as a writer it's worth asking, at what point do you just give up and go onto the next one? And in the end, what's the last straw, and does it depend on the stage in your life when you're reading it? Back in college I actually threw a copy of Norman Mailer's Tough Guys Don't Dance against a wall. Since then I've gone on to read and love it and bought it in hardcover. The opposite of this phenomena may be the book that you don't particularly like, but feel compelled to finish just so you can see how it ends. Both Chasing the Dead and Eat the Dark got reviews like this from Amazon readers who had serious problems with the plot, characters and theme, but finished them anyway. I always feel a little bit better when I hear that...I must have done something right.

For me, a book -- whether I'm reading it or writing it -- needs to do something a little different as it approaches the halfway point, to up the ante and subvert some expectation I've developed along the way. I can feel a writer spinning his wheels, building fake suspense (or sticking slavishly to some preconceived outline) and the momentum deflates, leaving me high and dry with a book I couldn't give a shit about. I'd always rather have the writer seem to go a little mad at the midway point, seeming to risk more than is actually advisable, and when this happens I feel a familiar thrill of recognition. As a writer I've been there plenty of times, that moment when your toes no longer touch the bottom and you actually panic a little before heading instinctively toward what's next. It's the books that hug the shore and do what's expected that I usually end up letting drift away. Of the three books I mentioned in my previous post, I've finished two. The third I already know I'll never finish, even though I could do it in an hour or two. There's just too much out there that I'd rather read.

On that note, may I suggest that anyone reading this post do themselves a favor and pre-order Mark Henry's forthcoming Happy Hour of the Damned, due out next month. This book was shamefully omitted from a list of books I'm hotly anticipating in 2008, although that's not quite accurate, since I devoured my advance copy wqay back in '07. But that doesn't matter. What's important is that Happy Hour has an awesome, totally original voice and a kickass heroine who will, I think, win a huge and loyal audience of readers very quickly. You need to order this book now.

It's definitely one you'll finish.

The Return of the Oversaturated Media Whore

I made it back in one piece. I'm pretty glad about that actually. Now I'm planning my next trip to Salt Lake City at the beginning of February. It's MRI related, not writing related, but if there's a bookstore in the area that wants me to visit, I sure will.

Meanwhile, I'm reading Red, by Jack Ketchum, The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril, by Paul Malmont and Everybody Had a Gun, by Richard S. Prather. I'm watching George Stevens' Giant, for the first time, and listening to Simone Dinnerstein's interpretation of the Goldberg Variations and Metallica's Master of Puppets, which my son got my for Christmas. I'm about halfway through my new non-paranormal thriller The Sound of Her Voice, still doing some consulting on a screenplay and cowriting a musical about Jim Jones and Guyana. I'm word on various projects, including one top secret project so secret I'm risking everything just mentioning it.

So shhhh.

Still in Tulsa

Because apparently O'Hare Airport is closed.

More on that in a minute. Up until very recently, I had a wonderful day in Oklahoma, awoke with the birds (and the early morning compulsive gamblers), hopped in my car and drove north on I-75 to check out Frank Lloyd Wright's only high-rise building, the Price Tower, up in Bartlesville.

Just around the corner, I had a delicious breakfast at a diner called Weeze's, on S. Dewey Avenue, where I recommend the scrambled eggs and hash browns with hot peppers, and came back for my book signing at Borders, where my old Ink Slinger pals turned out. Heather brought me two delicious pounds of turkey jerky from Texas, and I got to talk to a lot of great folks about books, writing and all things literary.

And, oh yeah, I'm not going home tonight.

I don't know...O'Hare looked fine to me yesterday when I was flying through it. But today, after I returned my rental car and got the ticket desk, I was informed that my flight home was cancelled, and so I'm spending another night here, this time as a guest of the Airport Radisson. It's not quite as swank as the Cherokee Casino, and I can hear the distant roar of jets taking off outside my window, along with the sound of the guy next door occasionally sneezing. I'm getting it at a "distressed traveller discount," which is semi-appropriate, since I already know I'm wearing tomorrow's underwear, today. If that's not distress, what is?

There's an exit strategy, though. United Airlines most direct way of getting me back to Pennsylvania tomorrow is to put me on a 6:50 AM flight to Denver, where I'll have a three hour layover, after which I'll fly back to O'Hare (assuming it's not still closed), where I'll have a two-hour layover, after which I should arrive back to my family and home in PA tomorrow night, only about twenty-four hours late.

Meanwhile, I'll be here kicking it old school in room 117 of the Radisson, if, you know, you want to drop by.

Tulsa!

I'm in Tulsa tonight, guests of the honorable Tulsa Ink Slingers Writers' Group, who flew me out here to hang out with them today.

And it's so freakin' cool.

Mark, Heather and Allen, Travis and Heather have a great thing going every other Saturday. If you live in the area and want a terrific group of people to share your writing with, you owe it to yourself to stop in.

Also, in the interest of full disclosure, they're putting me up here:

The Cherokee Casino, where I found an enormous room reserved in my name, four stories above the pinging and ponging of slot machines and absolutely silent. My biggest challenge is to decide which in-house restaurant I'm going to have dinner in. Will it be McGill's? Cabin Creek Smokehouse? The Wild Potato Buffet ("named after one of the seven clans of the Cherokee tribe")?

Friends, this is living.

Oh yeah, and I did a book signing today too at the Barnes and Noble here in town and hung out with Community Relations Manager Jeff Martin, who remarked afterward, "We don't have a lot of famous writers in this area. In fact, our most famous writer came by your table while you were signing." Of course, I was all, "Who was it?" And Jeff says, "S.E. Hinton. She lives right up the road." Yes, the S.E. Hinton, the legend, author of the second bestselling YA title of all time, just walking through B&N, past my little table, on a quiet Saturday afternoon. And then Jeff goes on to blow me away with a list of all the famous writers who have wandered through his store over the last year or so, from Michael Chabon to Neil Gaiman, along with the super-famous authors who drop by for the biannual Oklahoma Center for Poets and Writers Festival, at which point I realize that...

Tulsa is the literary capital of America!

How come it took me so long to realize this?

Why did I forget the camera cord to upload pictures of my awesome hotel suite?

Where am I going to have dinner tonight?

The answers to these and other questions when I return to PA.

Alien and Egg

A new mixed media piece constructed of paper mache, ventilator tubing, spray paint and a five year old.

Because in the basement, nobody can hear you scream.