Yeah, so this is still sitting on my desk. Deadline, schmeadline.
Time to Read
Last week I received a direct message via Twitter from the lovely Camille Noe Pagan, whose debut novel, THE ART OF FORGETTING, was published this week by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin (US). Camille was putting together a blog post for the “Author’s Desk” at Penguin.com about how and when authors find time to read. This is a topic of considerable …
Where Was I?
Goodness, turn around for a half a second, and a week or two flies by. Apologies for the lack of recent posts; things have been busy here. The fact that I’m in the office on a sunny Saturday should tell you something. My parents will be arriving in Missouri on Monday for an extended stay, which I am really looking …
Long Journeys
“Frederick loved America. He loved its big open spaces, the sunsets that drenched the evening sky in blistering color. Above all, he loved the smell of promise that hung in the air. Europe, he could see now, was slowly suffocating under the weight of its own history. In America the future was the only thing that mattered. Frederick turned his …
In Praise Of Eggs
I have developed a peculiar fondness for making scrambled eggs for my son. I have adapted a recipe I found in Eat Me, the brilliant cook book by Kenny Shopsin, proprietor of Shopsin’s in Greenwich Village. (We were introduced to Shopsin’s by our friend Don, who actually appeared in the hilarious documentary about Kenny that was made a few years …
News Round-Up
Some good news, in brief – we recently sold the Italian rights to A GOOD AMERICAN to Italian publishers Sperling. It’s always fun to sell foreign rights, especially in languages that I don’t speak. (The French editions of my earlier books always bothered me a bit, because the translator took some pretty extraordinary liberties with the text, to the point …
Foreign Rights
Earlier this week I tweeted and posted on Facebook that we had received an offer for UK and Commonwealth rights to A GOOD AMERICAN. This is obviously wonderful news for me personally, since I am English, and it would have been a little strange to have written a book (even though it is an “American” book) that wasn’t published in …
Covers and Blurbs
Very interesting piece up at The Awl about the trials and tribulations of novelists when it comes to the choice and design of their book covers, and the sometimes painful process of asking other writers for blurbs. As I mentioned in an earlier post, we are deep in that process right now, and so far, fingers crossed, touching wood, etc., …
Book Looks Like Book for First Time Shock
So, this is how it works. You sit alone, for hours and hours, and years and years, creating characters, telling stories, imagining lives. You live through the good days and the bad days. You slog away, you persevere, even when everything seems utterly hopeless and you think you’ll never write another word. Finally you have a book. Except that it’s …
Profile in Vox Magazine
Click here for a nice profile today in Vox magazine, the weekly sister magazine to the Columbia Missourian. I should say, in my defense, (jazz snob alert!) that the reference to “smooth jazz” was a little journalistic license on the part of the lady who came to interview me. I would hate for anyone to think that I’ve gone all …