My friend Joe Wallace has been a busy man lately. He has been baking souffles, reading a great deal, traveling a lot, and posting the occasionally provocative and entertaining opinion on Facebook. (Since he is one of the warmest and most engaging people on Facebook, this is an excellent thing.) Why has he been so busy? Because he has been …
Paperback Writer.
Oh, the shame of it. It’s been four months – count ’em! – since I last posted an entry on this blog. It’s been so long that the wordpress site refused to believe that I was who I said I was, and it took me a while to work out how to get on here at all. There were cobwebs, …
Memorial Day Weekend Update
Over this long weekend I have all three days on my own – the children are on a float trip in the Ozarks with their mother – and a long list of domestic chores to get done in that time, to say nothing of (I hope) further progress with the new book. In the spirit of prevarication that I cling …
Gaithersburg Book Festival
One of the very best things about publishing a book is being invited to events where one can meet readers and other writers. I’m particularly excited for this weekend, which is the Gaithersburg Book Festival, a hugely popular event in Maryland which brings dozens of writers from across the country to talk about and read from their books. The line-up …
Writer, C’est Moi. (Finally.)
An interesting thing happened the other day. The kids and I decided to take the puppy for a walk around our new neighborhood. Dog walking is an excellent way to meet new people – if you are accompanied by a cute dog and two (equally cute) small children, you are generally not considered too much of a threat, even if …
Um, phew.
So, yeah, sorry about the radio silence. It turns out that this publishing-a-book thing is a bit of a time-suck. But, you know, in a good way. Since the book was published – almost a month ago now, bizarre though that seems – I have hardly had time to sit down. It has been a wonderful, mad, hectic ride, and …
UK Cover
In August A GOOD AMERICAN will be published in the United Kingdom by Fig Tree Books, an imprint of Penguin UK. (Fig Tree also brilliantly published The Help in England to massive success.) I met my lovely editor there, Juliet Annan, several months ago in London. She told me right away that the English edition would have a different cover …
Linkage, Schminkage
Not long now. This is just a brief update to let you know about various things that have popped up on the web, if you missed my incessant tweets and facebook updates over the past few days. Publication isn’t officially until Tuesday, but the book has already been spotted in the wild. This is in Freeport, Maine: A GOOD AMERICAN …
Countdown!
There’s so much going on at the moment that I often lose track of what day of the week it is. So this is a quick post to bring you up to date with a few snippets of news, then I’m off to spend the weekend doing legal work, catching up with the stuff that has been piling up, both …
Librarians Are Not all like Philip Larkin. Really.
Let’s play a little cultural word association. If you ask an Englishman what comes to mind when he hears the word “Dallas,” he would probably answer Larry Hagman, JFK’s assassination, and possibly cowboys (although the cowboys would be wearing ten-gallon hats, rather than football helmets.) I’m told that if he was of a certain age and inclination, he might also …