Well, things are moving ahead. It now appears that we have a tentative date scheduled for the publication of A GOOD AMERICAN – January or February of 2012. It seems an awfully long way off right now but I know that there’s a lot to do in the forthcoming months and I will be kept extremely busy. I am told …
“Now the Fun Bit”
So, yesterday was a big day for me. I have lost count over the past couple of years how many times I have written on this blog that the book is “finished”. There have been so many drafts and rewrites that it makes my head spin. The difference then, of course, was that I was the only one who had …
Big Book News
More book news today… and for once, it’s actually about my book! While we were in Miami airport waiting for our flight to England – only four days later than planned, due to snow – I got an email from my editor and publisher, Amy Einhorn, with her comments on the rewrite to the book that I had been working …
Interview on “We Do Write”
I was recently contacted by Dorothy Dreyer, who runs the always interesting blog, We Do Write, which has great features about books generally and the publishing process in particular, and lots of interviews with writers. Dorothy wanted to ask me a few questions for the blog, and of course I was delighted to answer them. You can read the whole …
Writer’s Toy
This is my new writer’s toy. I believe it’s called a “lapdesk”. It’s a desk that sits on your lap. Hence, “lapdesk.” Stop me if I’m going too quickly for you. Look. It even has its very own light. All mod cons, you see. My wife bought this for me yesterday. Now, rather than sitting at my desk all day, …
Polish, Schmolish
After a busy weekend, I’m just over half-way through my final polish of the manuscript before sending it back to my editor and publisher. Things have been going smoothly enough, but occasionally I get a page like this one: That’s not a polish, that’s industrial cleaning.
Title Talk
Still no closer to a title for the book, although I am thinking about it an awful lot – whenever I have a spare moment, in fact. Often I forget that not everyone is as fixated about the subject as I am. This can throw up some interesting discussions, when only one party to the conversation is particpating with the …
Word Clouds!
I recently discovered this great site that creates beautiful word clouds from texts that users can submit. (Thanks to Emily St. John Mandel for the idea – she has a cloud of her most recent novel on her site.) It’s pretty cool. The size of the various words depends on the frequency with which they appear. Here’s a cloud I …
Exciting New Book from, um, Alex George
You couldn’t make this stuff up. A little while ago I dabbled with the idea of a slight name change, reducing myself to a pair of gnomic initials in the manner of Chesterton, G.K., Rowling, J. K., Byatt A.S., and Hartley, J.R. (inside joke for my English readers with long memories.) Anyway, that didn’t last too long, and here I …
Better Titles
Given my on-going struggle to find the right title for my book, I was excited when I read about this site. It’s done by comedian Dan Wilbur, who might just be on to something. The idea is that these new titles “cut through the cryptic crap”, as Wilbur puts it, and tell you what the book is really about. I …