Square Pegs

We have a friend whose job is author escort. She’s the one who drives authors to and fro during their visits to the Los Angeles area. Because: It is [Joan] Robbins’ view — shared, evidently, by the publishers who pay her several hundred dollars a day to chaperone legally competent adults on book tours in South Florida — that authors “don’t know where the hell they’re going.” We find this job fascinating (maybe because the husband thinks we would be more efficient with a handler — we remain convinced we can lure any professional to the dark side). So we

The husband and I were talking about one of our prized possessions: specifically the Replacements mobile from the Pleased to Meet Me Tour. This was the tour where the band was pleased to meet us multiple times. We also think this is the tour where the husband stole Paul Westerberg’s beer, but that’s another topic entirely. We can’t imagine getting rid of such an item, but we don’t recall seeing it in the past ten years. But anything could be in the boxes in the garage. The ones with “Important” in big black and red letters on all four sides.

Maud Newton has posted her interview with British author A.L. Kennedy. We hate to pick our favorite lines from these things, because we truly want you to savor the whole thing — when a writer speaks without regard for marketing angles, we get all giddy inside — but we thought Kennedy’s final comments were simply perfect: …And hopefully it’s funny. Otherwise it would be a bit bleak. It’s dedicated to my mother – which she found out last week, so she’s quite chuffed at the moment. And read the book in a day, which is depressing, because it took much

We have long argued the importance of fiction as a vehicle for social change. Just as it is easier for The Simpsons to take straight pins to the balloons of our world, fiction frames issues in a context that makes it easy for large portions of the population to understand. This morning, we commented upon how The DaVinci Code is a work of fiction and the constant debunking is rather strange — now we’re going to take another approach. We wanted to believe Norma Khouri, author of what is now a collector’s item, Forbidden Love. After all, she dared to

Whenever we encounter something we don’t understand in life, we write about it. We’ve solved myriad problems on the page. Some people talk; we write. And write. And write. Until something is resolved — or we’ve made peace with the situation. A current National Endowment for the Arts program is bringing this type of catharsis to active duty soldiers, with good results. Writing about war has a long tradition in the human experience, which is why we don’t fully agree with this statement: “These are two parts of society that don’t ordinarily talk to each other,” said Dana Gioia, the

We believe people know too much about us. Oh, not the things we post here — hard facts such as name, rank, and serial number. We realize they want all of this to target advertisements toward us. As we’ve said before, and as Adam L. Penenberg says in this Wired article: Maybe, but I don’t even see advertising on the Internet. I tune it out, like, say, Yanni in an elevator. I also don’t understand why publishers aren’t more concerned about the integrity of their data — unless, of course, all they care about is the illusion of accuracy. Of

One of our major causes is literacy. Actually, it’s our major cause. We tutor, and we support ProLiteracy financially (stick around…in December, we’ll give our annual spiel on the topic). We discovered ProLiteracy (actually, Laubach Literacy, which merged, etc) via the Romance Writers of America. Every year, during the National Conference, RWA holds a multi-author literacy signing* with all proceeds going to literacy. Not only is this an incredibly cool event, it’s an incredibly cool event. So please allow us to brag for a moment (yeah, like you can stop the wild machine that we are). This year, RWA’s signing

A project in the UK is cataloguing books that will never be written. Two librians are, with the help of a converted shopping trolley (yes, we included this detail because we remain fascinated by the oddities of British English), are soliciting stories from people for their Library of Unwritten Books. Understandably, some people run away when approached to participate; but, not surprisingly, there are many more willing to share the book they’ll never write. Of course, …not all concepts could or should be turned into full books, Mr [Sam] Brown says. “Unwritten books are different to the books that they

We’re still working our way to our notes (the suitcase remains in the same position it occupied yesterday, minus the cats — even they realize this unpacking project has gone on too long). There are lots of conference updates and postings and general advice to keep you busy in the meantime. Rather than bore you with our thoughts, we point you to David Thayer who explains, well, not the secret handshake, but the important concept of color-coding. Seriously, you gotta understand conference badges. It’s critical — sometimes the badges are tough to read, but it’s pretty darn easy to tell