Asheville's Stephen King Mystery

For a small city of 70,000, my adopted hometown of Asheville has a high number of bookstores. I counted up to 10 once. Strangely, they seem to be evenly split, too, between new and used bookstores. One of the used bookstores reported today that they’d found a sales receipt tucked inside a book apparently signed by author Stephen King. (I could be wrong, but I think the image below shows a carbon copy signature. Remember those?) The local blog Ashvegas has the story here.

By coincidence, Moby Lives has a nice piece about this 25-year-old bookstore…

See illustrations for my short story, 'Button Man'

Illustrator Tom Pokinko posted some images he created for my upcoming story in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine (AHMM). I’d rather not reveal what the story’s about until it pubs in December, but you might be able to glean some clues from the pencil sketch and the final ink sketch on the blog of this Ottawa, Canada-based illustrator. Thanks, Tom!

Stuck in a room, writing

Anyone who writes cannot help grappling with a basic conflict. Locked away in your skull are all these incredible visions—elephants skateboarding on toast, dancing rabbi babies, lemon-ball-shitting vultures—which somehow have to be siphoned out of your brain and put down on paper in such a way that anyone who sees it will be compelled to drop everything to finish it. Artists work with paint, sculptors stone, musicians sound. Writers suck out their own brain matter and smear it on paper. The more you smear, the less you have, unless you replenish it somehow. But how to do it?

I just stole that from someone else, by the way. Years ago, when I was still working in New York and unknowingly struggling with this issue, a friend turned me on to an essay by Michael Ventura called The Talent of the Room. In a nutshell, Ventura said that all you need to succeed as a writer is the ability to sit in a room by yourself for hours a day, writing. And even if you could do this, you’d produce words but no guarantee of success.

I’ve read tons of books on writing, but none of them have ever come close to the wisdom in this short, punchy essay.

Ventura wrote the piece for LA Weekly. (The friend who sent it to me was living in California at the time and clipped it out of the paper.) Ventura later expanded his ideas into three columns on writing, but I’ve only seen the first and third. The first is best. For years, whenever I moved, I always made sure that I packed that column with me. Then they invented the Internet, and now you can read it at Ventura’s site.

Cover Reveal: Blind Spot!

I’m always explaining to people that I write my own books for personal satisfaction/gain/pleasure, but my day job is ghost-writing books for other people. Most of the time, the “authors” of these books ask me not to reveal that I’ve written them and this is enforced by our collaboration agreement. (The degree to which I write these books varies greatly; more on that process one of these days.) Here’s one of the books where I’ll actually be getting a “with” line.

HarperOne, a division of HarperCollins will release BLIND SPOT, a nonfiction science book co-authored by myself and UK senior lecturer Gordon Rugg in April 2013. The publisher has yet to release the product description, but basically: science. 

Rugg, by the way, is your basic code-breaker, computer scientist, and supergenius. Almost a decade ago, I profiled him for a WIRED magazine article about his then-new theories about the mysterious Voynich Manuscript—a bizarre medieval-seeming book that appears to have been written in an unbreakable secret code or unknown language. Check out high-res images of that freaky book here.

I later revised that article and presented the new version as the title piece in my nonfiction indie book, The Scientist and the Sociopath. (bottom)

The publishers have released this (top) version of the upcoming book, which is now up for preorder on Amazon and other sites. I used to proudly say ta-da! with each new cover, but I’ve since learned that covers can change on a dime. Could happen here, too.

My Handmade Standing Desk (with thanks to Emily St John Mandel)

After hearing so much about standing desks, I built one out of two wine crates and a set of quaint books I don’t use that much anymore: dictionaries.

I saw that the author Emily St. John Mandel built her own standing desk using cardboard boxes, and I couldn’t resist trying something similar.

I will probably need to raise the screen a little higher.

Dear New York editor:

We are in receipt of the galleys, which you were kind enough to overnight along with a cute little blue pencil, for us to use in making our corrections.

We didn’t think there would be so many, but boy howdy, there sure were some!

That little blue pencil got a workout, just as the three red pencils did, which you sent us first time around with the copy-edited MS.

We’re noticing an interesting trend in the errors, though: Things which we penciled in last time tend to have been mistaken by the typesetter, and resulted in unfortunate errors. The word “pallor,” which we hand-wrote in last time, is now “pallar,” which is not a word. The word “world” is now “worll,” which isn’t a word.

We sure will try to improve our handwriting for the next pass, believe you us!

Funnily enough, the large chunks of text which we added last time, and which were so large that you thought it best that we send them to you as electronic files—those, miraculously, were inserted into the text without any errors at all.

Our computer must write more neatly than we do!

We know we’re just the authors and don’t know much about running large, multinational corporations, but you guys should maybe think about using computers more often.

Back in the day, when I worked at one of my first magazine jobs, they had a “text processing system” that allowed all editors and writers to access a particular piece of copy and input changes. The screen was small and green, and if you touched the leg of its metal stand to another piece of metal in your office, the terminal would go down and you’d have to cross your fingers and hope you didn’t lose anything. But they were quite handy devices, and when I went back to college in the fall, all us journo students would sit around talking about the sweet “tubes”—as in cathode ray tubes—we’d worked on during our summer internships.

But that was a while ago, and we know that technology is probably obsolete by now. Maybe nothing has come along that would allow one person to access a file on a company’s “server,” input corrections, save the whole thing and pass it on to the next person in the queue. Maybe that is why you are sticking with the old system of mailing 500-page, one-of-a-kind documents in airplanes, rubber-banded together with blue or red pencils. Minus the airplane, that system has probably served you well. Poe used it. So did Dickens, I bet. And Austen.

So we guess if it worked for them, it’s darn fine with us. What do we know? We’re just the authors. We just hope you guys are writing off the expenses of all these flying pencils. Between Xeroxes and FedExes, this one book has cost us about $180 so far, but who’s counting? We’ll deduct it on our taxes. You probably will, too, but we’re not the ones selling oodles of copies of Moby Dick and Great Expectations to libraries and schools every year. So maybe you have oodles to burn.

So look for the MS. It should be there, like, tomorrow. Except for the pencils. We kept the pencils. If you need them back, just let us know and will overnight them.

Best wishes,

us

Cover Reveal: The new, improved cover of THE GIRLS OF ATOMIC CITY!

The Girls of Atomic City—take two!

My wife’s publisher cooked up a new cover to her WWII book, which pubs in March.

It’s a long story, which I’ll save for a rainy day. In the meantime, the pre-order giveaway continues apace. If you buy the book and forward a receipt, you’ll be entered to win a Nook ereader. Details found here.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's Birthday Weekend in Asheville

Today is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s birthday. So please, for the love of God, read The Great Gatsby or one of his short stories. Or something.

This past weekend, I went to visit the Grove Park Inn, a historic lodge in the town where I live. Every year on Fitzgerald’s birthday, the inn opens the suite of rooms the writer rented often when he was in town.

Truth be told, the story of the Fitzgeralds and Asheville, North Carolina, is an overwhelmingly sad one. Fitzgerald was in town visiting his wife Zelda, who was committed to a sanitarium in town. On these birthday weekends, the lodge decorates the room with the accoutrements of drunkards—beer bottles and the like, and a local literature professor greets tourists and shares some of the Fitzgeralds’ story. (Denise took some footage of our talk with Prof. Brian Railsback, and I hope to post some clips one of the days.) Among one of things we learned was that when Fitzgerald elected to stay off gin, he switched to beer, drinking as many as 35 cans or bottles a day.

Zelda Fitzgerald suffered her first breakdown in 1930, and by the time the couple arrived in Asheville in summer 1935, Fitzgerald was trying desperately to support her medical stays by writing commercial short stories. By the second summer, 1936, Fitzgerald had pubished his now oft-anthologized essay The Crack-Up, his mother had died, and his inheritance was keeping them afloat.

Grove Park Inn legend has it that he flirted with countless women while here, checking them out as they entered the hotel from the window you see here. He had at least one embarrassing, documented affair.

Fitzgerald famously gave an embarrassing interview to a New York Post reporter while in these rooms. The interview, found here, reveals him to be a hopeless alcoholic.

Fitzgerald died of cardiac arrest at the age of 44. Zelda outlived him, returning to Asheville, checking herself in and out of the sanitarium on Zillicoa Street. Some local scholars say she finally found peace here in the mountains. (They infer this from her paintings.) If so, the peace was short-lived. One night in 1948, as Zelda was locked in her room awaiting electroshock therapy, a fire broke out. She and eight other women were killed. She was 47.

The hospital grounds are in my neighborhood. Tour buses roll past there all the time, filling tourists’ heads with the inevitable claim of ghost sightings.

If you walk there you can find a little stone to Zelda’s memory, and this quote: “I don’t need anything except hope, which I can’t find by looking backwards or forwards, so I suppose the thing is to shut my eyes.”

I finally crack Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine—thirty years later!

When I was a kid, I read AHMM and its sister publication, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (EQMM), on a regular basis until I just couldn’t keep up with the subscriptions anymore.

I would also, from time to time, submit stories to these magazines during my teens. Shockingly, they were all returned with little white slips—the first rejections I ever got in my life.

Decades later, I finally have some good news to report on that front. This year I committed to submitting my short fiction to magazines on a more regular basis instead of self-pubbing them right off the bat. Besides Even, which ran back in August on Shotgun Honey, two of my short pieces have been bought by Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine (AHMM). I couldn’t be more thrilled—penetrating that market has (obviously) been a lifelong dream of mine.

One is a straight-up story of corruption I wrote years ago. The other is one I wrote this year. It’s set in Rome. I’ve been thinking of it as written in the voice of an Italian Jane Austen, if such a thing were even possible. Seriously, the voices of both pieces couldn’t be more different.

They’ll run sometime next year. I’ll post the info when I have it.

Pre-order The Girls of Atomic City now

My wife and her publisher are running a giveaway to drum up pre-orders for her book The Girls of Atomic City, which pubs in March. If you buy the book and forward a receipt, you’ll be entered in a giveaway to win a Nook ereader. Details found here.

Denise was told that more and more publishers are going with minimalistic language on the back cover copy for advance reading copies (ARCs). In fact, say the publishing geniuses, they want them to sound like movie trailers. Hence the copy here.