I don't get you, you leaf-obsessed monkeys!

This time of year gets me thinking about seasonal buying patterns. We live in a tourist town and I notice that tourists drop off in September and return in force in October. It’s as if the shock of the school year is just too much for mom and dad. They need to completely withdraw from public life for a month to deal with making lunch, getting kids up, and getting them hooked on extracurricular activities. But then, what? They get four weeks under their belts and they’re out in force at the drop of the first leaf?

How does that impact books sales? Damned if I know.

I use Novelrank to track my sales across the board, saving my Novelrank RSS to Google Reader. So now I know what Amazon is selling of mine almost to the hour, or whenever Novelrank updates. It’s sobering. I didn’t used to check my ebook sales everyday because they’ve been so piss-poor. Now I see their sales (or rather the lack of them) every time I log into Google Reader. I’m not sure it’s a good thing.

But it is interesting to see the fluctuations. Certain books sell well on weekends; others Tuesdays. I know that the secret hand of Amazon weighs heavily in this equation but it’s still fascinating to behold. My ebooks were up in September, my trad books down. The reverse is the case for October.

What the hell are you people doing?

Did you surf and buy ebooks during your September hibernation but you saved your dollars for impulse buys of “real” books in October? Are teachers suddenly figuring out that they need stuff for class in October as opposed to September? Is that why they bought my math and picture books in droves in October but not in September?

I don’t know.

One thing we discovered when we do book signings is how easy it is to trigger people to buy. Seriously, it’s easier to sell six books than it is to sell one. No one wants to buy when no one’s at your table. But if you’ve got three people hovering around the table, you are likely to get three more people come over. Once one person asks you to sign a book, five others want you to do the same.

Granted, I don’t think this is a universally human impulse, but I do think it’s universally American. Americans must be the most easily triggered buyers on the planet. They want whatever everyone else is buying. Amazon’s figured that out. I’ll bet a lot of business owners never do.

Also in October:

* I’ve been working on two ghostwriting books this month. Both have reached the copy-edited stage and we’ve seen covers from the publishers. The clients seem happy, if a little nervous. Everyone always gets nervous at this point in the process, when they realize that their words are going to be read by the world. There’s an instinct to retrench, to delete what might be construed as inflammatory.

* I’ve finished a second draft of The Marshal of the Borgo. Happy with it but still tinkering with the voice. I set it aside to deal with my work-work projects, work on a couple of short pieces, and fine-tune a collection I hope to publish before the end of the year. 

* Discovered I can read mags on my phone. Not optimal, but it beats reading them on my B/W Kindle.

* Denise got her galleys and her ARCs this month for The Girls of Atomic City. The galleys go to long-lead magazines, the nicer ARCs will be sent to booksellers and used for giveaways.

Talking to Sue Kushner about You Saved Me, Too

I majored in journalism in college and a lot of my friends from those days eventually left that profession for theoretically greener pastures. One went to work building websites for B&N. Another became the spokesman of his local power company. Still another became the principal of an elementary school. A while back, I came to realization that there were only a few of us in the old gang who still wrote for a living. That says more about journalism than my friends, I suspect. You go where you must to support yourself and your family.

Susan Kushner Resnick

was one of the people I knew back then who stayed in the traditional world of writing. We first met in a creative writing class in the mid-eighties, but would also see each other at the journalism school across the street. She, like me, seemed destined for both worlds—creative writing and journalism. Her mind and her work always impressed me, and it still does.

Today she’s a teacher and practitioner of narrative nonfiction. She uses the dramatic techniques of fiction to write about the real world. In 2010, she published

Goodbye Wifes and Daughters

, a book about a 1943 coal mining disaster in Montana that snuffed out the lives of more than seventy men. Kush’s voice is on every page, paying tribute to men she never knew and their families.

This month Globe Pequot Press released her third book,

You Saved Me, Too: What a Holocaust Survivor Taught Me about Living, Dying, Fighting, Loving, and Swearing in Yiddish

. It’s a memoir of the friendship that sprung up between Sue, then a young Jewish mom who was struggling with depression, and a 76-year-old Auschwitz survivor, Aron Lieb, whom she met at a community center.

The two are drawn together by their Jewishness, their quick wit, their charming personalities. Though they are separated by four decades in age, they form a connection that will ultimately sustain and nurture both of them. Sue becomes determined to help Aron have a good life and death.

Her voice is key to this book. Here she is talking about the day she officially because Aron’s health care proxy.

After we signed next to the X’s, I dropped you back at your apartment. Later, I told a friend what I’d done.

"Now you have three aging parents to take care of," she said.

Put that way, the new arrangement sounded like a burden, but I wasn’t worried. I owed you whatever you needed because you had given me something no one else ever had: a character test. Or, rather, God has given me a test in the form of you. Here comes an old man walking toward you and your baby. Will you smile and walk away? Or will you stand and talk, bring him home, put him on your heart? Will you tell the story that his little sisters didn’t live to tell, and someday ask your children to keep his memories pulsing? Will you embrace the task or ignore it? This is your test.

I hope I will pass.

It’s a very moving book, but a funny one too. Actually, kind of hilarious. And it’s gotten starred reviews and rave reviews from authors and the

New York Journal of Books

. Sue agreed to answer some of the questions I had after I digested the book.

How did your relationship with Aron morph from him possibly being a subject for an article you were writing into a book. At what point did you make the shift?

It wasn’t an abrupt shift because we started as friends, then I realized he might be story-worthy, which I think may have been an excuse to keep hanging out with him. Once a book proposal about him and his girlfriend was rejected by many publishers, I packed up the little cassette tapes and the steno notebooks that contained his life story. Then we were back to being just friends and our relationship got deeper and more complicated because he needed help navigating the medical system. I wasn’t officially reporting on him during those years, but I always suspected I’d go back to writing about him someday, when I figured out the story, so I kept taking notes whenever he said something interesting or hilarious.

That makes sense. The book feels remarkably “reported” in the sense that you’re recalling things from the early days of your 14-year friendship.

That’s the beauty of memoir —you can chronicle life as you live it. And he’d ask me how the book was coming along every once in a while. I’d say, ‘I don’t know what to say about you.’ It wasn’t until his dying day that I figured out the story I needed to tell.

And what was that, the voice? Every review I’ve read talks about how the book is written in the second person. That’s not a narrative mode that’s used very often.

I realized as I was driving to his deathbed that I was talking to him in my head. I knew he was unconscious, but I was telling him to wait for me. I’d always promised him that I wouldn’t let him die alone. At that point, I wasn’t sure he was dying, but just in case, I wanted him to know that I was holding up my end of the bargain. And he had to hold up his: no dying until I arrived. Once I had that conversation started in my head, the rest fell into place. The biggest challenge was giving the reader information about the past while staying in the conversation. Fortunately, Aron was 91, so I could write “remember when” a lot.

At one point in the book you assert that you and Aron are soulmates—a word normally used to describe a romantic connection with someone. How can a happily married woman, a mom, claim to be a soulmate with a man who is forty-four years her senior and to whom she’s not related to by marriage or blood?

When we met, I was 32 and he was 76. I know most people think of soulmates as romantic partners, but I prefer the definition of soulmates as two halves of one person. That dynamic could be dangerous in a romantic relationship. 

Not a question, just a wow: I loved how you managed to convey history—American history, WWII history, etc.—without making us feel like we were reading history. Well played, ma’am, indeed.

Thank you so much! The story brewed for 15 years. I’m glad the end result goes down easy.

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…

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.

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

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.”

Literary March Madness

I know nothing of sports. But I do know books. Which makes me very qualified to participate in my local bookstore’s Literary March Madness...thing.

Should you pick ‘em according to literary quality? Should you pick the book you think will sell the most? Or should you just guess?

What if you haven’t read all the books on the sheet; how will you pick then? I dunno. It’s just fun. In this round, it’s a no-brainer. Conroy’s over-the-top Southern melodrama beats Larsson’s over-the-top Swedish melodrama.

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