David Thayer

A few weeks ago writer Steve Clackson tripped the silent alarm as he entered the atmosphere that shrouds planet Author. I won’t rehash what Lee Goldberg said upon finding the intruder in his inbox because Lee has articulated his stance far better than I ever could, and besides, Steve has moved on to offer publishers his novel, Sandstorm, for free. The only catch is they must donate a dollar per book to the International Red Cross. Mr. Clackson may not be a published author, but he has a flair for internet theater and has become a lightning rod for all those writers, published or not, who feel they’ve arrived in Iowa just as the tornado touches down.

Like everyone else I wonder if I would’ve done what Steve has done. On the one hand it presents a crisis of conscience. Let’s say you find yourself unable to find a publisher for your novel. Your agent, if you have one, is not returning your calls. Said agent, being human, blames you for the chorus of rejection. You, being human, catalog your many faults as a writer, as a person, and recall the time you were drunk and mooned a busload of nuns. Oh yeah there is divine retribution.

By offering his novel for free Steve Clackson is giving away a kidney while the rest of us hem and haw. Hell, I have plenty of novels, only the two kidneys, and yet I do not want to give my work away for free. I don’t want my publisher to contribute to charity, I want them rolling in dough. If they want to stage an old fashioned ticker tape parade down Broadway, I’m game. I’d probably knock Miss America on her keister jostling around in that vintage Cadillac convertible. Yeah, I’m bad. I’m keeping my kidneys.

Financial markets were roiled with the announcement that Zadie Smith had captured the Orange. The Dowager Princess had Hilary Mantle on the morning line with the earl, who wasn’t nominated, as a her long shot. “He botched the writein campaign,” she said before leaving town.

Trading on the Piltdown Exchange was halted when a tour group ran loose through the pork bellies pit. Suspicion fell on the Earl’s hogs one of which was detained for submitting false pork belly bids. “It appears the hogs understand that in order to trade pork bellies, one must obtain said commodity the hard way.” Several hogs were photographed in morning coats and straw boaters which, according to exchange officials, “is both inappropriate and distasteful.”

G. Gordon Lightfoot and HR Holdem of Chopin Security Services said the invading hogs were equipped with proper ID or they would not have been admitted onto the trading floor. DCI Borchardt warned that anyone caught providing fake drivers licenses or recent photos of the hogs as “student drivers” will be subject to the full penalty under the law. “A word to the wise,” he said. Other officials wondered why Borchardt appeared to be three feet tall and wearing a morning suit. He was reported to be driving erratically down Hess Gasse in the direction of the Imperial Palace Bar and Grill. “It may have been one of the hogs,” a police official acknowledged. “We maintain height requirements.”

Scott Esposito quotes from Henry Kisor’s farewell address over at Conversational Reading. Kisor is retiring after three decades at the Chicago Sun Times and delivers a state of the union essay on the publishing business. He makes reference to the once promising new journalism circa 1973 and how it morphed into the creative non-fiction genre of the 1990s, a journey through fear and loathing on a national scale to the personal memoir whose platform more resembles the bathroom scale.

The new journalism conjures two writers Hunter Thompson and Truman Capote-Tom Wolfe. By 1973 the year Henry Kisor went to work as a journalist, Capote and Wolfe were a two man literary salon while Doctor Gonzo was locked in a gripping war of words with Richard M. Nixon. The twain met in the back seat of a limo where Thompson and Nixon discussed football during the Prague Spring of the McGovern candidacy. Daddy Dick won in a landslide setting the stage for the Watergate drama, the fall of Saigon, and the remarkable survival of democracy cannibalized by the introduction of child proof caps at a time when everyone had a headache.  Nixon used his teeth to open the cap and never mastered the usage of the tape recorder.

The New Journalism was about engagement with a powerful enemy and didn’t survive the latter half of the Seventies because it did not have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore. Nixon was a brilliant opponent, shrewd, emotional, sinister, sincere, a guy who had enemies and kept lists, who wanted to argue with every longhair in sight, to win them over. That’s the enormous difference between Nixon and GW Bush. What was a two way street in 1973 of thrust and counterthrust has become the deserted byway of disengagement. Bush exudes indifference so what the hell is there to write about?

Wolfe filled the void with clever books about bond brokers and real estate developers with a vaudeville routine that was the literary equivalent of a pie in the face. It’s no wonder that Henry Kisor’s valedictory seems wistful as much as angry. The days of rage are a fashion show or a miniseries rendered harmless through the sepia lens of empty sentimentality.

Geraldo reporting from the Campus of Mars Stator near Pasadena, California. I’m keeping voice down as the commanders of all four invading legions assemble here at Faventia Paterna Julia Augusta Castranova, the catchy new name for Pasadena. As the seige of greater Los Angeles enters its 93rd day the commander of the Vicesima Claudia legion has taken my advice and begun to query literary agents and managers before sacking and burning Riverside and Kern Counties. Between you and me and the statue of Athena on Figueroa this Roman guy hasn’t got a clue about writing a decent query. I thought it might be fun to share some of his early efforts at querying an agent.

“Represent us or be dragged in chains to Rome.” He wanted my opinion of this query. I just said Wow. This is really good, no, I mean, like really good. I had to lie because the honor guard had swords and stuff; whenever I argue with the commander, the honor guard jabs me in the ribs. They also want to meet Anne Coulter and kill liberals. What am I a dating service?

Here’s the revised letter: Dear Ms. Careerbreaker, We greet you and salute you on this day of the Spring Festival, we have the honor of addressing you in your barbarian tongue. Salve, Ms. Careerbreaker, may your ancestors shed the blood of many enemies! Let them be crushed under the heel of your boot and all their lands and property be forfeit! Salve! ( This went on for several pages. I made a few cuts before we all went to Kinkos.)

I changed the “be dragged in chains to Rome,” to “don’t miss this opportunity.” I also changed the font from garamond to Times New Roman. They got a kick out of that.

SASE or no SASE? We got around this one by dispatching riders from the Imperial Messenger Service along with skirmishers and scouts. As is customary, the riders will present the query and await a reply. We’re checking traffic…uh oh, here come the honor guard. This is Geraldo somewhere in Roman occupied California. Okay, I’m in Pasadena.

A hearty Booksquare welcome to those of you seeking jello salad recipes or more information about French Door installation. This is a literary blog but it’s also a truck driving dry cleaning shredded carrots kind of  place. I think that a certain author who appeared in Seattle with Lee Child over the weekend knows why Google sees jello salad and thinks Cornelia Read.

We cover the fiction waterfront here. That’s why our Washington DC correspondent is such a busy gal. After Mandy Rice-Davies was outed as a Soviet spy she left the sports desk to become the Druidical & Literary’s White House reporter. As soon as Mandy has one of those cool lapel microphones, which aren’t cheap by the way, we’ll be bringing our readers the latest from the Oval Office, the Pentagon, Dupont Circle and Lafayette Square. Speaking of DC we have the latest George Pelicanos title, Night Gardener for review.

Today is the US release date for Cold Kill by David Lawrence from Thomas Dunne. This is the third Stella Mooney entry set in Notting Hill, London. Our own DCI Borchardt is eager to read the novel and hopes to review it this month. The Ghosts of St. Michel by Jake Lamar is out today. This is an American in Paris featuring protagonist Marva Dobbs. The book is from SMP-Minotaur.

City officials cordoned off a puddle of water this weekend to preserve the remains of Yeti, the Abominable Snowman. The visiting beast is believed to have melted when temperatures spiked unexpectantly. “It’s global warming,” said an official who declined to give her name, but did admit to violating Wellington Leg’s anti-smoking ordinance. “I noticed the puddle after my Zippo flared,” she said.

Tourism Czarina Mrs. Frothingmunster was pleased that mythological creatures ” are choosing Wellington Leg as a destination.” The city’s tourism budget remains impaired after the “My Sharona” musak incident. “Visitors have commented that soothing background music is one of the criteria they use when selecting vacation spots.” Pine nuts were second on the list, she said, followed by proximity to Costco.

Several yards of yellow tape were deployed around the puddle awaiting the arrival of a forensics team from Alfred Hitchcock University in nearby Brainhampton. Suspicions were aroused after a pair of snow shoes were found near the statue of Venus in Blue Jeans on Art Mahaffey Avenue. “This part of town has suffered from urban blight,” admitted Hizzoner Jinmmy “Jimmy Stones” Warden. “Like I care,” he added.

Direct flights from the Himalayas to Wellington Leg have been a boon according to Mrs. Frothingmunster. “Prior to this we’ve only had the earl riding his unicycle to draw tourism. Anyone who’s anyone in the hospitality industry knows how pathetic that is.”

Hizzoner promised to stamp out graft before departing the scene. “We can’t have graft and corruption until we have law and order,” he said. “As soon as we have cable I think the situation will improve.” City officials reported an alarming decline in bribes in the first fiscal quarter. “It’s a leading economic indicator,” said a spokeperson. Members of the Wellington Leg Booster Club stood guard over the puddle to prevent evaporation. A rainy forecast may complicate efforts to preserve the scene. Larry Boa reporting.

Yesterday’s event at the Seattle Mystery Bookshop featured two terrific authors, a great bookstore, lots of customers and a torrential cloudburst that was universally regarded by staff, bloggers, and customers as un-Seattle like in its intensity. The only person carrying an umbrella was a meter maid who admired this reporter’s near classic Volvo cleverly parked under the water feature called the Alaska Way Viaduct. For book fans the event illustrated how well the business can work. Both Lee and Cornelia signed stacks of books and the line went deep into the store. There were plenty of reserves, pre-ordered and ready, for a lunch time crowd of damp but enthusiastic readers.

It was fun and pleasing to see customers clutching their books. People hold books differently than other objects or so it seems to me, crooked in their arms in a protective sort of way. In this part of town there are five bookstores within a ten block radius along First Avenue anchored by Elliot Bay Bookstore to the south. There are a dozen taverns, several tattoo parlors, and a Starbucks along that stretch of Pioneer Square, so once you’ve got something to read, you can take the Underground Seattle Tour or go ahead and get that John Updike ink on your forearm.

I’m reading John Carlos Blake for the first time. The Killings of Stanley Ketchel is set in the US in the first decade of the Twentieth Century. Harper-Collins indicates on their website that the book is scheduled for July release. I’m reading a hardcover, not an ARC, so I’m confused. If I tell you the novel is a boxing novel you’ll wrinkle your nose, but this is a boxing novel the way No Country for Old Men is a crime novel, although we are in the ring with Stanley many times in the course of the story.

I went to the Harper-Collins site to research the author because I like his style. There isn’t much in the way of info about John Carlos Blake. Harper has posted a Q&A about the novel. The page would be more interesting and involving if the dialogue had a human connection.
Part of the problem for a publisher the size of Harper-Collins is volume, the sheer scale of their output makes it tough to personalize each and every release. In addition, an author may not want to interact on the website with their audience.

I would like to see Harper-Collins, Penguin and all the big publishers push the envelope a little further with the pages they create. TWB was trying with their individual author pages using blurbs, and some graphics, but the pages lack the dynamics of an interactive discussion.

At some point Harper-Collins or Penguin or Hachette will figure this out. Launching a first time novelist is a tough task, so why not match the author to a lit blogger? I don’t mean simply sending an arc, but connecting the author to an existing blog,  introducing the writer and the work in advance of publication. This happens on an ad hoc basis now, as with the LitBlogCoop, but also on individual blogs, where bloggers recommend books. The platform for the genre is in place and the readership is ready and waiting.

The blank link on the blogroll is my attempt to add a Metaxu Cafe button to the already blanched One More Bite of the Apple. I don’t know why it’s blank. If I had the coveted blank link option I’d use it and send everyone into wild corners of the blogosphere, but I don’t have that option and won’t be doing that anytime soon. If you’ve driven around California maybe you’ve seen the sign for the Trees of Mystery near Calistoga. The greater mystery is why anyone would part with five dollars to visit a stand of trees. French tourists sure. They’ve come a long way, they’re tired, and all the signs are in English.

That said, I’ve been to Stonehenge forty or fifty times and the Vale of the White Horse. I enjoyed them greatly without deriving any immediate benefit other than being outdoors. I once encountered a column of Centurion tanks grinding their way toward Stonehenge. Tourists with that kind of firepower can make their own rules.

For reasons that are now hard to fathom a seventeen hundred kilometer transmission line was built from Inga Dam in the Congo to the town of Kolwezi on the Zambia River. The project took ten years to complete, delivering electricity from Inga to the mining province of Shaba when the Congo was called Zaire. Constructeurs Inga-Shaba was an American led consortium of builders, designers and engineers who defied the problems inherent and fnished the job in 1982. The President of Zaire, Joseph Mobutu, helped cut the ribbon and electricity flowed across the nation.

This was the height of the cold war. Rebels known as Shaba Tigers seized control of Kolwezi, backed up by Cuban troops and advisors from the now defunct DDR, remembered more fondly as East Germany. The Cubans launched mortar barrages from flat barges on the river, barges that belonged to Contructeurs Inga-Shaba. Kolwezi was defended by American construction workers and Bantu soldiers from Haute-Zaire, but Kolwezi was liberated by a brigade of Belgian paratroopers. The fighting aside, all of the players denied being in Zaire. Thus the Cuban troops, pulled from the war in Angola, were never there. The East Germans were never there, nor were the Belgians, Americans, South Africans, French and Russian advisors, Zambian and Rwandan mercenaries, none of them were there. The kidnappings, beheadings, diamond thefts, bank robberies, and aerial bombardments that continue to this day never happened either.

President Mobutu stole two billion dollars in US Aid money, money we still can’t find. Mobutu was overthrown and subsequently died, but his two billion dollars is resting comfortably somewhere. When I wrote Ways to Die in the Congo I focused on the kidnapping aspect and the missing money. It’s a novel, so I cut all the references to the events described above because they were not believable. The night Mobutu was overthrown soldiers from the provinces rode hotel elevators up and down because they’d never seen an elevator before. Unbelievable.