David Thayer

If one metric for blogging success is the amount of Romanian spam received then this blog is a “runaway train with the dead man switch disabled” ( Wellington Leg After Dark). The post with the most from the archives is Mystery Solved: The Earl Fell Victim to an Abalone Attack. Spammers from around the globe have focused their attention on the aftermath of the Earl’s ill-advised surfing adventure off Santa Cruz. Faithful readers will recall that the earl fended off a Great Red, the most feared abalone. Red Abalone often reach a circumference of ten inches; if one calculates the distortion salt water provides, factors in the curve of the world, allows for global warming and the side-effects of cheap sunglasses, it’s easy to see why a Great Red in the wild would be really scary.

Skeptics thought the abalone incident was a “cheap publicity stunt” ( Wellington Leg Before Dark). If that was the case why are spammers from Western Australia, the Outer Hebrides, and Alberta so convinced otherwise? Professor Moriarity, an expert in Inadvertant Communication observed, “I think it’s obvious that the earl’s adventures have leap-frogged its intended audience to reach a dedicated cadre of Google bots in search of freedom of choice.”

Prudentia Chalfont-Smythe ( Her Lyrical Poetry) believes that under her stewardship One More Bite of the Apple would achieve a measure of respectability heretofore denied: “I think this abalone nonsense has kept us out of the New York Times.” Repeated calls to the Gray Lady went unanswered she said.

Prudentia will traveling this week, she goes on to say, which means the blog will lie fallow until she returns. The rest of the staff will be composing a mission statement to be presented to Management on All Hollows Eve. The dowager princess likes the Tigers, but that may be a ploy to curry favor with Detroit PD. She does hope her memoir will be selected by Starbucks although there are some racy bits from her days as an LA real estate developer. Century City, C’est Moi is a no holds barred if substantially false account of her adventures as a studio chief.

I’m sure by now our corner of the blogosphere is bursting with articles about the literary-genre divide which, for the average person, is an invisible crack in the sidewalk. I’m sure you recall avoiding sidewalk cracks, I certainly do, but the invisible variant was created by Billy, the only kid I knew equipped with 3D glasses. Billy called you out for stepping on invisible cracks. I had no idea he would go on to a career in marketing, or that he would wear his special 3D glasses many stories above the pavement in Midtown as a guru hired by industry so that Billy could tell them what it was they did for a living. This is how hedge funds were created. The Shopping Network. Billy did away with tokens to create the Metro Card; tokens were fun because you could stack them on your night table and feel prepared for the week.

Right after he dropped acid, Billy became a publishing guru. Believing  the stop lights on 57th Street to be the Aurora Borealis, he set out to bring clarity to the book world. He saw four thousand pin holes in his ceiling tiles and knew that if bookstores were divided into four thousand sections, he could spend the rest of his days drawing helpful diagrams, maps really, to navigate his burgeoning creation with the help of teenagers hired to direct traffic. Thus the wandering customer would be directed to the subcategory their interest demanded, or be told “we don’t carry that,” if the whim struck.

It has occurred to Billy that his device may be confusing to some and that many a weary customer, most of them middle-aged, lack the pioneer spirit to comb through the sections in search of that elusive book. Some are discouraged and leave without buying anything other than water to combat dehydration. Under fire, Billy created a New Releases Table heaped with all sorts of books with only their newness in common. New is the best genre of all. New: it even sounds good.

Elections in the DR Congo took a turn yesterday when one candidate sent tanks and troops to the home of the first runner up in the hopes of blowing his brains out. The object of this attention was holed up with more than a dozen foreign ambassadors including MONUC officials from the UN. A runoff is scheduled for October and it should be noted that over 70% of eligible voters cast ballots. Joseph Kabila is in the lead: his father, Laurent, overthrew Joseph Mobutu several years ago. Laurent Kabila was assassinated after he refused to honor pledges to the troops who fought for independence, choosing to import soldiers from the Great Lakes Coalition as a palace guard. The DR Congo used to be called Zaire and before that, the Belgian Congo. This is the first free election since independence in 1963.

When Mobutu was overthrown troops from the provinces entered the capital, Kinshasa, their first trip to a modern city. They rode elevators up and down in the city’s hotels while Mobutu slipped across the Congo River to exile in the ROC, the Republic of Congo. Mobutu’s sons drove around collecting gambling debts that night before they too escaped. Mobutu pere made off with a few billion dollars in American aid money, funds we have never been able to locate. We want our money back. Consider it a refund.

Kdogos are boys forced into military service by various armed factions. They are rounded up in refugee camps and given weapons along with an amulet to signify their status. Needless to say the atmosphere in the Congo has been dangerous for women and girls with shifting groups of soldiers and militia controlling towns and villages. Weapons are modern and plentiful, unlike most things. Let’s hope this election brings the Congolese people some peace after more than a decade of institutional insanity.

I’m reading Kate Atkinson’s CASE HISTORIES and enjoying her somewhat disjointed portrait of her private detective. She takes on the madness of vanished children from the points of view of surviving loved ones and then distills her character’s reaction through his experiences with these special people; Atkinson does a wonderful job of making this difficult group accessible despite the circumstances or, better yet, more accessible because of what has happened in their families.

With the earl imprisoned ONE MORE BITE OF THE APPLE has taken on a more professional tone, more of a literary blog than the mad blatherings of a novelist without portfolio or with the sort of portfolio that might land Newt on the cover of Vogue. This alteration had driven fans in some countries, Japan, for example, away while pulling some of the Eastern Bloc, Italy and Germany. Again our solid coterie of retirees in Costa Rica seem to visit no matter what’s going on, a tribute to the effects of retirement or the diminished state of daytime television. I don’t think Oprah discusses Mothra that often because if she did this blog would be out of business.

I’m trying to think of a creative way to make this more interesting, to focus on authors featured here even when they don’t have a new release. This thought is enshrined in its very own paragraph since it is unrelated to Mothra, Oprah, things to do in Costa Rica. What shall we do with this thing?

I’m not sure I can pinpoint the precise moment that popular music became meaningless dreck. Sure you can blame it on Barry Manilow, but he coexisted when rock ate its young. Las Vegas called. They washed ashore with glitter lapels and a few precious tubes of Brylcreem for the pomps. No I think Barry’s off the hook. All the powder blue tuxedoes can’t be laid at his doorstep because The Clash weren’t even born yet. Think of the mass hysteria resulting from booking acts boring enough for the White House or the National Christmas Party. They’d applaud Perry Como’s disembodied cardigan. Black people are off the hook too, despite Barry White and Lionel Richey. Those were white guys owning Studio 54 when disco made hip replacement surgery inevitable.

Writers don’t have a Las Vegas to go to when they start to suck. There is no handy alternative universe, no White House bookings, no Long Island wedding industry to prop that shit up. When the prose is bad a whole bunch of vicious critics rip it apart, guys like Newt from Georgia on Amazon. They gotta say it or Pat Robertson will send a hit squad to speed you on to heaven.

Maybe there could be a town somewhere for writers in decline. Never mind the young and struggling. They’re hip, they’re okay. Let’s have a town with forty bookstores, sixty libraries, a town where a fading hack can get some sunshine. It would probably have to be in California or Spain, somewhere warm. Where did all the Rod McKuen books end up? Bodega Bay? Oh no that’s where Hitchcock filmed The Birds, dude. Imagine the stress of that after decades of decline you got birds all over you, big ones, cormorants, turtle doves, red tailed hawks. Where is that literary Las Vegas?

It doesn’t take long swinging around the Lit blogosphere to realize how individual blogs are. Bud Parr reported that 300 bloggers have joined his Metaxu Cafe. Even someone without a blog joined although they left again, but 300 is a nice round number. I try to visit all of them over a period of time and it always amazes me how unique they are. There is nothing monolithic about the lit blog community; interests vary from children’s books to fantasy. Some blogs report the news, others describe the travails of writing, and one or two just thump the tub. John Baker has been interviewing lit bloggers asking why they blog, three favorite blogs, why they read fiction.

Now Bud Parr is asking for nominations for favorite blog entries among Metaxu Cafe’s membership. It’s worth noting that he went on vacation after making this announcement. Some of my favorite blog entries? It’s hard to compete with Steve Clackson’s launch of his novel SANDSTORM and the email exchange with Lee Goldberg. People were banned, dude. Banned.

I’ll have to give this question some more thought, check the Metaxu Cafe roster. This is a club that has me as a member, a cautionary note to be sure.

When Sirius, the Dog Star, rose in the heavens the Romans knew it was campaign time. Their legions would depart winter quarters, receive their marching orders and as their great general Marius once said, “go tune somebody up.” The onset of summer has the opposite effect in the publishing biz: when the dog star rises, activity slows. They don’t even trade Alfonso Soriano. Only Philadelphia stirred in the hazy heat but Philly isn’t where the publishing houses are. Of course the trading deadline has passed and publishers know that from now on authors have to clear waivers before being dealt.

Behind the scenes, though, things are happening. Writers conferences and conventions are in full swing. Rookie camps are full and scouts are looking for the next Big Thing. Your reporter is no exception, straddling both sides of the Mendoza Line, the mythical goal of all writers. Polishing my manuscript for submission, scouting post offices for relative insanity levels, proofreading, and rewriting.

I’ve been asked to review two books for January Magazine, Jason Starr’s LIGHTS OUT and George Pelecanos’ THE NIGHT GARDENER. I’m excited by the opportunity to review for January and hope to rise to the occasion; both are good books. I just finished LIGHTS OUT the first time I’ve read Jason Starr. I think the release date is in September. The working title for THE NIGHT GARDENER was MISSION MEN, before the manuscript went into galleys. Titles are funny things.

I’m reluctant to share a lot of what’s happening in my life as a writer because much of it is boring. There’s the typing part which has evolved into keyboarding and that sounds worse than typing. Every once in a while there’s a trip to the post office to get in line behind the woman mailing forty boxes of stuff to various nation states and postal codes hither and yon. What always amazes me is when the post office dude asks “how do you want to pay for this?” the lady’s reaction unfolds in a series of rummaging for coins, dark glances, and repetitive asides to her six year old who doesn’t have a major credit card handy or enough pennies to cover shipping and handling sufficient to fling those forty boxes into the system. We’ve already been through the fragile prologue. High explosives? Any drawings of Che Guevara or Joe Stalin? Insurance? Stamps? Live hogs at auction? ( I just want to beg the post office dude: please do not offer any more options to this person. She’s not even listening, man.)

I’m holding up my end of the bargain, I think, standing there with my manuscript box. I’m ready for the questions: go ahead and shake the box, pal, yeah, turn it on end. It takes more time to mail a novel than to write one, or so it seems, because one thing about the post office is this: they ask the same questions every time, culminating with the method of payment, which, for reasons the PO feel make it more human and accessible they’ve trained their workers to offer an array of options, credit card, debit card, cash, low down payment pay as you go no interest for seventeen years, and what I suppose was a well intended customer service thing has turned into a showstopper where the undecided form an effective commercial blockade and the entire nation grinds to a halt while you start hoping that Vesuvius will erupt, anything, just pay the man. Your carefully addressed box is bleeding from every orifice and by the time Our Lady of the Boxes dredges through the contents of her purse some sort of New Ice Age will devour the city and no one will be able to read your book or anyone else’s due to the extreme cold. Or, the recipient of your manuscript will think it was mailed from the trunk of a Pontiac by the guy from Goodfellas who wasn’t as dead as everyone supposed: DeNiro and company didn’t need to shoot him, they could’ve asked him to mail something, you know, run to the post office, and he would’ve shot himself.

Tomorrow we’ll discuss the SASE.

Literary agents who blog are now a fixture. Miss Snark has found an audience for her upstream view of the the industry, but other agents, like Jennifer Jackson and Kristin Nelson are blogging. Ms. Jackson has links to her clients who blog, an innovation that makes sense. I’m not certain what the status of Agent 007 is these days, but agents are on my mind. If you’re not sure what a literary agent is you may want to cling to that innocence, but if you’ve just finished the novel a decade in the making, the fun has not even started. If you want to have that novel published by a major house you’re going to have to find an agent.

I met my agent in a hallway during a conference. We didn’t talk about what I was working on. He was taking a break from the pitch sessions underway at a hotel ballroom. Steven J. Cannell approached to ask where the urns had gone, which I took to be a philosophical question, where have the urns gone? Bert told Stephen we were out of coffee until the three o’clock break. Cannell nodded, looked at me and said, “where have we met before?” Hollywood? Bali? The rooftop garden at 90 Pine Street? The correct answer on the tip of my tongue was: Nowhere have we met before.

Bert’s theory is that people who work in Hollywood assume they know everyone and when they go to other places like Portland, Oregon, they bring this assumption with them. If I’m talking to you it’s because I know you, otherwise why would I talk to you in the first place? I was thrilled. So, Bert and I talked with Cannell until a wrangler appeared to whisk him off to a radio interview. That left my future agent standing with me in the wake of implied celebrity. Cannell said it took him eight years to find an agent for his series of novels.

Eight years. He wrote The Rockford Files. I was musing about this tidbit when Bert’s eyes narrowed. “You’re a writer, aren’t you?” My first impulse was to deny this accusation, get busy shifting coffee urns, make myself useful. But I nodded and admitted that I didn’t know Stephen J. Cannell, that we hadn’t met on Bali or the roftop garden at 90 Pine Street. Bert handed me his card. A few months later we signed a contract. This is one way to meet an agent.

Now I need an agent for my mystery series. Bert doesn’t like crime fiction. I’m querying and submitting. I hadn’t thought about the necessity of having two agents, it was difficult enough landing one. But this is the age of specialization and I don’t want an agent trying to sell stuff they don’t enjoy themselves. An agent requested The Working Dead. I ‘ll send the manuscript today and start working on something else. Anon.

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.