The Writer’s Life

Well, right there I’ve started off with a title both pretentious and presumptuous. “The writer’s life.” Pah! Every writer I know has an entirely different set of work habits, interests, ambitions, obligations and frustrations, not to mention his or her own definition of what it means to be “a writer.”

How about This Writer’s Life?

That’s better, I think.

Right now, this writer’s life is mostly consumed with the legwork of launching a book. The reality of the world of books these days is that writing a book and getting it published—happy, joyful accomplishments though these may be—is only the beginning. New books by the score fall upon the reading public each year like so much confetti fluttering down at a New Year’s celebration. So how do you reach the readers who would like your book?

It’s a particularly vexing question when your book isn’t easy to categorize, when it doesn’t clearly fit into any familiar—or trendy—genres. When I’m in the mood for a good whodunit of the “I say, your Lordship, it seems that someone has committed murder most foul upon Lady Agatha in the drawing room,” variety, I head for the “Mystery” section and look for the more discreet book jackets (the ones with the loud colors and big type, I’ve found, tending to run too heavily for my tastes to gore, psychopaths, mounting body counts, and hard-boiled tough guys). Travel writing? There’s a section for that. Biography? Sure. But what if, say, it’s a biography of an artist? Will you find it in “Art” or in “Biography”? What if it’s an autobiography of an artist? Where should that be shelved?

So let us take for a specific example a new book called Electric Dreams, which just yesterday I heard a reader had found located shelved in the “Automotive” section of a big chain bookseller. I don’t blame the bookseller—they have acres of books to shelve, and hey, this one looks like it’s about cars, right?

But it isn’t. Electric Dreams isn’t “about” cars, or the South, it isn’t an “environmental” book, even though all those things are important elements within the book. Fundamentally, Electric Dreams is a good, rousing, fun, true story, with great characters, about an offbeat subject, in the tradition of books like The Orchid Thief and Rocket Boys and Seabiscuit. All books that were themselves hard to categorize. I’ve seen Orchid Thief shelved in “Gardening” and Rocket Boys under “History.”

Right now I’m reading a terrific book, The Emperor of Scent: A True Story of Perfume and Obsession, which I can hardly begin to categorize. It’s involves a scientist and a revolutionary theory of how we smell scent, and the secret world of scent-makers, and the behind-the-scenes power struggles and politics of the scientific community—and really, in saying that, I’m only just glancing over the surface of this book. It’s got scads of weird science in it, and it’s funny, and the author, Chandler Burr, has an utterly individual writing style. In short, it is another book in the rousing-good-true-story-with-great-characters-and-an-offbeat-subject, and probably it will end up shelved under “Fashion and Beauty” in bookstores all across the land.

I can list you plenty more examples. My friend Phaedra Hise has a gripping true tale of a book called Pilot Error, in the reading of which I learned many engrossing and interesting (and sometimes disturbing) things about the world of flying and airplanes and crash investigators and air traffic controllers and piloting small planes, but once again the book isn’t about those things; rather, all those elements are threads woven together in the making of a good, compelling story.

The books I’m talking about here are the ones that you want to read even if you don’t imagine, at first, that you’d have any interest in the general topic (orchids, small planes, perfume, etc.). The story itself interests you, and then through the story you get fascinated with the subjects within the story, and the questions they make you ponder. Life, the universe, and everything.

So, anyway, one way to try to get people interested in your hard-to-categorize book (or in my case, in MY hard-to-categorize book), so that they will actually ask for it, hunt it down, clamor for it (oh that would be lovely), is by offering the name of some other well-known and somehow thematically related book as comparison.

“It’s Seabiscuit on wheels!” I’m telling everyone. Unlikely team of quirky underdogs. Rousing scenes of competition.

However, I think it’s about time booksellers set up a Rousing-Good-True-Story-with-Great-Characters-and-an-Offbeat-Subject section. Perhaps, admittedly, a catchier name is in order. That’s right where I’d go when I walked into a bookstore, though.

But this is where the good independent bookstores come into the story. These people are in the book business for the love of it. They’re readers. They are masters of the fine art of hand-selling, which means that if you wander into their shops, and you say rather vaguely, “I want, you know, a good rousing nonfiction story, kind of quirky, with good writing, and maybe an oddball subject,” the booksellers will lead you about gently by the hand and pick out several possible titles and tell you about them, and chances are good you are going to leave those stores with just the thing you wanted. A book you can’t wait to sit down with and read.

Like, for example, Electric Dreams…

Apropos of this topic, according to today's (March 11, 2004) issue of USA Today, in "10 years of best sellers: How the landscape has changed" by Bob Minzesheimer, "never have so many printed books been published: more than 1,000 new titles a week, nearly double the volume in 1993. "

And this:

"Publishers don't know why some books sell. Books often become best sellers to the surprise and puzzlement of their publishers, says [Michael] Korda of Simon & Schuster, who wrote a history of a century of best sellers, Making the List. 'That's why publishers find it so hard to repeat their success. Half the time they can't figure out how they happened in the first place.'"

Date posted: 03.11.04

May 4:

We see here that I've done about as good a job keeping my online journal as I've done keeping any other kind of journal.

"Where you been, woman?" you might well ask.

Well, North Carolina for one. I've been to Cary, to Pittsboro, to Raleigh, to Roanoke Rapids, and to Charlotte in the last few weeks. I am not insensible to the irony that I've driven all over hell and gone in an internal combustion vehicle, with gas prices what they are these days ($1.75 a gallon when I filled up the other day) to promote a book in which the battery-powered electric vehicle is heavily featured.

I'd like to say thank you here to Pete, Beth, and Sarah at McIntyre's bookstore in Pittsboro, to everyone at Quail Ridge books in Raleigh, to Linda at the Barnes & Noble in Cary (thanks for the coffee!), and to Annette at the Book Inn in Roanoke Rapids.

Those of you with the cruel misfortune to have missed my recent bookstore appearances have missed out as well on the opportunity to be duly impressed by the simple demonstration electric motor I built and have brought along for the delight and amazement of my audiences. An electromagnet too. Now don't you want to be sure to put one of my upcoming appearances on your calendar? I know you do.

May 12:

More on my recent adventures, in case you are all agog.

And on the role played by coffee in this writer's life.

I didn't start drinking the stuff until I was somewhere in my later 20s. Until then, my position on coffee was that the stuff was perfectly vile, a position you will agree was not without merit when you understand that the coffee I remember from my youth was either boiled into a tarry sludge in a stovetop percolator or spooned in freeze-dried granules from a jar. Not coffee's finest hour, either of these.

But then on a cold, midwinter's day at the tail end of the 1980s, my friend and bicycle-racing cohort Marcy suggested that our only hope for thawing out our toes after a long ride was to repair post-haste to the neighborhood coffee shop and order us a concoction known as the "house cap." The house cap (short for cappuccino, you understand--we are not talking about a jaunty something sported atop the head), as I recall, was a great froth of milk and sugar with a shot of espresso slung in practically as an afterthought. Imagine the role played by vermouth in a bone-dry martini, and you get the idea.

We know where this story goes, don't we my friends? One day you're innocently sipping your first house cap and the next you've got that hollow-eyed, desperate look of a confirmed java-head waiting for the first pot of the day to brew.

So lately, as you no doubt have gathered by now, I've been on the road on behalf of Electric Dreams. Thus, I find myself regularly faced with that paralyzing decision: do I take the leap of faith to assume there will be a decent cup of joe where I'm going and leave my portable, single-serving coffee press behind? Mind you, I'm not one of those people who needs coffee of the approximate darkness and density of a black hole, but neither do I like taking that first swig and finding myself wondering if I've accidentally poured myself a cup of herbal tea. Yegads, the crushing disappointment!

Not so very long ago, outside of your larger urban centers the South was something of a coffee wasteland; I acquired that coffee press as an act of self-preservation after a harrowing trip to the mountains where the coffee was weaker than a newborn kitten. It was around that time that I proposed the idea of a travel guide strictly devoted to the subject of coffee. A five-bean rating would mean "All is well--aqui se habla caffeine." A one-bean rating...no, it's too horrible to imagine.

But now Starbucks and its spawn have spread like kudzu across the land; pull up to the meanest rural outpost of a general store and the toothless codger who's been running the joint since the Roosevelt administration will kindly inquire as to whether you'd like organic soy milk in your Sumatra.

One despairs of the homogenization of the American landscape, that uneasy feeling that if you were blindfolded and set down at the door of a suburban Home Depot or Blockbuster that you wouldn't have the faintest inkling of where in the country you might be.

But yes, I'll take the soy milk.

More thanks here--to Stacey at B&N, Richmond. To Lisa at Borders in northern VA (thanks for the cake!) Thanks to Bob Oldham at the Science Museum of Virginia.

(tulips in bloom in front of McIntyre's books in Pittsboro, NC)

May 21

Getting tired of scrolling down yet? Never ye fear, a new page will be inserted soon.

This week here in Richmond, Carytown Books and the James River Writers Festival are hosting the Readers Against Banning Literature, a "72-hour reading marathon" that began Wednesday afternoon and will run until tomorrow (Saturday) afternoon. In shifts, volunteers are reading from books that have been challenged or banned at some time in the last decade.

This is me, on the 2-4 AM shift Thursday morning, reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, and trying hard to refrain from doing all the voices in (dubiously accurate) accents. We've been listening to the latest installment of H.P. on CD during family travels, and I've been listening to P.G. Wodehouse on tape during mine, and the net result is an overwhelming urge to say things like, "Oh, rahther," and "I daresay," and "I should very much like a spot of tea and a biscuit, don't you know?"

Readers sit in a comfy chair in the window of Carytown Books. There's a speaker set up outdoors to carry our words to the masses. The masses were notably in absence at 2 AM. Sensible souls.

And this is Angela, who relieved me on the 2-4 AM shift, by taking over at 3 AM to read. Vonnegut, as I recall. Thanks Angela!

And below is resident cat Zoomer, doing what sensible souls do between 2 and 4 AM.

That black blob in the foreground would be Zoomer.

Fellow resident cat Cleopatra, on the other hand, was having none of this napping business. After climbing into my lap and trying to knock over the microphone for a while, she resumed chasing imaginary mice all over the shop.

After grabbing perhaps half of the customary forty winks, and with my usual last-minute rush of chaos and disorder, I headed north to Frederick, MD for a Borders event. Thank you to Darla of Borders for a warm welcome to Frederick. And to the Ungers, mom and son, a pleasure to meet you and your young friend.

May-June 2004

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