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The
Maplewoods Mirror #26 - June 2008
Welcome to my monthly newsletter on life and
writing. If you want to see my website for past issues and other
news, please visit www.chrismeeks.com.
In the last five weeks, I’ve publicized my new
book and attended three conventions, each for different reasons. Some
people have painful visits to the dentist. I go to conventions.
IN THIS ISSUE
WITH A LITTLE HELP
FROM MY FRIENDS
In searching through my slides the other day,
and coming upon a photo of my older brother, Joe Meeks, singing at
Woodstock (see above), I found myself humming the phrase, “Have a little
help from my friends.” I was reminded how I can use a little help from my
friends right now.
My latest collection of stories, Months and
Seasons, debuts on Friday, June 13, with a special reading with actors
at the Beverly Hills Public Library at 8 p.m. Friends in Los Angeles,
and friends across America, can help give my new book a shove in the right
direction in one of a few ways. Specifically:
1) If you’re in
Los Angeles, please come to the reading. Friday the 13th—a lucky
day. The library, located at 444 N. Rexford in Beverly Hills, will be
charging a $10 admission to defray costs with the actors, but I can say,
having been to one of these events before, it’s a good value for your
entertainment dollar. The four stories they’ll read are funny and
touching. You might even like the whole book if you choose to read
it. I’ll be signing, and Barnes and Noble will be selling. You
don’t have to buy. If nothing else, come for the party—free food and
drink, and I can say hi.
2) If you can’t make
the reading, but want to buy the book, buy it on June 13th from
Amazon.com. If there’s a surge in sales there, the sales ranking may
impress, and more people might notice. With more people noticing, my
book might be read by others.
3) If you can’t
remember to buy it exactly on the 13th, or you want to get it
elsewhere, any day or place will help.
4) If you like
the book, get copies for friends and family.
5) Importantly,
ask your local library to get the book. I want people to read
it, and with my wife as a librarian, I celebrate libraries. In fact,
whether you buy the book or not for yourself, your local library is always
open to suggestions from its clientele. I was pleased to discover
through www.worldcat.org that my last book, The
Middle-Aged Man and the Sea, is in thirteen libraries so far, including
the Library of Congress, Harvard, Vancouver Public Library (thanks, Gordon
Roback), Bozeman Public Library (thanks sister Tutti) and, my nearest
branch, the wonderful South Pasadena Public Library. WorldCat shows
you all the libraries where a book can be checked out, starting with the
nearest location.
6) If you write a
blog, please mention my book.
I don’t have a millionth of the budget that a
big publisher spends. I can’t get into the expensive library and
publishing journals such as Booklist and Publisher’s
Weekly. I’m just an author who loves writing, has a small
publishing company at work, and has found wonderful support from his
friends. You can help me get the word out.
Thank you, thank you, for all you can do.
BEA: BOOKEXPO AMERICA
2008
The BEA is an annual convention where 30,000
people in the book industry gather, and this year’s assembly was in Los
Angeles at the end of May. I went on a Friday, still not sure what I'd do
there, but I had invitations to my reading, copies of my book to give away,
a few copies of the first chapter of my novel The Laughter and Sadness
of Sex, as well as a dummy of the book using the cover design that my
friend Daniel created. I also had a list where my agent sent my
manuscripts already.
I discovered that there were no editors
typically at the big publishers’ booths, such as St. Martin's or Random
House. It was just a sales force. As one man at Grand Central
Publishers (formerly Warners) told me, "You won't find editors here.
This is just sales people talking face-to-face to the people they sell to
all year." When I showed him the dummy of my book, he said,
"What the heck are you bringing this around for? There's no one
to show it to. Sales people don't care. BEA is not about
acquisitions, and editors wouldn't want to see a cover design anyway.
Have you shown this to anyone?"
I told him there was no one to show it to
yet. He was the first. He pushed it away. I told him I
just wanted to see what BEA was and maybe I'd find some good books.
He said there was that. He wished me good luck.
As I wandered down the miles of aisles, I saw
displays of upcoming books and tables where sales people could talk to
clients more calmly. There were plenty of catalogues, and often free
advanced reading copies of books. In fact, books were given away everywhere.
At first I was in heaven, picking up this and that, but after about eight
tomes, my bag was getting heavy, and I realized I’d have to carry this
around all day. I shied away from more books until I came across a
friend in a booth who was happy to stash my heaviest bag.
Author signings at BEA drew lines of people
because not only could one get the book for free, but also the author then
personalized it. The longest line I saw was for Barbara Walters
signing her autobiography. Another particularly long line, inhabited
by mostly women in their thirties, was for a book by Mario Lopez.
Mario Lopez and fans
“Mario who?” I asked one woman who could not
take her eyes off of Mario. “He’s from Saved by the Bell,” she
said. Whatever.
Why doesn’t everyone go to the BEA? It’s
because it’s not meant for the consumer, and registration isn’t cheap: up
to $100 a day to get in. I’d never gone because the BEA is not in Los
Angeles often (about every four years) and because it’s not designed for
writers, unless you have a book out and your publisher wants to give
hundreds or thousands of them away with you signing them.
Tennis-great Billy Jean King
I did run into two writer friends and an agent
I know. All of them just liked the atmosphere of the place, hoped to
run into friends, and wanted to see what books were upcoming.
Despite what the man at Grand Central had told
me, when I came to the smaller houses, such as Milkweed Editions, I found
the head of the company was typically there, and he or she was also the
head editor, too. I pitched Laughter to Milkweed's publisher,
and he wanted to read my novel right away—to send it as an attachment by
e-mail. Three other publishers wanted to see it, too, those of Tin House
Books, Algonquin Books, and Europa Editions. Coffee House Press may
want it, too, but my agent has to speak with the head editor, who was not
there.
Hence, I left BEA feeling rather good. I
also brought out with me about eight novels, a biography on Polanski, and Cover
Letters and Resumes for Dummies, which might be great for my students.
One of the novels I found is turning out to be
a wild and funny book. Life is a Strange Place, a novel by Frank
Turner Hollon, is about a womanizer named Barry Munday who, in the first
chapter, is caught in a movie theater with a sixteen-year-old by the girl’s
father. The father smashes Barry in the groin with the blowing end of
a trumpet, and Barry loses his gonads. Poor Barry ends up in
the worst situations. It’ll be a movie next year called Barry
Munday.
All in all, a good convention.
LAWN AND GARDEN WORLD
I attended Lawn and Garden World in early
May. This yearly convention in Las Vegas, part of the larger National
Hardware Show, draws as many folks as the BEA, but instead of books, one
can see things you’d see in a hardware store such as fountains, hammers,
light bulbs, and things that kill kill kill those rodents dead through
poison or electricity. My friends Steve and Paula Hazard have a
company called Orcon that supplies beneficial bugs and organic repellents
for backyard gardeners. Live ladybugs are one of their most popular
items.
I happen to be writing my first true mystery,
partially inspired by my latest novel, Falling Down Mt. Washington, which
I completed earlier this year. It’s what I’d call a odd
mystery/thriller, recently sent out by my agent for consideration.
It’s about Ian Nash, a mild-mannered Ph.D candidate in theatre who is
writing a dissertation on David Mamet’s plays and persona. Ian is
taken hostage in a bank robbery gone awry when all he went there for was
the Starbucks nook. He now has to save his life.
My new mystery, untitled, has a protagonist who
owns a beneficial bug company. As much as I find Paula and Steve
sweet, this will be a gritty mystery with different characters than
them—but even here my friends help as inspirations. The story begins
when my protagonist sleeps with his ladybug one convention evening, and
when he wakes up in the morning, he finds her in front of the air
conditioner, arms out, dead.
Jennifer Lavoie, entrepreneur
and model, at the Lawn and Garden World
Thus I went to this convention to see what my
protagonist might see. In a single day, I absorbed the convention,
went to the Las Vegas Coroner’s Office, the regional courthouse, and a
community college.
I hunted down a possible apartment complex
where one of the victims might live, and I had dinner at the Paris casino
with friends who live in Las Vegas. In fact, they gave me a lot of
insider’s knowledge of the city that I hadn’t counted on.
Thus, books are born. I’ve spent a lot of
time outlining my novel, inspired by John Irving who I saw speak at the AWP
convention in New York in February. Irving stressed his approach to
writing a detailed outline, and for a mystery, I’m finding it quite
necessary. There are so many clues and turns to keep track of.
If I’m lucky, my new book will be a book found at a future BEA.
“SERIOUS PROSE” AT THE FEST OF
BOOKS
At the end of April, Ann and I went to the
Festival of Books at UCLA. For two hours, I signed books in the USC
Bookstore tent, while Ann wandered in the heat—over one hundred degrees—and
then found a nice shady spot to read.
The signing was fun, not only because some
friends and students showed up, but also because my colleagues at the
signing table were great conversationalists. They included
screenwriting guru Syd Field, who has seven books about screenwriting out
including his newest The Screenwriter’s Workbook; novelist
Gabrielle Pina, whose latest fiction is Chasing Sophea; and
memoirist Frances Kroll Ring who was signing her book Against the
Current: As I Remember F. Scott Fitzgerald. She was Fitzgerald’s last
assistant before his heart attack in 1940.
(By the way, for you trivia buffs: Ring’s book
was turned into a Showtime movie in 2002. Who played Fitzgerald and
Ring? The answer: Jeremy Irons and Neve Campbell.)
At 2:30, Ann and I went to a panel entitled
“Serious Prose,” with Tobias Wolff, Jane Smiley, and Ron Carlson, moderated
by L.A. Times book critic Susan Salter Reynolds. There was
much laughter for the serious topic—and many great points. Jane
Smiley, spoke about her book 13 Ways of Looking At the Novel.
To write it, she read what she considered the one hundred most important
novels of the last eight hundred years, starting with Boccaccio's Decameron.
Jane Smiley
She said that any novel is always dealing with
the issues of the time that it was written. For the first seven
hundred years, she said, the novel often focused on "What is
woman?" Is she property? Is she a free agent? Come
the 20th century, however, the novel often became, "Who am
I?" She says the search for identity is still where we are
now.
One of the more difficult questions that Susan
Salter Reynolds asked was, as novelists, did they feel their job was to
impart wisdom? After all, readers often look to writers for
answers. Were they purposely giving them answers?
Tobias Wolff
Each of the panelists felt that, no, that’s not
what they were doing as writers. Wolff never expected to be a writer
or instructor. He said, “If someone told me when I was young that I
could get paid for talking in front of people about reading and writing, I
would have thought you were nuts.” The consensus was they were
writing stories that they felt were important to them, and if other people
found wisdom in the books, fine.
Reynolds asked what single piece of advice
could they give to new writers. Wolff said, “Be patient. The
more you write, the better you get. It won’t happen overnight.”
Smiley said, “Finish the first draft. Until you have a first draft,
you won’t have the basic material to work with.” Carlson said, “Work
on a schedule. If you write on a schedule, the words come faster and
surer.”
Ron Carlson
If you go to the festival next year, the booths
and signings are interesting, but it’s the panels that have the richest
source of information.
READING
AT SKIRBALL CENTER
UCLA Extension Writers’ Program 15th
Annual Publication Party is a free event where you can hear eighteen
writing instructors read from recently published work. We each only
speak for five minutes or less—a great way to hear potential instructors
and excerpts of new novels, stories, and poems.
It takes place from 7 to 9:30 p.m on Wednesday,
June 11 at the Skirball Cultural Center. (Doors open at 7 p.m.; readings
begin at 7:30 p.m.)
DIRECTIONS: The Skirball Cultural Center is
located at 2701 North Sepulveda Blvd., just off the 405 Freeway and
Mulholland Drive.
Take the I-405 (SAN DIEGO FREEWAY) NORTH
Take the SKIRBALL CENTER DR. / MULHOLLAND DR .
exit
Turn RIGHT onto SKIRBALL CENTER DR.
Cross SEPULVEDA BLVD. and enter the SKIRBALL
complex
Inside the complex, drive north to the NORTH
LOT
ANOTHER JOE
For those of you who love the Cocker version
of “With a Little Help from my Friends,” you have to see this version
on YouTube by clicking
here.
The sixties never looked better or more vivid.
---
A friend is one who
knows us, but loves us anyway. -- Fr. Jerome Cummings
Friendship is born at
that moment when one person says to another: "What! You, too? Thought
I was the only one." – C.S. Lewis
See you next time,
--Chris
For reviews or more
information on my books below, click on the cover.
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