HelenKay Dimon

In the "things any author would love others to say about his or her work" category…

Author Lynn Freed wrote a memoir called Reading, Writing and Leaving Home.  When asked by The Week to name what she viewed to be the "Best Books", she pointed to The Lover by Marguerite Duras.  The pick isn’t all that interesting but her reason for the choice is worth a look.  It goes like this:

A book that I keep within reach to remind myself of what literature can do with life.

I’ve read the quote (not the book) a bunch of times because it’s a pretty powerful statement.  I’ve read books that made me laugh, cry, stand in awe of the author’s talent, think, believe, feel something.  Freed could be talking about that, but I’m not sure.

This sounds more like fiction to me, but I wasn’t there:

NON-FICTION: TRUE CRIME
Attorney Matt Dalton with Bonnie Hearn Hill’s PRESUMED GUILTY: What the Jury
Never Knew About Laci Peterson’s Murder, and Why Scott Peterson Should Not Be on
Death Row, to Peter Borland at Atria, for publication in December 2005, in a
very nice deal, by Laura Dail of the Laura Dail Literary Agency (world).

On the admission front:  I am a true crime enthusiast.  By that, I mean true crime books not the actual commission of crimes.  Unfortunately for the accused, I tend to believe whatever the authors say in this context.  Very bad, I know.  One memory I have is of reading Joe McGinniss’ book Fatal Vision about Jeffrey MacDonald’s  conviction for the murders of his pregnant wife and children.  I read it the first time and thought – the bastard is guilty.  Since its original printing there’s been quite a bit of controversy about this book.  The argument goes something like this:  McGinniss "lured" MacDonald into talking, McGinniss had an agenda and McGinniss edited the facts to fit his conclusion. 

You’re probably thinking: what’s wrong with McGinniss, doesn’t he know that’s the job of the prosecutor?  Anyway….

A few years later another book came out.  This one, Fatal Justice, had a very different view of who killed the MacDonald family and the culprit they fingered wasn’t daddy MacDonald.  If you look at the comments for both books on Amazon or B&N, you can see people – many who likely are planted commentators – have very strong views on the who, what, where and why of this one.  MacDonald’s site is pretty clear where he stands, but that shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.  You don’t actually expect him to say, after all this time, "hey, I did it" do you? 

In the interest of more disclosure:  I know one of the members of his current defense team, Tim Junkin.  Good lawyer.  Good writer.  Good guy – when I got married he sent me the biggest bunch of flowers I have ever seen in my life and that kind of thing wins my life-long devotion.

So, what’s interesting about this – except the flower thing, of course – is that I’ve read both books and find that my initial impression hasn’t changed.  See, I read the McGinniss book first and more than once before reading the opposition book.  There’s no question my views on MacDonald and his guilt have been shaped by McGinniss (and the TV movie that followed).  Is that fair to MacDonald?  Don’t know, but it will be interesting to see what happens when the DNA testing is done. 

Bottom line: I still think Peterson is guilty as hell.  It’s hard to imagine this book will change my view, but I’ll likely read it anyway.

We all joke about Nora  – okay, I do – and her ownership of the bestseller lists and romance awards and….everything.  This is pretty cool.  If you’re too lazy to follow the link or keep reading, she is donating $500,000 to a Katrina fundraiser.  She says:

Bear with me now. It’s generally my policy, when I donate funds to keep the matter private. In this case, since I’ll be making that donation as a member of ADWOFF and as part of this fundraiser, I feel we’re all a part of the final tally. As Wym and Sue and others have said again and again, every single dollar counts. We’ve proven it does. It counts a lot.

So as a member of ADWOFF, I’ll be sending in a check for $500,000.

We’re not just building one house, helping to give a family the foundation to make one home. We’re building more than ten.

That’s what we’ve done as a community. And that’s a powerful act.

I’ve been known to say I’m not big on inspiration. But I’ve been inspired countless times these past two weeks.

Nicely done and eloquent at the same time.

Put this one in the read-the-entire-contract-next-time file: 

An ex-DEA agent writes a book and sends it to  University Press. All good so far, right?  Wrong.  He signs a publishing deal without an attorney and without knowing anything – anything – about book contracts.  And, here’s the ending you’re expecting:  he ended up giving away rights he didn’t mean to give away: 

”We talked about it, and I signed,” Doyle said. ”Shame on me, I never consulted an attorney, but he was a nice guy and, frankly, I was flattered just to have the thing published.”

The book came out about a year later. In the meantime, Doyle’s editor left the company and Northeastern University Press was taken over by University Press of New England.

The book didn’t exactly rocket up the best-seller list. Doyle said the publisher did nothing to promote the book, got him no speaking engagements and didn’t push it to bookstores or to Hollywood. But according to the contract he signed, the publisher gets half of any TV or movie projects that came from Doyle’s book.

As luck would have it, Doyle’s daughter ran into an old college classmate, Neal Flaherty, who works for Benderspink, a movie production company with a list of recent hits including ”Red Eye” and ”History of Violence,” and she gave him a copy of the book.

”I couldn’t put it down,” Flaherty said.

Flaherty’s company would like to option the book for a movie or TV series set in Boston. But the pay-out to University Press makes it a financial non-starter. Doyle is currently trying to negotiate an equitable arrangement with the publisher so the movie deal can happen.

Now, I don’t fully understand why giving up a cut of the money makes this a "financial non-starter" since some money is better than no money.  Rather than dissect it, we’ll just consider This a lesson to us all.

This is not an Ode To Stalking.  It’s an Ode to, uh, something else.  See, I’ve always wondered about the thrill of seeing one of your auto-buy authors in person.  Readers go to signings, lectures and all kinds of fun wait-in-a-long-line things to see the people who write for a living.  I mean, we’re not talking about Clive Owen here.  We’re talking about writers. 

In the interest of disclosure, I’ve gone to a bunch of author workshops.  I’m as guilty as everyone else on this one.  I’m just not sure why I engage in this behavior other than to, maybe, pick up some priceless tidbit or otherwise get inspired.  Also, in a scientific way, I find the "how I do it" tales worth some of my time – not particularly relevant to my life since I can only write one way, but still worthwhile.  And, I’ve always loved The Call stories and enjoy hearing about subsequent sales, too.  Maybe that’s enough to explain the outlay of cash and the transportation to and from.  Dunno.

While I search for my answer, Clay Steward of  Purcellville, Va already has his.  He traveled to the National Book Festival in DC this weekend.  The Washington Post described the atmosphere like this:

This is what it’s all about in the end:  a guy who gets into a line that’s already 130 yards long.  He’s smoking a cigar, but he’ll have finished it long before he can get McCullough to sign his new copy of 1776. 

But isn’t reading these guy enough?  What is it about a few seconds of face-to-face contact that makes him brave these incredible lines?

‘It makes them real,’ Steward says.  ‘It takes them out of the stacks up at the Library of Congress and makes them a person, a human being.’

Now, whether or not you believe authors are human beings is a different issue.  I can’t help you there, but I can attest that there’s something about that face-to-face that’s hard to beat.

Stephen King’s column in Entertainment Weekly centers on Bret Easton Ellis’s new book, Lunar Park, and the whispers about how the book is a type of Ode to Stephen King.  So, basically, this is King talking about someone doing an impersonation of King.  [Yeah, I know, but read the sentence again because it does make sense.]

One of the many reasons I like King – I just can’t help it – has to do with his unapologetic and forthright discussion of authors, books and the literary world.  In an Oprah-like move back before Oprah pimped books, King helped to launch several books from obscurity to prominence (see:  A Simple Plan) which, as a writer, I can’t help but admire.  And, he’s never afraid to say something honest even if it causes a flinch.  For example:

I’m not quite a Bret Easton Ellis virgin.  I read American Psycho just to see what all the bellowing was about, and thought it was bad fiction by a good writer, the sort of hectoring narrative you can’t wait to get away from at a party, delivered by a guy who’s backed you into a corner and keeps telling repetitive anecdotes while his drink dribbles slowly onto your shirt.

That’s pure King.

Just as the rush of Summer Reading Lists dies down, the Fall Reading Lists arrive.  Me, well, I’m holding out for the mid-February Reading List ’cause February is cold and dull in DC.  I’ll need something to do to ignore a pressing deadline since going outside won’t be an option.  The newest list is from Seattle and, really, don’t all great things come from Seattle – coffee, the internet….most serial killers.

I don’t have a problem with the newest "must read" list.  Many of the books have been pumped and reviewed to death (yeah, I’m talking about The Tender Bar, On Beauty and Indecision – hell, I pumped them in earlier blogs, kind of).  This one talks about these three and a host of others, some I hadn’t heard of which might be a good sign.  It will be interesting to see if these now are the only books we’ll hear about for the next few months. 

And, what about this quote:

As Nelson noted, there are 200 adult hardcover books this fall with first printings of more than 100,000 copies. That’s more than 20 million copies in a marketplace that ranges from Costco and Amazon.com to the local independent.

If that’s true, why do we only hear about the same 10 books? 

This weekend is the 2005 Festival of Books sponsored by the Library of Congress.  It’s held in DC, not a publishing mecca, but that’s where the Library of Congress is located, so….

There will be speeches, booksignings and general book frivolity.  The list of attending authors is worth a look.  I like the way they’re divided into genres.  Yeah, no romance.  Of course not.  Not a big surprise but still, would it kill them? 

Now, I have to warn you that the genre categories are a bit murky.  In a somewhat confusing distinction, there’s a Children category and a separate Teens & Children category.  To further add to the confusion, David Baldacci is in the Children category.  There’s a joke in there somewhere, but I’ll let it go.

There are some romance-like folks hidden in these groups.  Sandra Brown is listed under Mystery &Thriller.  Diana Gabaldon is included under a category with a definition that can only be described with the legal term "overly broad" – Fiction & Fantasy.  Meg Cabot is in there with the teen and kid stuff, but not just the kid stuff because that would be silly.  And, if you wanted to chat with Lynne Cheney – I do not know, someone might want to – she’ll also be hanging out in the Teens & Children pavilion.  Never thought of Cheney and Cabot together before, but there’s a first time for everything.

If nothing else, the pompous meter in general DC area should be off-the-charts thanks to the History & Biography crowd.

Please excuse this brief blogging break as I direct a message to someone in need.  Feel free to skip ahead to the *** sign.

Okay, to the person who keeps searching for Neil Strauss’ book The Game and the quote about Randall P. and keeps ending up on my site thanks to this ….you need to take a valium or get a life or something.  Really, you’re freaking me out. 

I can only guess that you – yeah, I’m betting I’m talking to you, Randall P. – are trying to keep track of how many of us are talking about you and your general skanky behavior via the internet.  Fine.  But, really, stop.  Looking yourself up on goggle now and then is okay so long as you don’t, you know, make your obsessive self-involved checking too obvious.  You failed on that point.   See, here’s a hint:  conducting a google search on your name repeatedly in the span of an hour is one thing – a thing that requires therapy or a polo mallet to the side of your head – but following that same search back to my site 11 times in that same hour, well, that makes you look crazy. As in:  go buy the bucket size of valium ’cause a single serving ain’t gonna do it.  Not to point out the obvious, but you should have been able to tell after, say, the 3rd or 4th time you jumped to my site from your goggle search, what I was saying about you.  Get help.    

***For everyone else, today’s the last day of the ROMAID ebay auctions for Larissa.  Go here and bid on books and critiques and other amazing book-related items.  Go, go, go…..

Mike has found a new reason to be ticked at romance novels.  Actually, Mike and Hayley, who I assume is Mrs. Mike, appear to be in a rather accusatory mood regarding fairy tales, chick lit, chick flicks, romance novels and female porn.  Apparently, they view these as all the same thing, or one leads to another…or something. 

They define "female pornography" for us in Boundless Webzine, described as "A Website Of Focus On The Family":

[F]emale pornography has for decades been an accepted pastime, sliding under the radar of the religious right and instead being promoted as an acceptable distraction from the worries of life. But what exactly is female porn? Is there a definition for this newly discovered blight on society? For the answer to this question, we need look no further than the honorable Mr. Webster and his infamous dictionary of words.

pornography – 3: the depiction of acts in a sensational manner so as to arouse a quick intense emotional reaction

Catch that? Emotional. We contend that the job of the chick flick, romance novel, and love song is to arouse a quick, intense emotional reaction.

Then, after using the term "Female Pornocopia" in a sentence – yeah, they did – they say the problem is when a woman who has been pumped full of unrealistic expectations starting with the fairy tales of her innocent youth then later sees a chick flicks or finishes a romance/chick lit novel.  See, after all that exposure to cool perfect guys, she has to return to the deadbeat loser she’s married to and he can’t possibly be expected to live up to her expectations. 

They end – right before the plug for their new book Marriable – with this:

If the number of romance novels and chick flicks you consume in a month exceeds the number of dates on your social calendar, you may be getting out of balance.

Hmmm.  Or….movies and books are forms of entertainment and not the evil spawns of Satan.

Somebody read the book and tell me the ending.