If this blog were more popular, I wouldn't give this one away. While there are many wonderful bookstores in Portland, my favorite place to buy books in Portland is not a bookstore at all, but rather the Goodwill on Grand St. The prices are relatively low ($3.50 for a used paperback is f------ ridiculous, but it's still better than Powell's), but most importantly, whatever employee organizes their books is a genius. The classics section is four shelves--you can browse through it all in fifteen minutes and get an incredible overview of English literature. They also seperate hardback fiction from paperbacks, so if you're cheap like me you don't have to see all those hardback titles that you don't want to spring for. Their non-fiction organization is great, too. My brother Dave has an obsession with birds and he found a single shelf devoted to them, chock full of old prints.

Labels: Book Lovers, Portlandia

My sister Annie is one of the most voracious readers I know. This has always been somewhat surprising to me, given that most of my friends who are heavy readers are also writers, whereas my sister Annie has zero interest in participating in the literary arts.

Annie is also unusual in that when she reads a book, she reads the last chapter first, before she procedes to the front of the book to read the rest. She claims that knowing the ending has never detered her from reading the rest of the book. (Incidently, she also sneaks peaks at Christmas presents before Christmas, and eats the middle of the Oreo before the chocolate cookies.)

I have always admired both my sister's reading habits and her ability to read books her own way. As for me, reading the end of a book is simply against the rules. I don't know if reading the end first would affect my emotional response. But I have too much respect the art of writing suspense to even give it a try. (Or perhaps I'm simply a coward.)

Labels: Book Lovers

About me and my book.

Labels: What They're Saying about my Novel

And another one at my alma mater, the University of San Francisco, on March 21st from 5-6 P.M at the Lone Mountain campus.

Labels: Tour Dates, World Leader Pretend

I'll be reading at Powell's on Hawthorne on February 26th. Stay tuned for more details!

Labels: Portlandia, Tour Dates, World Leader Pretend

I figured I'd post before the inevitable question is raised: isn't there a band named World Leader Pretend?

Yes, there is. And a song by R.E.M. too.

Here's the whole story of the title of my book. In its nascent form, World Leader Pretend was titled The Strangely Peaceful Citadel of Blue Orcs. I thought this title was hilarious: like a bad sci-fi/fantasy book. The only problem was that when I went to sell it people didn't think it was a funny, strangely appropriate title. They thought I was trying to sell them a bad sci-fi/fantasy book.

So I decided to change the title, for the sake of getting publishers to read past the first paragraph of my cover letter. The title I chose was World Leader Pretend. I chose this title in 2002. At the time, I don't think the band World Leader Pretend existed, and if they did, they weren't showing up on Google. I picked the title based on the R.E.M. song, which is about a person who "sits at his table, and wages war on himself."

This seemed a perfect analogy to my main character, who is devastatingly obsessed with an online war game. It also suited me on other levels, as the act of writing is like this, too: forcing yourself to sit still in front of a computer for 4 hours each day, 5 days each week, for weeks and months and years on end is also an act of war against oneself.

So the book got bought, eventually. I spoke to my agent and editor about changing the title back, but nobody ever got the original title. And then this band came along--and now I'm stuck with a novel that appears to be named after an indie rock band.

I just hope nobody decides to sue me. Then again, I could really use the publicity...

Labels: World Leader Pretend

David Rochester reviews World Leader Pretend

Labels: What They're Saying about my Novel, World Leader Pretend

I was invited by a friend to go to an author reading last night at the Portland City Club. There were 15 authors on the reading list, and I confess that I attended with some degree of trepidation, vaguely recognizing a few of the names on the author list.

My trepidation grew worse when I arrived 10 minutes early for the event, poked my head in the window, and discovered that the place was empty except for a woman setting up a microphone with one of those giant puffy heads from the 70's and a crate for the readers. There were no chairs.

Fortunately, Powell's was a few blocks away. I took a peek at the new fiction, the typical chick lit and tragic relationship stories, all set in different eras to somehow make them more enticing, and came back to the City Club lamenting the state of modern literature and wondering if V.S. Naipaul was indeed right about the novel being dead.

And then the reading blew me away.

First of all, the organizers of the event had a very smart format, where they gave the readers only 3 minutes to read. The authors, being authors, all went over by a few minutes, meaning that the 5 minute snippets were all the perfect length--I even enjoyed the poetry. The organizers arranged it so that 5 readers would read and then we would take a 30 minute break. There was also a bar, which happened to be selling my favorite winter beer at a cheap $2.

The best part of the event, though, for me, was the almost total lack of an audience. I am sure the authors who were there will disagree, but I had access to these authors whose snippets I had just heard and enjoyed for over an hour and a half during break times, and I was enjoying my favorite beer, and I was with my friend Peg who is less shy then I, and I had a great time hob-nobbing with some very eccentric writers without having to worry about some signing line that was a mile long.

I met David Oateswho wrote City Limits, a set of essays about his walk around Portland's Urban Growth Boundary. While walking, he invited several political figures to come along with him to discuss the plusses and minuses of the boundary, and the book is the result of the conversations he had.

David speaks with a fire in his eye, and has an obvious passion for his subject, and I have to admit I wasn't entirely sure whether he was serious or not when he told me he invited dead people along with him on his walk. (In the book, he imagines himself walking with John Muir and Italo Calvino, and what they would have to say about Portland's Urban Growth Boundary if they were alive today.) David is a great speaker, so I was surprised when he told me that Powell's wouldn't give him a reading at their store. Damn you Powell's, give us something meaty.

I also spoke with Monica Drake, whose novel Clowngirl is coming out about the same time as mine through Hawthorne Books. Monica was in the same writing group that produced Chuck Palahniuk of Fight Club fame. In the introduction to the book, Chuck talks about how Monica was the star of the writing group, not him. It's funny how fickle fame is. Her book sounds fantastic--it's about a girl who takes jobs as a clown to pay the bills. The snippet she read had me laughing inappropriately loud, which is what I do when someone reads something uncomfortable funny: in this case about how the only books she could find about how to be a clown were written by Christians, and so at her first gig she made Jesus and Mary figures out of balloons.

I also picked up Peter Rock's book The Bewildered, published through one of my favorite publishers, MacAdam Cage, and edited by Kate Nitze, who I adore. The book is set in Portland, and the prose Peter read in his snippet set me right on the Eastside of the Waterfront in a heavy mist, underneath the tangled freeway above. It's so lovely to read a book about a place you know...

All of this set me to thinking about the publishing world. All these folks are struggling authors, and all of them are talented enough that if they lived in New York, they'd be big names. But we live in Portland, and our books are published by MacAdam/Cage and Hawthorne Books. And the books are lovingly edited and beautifully presented. But not that many people read them or know about them.

At the City Club last night, talking to all these eccentric, yet egoless folks, I can't say for sure that this is a bad thing. I feel like someone with a wonderful secret.

Maybe it's best to be totally ignored...

Labels: Book Lovers, Portlandia

Last week, I reached that point (once again) in my rewrite of my new novel where the story seemed to die. It was frustrating, being at that point again, and so Monday and Tuesday of last week were very dark days, where I contemplated putting my head in the microwave. On Wednesday, though, I had a sort of revelation: if you're having so much trouble writing the story forwards, why not try writing the story backwards.

Dna os tahw I did saw siht:

I'd already written an ending to the novel, that I knew needed to be modified, so I went ahead and rewrote the last chapter. This worked so well, and felt so right, that I rewrote the second to last chapter, and the third, and the fourth. In the course of Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, I rewrote 100 pages.

I'm pretty excited. At this point, I might actually have a workable draft before Xmas, and can get it into the hands of a few editors for the holidays...

Labels: Writing Process