NYTimes Book Review

My first priority on Sunday morning, along with coffee, is to devour the New York Times Book Review. One of my complaints (one of many) is that so few books about workers in offices appear. Not good escapist reading, methinks.

Imagine my pleasure this morning when the lead review is Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris. Set in a white collar ad agency office. Looks like a real good read. I wonder who his agent is.

Much of Promiscuous Mode plays in an office, as does Festival Madness (between festivals). So many of us work or worked in offices, one would think there would be more business mysteries, thrillers (Thank You, Joseph Finder) and the like. Perhaps no one wants to read about their day, but then why the popularity of Dilbert? Dilbert WAS my day.

Last night S.O. read aloud the scene in Promiscous Mode where the worker bees were told that manufacturing operations were shutting down at Great Northern Shoe. Good characters, drama, tension, and even a been-there, done-that feeling. Why is this such a hard sell? I don't know. I really don't.

Larry McMurtry has a new book out, damned with faint praise. Let me tell you a horrible embarassing secret. When I first started as a writer and had one book to sell, I didn't know The Rules, and was a nitwit, in Ms. Snark's inimitable phraseology. So I prostrated myself and begged two authors to put in a good word for me. One was Larry McMurtry, who used to grade my papers. We shared a major and a university as well as the teacher/student relationship. I wrote a really stupid letter, which thank dog I didn't save, and of course, heard nothing. How many letters a week does he get like that?

The second scenario was even worse. I went to a reading my Peter Mayle, a uniformly nice man, and was last in line for the book signing, at which time I handed him an envelope with some of my novel and an SASE. Bear in mind he was on a book tour. Though I checked the mailbox for months, I never saw my SASE. I didn't know the rules, which are that an unpublished writer may never ever under any circumstances ask or beg a published writer to a) read your work, b) recommend an agent and c) waste their time. This should be the first thing taught day-one in any writing course.

I still feel the humiliation. Somehow, through luck or chutzpah your work has to reach the published author's attention without your having appeared to have done anything. A reading, maybe, or prescient remarks one made, I don't know, still haven't figured it out. Take one of their classes and be brilliant. Assuming time, money and whatever you write will be brilliant. Maybe show up with something polished and honed for 10 years that you pretend to just dash off? Guile, in other words.

Last words of a longish post. I have read two books on this week's best seller list, both of which came to the house via a roundabout way as ARC's. High Profile, by Robert Parker, was an ok read but not one of his best. I didn't like the ex-wife at all, and felt neutral about the new girl friend. Plot was o.k., ending too macho. Jeez. Family Tree I nearly didn't finish. Writing was O.K., just O.K, but these tear-jearky sentimental things don't ring my chimes either. Janet Evanovich rings my chines. Robert Crais. NOT James Patterson.

When Patterson retired from J. Walter Thompson and started writing full time, he used to put the names of the people who used to work for him into his books as murder victims. I knew one of them and was completely creeped out that anyone would do that. It's not as though they bid at an auction. The first book of his I ever tried to read had people hacking each other up with machetes in the first chapter. Read him twice, you might say. For the first time and the last time. Now who else can I knock today?

Why are so few women on the fiction best seller list? I doubt my Information Technology tell all will make it. So many projects. So little time. So few pats on the head. What do we do?

All together now. Suck it Up.

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