My Recent Morning Show Appearance

 I had a great time chatting about Thorpe on VIRGINIA THIS MORNING in Richmond, Virginia. Hosts Greg McQuade and Cheryl Miller were fun to talk to. They had each read the book, liked it a lot, wanted me to sign their copies, and asked great questions.

Bye Bye Old Year, Hello New

 

Well, that was 2010. 

The last night of it was spent at a party at the neighbor's house down the road here in rural Virginia. The clock was set two hours back so that we could celebrate midnight at 10 p.m. (the tradition started when the children in the group were small; now they're in high school, but we still do it.) Stouffer's lasagne cooking away in the oven. Tons of corn chips. A sausage dip in the slow cooker that, we all agreed, looked bad but tasted good. Cheap red wine. Beer.

This year I went to the Dollar Store and bought out their selection of Mardi Gras-style beads. Everybody, even the dogs, got slung with green, red, and blue strands. The cats were upstairs, as usual, under the beds.

The day before, the few other nearby neighbors, who are either not invited or choose, always, not to come, are warned that there will be fireworks at 10 on New Year's Eve. "The cheesiest fireworks display ever," as it's fondly called, by us, anyway. The guys are really into the fireworks and look forward to them all year. The usual supplier was sick, so a new source had to be found -- a process meticulously recounted to a rapt audience of us. 

A scaffold is set up in the road (it's a cul de sac) with Roman candles, sparklers, tubes, mines, shells -- the works -- lined up in a row on the wooden platform. One year the Roman candles got out of hand and the men had to run for cover -- the incident now a beloved part of our oral history. The women and children gather several feet away, ready to scream with feigned fear and real delight as the crackles, pops, and sizzles begin and the men jump around waving their barbecue lighters.

Last night the sky was crystal clear -- Orion is big right now -- and the air not too cold. At the stroke of "midnight," the first round of firecrackers was lighted. Wow! Ooooh! Wow, again! Yay! Then, like big professional fireworks, just when we spectators thought it was all over, came the grande finale. OMG! Fabulous.

Welcome, 2011.

Signing Books, Getting in the Christmas Spirit

Me at Books and Company, Lexington, VA 12-19-10

What is more Christmassy for a writer than hanging out days before December 25 in a cool small-town independent bookstore, signing your own book? Not much. Surrounded by happy, laughing book-people shopping local by buying books? Perfect.

You can't help but think of all those years of getting books for Christmas: now people are giving your book to friends and family. It warms the heart, just as reading A Christmas Carol does, every year, without fail.  

You, the author, are now part of that great chain of holiday book giving, going back to Gutenberg (well, maybe starting a few years after his printing press; it took awhile, after all, for non-manuscript books to catch on, not to mention literacy). Going back, anyway, to when you were ten and a favorite aunt gave you a leather-bound copy of Little Women for Christmas and you never looked back.

This Christmas, 2010, at the end of months of Gutenberg-like revolutions in the book business, I couldn't help but think, as I signed my book near home this week in Lexington and Richmond, that all the indies I came across in my recent book tour, from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., might not only survive but thrive once the New Book Order comes to pass. 

Independent booksellers have made it this far and now nobody knows what's coming next in the book business -- except that the race may go to the small and the nimble. Social marketing is changing the game by the day. Independent booksellers are getting a cut of e-book sales. Their superb customer service and ambiance are winning hearts and minds. A passionate reaction is emerging, insisting that the bound book shall not disappear. 

Anthony Powell, the English author of the 12-volume masterpiece, A Dance to the Music of Time, wrote that books do furnish a room. Let's expand on that and say that bound books do furnish a life.

So, while we still have them and hope we always will: God bless us -- writers, publishers, editors, booksellers, book buyers -- every one.