Joe Finder's Blog: Writing Tips, Obsessions and More

Announcing New Blog & Website

2009-07-06T21:57:00.002-04:00

With the new book, VANISHED, and Nick Heller series, a new website has also launched. It went live today at http://josephfinder.com!

The new website features a clean look, more information about VANISHED, multimedia, updates, tour information, and a new blog. This is the last post on this blog at blogger.com. Please visit http://josephfinder.com/blog for new blog posts.

Free PARANOIA eBook

2009-07-01T19:39:00.004-04:00

"Masterfully told and thoroughly engrossing."
—People Magazine

Read the bestselling novel PARANOIA for free through dailylit.com or get it on Kindle.

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY talks about "The Cowl"

2009-06-15T14:15:00.002-04:00

...And even more news today: The Cowl, the comic created in conjunction with my forthcoming book, VANISHED, is the topic of an article in today's issue of Publishers Weekly. Read the article here, read more about VANISHED here, and stay tuned for the website publication of The Cowl!

Don't Mess with Joe

2009-06-15T12:10:00.004-04:00

The photo - courtesy of my Twitter friend @juliagoolia - speaks for itself.

June Writing Tip - What I Learned from Movies and TV

2009-06-15T08:53:00.000-04:00

The text of my June writing tips newsletter -- if you'd like to subscribe, you can sign up here.

Last month’s writing tips newsletter compared writing a novel to pitching a film or TV show, and I got a little flak for that from some acquaintances. In certain highbrow literary circles, it’s fashionable to pretend not to like blockbuster movies or network television shows. Cambridge, where I used to live and teach, is full of people who will tell you how terrible it is that no one wants to read because everyone just wants to watch “American Idol.”

Well, I watch “American Idol,” too. And “30 Rock.” And “The Office.” And “24” – especially “24.”

I go to blockbuster movies, too, and I think the Bourne movies are some of the best entertainment this century has produced so far. Not only that, but I think they’ve made me a better writer.

Why? Well, as Jack Bauer says, “I don’t have time to explain!”

No, I’m kidding. Movies and TV have fundamentally changed the way we read. Our attention span is much shorter, especially in this multi-tasking Internet age. Movies have to grab the viewer right away, and this is equally true for thrillers on the page. I’m not just competing with other authors, I’m competing with a medium that delivers bright colors and loud noises and extremely attractive people. My job is to deliver those things with equal impact inside a reader’s mind, instead of on a screen.

Critics can argue about whether this is a good thing. I just know that it’s true, and it’s changed the thriller genre accordingly. Pick up an early thriller – Wilkie Collins, for example, or Edgar Allan Poe, or even John Buchan – and you’ll see that they start very slowly. I’m looking at a copy of The 39 Steps right now; the writing’s wonderful, the atmosphere jumps off the page … but the pace is leisurely, almost stately. Here’s part of a paragraph from the first chapter:

“That afternoon I had been worrying my brokers about investments to give my mind something to work on, and on my way home I turned into my club – rather a pot-house, which took in Colonial members. I had a long drink, and read the evening papers. They were full of the row in the Near East, and there was an article about Karolides, the Greek premier. I rather fancied the chap. From all accounts he seemed the one big man in the show…”

The paragraph goes on well into the next page. Don’t get me wrong, I love this. I love the atmosphere, I love the way Buchan disrupts Richard Hannay’s polite, orderly, boring world. But in the 21st century, I don’t have that luxury.

Not only are today’s readers are more impatient than they used to be, but they’re also more used to figuring things out for themselves – and thriller readers, at least, want to. Part of the fun of reading a thriller is figuring out what’s going on – so it’s up to me to keep the action moving, and explain only the bare minimum as we go along. Characters have to do and show instead of telling, and nothing kills momentum faster than what Hollywood types call “Jake the Explainer” – the character who walks onscreen, often apropos of nothing, to tell the viewer or the reader what’s really going on. (The Austin Powers movies make fun of this cliché by calling that character Basil Exposition.)

Chapters are shorter than they used to be, and I have to be creative about ways to keep the pace moving: varying my sentence length, making sure each chapter ends on a note of suspense, keeping excess narration to a minimum. Authors no longer have the luxury of extended (or self-indulgent) descriptions of places or things, and must make the most of the reader’s time and attention span.

Now, you can go too far with this. We’re all familiar with thrillers (naming no names) that are nothing but dialogue and white space, and read like movie novelizations rushed into print. That’s a wasted opportunity. I write novels rather than screenplays because I want that extra space and time, for characterization and backstory and the details that bring a book to life.

Watching High Crimes become a movie, for example, gave me a new appreciation for the things I could do in the book that the filmmakers, in 120 minutes, didn’t have time for. In High Crimes the novel, Claire and Tom have a child, and she’s still one of my favorite characters (based on my own daughter at that age). The movie didn’t have room for her. While the film is faithful to the book’s major plot points, I’m grateful to have had the space to develop Claire’s and Tom’s backstories.

Five Lessons Thriller Writers Can Learn from the Movies:

1. The audience must identify with the main character, no matter what. As much as I’d like to convince my wife otherwise, Jack Bauer is not a role model. I wouldn’t want to be him (well, not most of the time), and I’m not even sure he’s a good guy – but man, I want him to survive, I want him to succeed, and I want him to annihilate the opposition. How does “24” do this? By keeping the focus on Jack, and keeping the stakes as high as possible: a life-and-death situation, compressed into the smallest possible window of time. Jack has no time for introspection or meetings, so neither does the audience; survival is the imperative, and we all identify with that. Making him the odd man out — facing skeptics, bosses who want him fired, Senators who want him jailed – gives us additional grounds for empathy. We know he’s right, but it’s even more pleasurable when we see him confounded and frustrated at every turn by people whom we know are wrong. It makes us root for him all the more.

2. Drop the audience into the action as late as possible, and take them out as early as possible. Think about how many thrillers you’ve seen that start with the hero on the run, already in jeopardy, although the audience has no idea why. The James Bond movies have made this into a tradition, upping the ante with every new opening sequence. It doesn’t matter why James Bond is running for his life, but you’re glued to the screen before the opening credits roll. Likewise, once the bad guys are defeated, the story is over. Rewards and punishments are implied -- and if you give too much away, you’re limiting your options for a sequel.

3. Backstory should come up as the audience needs to know it, not in one big lump. If you start with your hero in peril (see Lesson #1), how the hero survives is more important than how the hero landed in peril – but the audience will still want to know why it happened. A good movie thriller will dole this information out in carefully rationed pieces, as part of the action, rather than stopping the action to deliver one big flashback.

4. Show, don’t tell. It’s a cliché, but this is what the movies are for. In fact, it’s one reason screenwriting instructors advise against voiceovers; the audience needs to be able to figure out what’s going on from the action on the screen, not by having someone explain it. (See “Jake the Explainer,” above.) This applies to character, as well as to action. Think about how much we learn about Indiana Jones just from seeing him risk his life to save his hat.

5. Don’t overexplain. This is not exactly the same as #4, as what I’m talking about here is your story’s resolution – what screenwriters call “Act III,” when good triumphs over evil (or not, depending on what kind of book you’re writing). Someone I know refers to this as “the Scooby-Doo ending,” and you want to avoid it. The days in which Sherlock Holmes explained it all to Watson (and to the reader) are gone, at least from the thriller genre; the reader wants to be able to figure it out for him or herself, and needs only a minimum of confirmation that his or her deductions were correct. Let the reader connect the dots himself — but give her the dots to connect.

I’ll be fascinated to see how Paranoia and Killer Instinct evolve from page to screen. I’ve seen two different screenplays for Paranoia, and assume that further changes will be made as the movie is filmed and edited. The inevitable cuts from the books will cause me some pangs – after all, I created those characters, and I wrote those stories – but I’m confident that the movies will stand on their own, not only for people new to Paranoia and Killer Instinct but also for those who love the books as I do.

Raymond Chandler, one of the genre’s pioneers, understood the synergy of books and movies, and moved between them with equal facility. Discussing his early experience in writing detective short stories, he might just as easily been talking about his screenwriting career.

“The demand was for constant action; if you stopped to think you were lost,” he wrote in The Simple Art of Murder. “When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.”

I can’t add much to that…

Films for Thriller Writers, A Survey Course

2009-06-15T08:46:00.002-04:00

Thrillers on film and TV are research for me. Here are a dozen that taught me a lot:

The Third Man (1949). Old school. Joseph Cotten has no idea what he’s gotten into, and neither have we, except that we all know that nothing is what it appears to be. The Third Man is also among the original, and still one of the best, sources of that time-honored convention of thrillers -- the major character we never see until the very end, when his presence and influence is suddenly obvious throughout the whole story.

The Day of the Jackal (1973). Another great book, another great movie. The clock is ticking, literally; throughout the film, the director keeps showing us shots of clocks, to increase our sense of urgency as the Jackal stalks DeGaulle. Also, this movie has no soundtrack music, after the first five minutes. We’re in the Jackal’s world, not in movie-world. We know nothing about the Jackal, and it doesn’t matter; what matters is what he’s doing now.

Three Days of the Condor (1975). Here’s something I didn’t realize until I looked this movie up on IMDb: the average shot length of this film is 5.8 seconds. No wonder it makes viewers breathless. It never lets you settle down, just as Robert Redford doesn’t get to stop moving. It’s remarkable how well this movie holds up, and the fact that much of it is set in and around the World Trade Center gives it special resonance.

Marathon Man (1976). Once Babe Levy (Dustin Hoffman) realizes how little he knew about his brother and his brother’s world, his own world is transformed into a menacing, sinister place. We’re dropped into the action with Babe, given only as much information as he has, and forced to run with him. (And who can forget those immortal words, “Is it safe?”)

No Way Out (1987). Surprise, reverse, reveal; it doesn’t matter how unrealistic a plot is, if you keep the action moving fast enough and you give the audience a reason to root for the hero. No Way Out is actually a remake of a classic 1948 noir film called The Big Clock, starring Ray Milland and Charles Laughton, except that No Way Out adds a great Cold War-era framing device, and one last astounding twist at the end. No Way Out is also an excellent example of how you don’t need to get the research right if the story is compelling enough: one key scene finds Kevin Costner fleeing his pursuers in the Georgetown Metro station, when everyone familiar with DC knows that Georgetown has no Metro station, and the station in the movie is actually one of Baltimore’s.

Fatal Attraction (1987). An example of how little you need to make a thriller – one man, two women, a child – and an example of how much we can learn about characters from small details: Alex Forrest’s hair, Dan Gallagher’s open-necked shirt, and need I even mention the little girl’s pet bunny?

The Vanishing (1988). The Dutch original, not the American remake. A couple stops at a gas station, and the woman disappears. Three years later, her baffled and grieving boyfriend starts to get letters offering to tell him what happened to her. We see the story almost exclusively from the boyfriend’s point of view, and learn the woman’s fate as he does – with one of the most terrifying final moments I’ve ever seen. The audience’s imagination is often more powerful than anything you can put on the page or the screen.

The Silence of the Lambs (1991). I’d put this on a list of top ten film adaptations. Like the book, the movie gives the audience only as much information as it needs, and – except for the scenes involving Catherine Martin’s kidnapping – keeps narrowly on Clarice’s point of view. It also gives us one of the most memorable villains in any genre, in Hannibal Lecter. I’ve watched this movie just to try to identify exactly what makes Anthony Hopkins so frightening. It’s his elegance, his politeness, his complete detachment and immunity from the squalor of his surroundings, and more … I’m still trying to figure it out.

The Fugitive (1993). Nonstop action, and our hero’s adversary isn’t a bad guy – he’s just a man doing his job. This is Man against the System, done perfectly. The Fugitive ups the tension by allowing us to root for the hero while we admire and sympathize with his adversary. Is any film scene better than the one where Harrison Ford says, “I’m innocent,” and Tommy Lee Jones says, “I don’t care”?

The Usual Suspects (1995). It’s hard to say too much about this movie without revealing its secrets to anyone who hasn’t seen it – but if you haven’t seen it, you need to. It is a quintessential tour-de-force, in which the villain – Keyser Soze – winds up being the central character, although we never see him onscreen (or do we…?).

Runaway Jury (2003). We don’t know until fairly late in the movie whether the main character, played by John Cusack, is a good guy or a bad guy; we’re just sucked into trying to figure out why he’s doing what he’s doing. When we do find out his motive, we learn it with a series of images and a bare minimum of narration. We also have more than one protagonist – Dustin Hoffman, as well as John Cusack – who may or may not be at cross purposes, and a terrific showdown of adversaries (Hoffman and Gene Hackman in the courthouse men’s room) that is not in the original source material. In fact, the driving issue of the movie – gun liability – is completely different from the driving issue of the book – cigarette liability – which makes last month’s point about story being much more important than the background details.

The Bourne Ultimatum (2007). Arguably the best thriller of the decade so far. What’s so great is how it moves non-stop, and carries us along even though we barely know what’s going on. We identify with Matt Damon’s character from the first frame, racing with him from one heart-pounding scene to another, picking up information as he does, and just enough to understand what’s going on. This movie is a stripped-down, efficient machine, a model of showing rather than telling.

Joe on CNN's "Campbell Brown"

2009-06-13T07:56:00.006-04:00

Joseph Finder's recent appearance on CNN's "Campbell Brown" discussing the latest spy scandal -- the State Department mole with "Top Secret/SCI" clearance and how he got away with leaking some of our most sensitive classified intelligence to Fidel Castro for 30 years -- along with Spy Museum director Peter Earnest and CNN's Jeffrey Toobin.
Watch the CNN appearance on Youtube.

New piece for The Daily Beast

2009-06-10T14:04:00.003-04:00

Spies at State: how Fidel's mole got away with it for 30 years.

Read the article on thedailybeast.com.

Video of Joe's Interview on "Hannity" (Fox News)

2009-06-06T21:15:00.004-04:00

On June 5, Joe appeared on "Hannity" (Fox News) as part of the Great American Panel with Fox News Legal Analyst Peter Johnson, Jr. and Republican Tennessee Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn.

Watch Part One of the Interview

Watch Part Two of the Interview

Variety announces a movie deal for KILLER INSTINCT

2009-06-05T14:08:00.002-04:00

Chockstone Pictures and DeFina Film Prods. have optioned the 2006 bestselling thriller KILLER INSTINCT.

Chockstone's Steve and Paula Mae Schwartz will produce with Barbara DeFina. Roger Schwartz will be co-producer.

"The book appealed to us on two levels: as a terrific thriller and also as a parody of the technology industry that is scary and funny at the same time," Steve Schwartz said.

Steve and Paula Mae Schwartz most recently teamed with Nick Wechsler to produce "The Road," which Dimension releases Oct. 16, and the Schwartzes are co-exec producers of the Terrence Malick-directed "Tree of Life."

Read the full article on Variety.com.

Watch Joe on "Hannity" this Friday

2009-06-03T11:15:00.004-04:00

Joe will be on "Hannity" (Fox News) , which airs from 9-10pm Eastern, on Friday, June 5.

VANISHED makes the Chicago Sun-Times' Summer Reading List!

2009-05-31T10:39:00.001-04:00

In today's Chicago Sun-Times, reviewer David Montgomery recommends VANISHED for summer pleasure reading: "a perfect combination of action and intelligent suspense, led by a promising new hero."

Thanks, David!

A Reader Asks...How can writers power up their openings?

2009-05-27T13:00:00.001-04:00

"In POWER PLAY and KILLER INSTINCT you had a killer opening that raised not only great story questions but high stakes in a flash-forward moment before returning to a slower paced revealing of the protagonist's everyday world. These openings also set up the Thriller feel to the book nicely. Any suggestions on how writers can power up their openings, or other areas of their stories to nail that 'thriller' feel?"

Here’s the trick of writing a thriller: you need to grab your reader right away — but at the same time, you need to introduce them to a world that feels natural and normal. Because thrillers are about disruption of the ordinary world and our attempt to restore normalcy. So . . . I always recommend starting in the middle of things — as late as you can into a story, where something big is just about to happen. And the most important advice I can give you in this regard is to be stingy with backstory. Don’t load down the introduction of your main character with biography and description Be frugal. Parcel it out. Think of a good action movie, where we meet the hero living his or her life, doing something — and then the inciting incident takes place in the first 10 or 15 minutes. Gradually as the movie (or book) goes on, we get to know the hero much better.

Yet another jacket photo?

2009-05-17T11:17:00.002-04:00

Discovered: a long-buried photo of me from my days as a member of the 80's New Wave synthpop group A Flock of Seagulls. (Thanks to my Twitter friend @juliagoolia). Rawk on.

Joe's Rock 'n Roll Fan

2009-05-15T15:15:00.000-04:00

Here's another fan of Joe's -- Keith Richards (The Rolling Stones). This is his home bookshelf. Spot the Joseph Finder novel (hint: it's paperback and red).

May Writing Tip - Research: A Writer’s Best Friend and A Writer’s Worst Enemy

2009-05-15T08:52:00.001-04:00

The text of my May Writing Tips newsletter -- if you'd like to subscribe, you can sign up here.

My name is Joe, and I’m a research-aholic.

This should surprise no one who reads my books. In fact, I’ve taken some teasing about the length of the “acknowledgments” sections of my books, because so many people have been so generous about sharing their expertise with me.

I have always considered “Write what you know” one of the most useless pieces of advice a beginning author gets. Write what I know? If I’d started out writing what I knew, I’d have come up with 10 or 12 pages about a kid in upstate New York who wanted to be a cartoonist (I did, actually; see my monthly newsletter for more about this). Granted, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, among others, did very well in turning their life experiences into literature – but I wanted to write thrillers, and my life was not thrilling.

No, for me, writing was all about having my characters do things I could only dream of, whether that was taking the Concorde to Paris, escaping assassins on the streets of Moscow, or wining and dining beautiful women in Boston’s finest restaurants (which I am now able to do, thanks to my wife and daughter, but you know what I mean).

And let’s face it: research is the fun part. Who wouldn’t want to ride along with cops, learn to shoot guns (lots of guns!), and talk to interesting people about the cool things they do? It’s much more fun than sitting alone in front of a blank computer screen, trying to figure out what happens next.

Research has also given me some of my best plot points and material. A weapons expert once showed me how to smuggle a gun through airport security and on to a plane. Believe me, I could not have thought that one up by myself.

But every hour you spend doing the fun stuff of research is time you’re not writing. And I’m here to tell you that research, while fun and often necessary, is addictive and dangerous.

It’s also a great crutch. All novelists feel like impostors at times; it’s only natural to feel unqualified and insecure in what you’re writing about. You don’t really know it – what do we know, we’re writers, right? — so you want to find out as much as you can. But in the age of the Internet, you’re always one hyperlink away from the next website or article, and it can go on ad infinitum. The easiest thing in the world is to put off writing while you find out exactly how many gallons the New York City reservoirs hold, or how long it takes to fly from Washington to Timbuktu, or whether Brazilians drive on the right or the left-hand side of the road.

So stop. Put the story first. Write your story first, and fact-check later. It doesn’t have to be 100% accurate; it just has to be plausible.

John Grisham was 100 pages into his latest book, The Associate, which was set at the Princeton Law School – when he found out that Princeton doesn’t have a law school. It didn’t derail him; he just moved the story to Yale, which does have a law school. The key is that the setting wasn’t the important part, the story was – and he’d already written 100 pages, so he was able to go back and make the necessary changes.

In Hollywood they call this “fixing it in post.” Dozens, if not hundreds, of pieces need to come together just so in order to get a scene right on film. If 99 things are right and one thing is wrong, it’s not worth shooting an entire scene again; they can fix it in post-production, by overdubbing sound or correcting color or editing something out. The key is to keep going, so the production can “make its day,” and stay on schedule.

That’s what John Grisham knows: the key is to keep going. “When I write fiction, it takes a lot to get me out of the seat to check anything,” he said in a recent interview. “I hate to stop writing to go check a fact, to go find a city, to go to a hotel – I’ll just make stuff up.”

And you know what? Readers hate it, too. Nothing is worse than stopping a story to give your readers all the great research you did about how and when some government agency happened to be based in West Virginia instead of in Washington, DC, or why that particular vintage of Burgundy is considered the best, or who manufactures a particular kind of pistol in the United States. Research should be like an iceberg – only a fraction should be visible. (Ten percent of the iceberg, to be exact. I just Googled it.) Or to continue the show-business metaphor, it should be the lights that illuminate the stage, not a spotlight pointed at the audience’s faces.

Oh, but the research demon says: you want facts. Your male readers, particularly, want facts. If you get it wrong, you’ll get emails, and you’ll have to apologize and ask your publishers to correct things in future editions, and you – and they – HATE that.

This is true, actually, especially when it comes to weapons. If I make even a small error about something gun-related, I’ll get at least a dozen emails from aficionados who are sometimes downright outraged about my carelessness. (Which is why I take gun classes … or at least, that’s my excuse.)

It may even be one reason men read fewer novels than women, as Gore Vidal once noted in an essay: “It has been observed that American men do not read novels because they feel guilty when they read books which do not have facts in them. Made-up stories are for women and children; facts are for men. There is something in this…” As a man, this doesn’t make me proud … but Vidal probably has a point here.

But then I defer to that king of all research, James Michener, whose Herculean efforts filled whole bookshelves (Hawaii, Caravans, The Source, Centennial, etc., etc…). Even he admitted that research can only get you so far: “The greatest novels are written without any recourse to research other than that writer’s solitary inspection of the human experience. Flaubert, Dostoevski, Jane Austen, Turgenev, and Henry James exemplify this truth … To praise a writer for having done research is like praising a bus driver for knowing how to shift gears; if he can’t perform that function, he has no right to climb into the bus.” Because the story, like the bus, has to go somewhere.

I wrestle with this constantly. I’ve had to set time limits on my research. If questions come up while I’m writing, I might make a call or fire off an email, but I don’t stop writing while I wait for an answer; I keep writing, and fill in details later.

Take the word of a research-aholic: don’t let this happen to you. Don’t overdo the research, because the story is what’s important. Without a story, your pile of facts is worthless.

We can always fix it in post.

My new book jacket photo

2009-05-14T14:24:00.000-04:00

What do you think?

A Reader Asks...

2009-05-12T16:32:00.005-04:00

"I'm trying to turn a book into a movie and need some guideline on what exactly I have to do."

It's a question I am asked often and I wanted to share my experience with other writers.

I wrote PARANOIA, and my agent sold it to producers who will be making the movie. My direct involvement in making the movie will be very limited; I hope they'll consult me, but my work pretty well ended when I finished the book. If you're looking to sell a book to Hollywood, you'll need an agent who specializes in that kind of representation. THE WRITER'S MARKET, available in any library, lists agents who represent book authors in Hollywood; you could also take a look at this list of agents who have relationships with the Writers Guild. No reputable agent will ask for money upfront to represent you or your work.An excellent discussion of writers' role in the film industry is ADVENTURES IN THE SCREEN TRADE, by William Goldman. If you're interested in writing a screenplay, I recommend STORY by Robert McKee and WRITING SCREENPLAYS THAT SELL by Michael Hauge. Best of luck!

Talking Thrillers with Jonathan Maberry

2009-05-04T12:05:00.001-04:00

I was flattered to be the subject of an interview on award-winning author Jonathan Maberry's Big, Scary Blog last week. Check it out here.

Introducing … THE COWL

2009-05-02T08:30:00.003-04:00

This is the lead article of my May newsletter, which went out to subscribers yesterday. If you'd like to subscribe, sign up here!

Before I wanted to be an author, before I wanted to be a secret agent, before I wanted to be almost anything, I wanted to draw cartoons. I love cartoons, and always have. Visit my office and you’ll see several classics framed on my wall, including a Charles Addams original.

Reality got in the way, as it often does. The only D you’ll see on my college transcript was – yes – an art class. I realized I was better at words than at pictures, and the rest, as they say, is history.

But the dream never completely died, and at last year’s Bouchercon (the World Mystery Convention), I met a couple of guys from DC Comics. By coincidence, I was working on a subplot in VANISHED involving the main character’s teenaged nephew, Gabe, who was writing and illustrating what he called a “graphic novel” about a superhero based on his uncle, Nick Heller.

So I took the opportunity to talk comics and graphic novels with them, and discovered a world I’d barely imagined. I knew that several major mystery and literary authors were working in the graphic novel arena – Michael Chabon, Brad Meltzer, Gregg Hurwitz, Duane Swierczynski, to name a few – and at Bouchercon I met Brian Azzarello, author of 100 BULLETS and (with Lee Bermejo) THE JOKER.

This fired my imagination; I’m always looking for ways to introduce my works to new audiences, and what better way than a comic book, especially if a comic book were part of my plot? And what if the comic book included a clue to the central mystery of VANISHED, itself?

I took this idea to DC Comics Senior Editor Will Dennis, who was kind enough to encourage me. He helped me find a Spanish artist, Benito Gallego, who could create the images I imagined for Gabe’s fictional superhero, The Cowl – classically heroic images in the tradition of the comics I read as a kid, by artists such as John Buscema and Joe Kubert.

Writing a comic book, however, isn’t like writing a novel. It’s somewhere between writing a screenplay and writing a series of epigrams, and it’s not what I do. I had a story for The Cowl, but didn’t know how to bring it to life.

Brian Azzarello to the rescue. I asked if he’d be willing to take over The Cowl’s story, and he agreed – and came up with a script even better than I’d imagined, about the origins of The Cowl in a post-Apocalyptic Washington, DC.

The Cowl – the secret identity of international security consultant Nick Heller – takes to the streets of Washington, DC to fight the nefarious Dr. Cash, a scientist who rules with an iron hand and an endless supply of a mind-altering chemical that enslaves the city’s young men.

The idea of a comic book based on the creation of a fictional character is a little complicated, and putting it all together was complicated as well – me in Boston, Benito in Spain, Azz in Chicago. But the first copies came off the press a couple of weeks ago, and I’m delighted with the result. Over the next several months I’ll be giving copies away, and my publisher, St. Martin’s, will make copies available to booksellers along with advance reading copies of VANISHED.

It’s been a great adventure, and I’m grateful to Brian and Benito for letting me achieve my childhood dream, with a little help from my friends.

Interview on MSNBC News

2009-04-23T14:22:00.003-04:00

I was interviewed by MSNBC News this morning based on the article I wrote for thedailybeast.com on the CIA and interrogation techniques. Watch the interview.

Writing for The Daily Beast

2009-04-22T11:28:00.004-04:00

I am now a Contributor to thedailybeast.com!

Read my first article: Hands Off the CIA.

And subscribe to the RSS feed for my stories.

Looking for a great writer!

2009-04-18T09:38:00.000-04:00

A friend of mine, a legendary Harvard Law School professor, is defending a college student in a fascinating, landmark legal case against the copyright industry and the music industry. This is a story that, in the right hands, can become a book (and a movie) along the lines of A CIVIL ACTION (meets BRINGING DOWN THE HOUSE/"21"). He needs a writer, preferably in the Boston area (or who visits Boston often), with the skills of a journalist, who can be a fly on the wall in the courtroom and in the dorm, who has a sense of humor and a narrative flair and the ability to explain complicated internet technology in simple accessible language -- but most of all, who knows how to tell a story. Ideally, this project would start as a blog, then turn into a work of narrative nonfiction (a book for a wide readership) and then perhaps a movie. If you think you have this skill set and you're interested, please email me at joe@josephfinder.com, pointing to what you've done. Thanks,
Joe

April Writing Tips - Books to Be Influenced By

2009-04-15T12:09:00.002-04:00

The text of my April Writing Tips newsletter -- if you'd like to subscribe, you can sign up here.

It never ceases to amaze me. I’ll meet someone at an event who says, “I always wanted to be a writer,” and I’ll ask, “What do you like to read?” – and that person will say something like, “I’m really not much of a reader.”

Why would anyone want to be a writer who doesn’t like to read? And how does anyone figure out how to write without reading everything they can, first?

It’s basic primate behavior: monkey see, monkey do. We learn to speak by imitating adults who speak to us, and we learn to write by imitating what we read.

Here’s a secret for first-time novelists, in particular: it’s okay to be derivative. It’s okay to imitate what you think is good. As long as you’re not plagiarizing – as long as you’re using your own words and telling your own story – it’s not only fine, it’s helpful to try to write in the style of authors you admire.

We all do it, and it’s one of the most frequently-asked question any author gets: “Who are your influences?” It takes a long time to find one’s own voice, and even then, we’re all products of every other book we’ve ever read, and every person we’ve ever spoken to.

It’s not just writing; all artists do this, whatever the medium. Picasso’s early work, for example, borrows heavily from the old masters – and then, when he felt he’d learned as much as he could from them, he used what he learned to create his own unique style. How many times have you heard a band described as “Beatlesque,” or “the new Dylan”? Brian De Palma’s movies started out as faithful homages to Alfred Hitchcock, and Peter Bogdanovich acknowledges the heavy influence of Orson Welles on his early work.

It’s tricky, of course. Harold Bloom looked at this phenomenon in The Anxiety of Influence, a book about modern poetry. Bloom looked at the work of modern poets such as Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery, and argued that their work evolved first as a product of, then as a reaction to, their influences. Creating lasting work, Bloom argued, requires a poet to create his own voice, fighting against influences while still drawing knowledge and skills from them.

You can see this for yourself in the works of several top-level mystery authors. Robert Crais’ first novel, The Monkey’s Raincoat, is a wisecracking homage to the great hard-boiled novelists, somewhere between Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane. The tone of his books took a major change in L.A. Requiem, and the voice of Crais’ protagonist, Elvis Cole, in his most recent novel, Chasing Darkness, is very different from the way Cole sounded in The Monkey’s Raincoat.

Lee Child talks openly about the influence of John D. Macdonald on his Jack Reacher novels – like Travis McGee, he says, Reacher is rooted in the ancient tales of knights-errant traveling the countryside, correcting injustices. I’ve heard Harlan Coben talk about the influence of William Goldman’s Marathon Man on his own work, and you can see it – the protagonist caught up in events beyond his understanding or influence, a premise I’ve used once or twice myself (Paranoia, Company Man, Killer Instinct…).

So the key is, if you’re writing, to read good stuff – and then to trust your own instincts. Many authors I know can’t read within their genre while they’re writing, and I’ve become that way myself; if I’m writing something, I need to know that it’s come out of my own imagination, and that I haven’t borrowed some cool plot twist from Harlan Coben or Lee Child.

But when I’m not actively writing, I’m reading everything I can in the genre. A couple of years ago, I had the privilege – and responsibility – of serving as Chief Judge for ITW’s Best Novel Award, and had to read all or part of about 300 thrillers within the span of about six months. It left me in a daze, but it also was a phenomenal master class in thriller writing. At the end of all that reading, I knew exactly what worked and what didn’t, and had learned a lot that I could use in my own writing.

Before I started writing novels, I set out to teach myself how – and I did that by reading and rereading the best of the genre, picking apart the books to see how writers introduced characters, what information they revealed when, how they wove subplots together, and so on. Every writer has to find his or her own inspiration, but if you want to learn from the best, here are some books that helped me:

Frederick Forsyth, The Day of the Jackal. The book I still go back to, a masterpiece of plotting (and atmospheric detail, too; see my main April newsletter for a discussion of how Forsyth’s attention to food continues to inspire me). The Odessa File is also fantastic.

Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely. Chandler used to write on short slips of paper, inserted horizontally into his typewriter, and the end of every sheet was a cliffhanger. His long essay, “The Simple Art of Murder,” includes some of the best advice any writer could want, including the immortal wisdom, “When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.”

Nelson DeMille, The Gold Coast. Any early Nelson DeMille novel is a master class in plotting, but this was the book that showed me the importance of a character’s voice, and how important humor can be in thrillers.

William Goldman, Marathon Man. I’m with Harlan on this one. One of the keys to any thriller is how you balance what the reader knows with what the protagonist knows, and one of the key tools for achieving that balance is point of view. Marathon Man is a virtuoso work for so many reasons – pacing, surprises – but Goldman’s treatment of points of view is unmatched here.

John Grisham, The Firm. The novel that showed me – and every thriller writer working today – that thrillers don’t need to be set in exotic places or the inner circles of government, and that a creative writer can find villains and heroes everywhere.

John Le Carre, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, and the Smiley books. Le Carre’s characters often do terrible things, but we keep reading because he makes us understand why they do them.

Robert Ludlum, The Matarese Circle. Everyone recommends the Bourne books, and while those are great, I love the dynamics of this one, which goes from cat-and-mouse to global conspiracy. And talk about a page-turner; don’t start this unless you have time to finish it.

David Morrell, The Brotherhood of the Rose. The International Thrillers Writers have just announced that David Morrell is the 2009 ThrillerMaster of the Year, and I’d give him the award for this book alone. The attention to detail here is astonishing, but it’s the structure that makes this book required reading for anyone writing a thriller; everything pays off, nothing is wasted, and it’s all put together like a Swiss watch. Take notes.

That’s good advice in general, in fact. When you read something that impresses you, take a few minutes to figure out what impressed you – and write it down. Keep a notebook or a clipping file of ideas and inspirations, to remind yourself of what you’re trying to achieve (and, not incidentally, to make sure you’re not plagiarizing).

And remember that no matter how many people came before you, every author who sits down to write a book is writing that book – or that chapter, or that line -- for the first time. We’re all figuring this out as we go.

Out on the town... with Kevin Spacey

2009-04-07T20:22:00.002-04:00

Late Friday night in a Boston bar: left to right, Dana Brunetti (who runs Trigger Street, Kevin Spacey's production company; me; Kevin Spacey; author Ben Mezrich.

"When is PARANOIA going to be a movie?"

2009-04-07T10:56:00.002-04:00

Soon, I hope!

From VARIETY, 4/7/09:

Gaumont finds Finder's 'Paranoia'
Barry Levy to adapt bestselling novel
By MICHAEL FLEMING
Gaumont has acquired the bestselling Joseph Finder novel "Paranoia" and set Barry Levy to script an adaptation.

Alexandra Milchan will produce.

Story centers on a young man who funds a lavish retirement party for a co-worker with company funds and is caught by his boss. Accused of embezzlement, he agrees to spy for the boss to avoid prosecution. He is forced to infiltrate a rival company and steal information on a top-secret project.

Levy scripted the Columbia Pictures drama "Vantage Point," and just adapted "Button Man" for DreamWorks and producer Michael De Luca. Finder's novels include "High Crimes," which became a 2002 Fox film that starred Morgan Freeman and Ashley Judd.

For Milchan, the deal is the second recent project with Gaumont, where she is also teamed with director Alexandre Aja to develop "The Contractor," a drama being scripted by Ian Jeffers.

Read the full article at:
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118002185.html

"PROS & CONversation," a fundraiser for WriteBoston

2009-04-06T13:17:00.005-04:00

I was honored to be a guest at "PROS & CONversation," a fundraiser for WriteBoston, last Thursday night. WriteBoston is a citywide initiative created by Mayor Tom Menino to boost writing proficiency among the city's high school students. It's a public/private partnership that I have supported since its inception, and PEN New England is one of several nonprofit organizations that participate in WriteBoston programs.

With Alice Hoffman and Dennis Lehane

Left to right: Betty Southwick, executive director of WriteBoston; Sam Cornish (Boston's first Poet Laureate), Anita Shreve, Joe Finder, Alice Hoffman, Dennis Lehane, Peter Canellos

Dennis and I were dressed almost identically -- no, we didn't plan that in advance -- so he removed his boutonniere for the photos. I say, real men wear flowers.

Why I Write (and eat)

2009-04-01T14:12:00.004-04:00

I admit it: the lifestyle was one of the things that first attracted me to thrillers, particularly to spy novels. Who wouldn’t want to drive an Aston Martin and drink Meursault, like James Bond? Vicariously, at least?

When I first started reading thrillers, I remember being particularly captivated by the sophisticated lifestyle implied by all those descriptions of meals. Obviously James Bond knew how to live. Maybe if I read enough Ian Fleming, I too would learn how.

Of course, readers and writers don’t always have the same motivations. As a reader, I wanted vicarious experience. As a writer, I’m interested in characterization and setting. But I won’t deny I enjoy the research.

On my first research trip to Europe, in fact, I squired a glamorous brunette in the footsteps of Frederick Forsyth’s Jackal, going where the Jackal went and ordering what he ordered –- at various points, in case you’re wondering, the Jackal dines on cold chicken and Moselle, pot roast and noodles, and a “magnificent” speckled river trout grilled over charcoal, among other things. It became a joke between the glamorous brunette and me: “The Jackal dined excellently,” my wife would say, and we’d order the tartine beurree or the sandwiches or the fish. (I did, however, draw the line at buying a melon to use for target practice.)

Years later, on book tour in Madrid, I ordered baby eels for the first time because I remembered reading about them in another thriller –- and then I had Baumann, the villain of my novel THE ZERO HOUR, dine excellently on them when he’s in Madrid. Repellent as they may sound, tiny freshwater baby eels, or angulas, harvested in the rivers of northern Spain, are delicious. They’re no thicker than a strand of linguine, only they have eyes. It’s a Basque dish, served sizzling in an earthenware casserole in olive oil with garlic and chili peppers. I liked the idea of my bad guy dining on baby eels, for some reason. I felt it did narrative work.

Writers high and low, lit and pop, often use food as one of their storytelling tools (along with clothing and cars and domicile and physiognomy). In his novel SATURDAY, Ian McEwan’s protagonist, Henry Perowne, makes an elaborate-sounding fish stew while watching the news about 9/11; McEwan even posted the recipe on his website. The great Len Deighton (who just turned 80, by the way), is a major foodie and was once better known for his food writing than for his thrillers. (If you’re interested, read more here.) Bob Parker’s Spenser loves to cook, which sometimes may seem at odds with his laconic, tough-guy style. But as someone who dines excellently with Bob and Joan Parker from time to time in Boston, I can tell you that Spenser’s creator takes his culinary research seriously.

It’s not always that way, though. Not all writers whose narrators or protagonists dote on food are into it themselves. Ian Fleming once wrote, “My contribution to the art of thriller-writing has been to attempt the total stimulation of the reader all the way through, even to his taste buds.” So he gave us stone crabs in melted butter with Pommery pink champagne. But Noel Coward observed cattily after staying at Fleming’s house in Jamaica, “Ian Fleming’s cooking always tasted to me like armpits.” Fleming’s favorite meal was a plate of scrambled eggs.

Me, I’m more in the Bob Parker camp. I like to do firsthand research. I like food. So on a recent trip to Barcelona to research a sequence in the next Nick Heller book and do book publicity, I ate and ate. I fell in love not only with Barcelona’s amazing architecture, but also with the food.

In fact, I’m a little embarrassed by how much I ate, and when the airline threatened to charge me for exceeding the weight limit on the return trip, they weren’t talking about my luggage. I blame my friends, who gave me too many restaurant recommendations -– especially the author David Hewson, who made the mistake of telling me to try churros dipped in hot chocolate. I don’t know how I got to my current age without having churros, but I made up for it in Barcelona; they are fried pastry sticks, but to say that is like saying that Dom Perignon is a fizzy wine. The best I had in Barcelona (and I take pride in being a diligent researcher) were at the Café de l’Opera.

A look at my Twitter posts from Barcelona tells the whole story about my priorities: the herbal liqueur at Salamanca; Jamón ibérico (cured ham made from black Iberian pigs, which eat only acorns); the best paella I’ve ever had; arroz negro; chipirones (fried baby squid); and did I mention the churros?

Call it rationalization, but I think that food can often convey a sense of character as well as place. Think of how much we learn about characters by seeing what they eat: Nora Ephron’s main character in HEARTBURN, a food writer, channels her emotions through cooking, while the main characters in Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate and Joanne Harris’s Chocolat literally work magic through food. Cooking mysteries are their own subgenre, with books by Diane Mott Davidson, Joanne Fluke, Katherine Hall Page, Michael Bond, Philip Craig (well, his detective likes to cook), Anthony Bourdain, and even The Washington Post’s longtime restaurant critic, Phyllis Richman. We all eat, and we all like to read about food. At least, I do.

Which is why it’s a little ironic that I chose not to make my new series character, Nick Heller, a foodie. Nick doesn’t care about food. He likes his coffee strong and black, but he can’t tell Blue Mountain from Kona from Taster’s Choice. But that doesn’t mean the people around him can’t be into food.

I do need a pretext to keep doing research.

What’s a Hook? The Art of the Pitch

2009-03-18T13:17:00.004-04:00

This is the text of my March Writing Tips newsletter, which just went out. If you'd like to subscribe, you can do so here.

My Hollywood agent brought me out to L.A. not long ago to pitch a couple of Big Shot TV producers on an idea for a show they wanted me to create. I figured, why not? I flew out there and got into the meeting with Big Shot Producer #1, wearing my expensive jeans, and started telling him about my idea, the same way I’d tell my editor or my agent.

About five minutes into my spiel he cut me off and said, “Excuse me. No offense, but you’ve never pitched before, have you?”

I confessed I hadn’t, as if I had to say anything. I don’t pitch. I write.

He said, “I can tell. That’s not how you do it. Why don’t you come back in after you meet with the other producers and pitch it again?”

You might think that I’d be embarrassed or annoyed, but the truth is, I appreciated his honesty and respected the guy all the more for it.

Pitching is a specialized skill that has very little to do with whether you can write. But in Hollywood, the pitch is the currency. If you can’t pitch your idea, no one’s buying.

Why should novelists care about the art of the pitch in Hollywood? Because being able to pitch a movie, or a TV show, is the same skill as being able to come up with the “hook,” the “what-if,” the premise of that novel you’re writing. Or that script.

Put it another way: you’re in an elevator with one of the most powerful book agents in New York (or wherever), and you have ten seconds to pitch your novel to her so that she’ll actually want to read it. Can you do it?

Bet you can’t.

Maybe you’re thinking, “Who cares? I’m not going to ever get into an elevator with a powerful agent, and if I did, I’d probably freeze up anyway.” Maybe. But odds are, at some point you will have to e-mail or snail-mail a pitch in the form of a letter or a note.

“So what’s it about?” a friend asks you. You say, um, er, well . . .

Summarizing your story in a sentence or two is one of the hardest things to do, whether you’ve published ten books or none. Don’t forget, we established writers have to pitch our books too, when we’re interviewed on TV or radio. It’s not easy. But it’s essential, and not just to sell a book. I’m convinced that if you can’t “pitch” it in a sentence, you don’t have the story figured out yet. Simple as that.

Years ago, when I was struggling through the first draft of The Moscow Club, I had lunch with an editor. “What’s your ‘What If?’” he asked.

I had no idea. My “What If”? I’d never thought in those terms. But he was right; every book starts with a question that, in the end, it answers. Call it a Hook, call it a donnée, call it a premise. It’s the thing that sucks the reader in and makes him or her want to know what happens next.

Now, a confession: I’ve been writing thrillers for over 20 years, and I still get confused about the difference between a “hook” and a premise. Is a hook the thing that starts the book and grabs you by the lapel and makes you want keep reading? Or is it the concept of the entire book — a definition that veers dangerously into the Hollywood notion of “high concept”?

I’ve done some thinking, and here’s my answer. “High concept” is an unjustly maligned term meaning a story idea that can be easily grasped both by studio execs and by audiences. But a warning: just because you can pitch it in a sentence doesn’t make it High Concept. No — it has to be extremely appealing and commercial, not just succinct. It’s got to have wide, instant commercial appeal.

Yet if a story is all high concept with no follow-through, it’s little more than a gimmick. Take “Snakes On a Plane” — you get what it’s about instantly. You may even want to watch it. But it’s not a good movie. It’s all wind-up, little delivery.

Don’t get me wrong; there’s nothing wrong with a “high concept” thriller. In fact, if you have a high concept, that makes it even easier to sell. Take The Bourne Identity, for example. What if a man with amnesia has forgotten he’s the world’s most dangerous assassin? That concept boosted Bob Ludlum’s already large readership hugely, based on the premise alone. And it’s a great one. A couple more great high-concept thrillers: Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park: “What if scientists could clone dinosaurs from prehistoric mosquito blood trapped in amber?” Or John Grisham’s The Firm: “What if a high-end law firm turned out to be a Mafia front?

High concept isn’t necessarily cheesy at all — Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, anyone? It’s all about how well it’s executed. Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent (prosecutor is accused of the murder of his lover, and he’s the first-person narrator) is high-concept to be sure, but beautifully written and brilliantly plotted.

A hook, on the other hand, is the opening gambit that reels you in -- like a fish-hook. Harlan Coben is a master of the hook. (Dan Brown says so.) Tell No One, for instance — a guy gets an e-mail message from his dead girlfriend, who may or may not be dead. I’m there. The book spirals on from there, but that’s the set-up, the premise that grabs you at the outset.

A fishing hook needs bait and a fisherman, though, and a writing hook needs a story. An unusual situation, however intriguing, is not a story. “A family digs a swimming pool in the backyard, and finds a buried time capsule” is a great premise for a novel – but what happens next? “A family’s discovery of a time capsule buried in their backyard makes them the targets of government agents from every country in the world” — that’s a story hook, because now we know that the time capsule sets a chain of events in motion. (Hey, I just made that up, but I like it!)

So, the moral of the story: if you have a high concept for a novel, great. But you don’t need one. At the very least you want a great “what if,” a hook that grabs the reader in the beginning and makes him or her want to keep reading.

In any case, you do want your story to have a simple, easily expressible premise, and until you know how to articulate it, the odds are you haven’t figured it out yourself.

Life Imitates Art Imitates Life Imitates ...

2009-03-16T12:39:00.001-04:00

The question writers get asked most is “Where do you get your ideas?” I don’t mind that, but the one I wish people would ask is, “What ideas do you wish you’d get credit for?”, because this weekend I read this article from the Associated Press:

Deaths of gamers leave their online lives in limbo

By PETER SVENSSON – 1 day ago

NEW YORK (AP) — When Jerald Spangenberg collapsed and died in the middle of a quest in an online game, his daughter embarked on a quest of her own: to let her father's gaming friends know that he hadn't just decided to desert them.

It wasn't easy, because she didn't have her father's "World of Warcraft" password and the game's publisher couldn't help her. Eventually, Melissa Allen Spangenberg reached her father's friends by asking around online for the "guild" he belonged to…

For the rest of the article, go here.

The article discusses two services – Deathswitch.com and SlightlyMorbid.com – that will notify your loved ones and associates when you pass away. Deathswitch.com requires subscribers to enter passwords on a regular schedule; if you don’t enter the password, it assumes you’re dead, and lets your virtual social circle know.

What’s uncanny about this is that it is exactly like a service I thought up for my forthcoming book, VANISHED – except that I called mine InCaseofDeath.com (and yes, bought the domain). In VANISHED, InCaseofDeath.com provides key information about a character who’s missing. Is he dead? Well, you’ll have to read the book. (Out in August, thanks for asking.)

In the meantime, I wish I could figure out how the people at Deathswitch.com are tapping into my ideas – and whether I should ask for royalties.

My Twitter Obsession

2009-03-04T13:48:00.002-05:00

They warned me.

They warned me that Twitter would drain my blood like a vampire, sap my vital bodily fluids.

They were right, of course. My friends in marketing at my publishing house thought it might be a good idea for me to start Twittering, or Tweeting (whatever it’s called). My editor and my assistant were dubious — both knew how prone I am to getting caught up in things and spending way too much time on something that, let’s face it, only gets in the way of writing my next book. My editor does tend to treat writers like children who must be kept away from sharp objects lest they hurt themselves.

So I ignored Twitter, dismissing it as this weird thing that other people did, like clogging or snowshoeing or curling.

But I met a couple of much savvier guys at Ben Mezrich’s birthday party a few weeks ago who told me I had to, so I dipped in . . .

And got addicted.

My editor and my assistant both tried to stop me, but it was too late. As readers know, I’m a gadget guy, and I love new technology. Two weeks into this, I’ve already developed a following (everybody develops their own following; it’s not like I’ve gone all Hollywood on you), and my followers post all kinds of fascinating stuff — about books and bookselling, journalism, movies and TV shows. One of them even got me to start watching “American Idol” against my will! Honestly, no hype, I think we’re witnessing the birth of an entirely new type of communication — halfway in between private and public. It’s very strange.

In some ways, too, it’s like being back in high school. Like: I “followed” her, how come she’s not following me back? Some people seem to have nothing to do but Twitter — they don’t seem to have employment. People you’ve never heard of have twenty, thirty thousand followers. Some celebrities, like Ashton Kutcher, have huge followings; other, even bigger celebrities lock down their “updates” so that you can only follow them if you’re approved. (One movie star I’ve written a movie for, for instance, let me into his exclusive, private group of followers, fewer than I have; he seems to use it mostly to communicate with his girlfriend.)

Some Tweeters seem to accumulate followers and follow nobody, or only a chosen few — wannabe cult leaders, I guess. I have no patience for them. (One is a book person I know personally . . . sort of tacky, I think.) They're treating it like a one-way broadcast medium, which isn't the point.

At its best, Twitter is a multi-sided conversation. It's interactive. It's like a dinner party in some ways, where some people say nothing and just listen, others hold forth way too much, and you meet some great people and you learn interesting stuff. For some people, Twitter seems to be performance art — 140-character haikus — and some of them are quite clever. I do feel a pressure to be entertaining; if I’m not entertaining, people will Qwitter me. (Seriously, that’s what it’s called, and unlike Facebook, I get notified every time it happens.) The really entertaining, really involved writers on Twitter have amassed serious followings. Neil Gaiman has 36,361 followers as of this second, and only follows 179. (Wait, it just became 36,363.)

No doubt about it, there are also the TMI (“too much information”) Twitterers — who update you on their sinuses acting up or they’re standing at a urinal. Clogging your feed with useless trivia: Twitterhea.

It wouldn’t be exactly accurate to say I’m a reluctant Twitterer, but I’m certainly an anxious one. I love it – but it scares me, too, and I’m torn about its cost-benefit ratio. I ask myself, would Charles Dickens Twitter? You bet. He’d have a Facebook page and a TV series and a bigger branded presence than Jim Patterson. No question he’d be Twittering. Mark Twain, too.

Unlike e-mail, where you can take your time answering and filtering your replies, Twitter is instantaneous. You also get very public feedback. For example, I was Twittering at dinner last week, at a fundraiser, saying stuff like, "Sitting across from Tess Gerritsen" and "Michael Palmer just walked in." And one of my Followers cracked: @joefinder = name dropper.

Yesterday one of my Followers wrote:

"I wonder what a "real" author hopes to gain from engaging in the sick masses."

I told him I wasn't sure.

The novelist’s life is a great one, with two major exceptions. First, it’s very solitary; second, the feedback process is necessarily delayed, since by the time a book gets published the author is already working on the next book, or even the next book after that. I’ll get emails asking me about why characters in High Crimes did or said certain things, and I have to go back and look up the answer; I wrote that book ten years ago, and have written several hundred thousand words since.

Twitter addresses both of these shortcomings. I can walk in and out at will; I can check in on the people I follow, and they can check in on me. It’s the equivalent of passing notes in class, or making snarky comments to a friend in a movie theater – did you see that guy in the purple suit? What’s with her today?

It’s also a way for readers to connect with me in a way that provides immediate feedback. You’re reading one of my books, you want to know what a reference means; you can send me a direct message. (You could always send me an email, too, but sometimes it takes me a few days to respond. If I’m on Twitter, you’ll get a response a lot faster.) You can tell me that you like something, you can tell me that you don’t. On a day when I’m writing, it reminds me that I’m not just talking to the wall – I’m writing for readers, and the readers are with me.

But I can already see the dangers of it. It’s more fun to gossip on Twitter than it is to work. I already have half a dozen different ways I can avoid writing when I’m at my desk, and Twitter’s just one more; every link to a great article or piece of new information someone sends me is another justification for spending time on Twitter when I need to be writing.

Twitter creates a sense of intimacy that’s both seductive and dangerous. I’m not a celebrity, but I admit to tweeting about things like what my dog’s doing, or what I ate for breakfast; it amuses me, it seems to amuse the people who follow me, and it doesn’t do any harm … or does it? I’m not stalking any of the 300+ people I follow on Twitter, and I trust that none of my followers is stalking me … but if you wanted to stalk someone, wouldn’t Twitter be a great place to start?

So check it out — follow me on Twitter, where my handle is @joefinder. I promise I’ll follow you back.

But do it soon. Before they take the sharp object away from me.

My desk, during galley-proofing stage.

2009-02-27T08:53:00.001-05:00

To Outline or Not to Outline?

2009-02-17T16:14:00.002-05:00

The text of my February 2009 "Writing Tips" newsletter. If you'd like to subscribe, click here.

Okay, you’ve finally decided to sit down and write a thriller. As Robert Redford asked in the last line of The Candidate: “Now what?”

Outline or not?

This is the question I get most of all, whether by e-mail or at conferences: Do you outline or not?

It’s a good and important question, and here’s the thing: There’s no Right Answer. All of us writers make up our own rules as we go along. There’s no one way to do it.

Ask Harlan Coben, and he’ll tell you no way, he doesn’t outline, but he does know the ending before he starts. He says, “It’s like driving from New Jersey to California. I may go Route 60, I may go via the Straits of Magellan or stop over in Tokyo . . . but I’ll end up in California.”

Ask John Grisham, and he’ll tell you he can’t write a novel without doing an outline first. He does a 50-page outline with a paragraph or two about each chapter, setting out the major events and plot points. He spends more time on the outline than on the writing. Robert Ludlum once told me the same thing — his outlines were often as long as 100 or 150 pages!

I once got into a public dispute with my friend Lee Child — well, it being Lee Child, it was cordial and amicable and polite, of course — who said he never outlines, and I should try it his way.

So I did. I mean, I’m a top ten New York Times bestseller (polite cough into fist), but Lee’s had repeated #1’s, so he must know what he’s doing, right?

I tried it his way with my last book, POWER PLAY. No outline. I just brazened my way through it.

And I’m here to tell you that writing without an outline is like doing a high-wire act without a net. Some people can do it, but wouldn’t you really rather have a net? I would. POWER PLAY wound up taking me several months longer than usual, simply because I wasted a lot of time on plot and on characters that I ended up cutting out.

My feeling is that writing without an outline is one of those “Don’t try this at home, kids” things. It’s okay if you’re a professional, or if you’re a “literary novelist,” not trying to write a thriller.

Thrillers have too many moving parts. They’re all about plot. They’re almost always too complex to write without doing some sort of outline in advance.

But the reason that writers like Harlan and Lee don’t outline is that they enjoy the serendipity, the surprises that arise when they’re not constricted by the steel girdle of an outline. And I get that too. Some of the best plot twists in my work have been ones that I didn’t plan on, including the ending to PARANOIA. One of the great pleasures of writing fiction is living in the story so that you “experience” it the way your characters do.

Let’s say, for example, that you’re writing a scene between two characters. You’ve decided in advance, on your outline, that the purpose of this scene is basically to advance the story a beat, to provide a blip of exposition. But while you’re writing it you come up with a much better idea. Such as: one character reveals something unexpected. Or suddenly lunges at the other guy and tries to kill him. That’s just the kind of unpredictable twist you want, because if YOU didn’t expect it, your reader won’t either.

So you don’t want to be hamstrung by your outline. You have to stay open to inspiration, serendipity. You have to let your imagination be free.

Why does not outlining work for Lee, but not for me? I think simply because that’s how he works. He’s used to it, and I’m not. But the truth is, I’m convinced that he actually does outline — in his head. He has a decent handle on where the book is going.

But here’s a bigger point: you can’t reverse engineer based on what bestselling writers do. For one thing, they don’t always tell you everything. For another, they’re often so skilled at their craft that they don’t have a linear understanding of how they do what they do. Lee Child and others don’t need to outline on paper – it’s in their heads. And what works for them isn’t necessarily going to work for you.

So my solution — and the one I’d urge you to try — is to do a very rudimentary outline, with just the basic “beats” (as they say in Hollywood), the basic plot points. Use it as a road map. That way, you know where you’re going everyday. But if you come up with a better idea while you’re writing — if you surprise yourself — that’s fantastic.

To subvert Harlan’s metaphor of driving from New Jersey to California: I’m the kind of guy who likes to Mapquest things out, use Google Maps or a road map. But that doesn’t mean that I won’t let myself take the scenic route. If I’m driving from Boston to Syracuse, and I know how I’m supposed to go, it’s totally fine if I get off the Mass Pike and take the local roads, because sometimes that’s more interesting. I know I’ll get to Syracuse eventually. If I were driving there without a map and I got off the Mass Pike, I don’t think I’d enjoy the detour as much.

To beat this metaphor to death: print out your Mapquest directions for the story. Follow it exactly if you like. Or feel free to get off the highway from time to time. As long as you enjoy the trip, your passengers will too.

Chocolate: No Excuses Necessary

2009-02-14T11:17:00.001-05:00

February can be a grim month in New England. Temperatures are low, snow on the ground is filthy, and baseball Opening Day is still two months away.

The one ray of sunshine on the calendar is that holiday in the middle of the month – known as Valentines Day to some, but to us hardcore chocolate lovers, it’s Perfect Alibi Day.

“I’m not buying this for myself,” I can say. “It’s for my wife. No, my daughter. No, my wife and my daughter.” If an extra box of chocolate happens to make its way into my shopping bag, well, so be it.

Like coffee, chocolate is a time-honored literary obsession. Goethe loved his hot chocolate so much that he brought his own supply – complete with brewing pot – on a tour of Switzerland. (He didn’t trust the Swiss to provide him with proper chocolate!) Hemingway’s famous injury, in 1918 – the one that led to his writing A Farewell to Arms – happened when he was delivering chocolate (and cigarettes) to Italian soldiers in the trenches.

In fact, I don’t know why chocolate hasn’t gotten more attention in books written for adults. There’s Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate, of course, and Joanne Harris’s wonderful Chocolat – but the best books about chocolate are targeted at young adults and children. Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War (though, strictly speaking, that book might just as easily be The Wrapping Paper War or The Gourmet Popcorn War). Blood and Chocolate, Annette Curtis Klause’s vivid teenage werewolf novel. In J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels, if you’ve had contact with the soul-sucking Dementors, the best first aid is eating large quantities of chocolate.

And of course, the original and the best children’s novel inspired by chocolate is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, by Roald Dahl.

Dahl’s story about the origin of his classic children’s story is actually a great lesson about finding inspiration in anything that excites you. As a boy, Dahl attended a prestigious British public school with a sadistic headmaster. The one ray of light in the schoolboys’ life was monthly deliveries from the Cadbury chocolate factory, which wanted the boys to evaluate new products for them. It had never occurred to the young Dahl that someone might have the job of inventing chocolates; he fantasized about having this job himself, and coming up with his own inventions. Years later, this childhood fantasy became the basis for Willy Wonka’s amazing chocolate factory. (Factoid 1: Roald Dahl despised the original movie, which starred Gene Wilder; Factoid 2: Quaker Oats financed the original movie as one of the very first major tie-in campaigns, to help them roll out their proposed Wonka Bar … but they could never get the formula right, and the product was abandoned.)

I justify my own chocolate habit by calling it research. Did you know, for example, that while cacao is native to Central and South America, three-quarters of the world’s supply is now grown in Africa – where much of it, sadly, is harvested by child labor? Have you ever thought about the implications of African conflicts for the world’s chocolate supply? Can you imagine a situation in which someone might be willing to kill to keep the lines of distribution open?

Sure. I’d kill for chocolate. The stuff contains theobromine, which releases endorphins and serotonin, which cheers us up. It’s got phenylethylamine, too, the chemical secreted in the brain when we fall in love. Studies in serious medical journals like Nature and the Journal of the American Medical Association assert that dark chocolate has all sorts of health benefits: it contains antioxidants (polyphenols) and flavonoids, which reduce the risk of coronary artery blockages. It lowers blood pressure. And after all, milk chocolate was co-created by a German pharmacist (well, pharmacist’s assistant), Henri (ne Heinrich) Nestlé, who made his fortune from inventing the world’s first infant formula.

Okay, okay. This is all rationalization. Except for the mood part. That’s real.

A long time ago I discovered the chocolates of Robert Linxe at La Maison du Chocolat in Paris, and was so blown away I decided to bring a small box of the stuff (it ain’t cheap) to dinner at my French editor’s house. So I picked out several types of chocolates in the glass case and asked them to box them up.

Problem was, my French was lousy, particularly numbers. When I gave the clerk my order she lit up and called several of her colleagues over, and everything in the shop came to a halt. They invited me to have a cup of hot chocolate while they assembled my order. They gave me a complimentary assortment of their amazing chocolates and a big tasse of the best hot chocolate I’d ever had in my life — thick and velvety and rich and barely sweet.

I should have known why they were being so nice. I’d gotten the numbers wrong — somehow confused grams with kilograms or something — but when I saw the massive box I was too embarrassed to say anything. When I saw the bill, I was speechless. And when I brought it to my French editor’s house, he must have been a little embarrassed at my extravagance: he immediately trundled it away so that none of his other dinner guests could see it. My wife, when she finally got over the shock of how much I’d spent, began to joke that the next time I went to La Maison du Chocolat they’d probably have a bust of me, carved out of the finest dark chocolate.

Unfortunately, the hot chocolate at La Maison has gone downhill since then -- a casualty, I suspect, of too much expansion; they’ve now got boutiques in New York and London and Tokyo and all over Paris. When I was in Paris on tour this past fall I took some friends to their boutique in the Carrousel du Louvre and told them the hot chocolate there would change their lives. Feh. It was fine. Better than Swiss Miss. But nowhere near the way it used to be. Now my French gourmand friends tell me the best hot chocolate can be found at Angelia on the rue de Rivoli. I can’t vouch for that — never had it — but the best I’ve ever had since then, in fact, was in Harvard Square, Cambridge, at L.A. Burdick’s. (Any other tips are welcome!)

One last thing about chocolate. When was the last time you had a Hershey’s milk chocolate bar? I used to love them as a kid. But when I had one last Halloween I was amazed at how skimpy it was — paper-thin, way thinner than it once was, sealed in plastic instead of that great foil and paper sleeve. And it barely tastes of chocolate at all — though that may not have changed.

My tastes have changed. I’ve been spoiled by all the great chocolate you can get here — Scharffen Berger, Valrhona, Callebaut, Lindt . . . Even mass-market Dove, which you can get in any CVS, is infinitely better than Hershey’s milk chocolate. (And by the way, so is Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, but not the stuff made in the U.S. --which is manufactured by Hershey! -- only the bars made in the U.K.)

And speaking of U.K. chocolate: my favorite candy bar (as opposed to chocolate bar) is Kit Kat. But British Kit Kats are noticeably better than American. Maybe that’s because our Kit Kats are made by Hershey’s (sorry to trash Hershey’s again!), and theirs are made by Nestlé. Or maybe it’s simply that the Brits invented it (introduced in 1935 as “Rowntree’s Chocolate Crisp”) — and maybe they’re keeping their top-echelon manufacturing secrets for their own.

Which gives me a plot idea, of course. Plant Adam Cassidy, from Paranoia, in Nestlé headquarters in Vevey, Switzerland, see . . . Corporate espionage plus chocolate: — what’s not to love?

January Writing Tips: Just write the damned book already.

2009-01-15T17:31:00.000-05:00

You wouldn’t believe how many people I meet who tell me they’ve got a great idea for a novel . . . if only they had the time to write!

“You know,” I say, “You’re right. That’s my secret. I have all this free time.”

And if only I had the time to run for President, I’d be in the White House.

Writing is the only profession I can think of that requires no license, no certificate, no special training, and no special tools. Anyone who wants to can be a writer.

All you have to do is write.

It’s completely logical why so many people talk about writing a book (or a screenplay) and so few actually do it. It’s risky. When your novel exists only as a theoretical concept, it’s the best novel ever written. Put it down on paper (I’m a writer, I get to use figures of speech) and you risk realizing that you can’t do it. Or that you’re not good at it. Or that you really don’t enjoy doing it. You can’t fail if you don’t try, right?

Here’s my theory about the New York Times bestseller list: the most successful writers aren’t the most talented. They’re the most stubborn. We’ve all read the anecdotes about how every publisher turned down John Grisham’s The Firm or Tom Clancy’s Hunt for Red October (and the list goes on and on), but the lesson here isn’t that publishers are idiots. It’s that book publishing, like TV and Hollywood, incorporates a very real, if unintentional, Darwinian selection process. It keeps out all but the most determined. You think it’s hard to write a book? It’s even harder to get a good agent (more on that in another newsletter). And unless you get really, really lucky with your first book, it’s even harder to become a repeat bestseller.

Despite the fact that we spend a fair amount of time sitting and staring into space, every writer I know is driven. Single-minded. Obsessed. We’re driven because we love writing and want to keep doing it. Some writers even say that it’s all they could ever do.

That’s not me. There’s plenty I could have done instead, but I happen to like writing enough to keep at it, beyond the point at which most others would have given up. Even those writers who had a fairly easy time of it from the start — got an agent on their first try, got a publisher on their first submission — had to keep slugging away, writing book after book, until enough readers discovered them to make them a bestseller. It takes enormous persistence and discipline.

Maybe it’s self-delusion. Sometimes I think of my career path as being like the Wile E. Coyote Law of Cartoon Physics: in the old Roadrunner cartoons, Wile E. Coyote will run off a cliff, and he’ll keep going, but he’ll never fall until he looks down.

So I try not to look down.

If this sounds obvious to the point of uselessness, you need to know that I have a sign up in my office that says JUST WRITE IT. It’s a reminder to myself not to let that annoying critical voice inside me — the one that says, Oh, man, you can do so much better than that! — win. There’s a great Russian proverb: “The first pancake is always a lump.” Your first draft is likely to be a piece of crap — and that’s okay. You can revise it. You can “fix it in post,” as they say in Hollywood.

Anne Lamott, in her wonderful book Bird by Bird, apologizes for not having a magic word or secret formula to help her writing students get started – but offers the consolation that it’s the same way for all of us. “The good news is that some days it feels like you just have to keep getting out of your own way so that whatever wants to be written can use you to write it … the bad news is that if you’re at all like me, you’ll probably read over what you’ve written and spend the rest of the day obsessing, and praying that you do not die before you can completely rewrite or destroy what you have written…”

Rather than continue to rant, I offer up a few concrete suggestions for getting your book written this year.

1. Just write it. Fix it later. That means: don’t worry about word choice or grammar. Don’t worry about getting your facts right.

2. You do have time -- if you really want to do it. You have a full-time job? A family? Carve out an hour or two early in the morning before the rest of the house gets up, or before you go to work. Or at night, if you’re not too wiped out to write. Try to make this a regular time slot — do it at the same time each day, for the same amount of time. Make it a habit. I know a number of writers who finally started making enough money from their writing to be able to quit their day jobs, only to discover that, as soon as they started writing full time, they suddenly became far less efficient. All that time stretching before them in the day — the two hours of writing per day they used to squeeze in here and there now took them eight hours. There’s something to be said for not having a lot of free time to write. It tends to make you more efficient.

3. Writing is a job. Treat it like one. I don’t work at home; I have an office, and I go there to write. If you don’t have an office, you should set aside a place that is just for you and your writing – the attic, the basement, a corner of the laundry room with a screen around it. If you treat your writing like work, your family and friends should do the same, and be more respectful of that writing time. No one thinks twice about interrupting a hobby, so make it clear that it’s not a hobby; it’s work. It’s your time.

4. Be ruthless in managing your time. This is the biggest problem most writers have. I have a big old hourglass on my desk for use on those days when I’m tempted to check my Facebook page. I upend it and don’t let myself get up until the sands of time have run out.

5. No e-mail! E-mail is truly our modern curse. It interrupts our attention span, fragments our concentration. Sign off. Do not let yourself check your e-mail or go online. Use an hourglass or a kitchen timer (if the ticking doesn’t drive you crazy) for 30 minutes or an hour, during which you may not do anything but write. In order to write you really need to get into the zone, and to get into the zone you need to be distraction-free. I love e-mail — but it’s the enemy!

6. Set interim goals. A full-length novel can be anywhere from 75,000 to 150,000 words, or even longer. If you think about having to write 75,000 words – 200 pages – you’ll freak yourself out. But if you write 1,000 words a day, you can finish the first draft of a novel in less than three months, even if you take some weekend days off.

7. Work toward a deadline. Everyone needs deadlines. Parkinson’s Law says that work expands to fill the time allotted; among my author friends, I know only one who regularly turns in manuscripts before they’re due (she was probably like that in school, too). The rest of us need deadlines. My publisher sets mine, but even before you’re published, you will find that your own life gives you natural deadlines: finish that draft before you leave for your next vacation, before you turn 40, before your next high school reunion.

8. Reward yourself. In a future newsletter, I’ll write about the challenges of getting and processing feedback – but while you’re writing, it’s not unusual for your brain to second-guess everything you’re doing. Override this by promising yourself rewards for getting work done. “When I hit 5,000 words, I’m going to the movies,” or even, “When I finish this paragraph, I can have another cup of coffee.” It worked in kindergarten and it works for me now.

Go to it, and good luck. Next time someone hears you’re writing a novel and tells you that they have a great idea for one, you can just smile and nod and think to yourself, Yeah, but I’m actually writing one . . .

Writers: The Coffee Achievers

2009-01-15T11:21:00.000-05:00

Santa didn’t bring me what I really wanted for Christmas, but I hardly expected him to. Don’t get me wrong -- I was good last year, and Santa was generous. But what I really wanted was a Clover® Brewing System, the kind they have at the Starbucks on Beacon Street, and in only a handful of other Starbucks around the country.

It was a lot to ask for, I knew, even before I found out that a Clover® machine costs $12,000. But I swear, if I found $12,000 on a sidewalk, I’d buy one.

If you don’t understand why, some part of your psyche will always be a mystery to me. I don’t get people who don’t like coffee, and I distrust writers who don’t drink it. How can anyone be a writer without coffee? Writers are the original Coffee Achievers. At the risk of dating myself, I still love this commercial:

Yes, that was David Bowie … and Cicely Tyson … and Kurt Vonnegut.

Coffee has been an essential tool of almost all the greatest modern writers, and certainly of the most prolific ones. Voltaire reportedly drank 50 cups a day (and I’ve seen estimates as high as 72 cups a day). Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote what amounted to a love letter about freshly roasted coffee. Arthur Conan Doyle and his fictional sleuth, Sherlock Holmes, loved coffee almost as much as they loved cocaine (Holmes: “A cup of coffee would clear my brain”). Anthony Trollope, admirably disciplined, rose every morning at exactly 5:00 and drank his coffee before writing for three hours, after which he went to work at the post office. Edgar Allan Poe drank coffee by the gallon (the tell-tale heart’s pounding: conscience or caffeine overdose?). Maigret’s creator, Georges Simenon, could write a detective novel in three days on the power of his bottomless coffee cup. Beethoven loved his coffee strong, and Johann Sebastian Bach dedicated a sonata (BMV 211) to the glories of coffee.

I would argue that coffee has been far more important to literature than alcohol. We think of Hemingway, for instance, as a hard drinker, but he was equally addicted to coffee, and wrote some of his best work with its help. If you ever visit Montreux, Switzerland, you can take a Hemingway walking tour that includes a visit to the railway café where he wrote A Farewell to Arms.

The master Coffee Achiever, though, is surely the great Honoré de Balzac. Balzac wrote 16 hours a day on specially-prepared Parisian coffee, and no writer was ever more obsessed with it. His essay “The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee” [link: http://www.newpartisan.com/home/balzac-the-pleasures-and-pains-of-coffee.html]
describes its power and gives advice for overcoming caffeine tolerance (ultimately, by dumping raw grounds into an empty stomach; don’t try this at home). Once coffee hits your system, Balzac wrote, “ideas quick-march into motion like the battalions of a great army.” He once claimed he drank 50,000 cups of coffee during his lifetime. Maybe that’s how he was able to turn out 100 novels by the time he died, at 51. (Or maybe that’s why he died at 51.)

Coffee has been the official American drink since 1773, when colonists revolted against King George III’s tea tax by dumping a load of British tea into Boston Harbor (to which King George III allegedly responded, “So they threw their tea in the harbor. Let them drink coffee.”) No wonder, then, that the Continental Congress declared coffee the official beverage of the Colonies.

And yes, there have always been exceptions. Henry James was, of course, a tea drinker. Henry David Thoreau railed against coffee as an expensive luxury. “[W]ater is the only drink for a wise man; wine is not so noble a liquor; and think of dashing the hopes of a morning with a cup of coffee.” I bet he didn’t get invited to many parties… and of course, that was before Starbucks took over Concord Center.

Coffee is part of my earliest memories. My parents ground their own beans, years before it became common practice; the sound of the coffee grinder used to wake me up on school mornings, and I’d come downstairs to that intoxicating smell. I didn’t start drinking it myself until college, but once I did, I quickly figured out the difference between the good stuff and the – uh – not.

When I was a student, for example, you couldn’t drink coffee in England. The first time I drank coffee in London, I spit it out. (Agatha Christie, a tea drinker, once remarked, “Coffee in England always tastes like a chemistry experiment.”) Now, though, you can get amazing coffee in England – at the Monmouth Coffee Company in Covent Garden and Flat White in Berwick Street, among other places. And there are Caffe Neros all over the place, almost as abundant as Starbucks. Lee Child, quintessential Englishman, loves coffee and drinks it black (like his hero, Jack Reacher). My British-born assistant, Claire Baldwin, drinks only coffee, not tea.

Coffee gets credit for modern civilization, in more ways than one. Both the American and the French Revolutions began in coffeehouses. My friend Malcolm Gladwell, in a piece in the New Yorker [link: http://gladwell.com/2001/2001_07_30_a_java.htm] some years ago, pointed out that coffee helped give rise to the Enlightenment: Voltaire, Robespierre, Napoleon, Victor Hugo and Rousseau gathered at coffeehouses in Paris. Coffee also fueled the American Industrial Revolution, by helping workers get up early, work long hours, and coordinate their shifts.

And what are novelists but shift workers at the fiction factory? I space my working day out in cups of coffee. It’s my reward for getting work done, and also my stimulation to do more work. I need that psychoactive alkaloid stimulant crossing my blood-brain barrier. In fact, I’m sitting here drinking a perfect espresso as I write this.

Every week I buy a couple of bags of fresh-roasted Peets coffee to make at home. At the office, though, I drink only espresso, using a Gaggia espresso maker and Starbucks pods (less mess than grinding, and fresher-tasting than the Illy pods). It’s excellent, though it doesn’t compare to the coffee produced by a machine my friend Giles McNamee recently turned me onto: the Jura Impressa Z6 [link: www.capresso.com/automatic-coffee-centers-z6.shtml].

The Z6 makes espresso even better than I’ve had in Italy … almost as good as the Clover. And at a mere $3,699, it’s a bargain in comparison. I haven’t yet sprung for it, and probably won’t – but couldn’t I call it a business expense?

The Best Pencil in the World

2008-12-03T16:19:00.002-05:00

I’m often asked how I write — do I use a computer, when do I write, do I have an office, and so on. These are natural questions, actually, since they concern the mysterious alchemy of the creative process. And truth is, most writers I know ask each other the same sorts of questions.

Of course I wrote on a computer (a Mac, naturally — a G5 tower with an immense flat-screen monitor, and a Macbook Air at home). But it surprises a lot of people to hear that certain scenes (the more meditative ones) I write with a pencil. And I almost always edit pages, in hard copy, with a pencil.

So the right pencil is important to me. Years ago, at a stationery store in Harvard Square called Bob Slate’s, I discovered the best pencil ever. It was called the Blackwing 602, made by Eberhard Faber. It was perfectly designed, hexagonal so it wouldn’t roll off your desk, with lead that was creamy soft but not too soft. A great oblong eraser you could pull out to extend its use. Its embossed motto: “Half the pressure, twice the speed.” (Who wouldn’t want half the pressure and twice the speed?) In a world of yellow pencils it was silvery gray. Several times a year I’d stop into Bob Slate’s to buy a box.

Turned out there was a whole underground fraternity of Blackwing-obsessives. Stephen Sondheim told the New York Times he’d use nothing else: “They wear down quickly, so I feel like I’m getting a lot done.” Writers like Thomas Wolfe and Archibald MacLeish loved them. The late John Steinbeck, ever in search of the perfect pencil,thought the Blackwing “floated over the paper just wonderfully.”

Then one day I went into Slate’s and learned, to my horror, that the Blackwing 602 was no more. It had been discontinued. Frantic, I launched into action. I enlisted my assistant to call every stationery distributor, every mom-and-pop stationery store in the country, and buy up as many boxes of Blackwings as we could find. In time we’dd amassed a closet full of them.

When the terrible news spread throughout the Blackwing Underground, my fellow obsessives began buying them up too. Writer friends of mine who learned of my stockpile — Andre Gregory (of “My Dinner With Andre”) and Roger Rosenblatt — began calling me to ask if I could spare one . . . or a box. Soon, Blackwings began popping up on eBay for $20 each. In fact, I just checked eBay and found one for $38.99 — for a single pencil.

Still, I won’t sell mine, and I only give them away to my closest friends who will make good use of them. I figure that as long as I have them around, I’ll keep writing my novels with half the pressure and twice the speed.

Everyone's a Winner with POWER PLAY!

2007-09-07T11:22:00.000-04:00

Me with Keith Price, one of the high rollers at the Horseshoe casino in Tunica, Mississippi who were invited to my book event. Keith was the the winner of a random drawing for a week's vacation at a high-end salmon-fishing lodge in Rivers Inlet, British Columbia! (I hope Keith's visit to British Columbia is less eventful than the hero of POWER PLAY, Jake Landry's.)

My Number One Fan

2007-09-07T10:54:00.000-04:00

At the AJC-Decatur Book Festival with my friend George Murphy, who calls himself my own personal stalker. I first met him and his wife at Much Ado About Books in Jacksonville, Florida last year. He has first editions of all the books, and all the ARCs as well!

Home at Last

2007-09-03T07:38:00.000-04:00

Dateline -- Atlanta Airport, September 2

Sunday. Cherokee, North Carolina.

The last stop on the Power Tour before I get to go home.

After driving for three hours and getting a speeding ticket in rural North Carolina, I was hoping it would be worth it.

Actually, it was. It was a terrific event, run by a couple of really smart events people, Sharon Montague and Sandy Sauer. A VIP brunch for the high-rollers (one of whom handed me an unpolished ruby from the local ruby mine — who knew they had ruby mines down here?). Followed by a tour of the casino, which is one of the most profitable Harrah’s properties in the country — and they don’t serve any alcohol (the Cherokees, who own the casino, which is on their land, forbid it). The poker tables don’t even have cards (because of some obscure North Carolina law about games of chance vs. games of skill) — the “cards” are digital touch screens.

Driving back to Atlanta, and the airport — to go home — I was extra-careful to stay within the speed limit. Not only did I not want to get a second speeding ticket, but my time was tight — I couldn’t afford a long stop.

One of the annoying things about Highway 85, which runs through northern Georgia, is that the speed limit changes fairly drastically (from 35 m.p.h. to 70), but they’re not posted regularly. So there I was, about 20 miles outside of Atlanta, making good time but staying just a few miles an hour over the speed limit of 65 (the last sign posted).

And suddenly a cop pulled out of his hiding place and started tailing me.

Oh, crap, I thought, as I noticed a 55 m.p.h. sign.

The Georgia Highway Patrol car stayed right behind me for about a mile, clearly trying to intimidate me (effectively, too). Then it switched on its blue lights, and I pulled over.

“Driver’s license, please,” said the good-ol’-boy state trooper.

I handed it to him. He took it and went back to his cruiser and sat there for a good five minutes.

When he returned, he said, “Your tags are expired.”

“But — it’s not my car,” I said. “It’s a rental.” I showed him the Avis rental agreement, mentally cursing Avis for renting me a car with expired plates.

He took the rental agreement back to the cruiser with him, this time for ten minutes.

He returned and started to hand me a piece of paper, then stopped. He looked over at the passenger’s seat, saw several packs of Trident sour-apple gum scattered on the seat (my favorite: keeps me from going too stir-crazy on long car trips), then leaned in.

“Sir, have you been drinking?”

“Drinking? No, sir.” What the hell was he talking about?

“Not even one drink?”

“No, not at all.”

“You haven’t had a drink today, not even one?”

“No, Officer. What makes you—?”

“Because you’re certainly packing the gum.”

Suddenly I got it. When drunk-drivers are stopped by cops, sometimes they pop gum into their mouths to disguise the smell of booze. Now what was he going to arrest me for, gum-chewing without a license in the state of Georgia?

“You be careful,” he warned.

A fitting end to my book tour, I decided.

But not quite the end.

I walked went through the metal detector at the Atlanta airport, smiling to myself, delighted to be going home, finally. So maybe I did look a little demented.

The TSA guy on the other side said, “You win the lottery or something?”

“Me? Yeah. No. No, I didn’t win the lottery.”

“You won something, man,” he said. “I can tell. You got the vibe.”

“I just finished a book tour,” I told him. A friendly airport security employee: now that was a novelty.

“You wrote a book, huh?”

“Yep.”

“You got a best-seller?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Actually, I do.”

“What’s the name of your book?”

“It’s called Power Play. It’s a novel.”

“You hear that?” he said to the man behind me in the security line, just passing through the metal detector. He’d been standing there, waiting impatiently, while the TSA guy and I talked. He reminded me of Stanley in “The Office.”

He gave me a baleful glance. “Hear what?” he said without interest.

“This man here wrote a book called Power Play, and it’s a best-seller.”

Stanley, who wanted to retrieve his bags from the conveyor bag but couldn’t move because I was in his way, gassing on about some book, flashed me a look of disgust and elbowed me aside.

“You gotta buy this man’s book,” said the TSA guy. “It’s called Power Play. It’s a bestseller, the man says. You gotta buy a copy.”

“Yeah?” said Stanley coldly. “If it’s a bestseller, then he don’t need us to buy his book, isn’t that right?”

A note from Webmistress Clair: If you live in the Boston area, you still have one more chance to see Joe; he'll be at Jabberwocky Books in Newburyport on Friday, September 7. Click here for details.

And if you got a chance to see Joe on tour, stop by Joe's discussion forum and tell us about it!

Speed Trap

2007-09-02T10:03:00.000-04:00

Dateline -- Cherokee, NC, September 2

Bad weather in Atlanta (or so they say) kept me and my fellow Delta passengers sitting for three hours in a plane on the tarmac waiting to take off. Arrived in Atlanta late, crashed, and was awakened by the phone ringing. A live radio interview: a major show in Louisville, Kentucky. They put me on hold for a few seconds, just enough time for me to race to the honor bar in my hotel room, grab a Diet Coke, and chug it. Enough caffeine to kick-start my brain, but the carbonation wasn’t good for my delivery. . .

Saturday: The Decatur Book Festival, in the town of Decatur, Georgia, which is no more than 15 minutes from downtown Atlanta, a sweet small town whose streets have been blocked off for the 75,000 attendees. I shared a stage with David Robbins, author of The Assassins Gallery — always nice to meet a fellow thriller writer, even when they’re too tall (6’ 6”).

A three-hour drive to the town of Cherokee, North Carolina, the home of another Harrah’s casino. Decided to stop for dinner in a particularly rural part of Georgia — a charming looking restaurant in a tumbledown wooden shack that advertised “all you can eat fried catfish” and “hot fudge cake” and had a handwritten sign on the door saying, “We do not except credit cards.”

Maybe I’d discover one of those great road-food finds that Jane and Michael Stern are always writing about.

Yeah, right.

Turns out that fried catfish night is Friday night, and this is Saturday. So I order the spaghetti special: soapy overcooked spaghetti and lousy bottled ragu sauce, a cold iceberg lettuce salad with Day-Glo orange dressing, and a slice of Wonder Bread. It tasted exactly like the cafeteria food in junior high.

I’m so taken with the spectacular beauty of the Smoky Mountains that I don’t notice the sheriff’s car waiting beside the road, in the town of Sylva, North Carolina, which is apparently one big speed trap.

“Where’re you headed?” the sheriff asks.

“Cherokee,” I say.

“Casino, huh?”

“Right.”

He asks for my license and comes back 20 minutes later, hands me a speeding ticket. No mercy for the out-of-towner. “Slow down,” he says. “You got plenty of time to lose your money.”

In Praise of Independent Booksellers

2007-09-02T09:54:00.001-04:00

Dateline -- Kansas City, August 30

After Wednesday night's event at Harrah's, Vivien Jennings of Rainy Day Books in Kansas City and her partner Roger Doeren take me out to dinner to celebrate. Rainy Day Books has become the destination bookstore for author signings here — they do a great job, and the store has a devoted following. Plus, Vivien and Roger are smart entrepreneurs, so we end up talking a lot about the book business (naturally) and what independent booksellers need to do in order to survive.

The number of indie booksellers — those not part of a chain like Borders and Barnes & Noble — has been dwindling, down from over 4,000 ten years ago to around 1,600. In a world in which chain bookstores are almost as plentiful as Starbucks, the indies are vastly outnumbered, their existence threatened.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m grateful to Barnes & Noble and Borders for finally giving a book of mine major display space at the front of store. The B&N stepladder and the Borders Major New table and rolling display cart do sell a hell of a lot of books.

But what happens to those writers who haven’t published three hardcover NYT bestsellers in a row, or who are coming out with their first novel? Trying to land front-of-store space at the chains is difficult, even when the publisher is willing to pay for it. The bookselling business is really about word-of-mouth, but that doesn’t do much good if a book’s in the witness protection program.

This is one of the reasons I’m such a booster of independent booksellers. It’s not just that I love indie stores and the book-lovers who own them (why else would you go into such a low-margin, time-consuming business if you weren’t passionate about books?). The fact is, most books succeed because someone tells someone else to read it. That has to begin with a bookseller, and it’s almost always the independent bookseller who’s willing to pick up a novel that isn’t accompanied by a major marketing campaign and read it and tell their customers to read it too.

The list of novels that have become huge commercial successes because of indie booksellers is long (The Kite Runner is just one recent example). My own book PARANOIA would not have been a NYT bestseller if it weren’t for enthusiasm on the part of indie booksellers, I know that.

I could go on, but I’d better not.

After dinner, we run into a guy in the bar named Dennis Fritz, who’s the author of the book Journey Toward Justice — and is the subject of John Grisham’s book The Innocent Man. Dennis, who’s a lovely, gentle guy, was a high school science teacher and football coach who spent 12 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit.

I’ve been complaining to my editor about the lack of Internet access on this tour — which is why so many of these travel blog entries have been so delayed. But Dennis Fritz’s life puts things into perspective. I doubt he was able to log on to the Internet while serving a life sentence in a maximum security prison.

Good News in Kansas City

2007-09-02T09:48:00.001-04:00

Dateline -- Kansas City, August 29

Kansas City.

Another city I’ve never visited before. My escort, Dick Brown, took me to have some K. C. barbecue for lunch, and on the way to the restaurant, my cell phone rang.

It’s my editor, Keith Kahla. He rarely calls — we have an almost exclusively e-mail relationship.

“Why do you think I’d be calling you on your cell phone while you’re on book tour on a Wednesday afternoon?” he began.

“Don’t torture me,” I said. The second Wednesday after the on-sale date is when you learn about whether you’ve hit the New York Times bestseller list. Publishers get a PDF of the NYT list e-mailed to them some time on Wednesday afternoon — as early as noon, as late as 5:30, I’m told — representing book sales for the week ending the Sunday before. If you have any hope of making the list — if you’re close — it can be a very tense afternoon. (More high-class problems, huh?)

“Number seven,” he said.

I let out a whoop, startling Dick, who was driving and almost veered off the road.

The first time I’ve ever been in the top ten. Seven is, of course, the traditional lucky number (Seven Wonders of the World, seven days of the week, seven ancient planets, seven deadly sins. James Bond’s 007 . . . seven dwarves . . . and a good number at the slot machines.)

On the way into the Harrah’s North Kansas City casino, there’s a big billboard, with three big red sevens on it and the slogan, “We’ve got your number.”

And one more from Rainy Day...

2007-09-01T08:08:00.001-04:00

With Vivien Jennings at Rainy Day Books.

Let's hear it for the independents!

2007-09-01T08:05:00.000-04:00

Rainy Day Books, Fairway, KS -- no fairweather friend.

The Innocent Man

2007-09-01T08:01:00.001-04:00

Book tour makes it possible for me to meet people I'd never meet otherwise, and sometimes it's really an honor. This is Dennis Fritz, the subject of John Grisham's THE INNOCENT MAN (and author of JOURNEY TOWARD JUSTICE), the Oklahoma man who spent 12 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit. Dennis came to see me in Kansas City.

Rainy Day Friends

2007-09-01T07:56:00.000-04:00

With Vivien Jennings and Roger Doeren of Rainy Day Books, at Harrah's in North Kansas City.

A Near-Death Experience

2007-08-31T14:17:00.000-04:00

Dateline -- Denver Airport, August 29

I’m going to try not to complain about that stupid little one-quart Zip-Loc bag that TSA, the airport security people, make you jam all your liquids and aerosols and gels into. (Note to self: ask around to find out many terrorist acts this ridiculous rule has stopped.) But bear in mind that all of the post-9/11 security regulations were put into place by a presidential administration that also brought us Katrina recovery and, frankly, 9/11 — but that’s another subject. . .

Anyway . . . because of the one-quart Zip-Loc bag rule — I’m not checking any luggage on this tour, at Lee Child’s suggestion — I’ve run out of some basic necessities. Like toothpaste. So the folks at the Grand Hyatt in downtown Denver give me directions to a Walgreen’s a few blocks away. The concierge tells me it’s located on a “pedestrian mall” on 16th Street.

Red-eyed and inadequately caffeinated and not seeing too well, I stroll along the pedestrian mall, admiring the variety of shops (Jamba Juice — my favorite! Time for a double wheatgrass shot!) and the abundant outdoor seating.

Suddenly there’s a blast of a horn, and I’m almost hit by a bus. It scrapes my shoulder and the side of my face.

When they told me this was a “pedestrian mall,” they forgot to mention the shuttle buses — hybrid-electric buses that zoom along quietly, and apparently don’t stop for pedestrians.

My Starbucks venti coffee is all over the ground, but otherwise, no harm done.

An enjoyable appearance at High Crimes, the mystery bookstore in Boulder, owned by one of the leading mystery mavens, Cynthia Nye.

Borders has moved POWER PLAY to their Major New table at 30% off — a big step up from last week. It’s really selling there, too.

Another ridiculously early flight the next morning. The night before, I put in a wake-up call for 5:15 a.m.

The call never came. I find myself scrambling around, trying to get some coffee in me, enough to pack up. Yes, the glamorous life of an author on tour. Where’s my stretch lizine?

The Denver airport has a shuttle that runs between terminals and plays honky-tonk piano music at intervals. It also has a recorded message, a woman’s voice chiding passengers, “You are delaying the departure of this train!” This is not good for Denver’s friendly image. Someone should do something about that.

Mile High

2007-08-31T14:14:00.000-04:00

Dateline -- Denver, August 27

Arrived in Denver, the Mile High City, on an inhumanely early flight out of Louisville, in time to do two big local TV shows. Met by the local escort, the fabulous Lisa Maxson (Janet Evanovich had raved about her, and she wasn’t wrong) and was escorted around in her gold Jag. This lady really has it together, right down to the ice-cold bottles of water in the cooler in the back seat. Learned that POWER PLAY is actually selling out in a lot of the Barnes & Noble stores. Which is a good thing — only I hope they have enough on reorder.

A signing at the famous Tattered Cover on Colfax Avenue, which has a huge poster of POWER PLAY on display. An amazing bookstore, one of the great indies, and to think there are four of them. Boston, allegedly the Athens of America, has — what — one indie general bookstore left?

Then I get the news that POWER PLAY was the number three bestselling hardcover fiction title at Barnes & Noble this week. Amazing! My editor, and everyone else at St. Martin’s, is elated, because this surely means that the book will automatically go on the B&N bestseller wall, at 30% off.

Then, a few hours later, a strange twist: Barnes & Noble is not going to be putting POWER PLAY on their bestseller wall. Their number three hardcover fiction title — and it’s not one of their bestsellers.

Why?

Because they’ve run out of stock. There aren’t enough copies in B&N’s distribution center to supply each of their stores.

I can’t decide if that’s good news or bad news. I just hope that when the next book comes out, they order a few more copies.

I guess you could call this a high-class problem, huh?

The next morning . . .
Woke up with eyes as red as a UFO’s. Went to the hotel gift shop for some Visine and was told by the saleswoman, kindly, that I looked “drunk.” I snagged her last bottle — she said she can’t keep it in stock. Denver, the Mile High City, has extremely dry air, and a lot of visitors suffer eye irritation.

Great.

I have to do a TV appearance this morning, on a Denver business show. The Visine doesn’t work too well. In the TV studio, they mike me up and put one of those Secret Service squiggly earphones in my ear. I’m seated in the newsroom and instructed to look into the robotic camera.

Ten second warning.

But where is the camera I’m supposed to look into? There’s a monitor — showing me, red-eyed, looking confused — and a teleprompter scrolling the anchorman’s script. So I look into the teleprompter and try not to read the questions rolling by while I talk.

They can’t hear me too well, though. When my segment is over, I discover why: my lavalier mike somehow got unclipped and slid down into my crotch.

My name in lights...

2007-08-31T10:07:00.001-04:00

How cool is this? This is The Bookstop in Houston, TX, now part of the Barnes & Noble chain.

Thanks to my cousin Ashley Segal for taking the picture!

Graceland

2007-08-31T08:49:00.000-04:00

Dateline -- Memphis, August 26

When I told Shirley Crenshaw, my author escort in Memphis, that I wanted to visit Graceland, she thought I was kidding at first. She’d only gone once before.

Then she told me her sister had gone to high school with Elvis. Seriously. So we had to go. After all, this is the 30th anniversary of Elvis’s death.

First thing I learned is that it’s not pronounced the way Paul Simon sings it. The second syllable is unstressed.

Second thing I learned is that it’s not exactly a mansion. It’s like a big suburban house, decorated in the worst 1970s taste. The famous “Jungle Room” is basically a rec room with shag carpet and fake-fur upholstery. One look at the kitchen, with its cheesy wood veneer cabinets, and you want to tear it all out and renovate.

But hey, it’s Elvis. He bought the house in 1957 for just over $100,000, with a $37,000 mortgage, a year after he hit the top of the charts with “Heartbreak Hotel.”

By the time he died, the poor guy was way overweight and drug-addicted and chronically constipated, and in financial trouble. His manager had sold the rights to most of his songbook back to RCA, for a fraction of what they’d have gotten now — but he needed the cash.

Elvis was a great singer, a charismatic performer, and a very generous guy. But at the time of his death, he was pretty much washed up, and I suspect he’d be all but forgotten, a pop-culture curiosity of the 1950s and ‘60s, a Trivial Pursuit question . . . were it not for his ex-wife Priscilla, who hired a brilliant entrepreneur, Jack Soden, to manage his estate, Elvis Presley Enterprises.

Soden, a marketing genius, didn’t hesitate to file lawsuits against anyone and everyone who dared to use Elvis’s image — his face, for God’s sake — without paying for it. He turned Graceland, this kitschy high-suburban house, into a shrine that gets 600,000 visitors a year, a tourist attraction second only to the White House.

Two years ago, Elvis’s daughter, Lisa Marie, sold 85% of Elvis Presley Enterprises to the media mogul, Robert Sillerman, for around $100 million.

She got to keep Graceland, though.

The signing was at the Horseshoe Casino in Tunica, Mississippi. A nice crowd of people, just about none of whom had ever read any of my books before. Tunica, which used to be one of the poorest places in the country, has exploded in the past five years, with all sorts of casinos springing up. The night sky glows neon.

Cincinnati & Dayton

2007-08-27T11:59:00.000-04:00

Dateline: Dayton, OH -- A great new Books & Co. store, which put on a real party — lemon bars and chocolaty “magic bars"... An enthusiastic crowd, several of whom drove quite some distance (I guess people just drive more out here in the Midwest) and had bags of my older books to sign.

Boston songs — the first time Books & Co. has ever had Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion” blasting over its speakers. Guster a hit – who’s that? I had to explain the principle behind the Boston songs — that either they’re songs about Boston (“Government Center” by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, “Charlie on the MTA”) or by artists who got their start in Boston (Tracy Chapman, Bonnie Raitt, James Taylor, Aerosmith, Guster) or songs irrevocably associated with Boston (Neal Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline,” played at every Red Sox game or the Dropkick Murphys' “Tessie”). A lot of requests for copies of the CD, which unfortunately I can’t do, because of copyright restrictions (and frankly, how would I feel about, say, Stephen Tyler giving away bootleg copies of POWER PLAY at one of his concerts? Actually...)

Awoke to an e-mail from my editor telling me to read a review of the book in today’s (Sunday’s) Chicago Sun-Times by David Montgomery.

Off to Memphis this morning. Clair Without an E, my devoted webmistress, tells me to make sure I go check out Graceland. I hope I can.

Louisville

2007-08-27T11:44:00.000-04:00

Okay, so here I am, sitting in a huge black stretch limo that’s taking me from the Caesar’s casino in Elizabeth, Indiana, to the Louisville, KY, airport. It’s a 10-passenger limo — a “liz-zeen,” as my daughter used to say when she was little. Cushy leather seats. Cavernous interior. A full bar with racks of champagne and highball glasses. (It’s 8:55 in the morning, so I don’t really feel like cracking out the booze.) This is one of those ridiculous, city-block-long limousines that I always make fun of.

But that’s me behind the smoked-glass windows. Yep, everyday life on book tour.

Yeah, right. You should have seen me jammed into my seat on a Chautauqua commuter flight yesterday. But never mind. . .

I once read a great quote about how stories only happen to people who can tell them. I don’t remember who said it, and there’s no internet access in this limo — not that I’m complaining, mind you — but the last 24 hours reminded me of the truth in that.
Yesterday morning my editor e-mailed to tell me that a review of POWER PLAY was just posted online, a few days early, on the website of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. It may sound like just a regional newspaper, but in fact its readership is large, and the reviewer, Oline Cogdill, is one of the most widely syndicated — and widely respected — reviewers in the mystery/thriller business. A good review from her can sell a lot of copies. Luckily, this was a really good review (you can read it here.) I was at once relieved and elated.

Then a few minutes later he e-mailed to say that a review was in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, by Tom Nolan (which you can read online for a few days, here). Also a terrific review.

So I went out to pick up a copy or two of the WSJ and discovered that my hotel was located on the corner in downtown Louisville — Fourth and Walnut — where the eminent religious philosopher Thomas Merton (The Seven Storey Mountain) had a life-changing epiphany in 1958. As he later wrote: “In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs.”

Well, I was in a good mood too, but not quite that good. I mean, the folks walking around Fourth Street seemed nice and all, but I wouldn’t go as far as Merton.

When I got back to the hotel, I asked the concierge about something I’d read in a history of the Seelbach Hotel I’d found in my room. Apparently Al Capone, who pretty much took up residence in the hotel in the 1930s, had a secret passageway built through the innards of the hotel to allow him to escape from the feds. I asked the concierge, Larry Johnson, if I could see it. Unfortunately, the Oakroom restaurant (the famous 5-diamond restaurant where I’d had dinner the night before) was closed, and anyway, the concealed entrance to Capone’s tunnel, hidden behind a panel in the wall in one of the restaurant’s booths, had been destroyed in a fire a few years earlier.

But Larry told me that just a few days ago, some hotel workers putting in a new air-conditioning duct had come upon a long-forgotten stretch of Capone’s getaway tunnel.

I asked Larry for a copy of the Seelbach history, and it turned out that he was the author: he’s the hotel historian. He asked for my name, so he could inscribe the book to me — and did a double-take. “You’re Joseph Finder, the writer who’s going to be at Caesar’s casino tonight?”

I said I was.

He told me that a friend of his, an 87-year-old woman named Noni Fischer, was a huge Joe Finder fan and was in the middle of KILLER INSTINCT, and would I do him a favor? He picked up the phone and called Noni, then put me on.

I thought she was going to have a heart attack. (Which worried me: I sure didn’t want to lose such a devoted reader.)

A late lunch at a great restaurant called Lynn’s Paradise Café, where I tried (and loved) fried green tomatoes (rolled in cornmeal, not dipped in batter, much better) and a fried catfish sandwich. Delicious. A very cool place, decorated in high kitsch style, with a collection of the ugliest lamps I’ve ever seen. (Keep eating like this, and I’ll have a heart attack before tour’s over.)

The book signing that night was at Caesar’s Indiana — a casino. I’d never done a book signing at a casino before, and Caesar’s Indiana had never done one either. I was their first. And it turned out to be a huge success. It’s a brilliant idea, still quite new, something that my publisher first tried with Janet Evanovich. But I don’t have a fraction of Janet’s following, so I worried that I’d be sitting there under a poster, ignored by the passing parade of gamblers.

Instead, there were throngs of book buyers, most of whom don’t go into bookstores very often, and many of them hadn’t read me before — but they were willing to gamble. The books were sold by Borders, which was delighted. We sold boxes upon boxes of books. (The publishing industry needs to do more of this kind of out-of-the-box thinking, to reach potential book buyers who just don’t visit traditional bookstores anymore.)

Granted, I did have some people come up to me and say, I’m only interested in this book if it tells me how to win. I told each of them that the secret’s inside the book, including the number of the lucky slot machine. (Note to my publisher: whatever it takes.) Posed for pictures with Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, who kept me company the whole time.

And then who should come up to my table but Noni Fischer, accompanied by the Seelbach’s concierge, Larry Johnson. Noni had just finished KILLER INSTINCT and decided she had to get a copy of POWER PLAY. What a sweet lady. We posed for pictures, which are going right up on my website as soon as we get them.

The Red Sox are 6.5 games ahead of the Yankees, so all is right with the world. Maybe Thomas Merton was onto something.

Iron Man and Gatsby

2007-08-24T11:19:00.000-04:00

Louisville, Kentucky. A good start to the day. USA Today’s lead story was on the Boston Red Sox — “America’s new home team.” A nice piece, but of course this sort of coverage can only make a Sox fan feel nervous.

An e-mail from John Sargent, the CEO of Holtzbrinck, the parent company of my publisher, St. Martins’ Press — the capo de tutti capi — telling me that we’ve already sold more copies of Power Play in its first two days on sale at Barnes & Noble than we’d ever sold in a week before. Having the book in B&N’s stepladder, for the first time, was surely a major factor. It’s doing great at Borders too, which also has it prominently on display in the front of all stores.

And then a terrific piece on my books in The Economist has just come out, here. The issue hits the newsstands tomorrow, I think. One of the best articles ever written about my books, and in one of the most widely read magazines in the world. (Accompanied by a photo of me sitting on top of the boardroom table at Bear Stearns in Boston, taken by my friend, Norman Lang.)

Louisville was 100 degrees when I arrived. I checked in at the Seelbach, the city’s grande dame hotel, where F. Scott Fitzgerald used to hang out while he was stationed at Camp Zachary Taylor nearby, and wrote most of The Great Gatsby (and where his characters Tom and Daisy Buchanan had their wedding: “In June she married Tom Buchanan of Chicago, with more pomp and circumstance than Louisville ever knew before. He came down with a hundred people in four private cars, and hired a whole floor of the Seelbach Hotel, and the day before the wedding he gave her a string of pearls valued at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”) Apparently Al Capone used to stay here a lot, too. Like a lot of Chicagoans, I feel a connection to Capone. My great-grandfather, who owned a number of dry-cleaning shops in Chicago, apparently tried to stand up to Al Capone but then came to his senses ... after one of his shops was fire-bombed or something. I’m hazy on the details.

There’s a big Iron Man triathlon going on in Louisville, which is why the Seelbach is fully booked. The guy at the desk who checked me in asked if I was here for the Iron Man. Flattery always works on me. Well, when I’m on book tour, I do feel like I’m running a triathlon — does that count?

A Red Sox Legend, and some old friends

2007-08-24T09:49:00.000-04:00

Philadelphia/West Goshen, PA. The Power Tour road trip started with an event at one of the great independent bookstores in the country, Chester County Book & Music Company. Joe Drabyak, one of CCBM’s booksellers, had invited me there, and another staff member — David English — has interviewed me for his web radio show a number of times.

Tough to decide what the highlight of the event was for me — there were several. Three great college buddies of mine – Peter Evans, Doug Stuart, and Dick Dupuis — showed up to razz me and try to trip me up with embarrassing questions, but I’m sorry to say after so many book signings I’m not so easily tripped up. Peter and Doug sang in the Yale Whiffenpoofs with me; Dick sang in the Whiffs a year ahead of me.

Then there was Elise Parker (the mother of one of my college roommates, Sumner Parker), who used to make dinner for Sumner and me at their house in New Haven when we couldn’t take dining-hall food anymore.

And —OK, maybe this was the highlight — another audience member was one of the great major-league baseball players of all time: Mickey Vernon, who played for the Boston Red Sox in 1956 and 1957. (My hometown team, in case you didn’t know.)
Mickey Vernon, who was named by Bill James as one of the best first basemen ever, was a two-time American League batting champion — he beat Ted Williams for the title in 1946, at .353, and did it again in 1953. (OK, he played for the Washington Senators a lot longer than he played for the Sox, but I’ll claim him.) He holds the major league record for career double plays at first base (2044) and really should be in the Hall of Fame.

And his daughter, Gay Vernon, is famous in Boston herself: a radio host and “personality” on Magic 106.7, and a friend.

That's INTERNATIONAL Man of Mystery to you...

2007-08-23T15:04:00.000-04:00

This week's ECONOMIST includes an incredibly nice piece about me. You can read it here.

Wednesday, August 22 -- Boston to Philadelphia

2007-08-22T18:15:00.000-04:00

PHILADELPHIA, PA -- I’ve done a lot of book tours by now, but this one really seems to be starting off right.

Okay, I’ll ignore the fact that I had to get up at 3:00 a.m. after having gotten to bed at midnight celebrating the POWER PLAY launch. (Maybe I should have taken my friend Daniel Palmer’s advice and stayed up all night. After three hours of sleep I look like Herman Munster.)

Woke up, made a large pot of coffee, tried not to wake the girls (being my wife, my daughter and her best friend, who was sleeping over, and of course our dog Mia: I live in an all-female household). Checked my e-mail and found a terrific review of POWER PLAY in my hometown paper, the Boston Globe (the reviewer, Chuck Leddy, called it a “delicious, perfectly prepared mixture . . . a fast-paced fun ride”). This after two really nice reviews in the New York Times, by Janet Maslin on Friday and in the Book Review on Sunday, which is unusual. (The great Robert B. Parker e-mailed on Sunday to say, “Nice treatment in the Times. I have always wished you well, but that well?”).

So we’re off to a fast start. A separate item in the Boston Globe mentioned the case study I wrote for the Harvard Business Review — a prequel to Power Play. I opened the New York Times and found the remarkable full-page ad my publisher took out for Power Play, on the back page of the arts section. A e-mail from my editor telling me to check the rankings on BarnesandNoble.com — Power Play was #3! (Ahead of Harry Potter, I might add. Incredible.)

Last night was an amazing launch party at Borders, in Boston’s Back Bay. The Borders folks really turned it into a party — a cake with the book’s cover on it, helium balloons (including black Power Play balloons), a huge SRO crowd. My assistant, Claire, had to be out of the country for a wedding, but fortunately my former assistant, Sarah, filled in for her, assisted by the great Clair Lamb (Clair Without an E), who runs my website so well. My life really is run by some remarkable women — thank God.

The 5:30 a.m. flight left reasonably on time. No checked luggage this time — based on Lee Child’s advice: “Travel light, travel far.” Three weeks worth of clothes in one small carry-on case. Very tightly packed. Very. An aluminum suitcase, so it’s not likely to explode — or so I hope.

POWER PLAY on sale August 21!

2007-08-20T20:19:00.000-04:00

The tour starts on Tuesday, August 21 with the launch party at Borders-Back Bay. Come see me there, or check the main website for other events.

Dateline: Orlando, June 8 -- My M. C. Escher Moment

2006-06-10T19:59:00.000-04:00

Every year there's a big trade show for the “display industry” - plasma and LCD TVs and monitors, video equipment, huge screens you see in football stadiums and ballparks, and all the related stuff - called InfoComm. This year it was in Orlando, Florida, and the NEC Corporation invited me to do a book signing and talk there. The last stop of my book tour.

This was inherently weird, of course. A pivotal scene in Killer Instinct is set at a huge trade show, which I call “TechComm.” Now I was talking there. It was like that M. C. Escher drawing of a hand drawing a hand - surreal.

I arrived at the show half an hour before my scheduled appearance and saw a huge line at the NEC booth. When I asked what that line was for, they said it was for me.

I signed and signed until all 250 books were gone and my hand started cramping. A couple of techie-looking guys came up to my signing table, not in the line, and started looking at the piles of books.

“What's this?” Guy One said to the other, picking up a copy of Killer Instinct.

“I think it's a book,” Guy Two said.

“A book?” Guy One turned it over and over.

I looked up from signing. “Yeah, a book,” I said to Guy One. “Dead Tree Technology. Old Media.”

Guy One nodded. Turned the book over again and said, “Where's the On button?”

Upcoming media appearances

2006-06-09T14:24:00.000-04:00

If you live near Asheville, N.C., listen for me on the Ken and Tammy Show on WOXL-96.5, Tuesday morning right around 9:00.

[cliche.]

2006-06-05T15:22:00.000-04:00

Something disturbing is happening in hotel rooms across America. The bars of soap you used to see -- with faux-British brand names like "Crabbe & Whitford," or whatever -- have been replaced by spare white boxes with spare black lettering (inevitably Helvetica) saying something like clarity or refresh or rejuvenate. One word, lower-case, usually followed by a period.

Does anyone remember when the only soap in most hotel rooms was Cashmere Bouquet?

An airport story

2006-06-05T00:05:00.000-04:00

Stopped at the newsstand near my boarding gate at the San Diego Airport to pick up a newspaper. They didn’t have any copies of Killer Instinct on sale (or none left, maybe?), but they had some copies of Company Man in paperback. I saw a guy reach for a copy, pull it down and look at it. I tapped him on the shoulder and said, “I’ll sign that for you if you want – I wrote it.”

He stared at me. “What do you mean, you’re Joseph . . .Finder?” (As usual, he pronounced it wrong. I wonder how long it took before people learned how to pronounce “Crichton.”)

I said, “Right.”

He said, “No way. I don’t believe you.”

I said, “Really, I am.”

“You’re telling me you’re Joseph Finder? I don’t believe it.”

I pulled out my driver’s license.

“Oh, my God,” he said. “You really are Joseph Finder.” He started telling people around him. One by one, people started grabbing copies off the shelf and asking me to sign their books too, until they were all gone.

“Now you’ve actually got to buy the book,” I said. “Don’t put it back or anything.”

The Green Room

2006-06-05T00:04:00.000-04:00

Just about every TV show I do, they show me to the "green room" to chill before I go on the air.

Not once, never, have I actually seen a green room that’s green. So what I wonder is, why do they call it a “green room”? Seriously. A quick Google search tells me the term has been used in the theater since 1701, but none of my usual word-origin websites has a good explanation. Someone told me not long ago – and this is a theory I haven’t read on the web – that it comes from around Shakespeare’s time, when actors would hang out before their scenes in what was sarcastically called “the green room” – outdoors, of course, in a copse of trees in the forest.

Does anyone know the real derivation?

Mike Piazza

2006-06-05T00:03:00.000-04:00

A piece in the San Diego Union-Tribune about the Padres beating the Pittsburgh Pirates, 7-0. PNC Park was, according to the paper, a swamp. The conditions in the ballpark were the worst any of the Padres players had ever seen. The article quoted the catcher Mike Piazza: “It was unbelievable, really. The infield looked like the Everglades. I didn’t want to hit a grounder for fear that I’d ruin the habitat of some endangered species.”

Who said baseball players aren’t funny?

The solo genius

2006-06-05T00:02:00.000-04:00

Whenever I talk to a group of businesspeople, I talk about the role of the individual in the corporation in coming up with creative, innovative solutions. I just stopped at a Starbucks to get a Frappuccino, and I remembered that the Frappuccino was invented by one clever employee at a Starbucks. It wasn’t a corporate invention. It was one woman’s idea (I think it was a woman), and it caught on, and after a while Starbucks’ headquarters heard about it and decided to adopt the recipe companywide. By now it’s got to be one of Starbucks’ biggest revenue-generators.

I made a note to myself about this on a Post-it pad. And then remembered that the Post-it pad was also invented by one creative guy at the 3-M company.

What's with the $6 water?

2006-06-05T00:01:00.000-04:00

Is anyone else as weirded out as I am by that single small bottle of Evian water (750 ml, which by my calculation is 25.5 lousy ounces) you find in so many hotel rooms selling for six dollars?

Dateline: San Diego, June 2 -- The Best Day Yet

2006-06-04T23:49:00.000-04:00

I’ve reached the point on tour where – and it comes every time, right around now – I stand at the bank of elevators in the lobby of a hotel unable to remember my room number. 1607? 511? 816? 907? I had to go back to the front desk and ask them. Not good.

Today was the best day yet, despite my inability to remember my room number (wrote it on my room card-key with a Sharpie). San Diego, which is one of my favorite cities. The weather is perfect. Back home in Boston, it’s pouring rain. I’m enjoying it here.

For some reason, San Diego isn’t a regular stop on most author tours, and I don’t know why. Maybe publishers haven’t gotten the word. It’s a lot smaller than San Francisco, less going on, and as a result people tend to turn out for author events in much larger numbers than in S.F.

I came here back in November, to talk to several Northern Trust literary societies, and met with such an enthusiastic reception that I decided I had to come back. Glad I did.

Back to school.
Anyway, today I did an event that most of my writer friends would consider sheer lunacy. And it was the best thing I’ve done this whole tour. Book tours are about bookstore events, stock signings, media interviews. If you have any free time, you fit in another interview. Or maybe catch a quick, restorative nap.

But in the middle of the day I took a break from my tour and paid a visit to Montgomery High School in San Diego and talked to a class of 16 kids.

Montgomery H.S. is three miles from the Mexican border. It’s 75% Hispanic, and just about all of its students are from low-income families. It’s also surrounded by high chain-link fences – a little like a minimum-security prison, frankly.

I’d met some of these kids when the Northern Trust Bank brought me over to California in November to speak to their literary societies. Northern Trust, which is quite civic-minded, always invites a group of high school students to the lunches to meet the featured author. At my San Diego appearance I met a small group of students from Montgomery High School along with their teacher, Kathleen Obrist, and the school’s librarian, Marsha Litwiller.

These kids were amazing. Hispanic -- in one case, Filipino -- and “underprivileged,” meaning not rich, these students were extraordinarily bright and motivated and privileged to have this fantastic, inspirational teacher, Kathy Obrist, the likes of whom you rarely see. When I decided to return to San Diego, I asked Kathy if she’d like me to talk at her high school. Kathy said yes.

All the kids I talked to had read Killer Instinct and had even spent two weeks of their lunch hours to talk about the book. So the questions I got were extremely thoughtful. The last time I talked to a high school class was two years ago, at my own alma mater in Latham, New York – Shaker High School. But Shaker is a fairly well-to-do public school. Montgomery isn’t. All the more remarkable the way these kids are being educated. If only Kathy Obrist could be cloned and placed in every public high school in the country.

I told them about my struggles to make it as a writer, the many obstacles in the way of anyone trying to write, the way people tried to talk me out of it. And I found myself turning into some kind of evangelist – urging them to be stubborn, the ignore the naysayers, to give themselves a chance, to realize that they don’t have to do the same job as their parents if they don’t want to, that there are careers out there like writing (or acting or painting or whatever else) that don’t have a formal entry system, or mentors.

One of the students asked me how much money I made. I was a little embarrassed, of course (though there are countries, such as Russia, where people talk freely about how much their income is), but I couldn’t blame her for asking – it’s something I’d want to know. I told them that I made a lot of money, but that sure wasn’t the reason I was a writer. If I wanted to make serious money, I’d be in venture capital. For me, selling a lot of copies of my books means a lot of people are reading them, and that’s what I’m happiest about.

The real reason I took time out of my tour to talk to these great kids was because I wish I’d had the opportunity to meet a writer when I was in high school. I had no idea how that whole business worked. It would have been so much easier for me if I’d met someone who actually did it for a living. And I was raised in an intellectual, middle-class family. For these kids to actually meet a professional writer has to have been unusual -- and, I hope, in some small way inspirational.

I’m glad I took the time to do this. If these kids were at all moved, it doesn’t compare to the way I felt afterward.

Best signing so far: Warwick’s, in La Jolla, is one of the great independents. I’ve done a number of outstanding indie bookstores, including Third Place Books and Book Passage, but this place was packed. The events coordinator, Amy Pickell, is famous for running the best events. She always gets the word out. Plus, San Diegoans really turn out at book signings. Great, thoughtful, deep questions – I felt like I was back in Boston. (That’s a compliment, folks.)

One of the people in the audience was a friend of mine named Ron Gillies, who invited me to talk to everyone in the plasma division of NEC when he was the General Manager and Senior V.P. there. I’m grateful to everyone in the corporate world who’s willing to spend time talking to me, but Ron really went out of his way, and Killer Instinct was that much better because of it. I got all kinds of great details from his people – lots of anecdotes. Went out to dinner afterward with Ron and his wife and a number of other friends of theirs.

I wouldn’t have met this guy if it weren’t for my research. Another reason I like that part of my job so much.

Dateline: San Francisco, June 1

2006-06-02T16:56:00.000-04:00

Who’s profiting more from America’s post-9/11 terrorist scare, I wonder – General Electric (manufacturer of a bunch of high-tech airport security machines, including the EntryScan, which looks like a futuristic time machine), or RubberMaid, which makes all those gray plastic trays onto which you now have to put your laptop, your suit jacket, and your shoes)?

How cool is it to run into a fellow author when you’re on book tour? Especially when that author is my friend Barry Eisler, author of the widely praised John Rain thriller series. I dropped by M is for Mystery, the great mystery bookstore in San Mateo, California, owned by one of the legends of the book business, Ed Kaufman, to do a stock signing. As it happened, one of my Silicon Valley sources (and a friend, Roger McNamee, was there to meet me with a bag full of books to be signed. And then Barry Eisler came by as well. He lives 15 minutes away, and he was there to sign copies of his new book, The Last Assassin, just before setting off on a 30-city tour (And I complain about 10 cities?) A couple of other people dropped by to meet me, and they all ended up meeting Barry as well – and buying his new book too. I told Barry I’m going to follow him around on his tour and horn in on his signings.

But I was kidding.

Thirty cities? No thanks.

Airport bookstores all seem to work differently. I don’t quite get them. At the San Francisco Airport, waiting to board my flight to San Diego, I spotted a nice stack of Killer Instinct at Compass Books, one of the most impressive airport bookshops I’ve seen outside of Europe. I offered to sign them. The clerk was thrilled, then she rounded up loads of paperback copies of Company Man as well. Then I saw Killer Instinct in the bestseller rack at the CNBC News shop not far away, and I asked the clerk if she’d like me to sign them. She looked at me as if I were offering to rip the covers off or something. When I explained, she shook her head violently. “I’d have to get permission for that,” she said.

Old friends
I know I’ve complained a lot about book tour, but there are also some cool aspects --including meeting up with old friends I haven’t seen in years. When I walked into Book Passage in Corte Madera for my Thursday evening signing, a woman came up to me whom I haven’t seen in years. Her name is Patty Hoyt (I’m not sure if that’s still her last name, actually), and I’ve known her since we were in third grade together in Loudonville, New York. Patty has an identical twin, Angie, and I was always getting them mixed up.

I saw her and said, “Angie!”

“Patty, actually,” she said.

Oops.

Book Passage in Corte Madera is one of the most famous independent bookstores in the country, and I’d always heard that it’s one of the very best for author signings. Now I know why. Sure, it was a very well run, very well publicized signing, and man, do they have the routine down. Tim, one of the events people, a guy with a radio announcer’s voice, runs author events like a field marshal. And the winner of the 42” plasma TV turned out to be one of Book Passage’s most regular customers. All great. But the best thing is the gift they give every writer who does an event there: a box of elegant correspondence cards with his or her name embossed on them. I won’t need to buy stationery again for a while.

I plan to return to Book Passage again next year -- by which point I hope to have used up all the stationery.

The Perfect Signing Pen...

2006-06-01T14:47:00.000-04:00

does not yet exist.

The classic, of course, is the Sharpie. They’re great for signing your name, but they’re too thick for writing anything more than a few words -- legibly, anyway. They also tend to bleed through the thinner paper that publishers have been using in recent years. Sharpie makes an Ultra Fine, but that’s way too thin and scratchy.

Even my favorite general-use writing pen (and yes, I’m a pen-obsessive),the Uni-Ball Vision Elite, isn’t right. Not bold enough.

At the beginning of this tour I found the perfect signing pen, given to me by someone at a Barnes & Noble – a model sold by OfficeMax and marketed under their house brand – but when I went to OfficeMax to buy more, I found that they’d stopped making them.

So the question is, how do I convince the Sharpie people (Sanford, owned by Newell Rubbermaid) to make the classic Sharpie in a somewhat thinner point? Call it the Sharpie Autograph. I’ll bet I could get it into the hands of every bestselling novelist in the country. Come on, folks!

Who or what is "Lodgenet"?

2006-06-01T14:46:00.000-04:00

–- and how, for God’s sake, have they managed to capture every single TV set in every single hotel room in the country? Does it have anything to do with the One World Alliance?

A phrase you don't want to hear in a hamburger place (though I did)

2006-06-01T14:45:00.000-04:00

"E. coli."

Dateline: Seattle, May 31

2006-06-01T14:19:00.000-04:00

Seattle. One day – but the perfect Book Tour day. Scheduled almost to the minute, lots of bookstores, great media.

Well, actually, it didn’t start perfectly. I shaved too quickly and somehow cut my nose (don’t ask). Apparently the nose is, as my brother the doctor would say, “intensely vascular, and it bleeds like stink.” Whatever that means. I carry a styptic pencil along with me, but that did no good. The blood began running down my face and into the hotel sink as if I’d decapitated myself. It took a good ten minutes and a box of Kleenex before the bleeding stopped. All the while, I kept thinking: This is not going to look good on TV this afternoon.

Started with two radio interviews, including a terrific interview on Seattle’s NPR station with John Moe, who asked some really interesting, provocative questions. You can listen to it here. Stopped by Seattle Mystery Bookstore, saw JB Dickey and Bill Farley, and signed a bunch of copies. Some interesting talk about the bookselling business. (I love getting the inside dope from people who really know it.) Anyone who wants to buy signed copies can get them there.

Did a terrific TV interview on KOMO-TV’s afternoon news program, though it was a format I was totally unused to: the anchorwoman, Kathi Goertzen and I stood next to each other in the newsroom and talked. Suddenly I became very aware of my hands. A very good interview, and far more in-depth than the usual three-minute TV spot. A lot of people watch that show – and lots of them turned up for my evening signing at Third Place Books outside of Seattle.

What a great bookstore that is. I’ve never seen anything like it – it’s huge, extremely well stocked and well displayed, and it’s sort of open to, and adjacent to, a food court. This creates a kind of giant café area, a destination in its own right, from which people can migrate over to the bookstore. Wendy Manning, the events manager, put on a fantastic event. She really got the word out. A big crowd.

Interestingly, many of them were people who’d never read my books before but were intrigued, wanted to hear more – and most of them bought copies of Paranoia and Company Man as well as Killer Instinct. The audience was truly engaged, asked lots of great questions about everything from how I name my characters to was Ashley Judd as beautiful in person as she is on the screen. When I announced the winner of the NEC TV – and she gasped – everyone broke out in loud applause. I also got to spend a little time with Jeff Ayers, a writer and librarian who wrote an excellent piece about me for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

I’m coming back to Third Place Books next year. At least if I have anything to do with it. And I hope I do.

A lot of press stuff on the new book has come out this week. An amazing piece in Time magazine this week, for one, by Andrea Sachs. It’s headlined “Chapters for the CEO Set: Novelist Joseph Finder has carved out a market niche: the corporate thriller.” Wonderfully written piece, done with humor and a light touch. She quotes Malcolm Gladwell saying, “Joseph Finder is doing for the business thriller what John le Carre did for the spy thriller – moving it from the level of simple genre to something more complex and ultimately satisfying.” Wow. Plus a very cool photograph of me taken my one of the legendary photographers Time regularly calls upon, Asia Kepka. She’d scouted out a location on the Boston waterfront and found a bizarre structure: a boat ramp with a ribbed ceiling of blue tarpaulin that made an arresting background image. Very cool-looking.

A great review in the Boston Globe by David Montgomery that was so enthusiastic, and so articulate (Montgomery is a regular mystery reviewer and one of the best . . . clearly) that St. Martin’s ran an unusually long excerpt from it in their New York Times ad today (Thursday). If I may quote (I may – this is my blog, dammit): “Superb . . . fascinating . . . Heart-pounding suspense . . . The most successful writers are often the ones who either anticipate the trends or create trends on their own . . . that’s what Tom Clancy did with military thrillers . . . what Dan Brown did with the religious thriller. Joseph Finder has firmly established himself as the master of the corporate thriller, doing for the country’s boardrooms and executive suites what John Grisham did for its courtrooms.”

I blush as I type those words.

I also am beginning to realize that I’m not easily going to be able to shake that “corporate thriller” label I so detest.

A great review also came in from Fortune Magazine. I had no idea they were going to review the book, and I’m delighted they did.

But I leave the best for last. I had about an hour between the TV appearance and when I had to leave for Third Place Books, so I went back to the hotel room to grab a desperately needed nap. I was just drifting off when my cell phone rang. Snatched it up, fumbled with it, heard a voice saying, “You’re number 13.”

I said, “Who’s this?” And what did this mean?

“Keith.” My editor.

“I’m number – oh. Oh, my God!” I woke up fast. He was telling me that Killer Instinct had just hit the printed New York Times bestseller list, for the week of June 11. Amazing, actually, given how many of the big chain bookstores were out of the book last week. And given the mega-bestsellers who have books out right now – Cornwell, Patterson, Sandford, Mary Higgins Clark. Plus my friends Harlan Coben and Lee Child, both of whom have been at the book-a-year thing far longer than I and have built up deservedly huge followings. Alexander McCall Smith, who apparently writes 15 novels a year. Bad Twin, which seems to be some bogus “Lost” spin-off. And Dan Brown, of course.

Within a few minutes, my BlackBerry started buzzing – congratulations from a bunch of people at St. Martin’s, and a number of friends in the publishing industry, including my beloved first editor (at Viking, for The Moscow Club), Pam Dorman.

I e-mailed my brother the editor to tell him the news. Among the books Killer Instinct led was Suite Francaise, two novellas about life in Nazi-occupied France, by Irene Nemirovsky, a woman who perished at Auschwitz. As I marveled at this, my brother replied -- I trust him for the blackest of humor -- “Well, she didn’t tour.”

A good day.

On the radio in Seattle

2006-05-31T19:44:00.000-04:00

Radio listeners in the Seattle area -- or anywhere -- can hear an interview with me on KUOW's "The Beat" sometime between 2:00 and 3:00 p.m. on Thursday, June 1.

Let me know if I sound too much like Frasier Crane...

Dateline: Boston -- Because I Asked

2006-05-29T20:19:00.000-04:00

OK, I just got a response to my item about the Boston cabbie's claim about Pat Boone and Metallica. This one came from my editor:

No, the cabbie is all wrong.

I happen to have a copy of Pat Boone's In a Metal Mood: No More Mr. Nice Guy. It's a classic! His version of Judas Priest's "You've Got Another Thing Coming" never fails to crack me up and appall whomever happens to be in listening distance.

But actually Pat Boone never wrote anything - he's always covered other folks' songs and like a lot of classic crooners, he relies on his producers to assemble the songs. In addition to the brass section and the violins, he has some classic metal folk doing cameos on the album (Ronnie James Dio, Ritchie Blackmore, Dweezil Zappa). He does a cover of Metallica's "Enter Sandman" on the album. And he used to be Ozzie Osborne's next door neighbor. But no, that's all pure Boston cabbie b.s. Never wrote a song in his life, much less Metallica.

As for the Barry Manilow rumor. Piffle. No idea where that one came from but not possible - heck, Barry Manilow only wrote about half his own songs, others were covers of others'. (In a particular odd moment, he made a hit out of an Ian Hunter song, "Ships." Ian Hunter, of course, was the lead singer of the classic Mott the Hoople. OK, classic to me...)

I pointed out that Pat Boone wrote the theme song to the movie "Exodus," and he replied:

That's one he is credited with. I always assumed that was so much b.s. - just the way Elvis used to get co-writing credit on his hits even though he never wrote a note (through the 60's anyway).

Dateline: Boston -- Impersonating an Author?

2006-05-29T20:18:00.000-04:00

Stopped in at a Borders in Cambridge, on the way to the Apple Store, and asked one of the managers if she'd like me to sign copies of KILLER INSTINCT. She gave me a dead stare and said, "If you can show me a picture ID."

I said, "You're kidding, right?"

She said, "No, I'm not. New store policy. Some people sign other people's books."
So what I'm now wondering is -- just who the hell goes into bookstores and signs books they didn't write?

Dateline: Boston

2006-05-28T11:10:00.000-04:00

Home again – for a couple of days anyway.

Arrived back in Boston for the Memorial Day weekend, and not a moment too soon. Too many days in a row of getting up at 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. to get on a plane can wear a guy out. My daughter was away at a sleep-over at a friend’s house, unfortunately, but my wife was happy to see me.

My dog, however, nearly went out of her . . . fur. She’s a Golden Retriever we adopted from The Seeing Eye guide-dog school in Morristown, New Jersey. She’s a total sweetheart, like all Goldens, but more than a little neurotic. She has serious separation anxiety. Whenever she seems me take out my suitcase, she goes into a funk, puts her head between her paws and won’t move, issues long heartfelt sighs.

Anyway, when I came back Friday night she couldn’t stop running around in circles, and then insisted on licking my face and neck – and hair (!) – until I had to make her stop.

I dread seeing her Tuesday when I start packing my suitcase again.

So . . . a quick update. I haven’t blogged for several days because I haven’t had a minute to do so.

First thing: the taxi driver who took me home from Logan Airport home on Friday night told me some things I’m not sure I believe. Anyone reading this who knows the truth, e-mail me and let me know if these things are true: Pat Boone wrote several of Metallica’s songs, and the legal stipulation in the contract was that he couldn’t claim any credit as long as he stayed out of heavy metal – which is why he recorded a heavy metal album, which sold maybe 3 copies – just to stake a claim to authorship. (???). Barry Manilow ghost-wrote many of the Stones’ songs for Keith Richards. Can these things really be true?

Left the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas at 4:00 a.m. Appeared on “Atlanta & Company” on WXIA-TV, a really good if brief interview.

Then . . . I was scheduled to appear on CNN Headline News at noon to talk about KILLER INSTINCT. In the car on the way to CNN studios, my cell phone rang. The Enron verdict was going to be read at noon. I was going to be bounced (dropped) – unless I could talk about Enron. I said, sure. I can talk about Enron and the culture of corporate corruption. After all, don’t I write novels about that kind of thing?

Got to CNN, where they brought me to a computer right in the studio, and I frantically read up on the specifics of the legal charges against Lay and Skilling. Five minutes before noon, they miked me up and brought me to the anchor desk. At noon the verdict was announced: both men were guilty. They immediately turned to me for reaction.

I have a new admiration for on-air experts who can give instantaneous reactions, in real time. It ain’t easy. But I gave my opinion, which was a contrarian one: these guys don’t represent corporate America. A tiny percentage of corporations are involved in this kind of scamming. Sure, I write about it in my novels, but the truth is, most companies don’t do this kind of thing. Most of them, in fact, are overburdened by the Sarbanes-Oxley regulations that require a ridiculous amount of financial reporting.

I got a number of outraged e-mails from viewers who accused me of shilling for corporate America. Which is funny, since the usual attacks I get via e-mail are from readers who think I’m too ANTI-corporate. Sorry, folks – I tell the truth as I see it.

Still on an adrenaline high from CNN, I went right to a taping of the Paula Gordon Show, a very smart radio program whose hosts, Paula Gordon and her husband Bill Russell, are always incredibly thoughtful and smart. They're a welcome change from the usual 3-minute radio interview, and always a pleasure.

A nice signing that night at a Books-a-Million in Peachtree City, Georgia. Met a couple of longtime readers of my books and a bunch of people who were just discovering me – one of whom won the 42” NEC plasma TV.

The next day, I taped Café Central TV with host Conn Jackson, a show that’s seen in 47 markets. Conn is a terrific, energetic interviewer who’s interested in stories of inspiration. We talked about what it takes to make it as a writer, the obstacles you have to overcome. This is the kind of thing I normally talk about privately to beginning writers; it was interesting to talk publicly about it. Good interview.

Now, I’m unplugging until Seattle . . .

In the news -- Seattle

2006-05-26T06:57:00.000-04:00

Today's Seattle Post-Intelligencer runs an interview I did with librarian Jeff Ayers, whom I'm looking forward to meeting in person next week.

I get to go home for Memorial Day weekend, but it all starts again next Wednesday, with an event at Seattle Mystery Books at 12:30 p.m. and another TV giveaway at 3rd Place Books at 7:00 p.m. Hope to see you there!

Dateline: Atlanta, May 25

2006-05-26T06:44:00.000-04:00

An event last night at Hastings Entertainment in Denton, Texas. Someone at my publisher must have thought Denton was a suburb of Dallas – instead of a 45-minute drive away.

Anyway, I got to meet a number of longtime, loyal readers, including Paul, who’s managed to buy first editions of ever book I’ve published, and Marcia, who lived in New Orleans and lost her house in Katrina. In fact, she lost everything she had. She’s since moved to a town near Denton, Texas.

When it came time for the NEC plasma TV drawing, I pulled out the winning entry – and of all people, it was Marcia who won. What a great karmic twist that was. Made the 45-minute drive worth it.

Dateline: Dallas, May 24 -- A Hotel Rant

2006-05-26T06:37:00.000-04:00

Once, while on a research trip, I saw some corporate bigwig shouting into his cell phone that “the !@%#* limo isn’t even here yet!” And I thought, How pathetic that someone so entitled, so overly privileged, is actually angry about his limousine not arriving on time. Gotta put that in a book.

But now I’m beginning to understand how that guy felt.

I’m on tour. I get up ridiculously early most mornings to get to some airport to do a day of media and then an event at night. The travel can be so stressful and exhausting that I need to be able to count on my hotel to do everything right, so I don’t have to worry about it.

In Miami, the hotel I stayed at near Books & Books (which shall remain nameless)turned out to be so incompetent it was funny. . . almost. When I checked in, they had me staying for one night (instead of three), and they had no record of payment from my publisher and demanded my personal credit card. OK, so people make mistakes, no big deal.

Next morning I had to get up early to do a Miami TV show. Called room service the night before, but no one could take my order; they told me I should hang a room-service request form on my doorknob. Which I did.

6:30 the next morning, no breakfast. At 7:00 I called down to room service, who said they had no record of any room service request from me. I went to the door of my room, and sure enough, the form was gone – someone had picked it up. Whoever picked it up never delivered it to room service. So no coffee before my TV appearance. Somehow, I did OK anyway.

Next morning, having learned my lesson about hanging the thing on the door, I decided to CALL room service at 6:30. It rang and rang, and no answer.

For half an hour. Rang and rang; no answer.

Finally, I went down to the front desk, where I was told that I should have hung a room-service menu form on my doorknob; "Right now, the room service people are too busy delivering breakfast to answer the phone." I put in an order for breakfast with the front desk.

It arrived an hour later. I’d asked for a large pot of coffee, and when I poured it out – it was hot water. No coffee.

Pretty much everything at this hotel worked like that. A FedEx package sent to me never arrived – it got there, but someone in the hotel lost it. My publicist faxed me something on Monday – never got it. She faxed it again, and I still didn’t get it. Tuesday night I went down to the front desk – no, Sir, no fax for you.

Around 10:00 that night came a knock at my door. Turned out they had indeed received the faxes -- but someone had put them in an envelope labeled “Mr. Fischer.”

Now I began to understand the frustration of the corporate bigwig whose limo never arrived.

Then I flew to Dallas and checked into the Adolphus Hotel. They handed me a fax that had just arrived. A few minutes after I got to my room, they delivered a FedEx package I’d just gotten, then another fax. Brought me a fruit tray as a VIP welcome gift (!). Coffee arrived, right on time, at 3:30 a.m.

The Adolphus is a beautiful, magnificently run hotel – and now I appreciate well-run hotels as never before.

Dateline: Dallas, May 24

2006-05-26T06:36:00.000-04:00

Passed by the famous Grassy Knoll, the site of the Kennedy assassination. A crowd was there, gawking at – what? The grass-covered slope of a hill?

Is it just me, or is it weird that Dallas has an Assassination Museum in the Texas Book Depository?

Dateline: In Transit, May 23 -- A Fan

2006-05-26T06:34:00.000-04:00

On the plane from Miami to Dallas, I passed someone reading Company Man. I tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Enjoying the book?” He looked up, said, “Huh? Oh, yeah.” I said, “Great. Because I wrote it.” He said, “Huh? What?” He shook his head and went back to the book. Clearly he didn’t believe me.

After we landed, he found me near the baggage claim and introduced himself. Troy had thought that one of his friends was playing a joke on him – he didn’t believe I was really the author of the book he was reading. Then he looked at the picture inside the back cover, and saw I was telling the truth.

I probably shouldn’t do stuff like that – it freaks people out. But it’s also hard to resist.

Dateline: Miami, May 23 -- "24" Fans in High Places

2006-05-26T06:31:00.000-04:00

After my signing at Books & Books in Miami, I talked to that great bookstore’s owner, Mitch Kaplan. His sister, as it turns out, is an executive at Fox involved with “24.”

Mitch began to reel off for me a list of famous writers and literary figures who are as obsessed with “24” as I am. I won’t list them here, since Mitch didn’t give me permission to do so, but they include a legendary former editor of The New Yorker and Knopf, a former editor of the New York Times Book Review, a very mandarin book reviewer. . .

So it’s not just me.

Dateline: Miami, May 22 -- A Day Off, but a Day of Cliffhangers

2006-05-23T13:28:00.000-04:00

Determined not to miss the season finale of “24,” I apologized to my dinner host, left the table, and grabbed a cab back to my hotel. The ride took way longer than I expected.

8:00 -- we're still miles away. Miami is big, huh? Then the cab driver tells me he has no idea where my hotel was, so I have to help him find it.

8:15 -- arrive at the hotel. Cab driver can't figure out how to navigate the one-way streets around the hotel, so I give him too much money, jump out into traffic and weave my way through cars to the hotel entrance.

Just like Jack Bauer would do.

8:17 -- The room card-key doesn't work in the elevator. The flickering red light comes on. Elevator doesn't move.

8:19 -- Another hotel guest enters the elevator and puts in her card. I get to my floor.

8:20 -- Run through the maze of hallway to my room, dodging room-service carts and maids’ service trolleys. Get to the door of my room.

8:21 -- My room key doesn't work. I try it for the next two minutes, but keep getting the flickering red light.

8:23 -- Race back to the bank of elevators, where I find a house phone. Call the front desk. The clerk tells me that that the hotel thought I had checked out(!), so de-activated my card. They promise to send someone right up with a new key.

8:28 -- Return to my door to wait.

8:33 -- Still waiting.

8:35 -- Pulse is racing. Blood pressure is high.

8:36 -- I can wait no longer. Race back down the hall and see a door marked “stairway.” Figure the stairs to the lobby will be much faster than the elevator. A sign on the stairs says “no exit to hotel.” What can this mean? It’s a dark, concrete back staircase, obviously not supposed to be used by hotel guests.

8:42 -- I reach an unmarked door. It opens not onto the lobby or a hotel floor, but into some concrete underground garage. I run through the garage, but can't find an exit to the hotel. They’ve probably already arrested the President on “24,” and I’m stuck in a parking garage.

8:45 -- I run up a ramp that leads to the street, around to the hotel entrance, up the escalator to the front desk - and hit a long line of people waiting to check in. No. This can’t be.

8:46 -- I go right up to the desk, angering all those people in line, and demand that they replace my card. They do.

8:50 -- I get to my room, find the channel for Fox, and put on the TV just as the segment is ending.

Meanwhile, the Red Sox are playing the Yankees. I can’t do both, so I put on my laptop and watch the action there. We’re ahead 9 to 1 at the top of the 9th.

Then Alex Rodriguez hits a 2-run homer. Then Posada homers. Our lead seems to be crumbling.

But back to “24.” A brilliant little twist involving Jack Bauer, the President, and a listening device – got me, and I’m the plotmeister.

And the Sox won after all, 9-5.

Miami media appearances

2006-05-22T11:40:00.000-04:00

If you're in the Miami area -- or even if you're not -- tune into WIOD-AM, News Radio 610, this evening to listen to a conversation I had with host Aron Bender.

And don't forget to come to one of my two appearances tomorrow. I'll be at Levenger in Delray Beach (420 Congress Ave.) at 12:00 noon, and then at Books and Books in Coral Gables (265 Aragon Ave.) at 8:00 p.m. The Books and Books appearance is a TV giveaway, so I expect the crowd will be a little bigger at that one...

Dateline: Washington, D.C., May 20

2006-05-21T08:59:00.000-04:00

Exhausted from the day before and a dinner given by St. Martin’s for other St. Martin’s authors, including Sherrilyn Kenyon, Julia Spencer-Fleming, and Will Shortz (the crossword puzzle editor of the New York Times), I slept later than I’d planned to. I wanted to get a workout in – it had been 3 days since I’ve worked out, and I needed it badly – but didn’t have a chance.

First I got a call from St. Martin’s Publicity Director that I should put on the Today Show (Weekend Today). The book editor of Cosmopolitan, John Searles, was on, recommending the “must-read” books for summer, and started with Killer Instinct. A great way to start the day. Then a friend e-mailed me to say that the Wall Street Journal had just reviewed Killer Instinct – in its Weekend Edition. A terrific, enthusiastic review. The reviewer really got the book. A burst of e-mails followed – my editor, my publicist, friends – and by the time I answered them, it was time to get back to the show.

No workout today either.

In the afternoon, I did a panel with George Pelecanos, Mark Bowden, and Jim Belushi. We all met up beforehand in the Green Room – green rooms, I’ve learned, are never ever actually green – and hit it off immediately. The immensely talented Pelecanos is a great guy, as is Mark Bowden. Belushi was trying to figure out what this whole gig was about. He’s on book tour himself and says it’s way harder than the TV-star gig or even touring with his band.

The panel went great. It was moderated by Scott Brick, who reads my audio books. I’d never met him before, though we’ve e-mailed each other. I told a couple of stories about what a rock star Scott Brick is, among audiobook devotees, and one story about a problem I had last year while doing research at a company... and my zipper broke. Belushi, who’d worried beforehand about what he was going to say, was extremely funny, no surprise.

A bookseller in the audience raised her hand at the end and asked if she could get a hug from him. He complied. I said into the mike, "Hey, what about the rest of us?" Afterward, one of the women in the audience came up to me and gave me a hug. Now everything was OK.

Rushed out of the BEA, into a car to the airport, and now I’m on my way to Miami. Looking forward to the warm weather, my appearance at the remarkable Books & Books...

And the season finale of “24,” Monday night. Thank God I don’t have a signing scheduled Monday night, or I’d have to cancel it. Forget taping – I need to watch this show in real time.

But apparently I’m scheduled to go out to dinner Monday night. I love the folks I’m having dinner with, but sorry – I’m not missing “24.” Not sure how I’m going to handle this. Stay tuned.

Dateline: Washington, D.C., May 19

2006-05-21T08:47:00.000-04:00

An amazing and exhausting day. Got to the hotel around 1:00 in the morning, finally got to sleep around 1:30, then the wakeup call came at 6:00.

Because of the complexities of my travel schedule, I had to do "Squawk Box" by remote -- in the DC studio, while the show is broadcast out of the CNBC studios in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Doing a TV show by remote is a strange experience. You sit in a room with lights on you staring into a camera lens, while the questions come in through your earphone.

"Squawk Box" (a show I’ve always enjoyed) is frenetic and fast-paced, and the questions came at me really fast. I was expecting questions based on a piece I published in the latest Forbes magazine on the myth of the corporate spy (I make the point that the spy-versus-spy stuff between companies is overhyped, happens more in my novels than in reality, and is a bad idea anyway). But they wanted to talk about Killer Instinct – which was great.

Raced over to the Washington Convention Center – skidded in just in time for my signing. Lots of people in line to get me to sign copies of Killer Instinct – some friends I’ve met on tour last year or the year before. Some seem to have discovered me with Company Man. Some with Paranoia. And a few actually read my earlier books (especially High Crimes). It’s funny how many people (booksellers and librarians mostly) told me they loved “my first book,” Paranoia. I no longer bother to explain that I wrote four novels before that one.

The number of writer friends I ran into at BEA is amazing. Nelson DeMille, one of my favorites (as a writer and as a human being) was there with his great wife, Sandy. Dennis Lehane, a friend from Boston who’s been teaching in Florida the last year or so, was there as was Laura Lippman. James Patterson too. My great friend Daniel Silva signed audiobooks of his new novel, The Messenger. Dan and I tried to grab lunch, but the lines were incredibly long and slow-moving, and ended up gobbling down some crappy prepackaged pound cake from some stand.

Dateline: Midair, May 18

2006-05-21T08:44:00.000-04:00

Will someone tell me what the “One World Alliance” is?

Is it the final revelation of a Robert Ludlum thriller, in which the hero learns that everyone, but everyone, is involved in the Big Conspiracy?

And if it’s not – why is American Airlines a member of the One World Alliance?

I’m on a flight to Washington D.C. – the BEA (Book Expo America), the big annual book industry trade show, begins tomorrow. I’m doing CNBC’s “Squawk Box” tomorrow morning, then doing a signing at the BEA, and on Saturday I’m on a panel with George Pelecanos, Mark Bowden and Jim Belushi. (I don’t get the connection either.)
But right now I’m on an American Eagle plane that’s only slightly bigger than an extra large toothpaste tube.

The book tour got off to a good start in New York today. I’ve already forgotten most of what happened, but I stopped by The Mysterious Bookshop, signed a bunch of books, and said hello to the proprietor, Otto Penzler, a major force in the mystery book world. This is one of the best mystery bookshops in New York – oh, hell, since it’s the only one that always insists I stop in and sign books, they must be the best, right? Last year it was located farther uptown, but after many years they moved to TriBeCa – probably a better, more street-traffic friendly location. But Otto no longer has the best office in the world, which he had at the old place – twelve-foot ceilings, floor to ceiling bookshelves. It looked like Henry Higgins’ library in “My Fair Lady.” (If you want signed copies of Killer Instinct, e-mail his store: info@mysteriousbookshop.com)

Just before the Borders signing began, the skies opened up and the rains came down in torrents. But despite it all, a great turnout, a very enthusiastic crowd. Some of them are regulars by now, some I know just because they e-mail me fairly often – Randy R., Seth T., Rudy, and others.

The winner of the plasma screen was someone who’s just discovered my books, a very nice guy named Richard who, as it turned out, knows a lot about the plasma/LCD industry. But he didn’t have a flat-screen TV – until that night.

Dateline: New York

2006-05-18T15:12:00.000-04:00

So book tour has begun.

Ten cities in four weeks. Tonight I’m at the Borders in New York City, where we give away a 42” NEC plasma TV. Then – just to give you a taste of what my travel schedule is like – I have to bolt out of the signing at 8:45 p.m. and get on a 10:40 p.m. shuttle to Washington D.C. I have to be at the CNBC TV studios in Washington early the next morning so I can be on “Squawk Box” (one of my favorite shows, actually) at 7:50 a.m. (Watch and let me know what you think!).

Then I head over to BEA – BookExpo America, which is the big book trade show for the whole industry – and do a signing at 10 a.m. The next day I’m on a panel with Mark Bowden (author of Black Hawk Down and Guests of the Ayatollah) and Jim Belushi (author of Real Men Don't Apologize!) That night I fly out to Miami to do a TV show Sunday morning . . .

Since I spend much of book tour in a state of sleep deprivation, I really should try to bank up sleep. But last night we stayed up late at home, because I wanted to spend as much time with my wife and daughter as I could before I go off for weeks and miss them everyday. Our Golden Retriever, Mia, seemed to sense that I’m leaving. She put her paws on my knees and proceeded to lick my face for about 45 minutes.

I let her do it, of course.

And I got up way too early this morning – maybe because my body is just programmed to get up early to write, or maybe out of excitement. Lots to pack – enough for at least 2 weeks of dress clothes for TV and other public appearances. Books to read on the plane (including Barry Eisler’s first novel, Rain Fall. I keep hearing how good the John Rain thrillers are, so it’s time for me to find out firsthand.) My PowerBook so I can keep writing my new book. My iCam, so I can do video “conference calls” with my wife and daughter and see their faces. (And so that Mia can see my face too.)

I won’t lie and say I love book tour. It’s exhausting, and in a lot of ways it’s stressful. But as I always tell my friends, if my publisher didn’t send me on a book tour, I’d really be pissed off.

The one thing that totally lifts my spirits is meeting readers. We writers spend too much time alone in a room staring at a computer. We need to get out there and meet real people. This is the part I love. (If you’re coming out to meet me at one of my signings, please bring your digital camera so we can get your picture up on my website.)

Oh, yeah. I guess I should recap what’s happened so far. The tour started with a special fundraiser Monday night at the Boston Private Bank. Boston’s Mayor Menino introduced me, and so did my great friend Rick Weissbourd, the founder of ReadBoston, Boston’s amazing literacy program. The event was not only a way to launch my book tour in high style, but a way to raise funds for an important cause. It’s a tradition – Boston Private has hosted a book talk and signing for me every year for the last 3 years.

The next morning, I did my favorite Boston morning radio show, "Matty in the Morning." I love his show -- he's the number-one radio "personality" in Boston -- and he’s a great interviewer. He actually reads the books. After that came a TV morning show on Boston's Channel 38, and Tuesday evening was my first “official” signing, at Brookline Booksmith.

Very exciting – a decent turnout despite torrential flooding in the Boston area. And I gave away the first plasma TV. I closed my eyes and picked out one slip of paper, and as it turned out, it went to a friend I went to college with! (Maybe not so surprising, given that a bunch of friends showed up at the signing.)

Time to get packing. Mia will not be happy.

Squawk!

2006-05-17T21:26:00.000-04:00

Early birds and fans of CNBC should tune in on Friday morning, when I'll be on "Squawk Box" around 7:50.

Before then, of course, everyone in the New York area should come to the Borders on Columbus Circle tomorrow night at 7:00, when I'll be talking about KILLER INSTINCT -- and drawing the name of another lucky plasma-screen TV winner!

Boston media appearances

2006-05-16T07:39:00.000-04:00

If you hurry, you can catch me on the radio or TV today:

Around 7:15 a.m., I'll be on "Matty in the Morning" on Kiss 108, WXKS-FM. From there, I go to the Boston UPN affiliate, WSBK-TV (channel 38), where I'll be interviewed live at about 8:20.

And don't forget tonight's launch party (with plasma TV promotion!) at Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard Street in Brookline. It starts at 7:00; don't be late, because you must be present to win. Call 617-566-6660 if you need directions.

Dateline: Boston

2006-05-15T13:33:00.000-04:00

Publishers Weekly asked me for some thoughts about book tours, which will appear in the May 29 issue.

I was just looking over what I wrote for them -- a piece that compares book tours to political campaigns -- and I'm a little worried that I didn't stress enough how much I enjoy meeting readers and booksellers.

While I might wish that I had more time to spend in each city... and I might wish that my family could come with me... and I might really wish that I could be teleported from city to city instead of taking my chances with airport security personnel... I couldn't wish for more support than I get from all the readers who turn out to buy my books and listen to what I have to say about them.

This time around, St. Martin's and NEC are rewarding readers in nine cities with a special plasma-TV promotion. Even in the stores that aren't part of the promotion, I'll be handing out Post-It notes and giving away water bottles, so I hope you'll think it's worth a trip. The rules of the TV promotion are here, and the list of tour stops is below.

I'll post as often as I can from the road, and my webmistress, Clair, will add information about TV and radio appearances. You can subscribe to the RSS feed by clicking on the link in the right-hand column, and feel free to leave comments.

The KILLER INSTINCT Tour (details here)

Tuesday, May 16 at 7:00 p.m. -- TV Promotion!
Brookline Booksmith
Brookline, MA

Thursday, May 18 at 7:00 p.m. -- TV promotion!
Borders-Columbus Circle
New York, NY

Friday, May 19 at 10:00 a.m.
BookExpo America
Washington, D.C.

Saturday, May 20 at 4:00 p.m.
"The Heard Word: BEA's Audiobook & Author Tea"
BookExpo America
Washington, D.C.

Tuesday, May 23 at 12:00 noon
Levenger
Delray Beach, FL

Tuesday, May 23 at 8:00 p.m. -- TV promotion!
Books and Books
Coral Gables, FL

Wednesday, May 24 at 7:00 p.m. -- TV promotion!
Hastings Entertainment
Denton, TX

Thursday, May 25 at 7:00 p.m. -- TV promotion!
Books-a-Million
Peachtree City, GA

Wednesday, May 31 at 12:30 p.m.
Seattle Mystery Books
Seattle, WA

Wednesday, May 31 at 7:00 p.m. -- TV promotion!
3rd Place Books
17171 Bothell Way, NW
Seattle, WA

Thursday, June 1 at 12:30 p.m.
M is for Mystery
San Mateo, CA

Thursday, June 1 at 7:00 p.m. -- TV promotion!
Book Passage
Corte Madera, CA

Friday, June 2 at 7:30 p.m. -- TV promotion!
Warwick's
La Jolla, CA

Monday, June 5 at 7:30 p.m. -- TV promotion!
Borders-Bailey's Crossroads
Bailey's Crossroads (Fairfax County), VA

Wednesday, June 7 at 7:00 p.m.
Bacon Free Library
South Natick, MA

Saturday, July 1 at 11:00 a.m.
Panel Discussion: "Now You Tell Me! Who Knew?"
Thrillerfest
Phoenix, AZ