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Surreal Everbind Redux

I have always had an image of book production from a 1930’s black and white movie – like a newspaper that comes hot off the presses. I pictured a huge machine many geared machine taking up a whole section of a building that inserted paper on one side and sent out a finished book on the other without human hands touching it. I watch way too many old movies. The reality is very different and somewhat surreal. At least it was for my wife, my son, and me when I went to see Open Wounds get bound on Tuesday. My son was thrilled to get a day off rom school but we all figured it was worth it – and it was. What surprised me the most was that a lot of the process is still done by … and that’s as far as I can go. I’m serious. The pr0cess is secret.

I can’t show you all the pictures I took nor can I describe the process because if another binding company saw these they might be tempted to copy or take ideas from what they see and book-binding is an old process whose secret’s are highly guarded. I didn’t see any laser trip wires or guard dogs but I have a good imagination so I added them in. In any case the whole process seemed like magic to us. Pages, covers, dust jackets, and a stack of books at the end of the line ready to be shipped to distributors and bookstores. I love this stuff!

: First Batch finished from the binding machine…

: Dust Jackets ready to be put on…

: That’s my son looking up at us from the pallet with the dust jackets on it.

So when will the book be available in bookstores? They still have to be mailed to distributors and from there to stores so… 2-3 weeks more, depending on how fast the connections are made from place to place. But soon, yes, it’s soon.

June 15, 2011 | Categories: Blog | Leave a comment

Crystal Book Reviews: Open Wounds

Viviane Crystal at Crystal Book Reviews has posted a nice review of Open Wounds on her blog-site. Take a look at the link: Review. She reviews all genres but has a special place in her heart, I think, for swordplay and historical novels. Thank you, Viviane.

June 11, 2011 | Categories: Blog, Open Wounds | Leave a comment

Book Review: Between Us Baxters

Between Us Baxters, by Bethany Hegedus is a diamond waiting for readers to find. It is a tale of familial and cultural relationships brought to a breaking point in 1959 Georgia.

From Goodreads: The story of twelve-year-old Polly, a poor white Southern girl whose close friendship with Timbre Ann, a middle-class black teen, puts both families in danger. As white supremacists set fire to black businesses, Polly struggles to cope with the implications for her family and to understand the true meaning of friendship. Polly’s sense of justice threatens to upset the status quo in her small town.

The settings are the white side of town and the Tracks, the black side of town. The conflict builds in intensity from the first page to the last. This is the kind of book that I couldn’t wait to get on the subway to read (that’s my longest stretch of reading time – as a straphanger) and actually stayed on the platform for when I got off at my work stop so that I could finish it.

The narrator, Polly is a like-able and struggling girl who as a protagonist was easy to root for and feel for. I especially liked that the mother and father were complex characters in their own right, neither one falling into stereotype, acting in surprising ways that became apparent as appropriate for them in hindsight. So many times the parents in YA fiction are simply cut and predictable but Ms. Hegedus has created wonderful characters that struggle in the gray area of right action, safe action, best action for yourself, and best action for people you love.

The feeling for the period of the book is perfectly evoked through dialog, simple details (black and white TV, three in the seat of a truck without seat belts), and Jim Crow Laws (who can sit in the back of the bus and who can sit in the front). A scene of Polly riding on a bus with her mother and having to watch a black woman with a crying baby leave the bus, knowing they’ll have to walk the rest of the way because they don’t have enough money to pay double fare, is heartbreaking. The issues of race and class are well delineated and provide the constraints from which all the players act out their dramas. The ending is wrenching and not neat, but that is as it should be.

The marketing for this book says it’s for 5th – 9th grade and I can see this would be a terrific read for that age group – challenging them with its ideas and putting them (the reader) in the position of asking him/herself what they would do in Polly’s situation? But don’t let the marketers stop you if you’re an older kid or adult from picking this diamond up and examining it page by page yourself. You’ll find it well worth the time.

June 10, 2011 | Categories: Blog, Book Reviews | Leave a comment

3rd Gade Q & A

My son’s teacher asked me to come in to speak to the two 3rd grade classes at Buckley Country Day School this morning. After reading Andrew Smith’s column on going to a high school class for Q & A I have to say I wasnt as sure what to expect from a group of 8 and 9 year olds. Okay. That’s not true. I’ve been to his class before and his teacher is a wonderful reading and writing teacher who keeps the class mayhem to a minimum so I knew the class would be behaved but I was not quite prepared for how focused they were and for how long they lasted.

Now I wasn’t there by myself. Another father who also happens to be an author – Paul O’Donnell, author of Man Up (a terriffic book) was also invited to speak so we shared the space and did a compare and contrast on fiction and non-fiction which, because Paul is so good and natural a speaker – came off well. Then we got to Q & A and man did they come up with some good questions. Here’s a few of them:

How do you come up with the titles of your books?
How many times did you have to rewrite your book?
What do you do if a bookstore won’t take your book?
Do you write only fiction? Non-fiction?
What gave you the idea to write the book?
Will they make a movie out of it?
What happens to the books that a store doesn’t sell?
Do you like to write books?

I wish I had a tape-recorder so I could remember the rest. Easily a third of the 30 kids in the two classes asked questions and some times they came rapid fire. We lasted an hour and fifteen minutes – pretty amazing for a group of 8 and 9 year olds. The teacher had to stop a few kids for asking their final questions because they were way past their next class time. But hey, they can see Paul and me any time when we come to pick our kids up at the end of the day. Hearing the teacher remind everyone of that and then watching the kids heads nod in recognition (oh yeah I see those two old guys all the time) put a smile on my face for the rest of the morning.

June 10, 2011 | Categories: Blog, Events, On Writing | Leave a comment

Lawrence Block on the Late Late Show

I met Lawrence Block at a the Ragdale Foundation, a writer’s retreat outside of Chicago. He was there for a month and I was there for a week. I remember thinking, holy crap, it’s Lawrence Block! And he’s sitting at dinner right next to me! Holy Crap.

Okay. Not the most eloquent but I tend to get tongue-tied when I’m around celebrities. Lawrence Block has been one of my hero’s as a writer for a long long time. Besides writing wonderful mysteries like the classic Matt Scudder series (as hardboiled as you can get) he wrote two of my favorite books on writing, Spider Spin Me a Web, and Telling Lies for Fun and Profit. They are collections of his columns for Writer’s Digest when he was the fiction columnist. I read him religiously when I was younger. I use his writing techniques today.

That was the last retreat I was at before my son was born and I haven’t been back since but… I got a chance to speak to Larry a few times, hear him read from a new book he was working on, and talk about the difficult process of writing a memoir. He even defended me against some challenging critiques in the audience when I read my work. I write him an email every once in a while and I’m on his newsletter email list. I just got one the other day and wanted to share his interview on the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. It’s a howler. I mean, I was laughing my ass off. He’s a man of few speaking words (Larry, not Craig), well-chosen and taciturn. Watch him talk about his book and enjoy himself. He’s a great guy, a wonderful writer and 100% himself.