Dispatches from the Road: Los Angeles Times Festival of Books

April 30, 2006 @ 7:13 pm

Worked the bar Thursday night and hopped a plane for L.A. on Friday morning, which meant little sleep before grabbing my “small black, muddy bag beaten shapeless by a few hundred thousand miles” and hopping the BART to the Oakland airport, to then sit on board a cramped and noisy cropduster for an hour and fifteen minutes. Have I mentioned I hate flying? On the upside, an old and dear friend greeted me at LAX, to shuttle me back to a cozy Malibu studio where she demonstrated her ever growing skills in the art of sushi making and deep tissue bodywork. My life of poverty does not exclude some stylish decadence. As usual, I spent little time at the book fair, but was miraculously only a couple of minutes late for my signing slot at the Mystery Bookstore. I suppose it’s a good sign that with each festival I go to, I sit next to ever more prestigious authors. Case in point: I shared a table and book tour pleasantries with Christopher Rice, whom I’d seen at a BookExpo in Chicago years back, signing galleys of his first novel. The hour flew by with plenty of Velvet faithful shaking my hand, with the down time spent signing the bookstore’s stock which, thanks to the persistent word of mouth from their crew, doesn’t stay on the shelves long.

I’d planned on meeting up with Rob Roberge once more but that, along with a half dozen other rendevous, fell through. I crashed early last night, hit a couple of bookstores this morning en route to the airport, in search of more endagered Moleskine specimens, and ended up stranded at LAX from 10:00 a.m. until around 4:00, after getting bumped twice. I’ve got a couple of hours to eat and hose the airplane stink off before I head to work tonight.

I’m a couple of days late with updates to the graphic novel of the Handbook, I realize. They’ll be up within a day or two, so thanks in advance for your patience.

Otherwise… life returns to abnormal for a while, so I guess it’s time to open the locks on the Pit and return to work.

Stay warm and bound,

~Craig

Deux ex Porcelain

April 22, 2006 @ 6:56 pm

I’ve lived in my apartment for a year now, and just this morning noticed the brand on our toilet is ‘Church.’ Right there under the lid, the word ‘Church dot tee-em.’ Go figure.

Anyway, the folks at Misnomer have a podcast interview with with yours truly alive at kicking, here . Check it out.

Back with more, soon.

Stay warm and bound,

Craig

P.S. The name I blanked on during the interview, conducted while I was knocking back huge amounts of whiskey-honey-lemon tea to combat my flu, was Rob from the Velvet. Apologies, Rob. In other news, the Moleskine company is up for sale, which means the death of the greatest notebook ever made. Both of my novels were conveived in these black books, so I just dropped an obscene amount of money I didn’t have on a stack of lined six by eights and three by fives, and will do so again, very soon. Consider doing the same.

Fugitive Tendencies

April 14, 2006 @ 5:35 pm

The Harper-Perennial U.K. paperbacks of the Handbook arrived today which, by most measures, is a good thing. My U.K. publishers are very good about keeping me up to date on their activities, providing me with a steady stream of emails and a semi-regular shipment of cover proofs, blue lines and finished books. The downside of these shipments being the louder-than-God buzzer in my ancient flat sounds like the mating call of some post-apocalyptic mutant housefly, and the DHL man always rings on a morning after I’ve worked late at the bar the night before. Like last night, for example, where I worked a full shift sweeping up broken glass and playing Bad Cop to the non-tipping tourists who all seem oblivious to the fact that the female members of our crew have a central nervous system (or, for that matter, any anatomy above the neck), all while having consumed enough Da-Quil to kill a lab monkey in the hopes of masking my raging flu. I digress, though, and bitch. The books look great and, as I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, have a couple of essays in the P.S. section by myself and Will Christopher Baer. If you live in the U.K., it’s due out on 2 May, along with the Harper-Collins U.K. version of Dermaphoria .

This month, the weekend of the 29th and 30th, is the annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, held at the UCLA Campus. I’ll be there on Saturday at 5:00 p.m., signing at the Mystery Bookstore Booth #411. Should you, for reasons of you own, feel compelled to have me deface one of your books with my signature, please swing by. The Mystery Bookstore in Westwood has been extremely supportive of my work from the very beginning, so they’ll have copies on hand should you have spare shelf space.

Lastly, Gabor continues to lovingly render the Handbook in comic form, and there’s four more pages of eye candy waiting here .

More to come, soon. I’m doing an interview today with the folks at Misnomer , who did a stellar job with Stephen Graham Jones a few weeks ago. I feel like death, and I always fear my congestion will make me sound like Bob Goldthwait impersonating Wallace Shawn, so I’ll be spending part of today doing Tobasco shots while continuing my thus far fruitless title brainstorming for my novel in progress. Aside from that, I told Logan I’d speak more candidly about some of the buried sybolism/clues/messages/metaphors/pretentiousness in Dermaphoria, on which I’ve been largely silent since the book’s release. On that note, if you found a flipper baby, aka typo (or txpo, as I like to say), post it here , should you feel so inclined. The American paperback’s going to press in a couple of months, and I’d like to weed them out, once and for all.

Somewhere in the near future, as well, I’ll have an interview with Sara Gran, whose third novel, Dope, is making some serious waves. The interview’s been wrapped up for some time, and as soon as it’s live, I’ll post the link here. In the mean time, get your hands on Dope . The book, I mean. Spread the word, and…

… stay warm and bound,

-Craig