DEATH TO THE DARK WIZARD!

We're hexed! There can be no other explanation.  Have you been to our gorgeous website,  www.booksbnimble.com? If so, we cordially HOPE you found it gorgeous, and weren't one of the three in ten who see it with no middle column. This is not a browser problem--sometimes it works in all three of the most popular browsers (i.e. Firefox, Safari and Explorer). Nor is it a size problem. It seems to work great on everybody's itsy-bitsy iPhone,  and it works great on the huge screen at the host's offices, but in Safari on my laptop screen, it's just not there. Yet on e's it's perfect. And for all intents and pruposes, we have exactly the same screen. The thing is, it's completely random. As if we're hexed.

YouTube, someone said darkly, is what's doing this to you--there can be no question. And yet our host, ever eager to be let off the hook, has never even suggested such a thing. It can't be that. There's a dark wizard at work here, possibly Lord Voldemort himself.

Okay, here's a hint--if you're one of the three in ten, and absolutely can't find the middle column, scroll way, way down past the rest of the website and there it'll be. This is  actually worth doing, by the way.  Because we have a great new video on there--a trailer for our winsome and delightful Christmas offering, Anneke Campbell's O LITTLE TOWN OF BELLINGHAM, about a pregnant virgin who turns up in Indiana  right about...now. Yes! A pregnant virgin in 2010--and her name's Mary. This is the crowd-pleasing Christmas book you really need to stuff in someone's stocking this year--a someone who's getting an e-reader for Christmas, of course.  (By the way, we also have a Chanukah book--maybe not as cheerful a read, but just as absorbing.--Patty Friedmann's TOO JEWISH.)

But how, you may ask, can you stuff an ebook in a Christmas stocking?  We've invented a way!  Not only that, it can be signed by the author. But I'm not saying how.  To find out, you actually have to defy Lord Voldemort and go to the site. (Once again, that's  www.booksBnimble.com  )

And while you're there, could you possibly slip the resident gremlin the old Avada Kedrava?

WHY THEY CALL IT DRAMA

Where we left off yesterday: Our star had just quit, and e. was speaking from her local: "Here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna get this chick I just met on a barstool.  She's done performance art. If you take my meaning."

Now e. is not the sort of person who does verbal air quotes, so what was up with that? "She has a very authoritative air," she continued.  Oh.

 "You mean she speaks Phone Kitten?"

"More like Hellcat."

"Hire her."

"I already did."

Problem solved.

In the morning, e. would still have to make a Wal-Mart run for new granny pants before she picked up the Hellcat, but no big deal. That would give L. time to fire up the lights.

Eight-thirty came and went, with no B. and no L. Finally, at  ten after nine, L. arrived with nine thousand pounds of heavy equipment, half of which he proceeded to lug up the stairs. By Floor Three he didn't look right. Kind of celadon. Something, he explained, about a dubious soft-shell crab.

"You just sit down on that and rest," I pointed to one of his mammoth footlockers.

"Uh, maybe 911 instead?"

He was sort of kidding and sort of not, but the bottom line was this: No workee today.

Not to be callous, but I had a video to make. "Okay, okay," he managed to croak. "I'll see what I can do." Sliding pitifully off the trunk and onto the floor, he managed to dig his phone out of his pocket. I left him dialing in a crumpled heap while I went to let B. in and administer morphine when she heard the news. (Kidding, of course--it was actually high-octane coffee.)

And from his bed of pain, L. performed magic. By the time e. arrived with the granny pants and the star, we also had ace gaffer Keith, who hustled the rest of L's truckload onto the set before B. could finish her morphine drip.  Wait...coffee!

And then The Star arrived. Beautiful! An excellent actress, it turned out. And absolutely dead wrong for the part, which called for an overweight redhead. Well, forget overweight, the kitten was only barely chubby herself. But the hair. Inky black. Okay, a quick call to Fifi Mahony's, wiggers extraordinaire to the drag queens, Mardi Gras revelers, strippers, and performance artists of the French Quarter. Alas, not happening till noon.

 As it turned out, that was no problem at all. Although here was the deal:  The Star had only managed to work in the gig by giving away half her waitress shift, but she ABSOLUTELY, NO LEEWAY had to  be at work by five-thirty.

So good news and bad news: We had time to get a wig, but no time to make the video. Because the ace gaffer had to turn the set (aka my house) into a studio.

 Pretty soon I couldn't even find the dog's leash. Because by one-thirty p.m., my house was a studio. Miraculously,  though, the hellcat--now a redhead--had actually started to look the part.

By three-thirty they'd shot two out of twelve scenes.  I was never doing this to my house again. I was over all the personnel drama.
And the star was due at work at five-thirty. I took B. aside. "Look, if we don't get anyhting else, let's at least get the Big O scene. We can use it by itself if we have to."

Okay, she said, and, afraid of what I might do otherwise, I went in another room to rest my eyes. E. arrived shortly. "Got some black thread?"

 "Oh, sure," I said, "whatever you need." And then it occurred to
me to wonder what on earth they needed with black thread.  Black just wasn't in the phone kitten's pink-and-green palate. E. gave me a look I'd never seen on her face--a kind of braced-for-flight look. "Uh..."

"Come on You know I'll find out."

She spoke really fast, like maybe I wouldn't hear her that way. "They need to animate the roach."

YEEEEEK!  An hour and a half to go and they were animating roaches? Seeing my face, the hellcat
suddenly started purring: "Weeell...I guess I could cheat another half hour out of my shift."

Oh joy! A whole half hour!

"Could you just....do the Big O?" I croaked.

Nope. Not yet they couldn't. But damned if they didn't at approximately five-forty. We had to cut two scenes, but otherwise, guess what? We actually shot the video! I mean, they did.

There was only one other tiny mishap. At ten of six, The Star raced to the bathroom to change and next thing you know, wild shrieks issued out of there. This from a woman who'd work with roaches!  I was pretty sure she'd broken a leg, but e. knew exactly what the problem was. "Looked in the mirror, didn't you?" she asked. "With the granny pants on."

Yep. She had. Some things are worse than roaches.

MOVE OVER, CECIL B.-- DAY ONE

Since half the fun of being an ebook publisher (I thought) would be making little movies, I couldn't wait till we shot the video to enhance PHONE KITTEN, a hilarious mystery by Marika Christian. The book's about Emily, a sweet but slightly nerdy girl who ends up doing phone sex after losing her job, and finds herself in the middle of a murder. So here's what we thought:  A three-minute movie showing what a phone sex worker really does while fulfilling fantasies. Pretty funny, n'est-ce pas?

We held auditions, found the perfect actress, who I'll call K, cajoled B., a well-known producer, into wrangling the camera, and hired L, who's worked in local TV for twenty or more years, to do lights.

 It was going to be down-and-dirty, the e-guerrilla way--half a day to dress the set, half a day to rehearse, and a day to shoot. E. and I scrambled till 1 p.m., producing a cozy phone kitten nest. Please note the pink princess cover and Edgar Allen Poe doll.

Good, said B, and ditto the disgusting phallic cactus. But she thought the roach looked a little fake. We could live with that, but then K. was overcome by a rogue attack of shyness. Couldn't fake orgasm if you paid her (which we were going to, but not much). All seemed lost until e. thought to ask politely if K. ever indulged in spirits. It seemed the kitten did. Well, then, would K. like a tiny libation to loosen things up? K. lit up, and three vodka-and-cranberries later, the big O was roaring out of her. While she mopped.

Okay then! We were ready for the big time.  B. left with an admonition to look sharp by 8 a.m. the next day  and don't forget the muffins and coffee. I was thinking about celebrating with my own libation when the phone rang. I knew it couldn't be good. No way it could be good, especially when I saw it was K. Yep, she was backing out. She thought she could do it, but she just couldn't. She'd realized she probably couldn't run for president if she went through it. Or even the Board of Education. She sounded like she'd had quite a few more pink drinks.

I had one of those weird dissociations like you get sometimes. You know, you break a leg and notice the run in your pantyhose.  I suddenly realized she'd gone home wearing the pink granny pants so essential to the plot.  But wait a minute, the plot was still lying soggily on the page.  It wasn't going anywhere.

And then the phone rang again. It was e., from her local in the Lower Garden District. "You want the show to go on?" she said. "Here's what we're gonna do..."

Stay tuned for Day Two: WHY THEY CALL IT DRAMA

LIT YOU LOVE TO HATE

About the time the Earth cooled, there was a writer named Judith Krantz, who introduced a kind of book that came to be known as "shop-and-fool around".  Actually, we weren't nearly so delicate as to say "fool around," but I'm going to here, to preserve decorum online.  Those books were a lot of fun, guilty pleasures for those who are prone to literary guilt (I personally am not). But you know what isn't fun? S&F for kids. Gossip Girl kind of books, books in which kids have no parents, drink and freak around at will, and wear clothes they buy for the cost of cars in Krantz's time. To be honest, it's not the drinking and sex that bothers me  so much--I've been known to pen the odd spot of gritty realism myself--it's the relentless materialism. And the unconscionable parenting. Who lets their kid loose with a credit Barney's credit card and why?

This is not the only literary convention that makes my eyes glaze over, or my teeth clench in irritation. Here are my top five, in no particular order:

1. S&F FOR KIDS


2. THE 'SURPRISE!-I'M-DEAD' ENDING. I guess you could call it the ghost narrator. Listen, if you're dead, how can you be telling this story? Even Archy the cockroach had to bang his head on one key at a time to get the job done, so how does a sad mess of ectoplasm do it?  It's plain disconcerting, and as much of a cheat as a deus ex machina. In fact, I guess it kind of is one.

3. THE SCIENCE FICTION GAY YARN. In this one, everybody's gay--the hero's clients, brother, sister, uncle,  friends, even the homeless person he helps, as well as the victims of any murders (though not necessarily the villain), and half the cops. In real life, gays and lesbians comprise  about 10 per cent of the population and though like tends to seek out like, I'm talking about books that go way beyond that--in fact that postulate a world in which straight people are the ten per centers. Kind of fun, I guess, if you're a fan of gay lit for itself, but if you read it for literary merit, ultimately dishonest. I guess I should I should mention I'm not homophobic, or how would I know this? You have to read gay lit to know what's in it. I'd rather read Sandra Scopettone or Greg Herren (neither of whom is guilty) than most writers. I just like my science fiction so labelled.

4. SERIAL KILLER BOOKS IN WHICH WE KNOW WHAT THE UNSUB IS THINKING.  I don't care! In fact, I already know. I've been reading serial killer books all my life, and ground on this was broken early in my reading career. There's no new ground to break. These guys are all the same--evil, bad, crazy, nuts, insane, and much, much worse--insanely boring.

5. THE ALTERNATE UNIVERSE THAT ISN'T. We're living exactly as we actually do, Except  For One Thing, the Thing that's the premise of the exercise.  I don't mean magic, we all know magic is real, I certainly don't mean vampires, they're thick as mosquitoes in my neighborhood.  I mean any preposterous thing that really could happen in a few years if things continue to go wrong, but  hasn't yet. So here we are in 2010 with, say, a king instead of a president, an evil but genial ruler who orders dissidents murdered by day and by night guest stars on Jimmy Fallon. Or maybe  live snuff shows have replaced baseball as the new national pastime. (The ultimate reality show, get it?) Not just clones being raised as organ donors, I'm down with that sort of thing--Something That Changes Everything. And why? For the convenience of an author who played a game of "what if" and lost. Listen, guys, show a little ambition--go out there and....you know...at least change the date or something.

WE WENT LIVE!

It's been almost ten  months to the day since a friend and I said to each other,"Let's become digital publishers,"  and today we published our first book. Who knew how hard it would be just to get a website up? It's been a long and fascinating road, but www.booksbnimble.com --now its name can be told!-- today exists in cyberspace. Go there now. Buy a book.

You can actually do that. Not only that, the most amazing thing to me is that that book didn't exist in saleable form six hours ago. What we did was, we finally hooked up the store to the website (or to be perfectly honest, e. did--matter of fact, she built the whole thing with her bare hands) and then we (okay, e.) formatted it as a pdf, and we put it on our virtual shelves and we bought a copy with our little plastic card. I don't think I've been this excited since I the first time  I held a book I'd written myself in my hands.

This was just an experiment, of course, to see how things were going to work. In a few days, we're going to have much fancier formats for that book--Marika Christian's PHONE KITTEN, by the way, a hilarious and delightful comic mystery--and in no time at all, we're enhancing it with the world's cutest video (really!). But you can still buy it, read it now, and get the video-enhanced version (or if you prefer, a link to the video) by going to our store, clicking on "contact us", and asking for a free update when they're available. (Actually, you can't do that quite yet. Maybe tomorrow--we need to hook up the e-mail first.) But you CAN buy the book. I would like to emphasize that. booksBnimble exists and has a book for sale.

If you want to write us to tell us what we're doing wrong (or better yet, to congratulate us), maybe do it on our FaceBook page--we have one!-- or here, since we don't yet have working email.

Meanwhile, buy PHONE KITTEN! You'll love it.

POST-KATRINA LIT

I seem to be undergoing an identity crisis.  This blog, originally meant to chronicle  electronic adventures,  will henceforth address itself also to the larger issues  (and non-issues) of the literary world, since it develops that twice in a week I've been unable to resist. Even Mike Shatzkin, the 600-pound gorilla in the e-pub world, sometimes talks about baseball. So this guerrilla feels free.

Let us now give our attention to a piece in the New Republic by a staffer named Chloe Schama, in which Ms. Schama wonders why no "major literary figures" have tackled the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, in sharp contrast to the way they wrote about 9/11.  "In fact," Ms. Schama writes, "the literary response to Hurricane Katrina has been almost non-existent."

As a New Orleanian, I'd have to agree that there isn't nearly enough post-Katrina lit out there, but I'd submit first that there's a lot more than Ms. Schama seems aware of and second, that the fault may not lie so much with the writers as with the prevailing attitude of New York editors and possibly agents.  I think we should establish that she's talking about fiction, although she is grateful for Dave Eggers'  Zeitoun, which isn't fiction. Actually, she just seems grateful that a writer of Eggers' stature took on the issue.  But I think what she's missing is that there are probably only three writers she'd probably consider "major literary figures" who are actually qualified to write a credible Katrina novel.

New Orleans being the extremely tricky and many-layered can of worms it is, Eggers was smart to go the non-fiction route. The Treme crew has gone to great lengths to make sure they portray the city properly, and yet Treme, though widely loved here, is also roundly criticized for every bit of misplaced minutiae. Offhand, I can think of four "major literary figures" who  actually could write about the disaster with the confidence of an insider, but since one is Anne Rice, I'd have to guess that Ms. Schama wouldn't find her literary enough (though you could hardly get more major). Ms. Rice could do it, though--she's written some good mainstream novels in addition to her paranormal material. The other three are Valerie Martin, who grew up in Lakeview, as thoroughly annihilated as the Ninth Ward; Richard Ford, a sometime resident who has deep roots not only in the community, but  in local political life; and Robert Olen Butler, who's already won the Pulitzer for a book set in New Orleans.  Frankly, if a major literary figure who didn't have that kind of connection tried to take it on, the results might well be laughable. Let's hope to hear from these four one day. I can only thank other "majors" for staying out of  this thing.

But I wonder if a lot of "minors" haven't been heard from because there is simply no taste in the world of  New York publishing  for post-Katrina angst. I can guarantee you there wasn't some years ago when I proposed such a novel myself. I was shot down before I could get the last syllable of "Katrina" out.  Maybe Ms. Schama's right--no one wants to hear what a mere mortal might have to say about it, and no literary god has yet stepped forward.

But a lot of others have. She did acknowledge Tom Piazza's City of Refuge and something else she described as "a comic book," not even a graphic novel. Since she mentioned the comic book, I'm going to decide that she isn't a literary snob, she just doesn't know about the many books and short  stories  that have made it through the Big Pub sausage-grinder.  One of the first on the scene was Patty Friedmann's very good but highly  under-appreciated A Little Bit Ruined.

New Orleans Noir, a book I myself edited, contained no fewer than eight post-K short stories, every one of which I commend not only to Ms. Schama, but to anyone. Two post-K books have become best-sellers, that I know of, one by James Lee Burke, the other by Erica Spindler. Other authors who've honorably tackled the subject are Tony Dunbar, Greg Herron, and Jean Redmann.  And it's also notable that Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine devoted a whole issue to New Orleans, containing several post-K stories.

I doubt Ms. Schama ever heard of EQMM, as it's affectionately known, so I'm cutting her slack for that. But what about every other book and story in the preceding paragraph? They're all mysteries, thus not "major," but then again she did mention the comic book as well as the movie Bad Lieutenant, noir by every description. So by Ms. Schama's own standards, surely these works should count if those do.

LATE TO THE FRANZEN FEUD

Late, but I have new info! Well, new to me, though possibly not to Jennifer Weiner, who it will be remembered, along with Jodi Picoult, took on the early canonization of Jonathan Franzen sometime in the distant past. AKA last week. Their point, or one of them, was their distress at not, as women, getting enough respect from the literary establishment.  I was particularly struck by something Weiner said, which to paraphrase, was that she was no Jonathan Franzen, but why couldn't she be treated as well as Nick Hornby or Jonathan Tropper?

At the time,  I had no opinion, having read one Picoult, almost all of Weiner,  and one Hornby, with varying degrees of enjoyment. But no Tropper. However, I did have a copy of Tropper's THIS IS WHERE I LEAVE YOU on my TBR pile. So I  picked it up, ripped through it, and loved it!  Yet also found that Weiner not only has a point, she has a major, scary point.

Omigod, that was a funny book! I thought I'd die when the D-cup mom having the affair with the female neighbor at her husband's shiva  gives her kid a tube of K-Y jelly along with with tips on how to masturbate at Friday night dinner! Completely rolled on the floor.

It's actually the kind of thing Weiner can do just as well.  But I have a feeling if  she had, reviewers would have sneered. Tropper's book's a coming-of-age story about a 35-year-old guy, practically a genre,  and a well-respected one. But if  someone tried to write about a  woman as whiny and distant as Tropper's hero, she'd get slapped around, I'm pretty sure. (Not meant as a criticism of  Tropper; I   have personally known a number of immature and self-pitying, although very smart 35-year-old males, especially when I was 35, so I know this is a phenomenon that needs to be addressed.)

Women in literature have to be somehow Better. Because if they're not, their biographers will be dismissed as trivial. If  Weiner wrote a book about a family sitting shiva, in which all the characters were over the top,  the heroine was basically a princess who needed to grow up, and by the end of the book, actually had grown up a bit, at least realized she had "options", as Mr. Tropper rather unsubtly put it,  I think she'd be dismissed as commercial, trivial, and formulaic. Or perhaps the book wouldn't be reviewed at all.

I'll take Weiner's word for it that the NEW YORK TIMES hasn't treated her as well as the guys, because in a five-minute search, I couldn't find the reviews to confirm it and didn't want to spend all day on it--Tropper's came up right away, so maybe that means something. But I guess that's even a bit irrelevant. Tropper's book was a great beach read--and in fact, that was where I read it.  But isn't it weird to hear that? Can guys' books (other than those of Nicholas Sparks and thrillers) be beach reads? Let me tell you something: If that book had a heroine instead of a hero, no matter who wrote it, it would have been so considered. The problem may not be with women authors so much as the perception of female experience, period.  But that shouldn't be a surprise.

Still, it was. I was actually kind of shocked. In researching this piece I came across this amazing quote from the young and evidently oblivious female writer C.E. Morgan: "Male genius has far outnumbered female genius in the history of literature." Morgan went on to pronounce that this kind of discussion would stop if women would simply produce "more work of indisputable genius." 

Aside from her grammatical issues,  Morgan couldn't possibly know any of that, and she'd know she couldn't if she had the slightest grounding in what used to be called women's studies, though now I wonder if it exists at all. C.E.-cakes, listen up--feminists of yore tried tirelessly to get across the simple point that since men have consistently controlled the standards, sure, they've patted themselves on the back; sure they've considered women's books trivial, sure they've hired female reviewers with similar sensibilities. How many female geniuses have gone unsung and maybe unpublished no one knows. And Genius is always disputable--look at the Franzen skirmish. Plus, there's the small matter of perception of what constitutes genius, which, in a lesser way is one of Weiner's points. Only she's not talking genius, just fair recognition.

Evidently these early pioneers failed miserably. I'm horrified that we're having this discussion in 2010.