April 13: Hormel Center, San Francisco Public Library (site)
100 Larkin Street (at Grove), San Francisco, CA 94102 (map)
There is a reception at 5:00 pm, and I’m told there will be excellent food. The reading itself begins at 6:00 pm in the Latino-Hispanic Room.
Featuring: Malinda Lo, Kevin Killian, Z Egloff, Minal Hajratwala, Elana Dykewomon, Dexter Flowers, Matt Dean (me!), Randall Mann, Karin Kallmaker. Hosted by Tony Valenzuela, Katherine Forrest and Karen Sundheim.
April 22: LGBT Center, New York City (site)
208 West 13th Street, New York, NY 10014 (map)
The reception begins at 6:30 pm, and the reading begins at 7:00 pm.
Featuring: Dale Peck, Rakesh Satyal, Rob Byrnes, Frank Anthony Polito, Matt Dean (c’est moi!), Christa Orth, Gabriel Rivera, Donal Mosher, David Ciminello, Bobbie Geary, Ana Bozicevic, Julie Abraham, Emma Marie Perez and Douglas A. Martin. Hosted by Don Weise and Antonio Gonzalez.
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At the moment, these are the only public readings I have planned, and because there are so many of us, my reading at each event will be brief. It’s not much of a book tour, heaven knows, but it does at least encompass my two favorite cities.
Oh! But! By pure, joyous luck, I will be able to have lunch with other writers at readers at the famed Algonquin Round Table. This is bucket list stuff. Zing!
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* Three other readings will be held in May, in Chicago on the 4th, in Los Angeles on the 10th, and in New Orleans on the 15th. I wish I could do them all.
I’ve already bought tickets for the awards ceremony and the benefit that follows. It’s improbable that mere words can express how excited I am to attend.
A while back, I posted something about The River In Winter on a message board entitled “Shameless Self-Promotion.” I’d have to say I wasn’t so very shameless; I posted a link to the book’s Amazon page and a couple of links to my site.
Since then, I’ve been getting emails from other writers who’re shamelessly self-promoting their projects. Others are shamelessly shameless. Phrases such as “non-stop thrills” are employed. Iron-clad promises that readers will become “addicted.” Words are described as “jumping off the page.”
Actually, I envy some of these people their willingness to brag. When I was a kid, we used to say “when god was handing out brains, you thought he said trains and told him you’d catch the next one.” One might say that when god was handing out brag, I thought he said slag and told him that didn’t sound very nice.
In any case, I’m thinking I should probably try to get better at this. Here’s my first attempt:
The River in Winter is a book for the ages. With each syllable of each word of each sentence of each paragraph of each chapter, you will fall more deeply in love with its characters, until you find yourself wanting to move with them to California’s redwood forests to create a free-love hippie commune, where Spike will no doubt secure the medical marijuana license.
Huh? Huh? Whattaya think? Love, redwoods, pot. A little something for everyone, yes?
In the final version of The River In Winter, in chapter 13, Jonah travels to San Francisco to visit his mother, Barbara.
In an earlier draft, the San Francisco trip extended into a second chapter, but after a few pages I discovered that I’d fallen down the proverbial rabbit hole. I’d introduced a subplot that could easily have consumed 50 or 100 pages. I had no idea where it was going–or, for that matter, where it had come from or why I needed it. I had to cut it.
One of the many principles I learned from Carol Bly is a certain economy with characters. Of course, there are always bit players, walk-ons, spear carriers, but I try to keep their numbers small. In general, I like to feel that every character has some clear purpose.
And that’s why, as much as I enjoyed writing Bryce, I had to let him go.
I know it’s way, way too early for this, but I’ve already started playing around with cover designs for my novel-in-progress. Here’s what I’ve got so far (click for a high-res PDF):
It’s a study in white space, this cover. The great expanses of emptiness signify the loneliness, the futility, of daily existence. The key–islanded as it is within those ample tracts of nothingness–symbolizes our conviction that we know what we think we know, that we are what we think, that the unknowable is, in fact, knowable. The title and the author’s name are motion-blurred–smudged a smidgen–betokening the unfathomable speed of life’s passing. Years melt away into the void, faster than we care to admit, and all along the way we convince ourselves that we hold the key to understanding.
Actually, that’s all pretty much BS. I just pushed some pixels around until I found something I liked.
This could get a little meta: I’m going to post a link here, from my site, to Goodreads, where my author page includes an automatic feed of all my posts. But whatever.
I’m giving away five copies of The River in Winter. Lots of people have entered so far, but there’s no rush. It’s open for a month, and the winners are selected randomly by magic mojo on the Goodreads side.
If I’d known so many people were going to enter, I would have selected a much shorter time span. When I set it up, I thought it might take a whole month just to get five people!
As I’m working through a draft, I often write a scene that’s too tangential or that veers off in the wrong direction entirely. But I try not to delete anything outright; instead when I make cuts I move the text to a separate file, in case I’m able to use them after all. I thought it might be fun to sift through the material I cut from The River in Winter and see if there’s anything worth sharing.
Among other things, I found this flashback scene, describing how Jonah met his partner, Tom:
I’d first seen Tom in the crowded gymnasium, at a freshman orientation event, a kind of expo where the school’s sports teams and clubs tried to lure first-years with brochures, posters, and instant rapport. I’d volunteered for an early shift at the rowing club’s table. My first glimpse of Tom had been from behind. Long black hair halfway down his back. A black tank top and skimpy blue running shorts showing off bronzed legs and arms.
He’d stopped at the table across the aisle from ours, had chatted for some minutes with a perky member of the French Club. Beneath the table her feet were demurely crossed in penny loafers and short white socks. She smoothed the folds of her plaid skirt over her knees. As she spoke, she looked up at Tom, her head tilted to one side. She twirled a hank of hair around her fingers.
As he turned away, he glanced in my direction. His eyes met mine, then slid immediately away. He stood for a moment, reading the poster behind me?-“Partridge Lake Rowing Club” was all it said. And then he shook his head, tucked his hair behind his ear, and walked away. Well, of course. He wasn’t built like a rower. A runner, perhaps. Tall, lean, wiry.
Outside, after my shift, I saw him standing with a couple of seniors from the Native American Student Union. As I passed, I felt him watching me, but when I turned back, he and the seniors were walking three abreast toward the Campus Center.
Weeks later, some friends from the rowing club dragged me to the homecoming dance. One of the coxswains, Carl, lent me a shirt and a pair of shoes; I didn’t own anything with buttons, in the former case, or without reflective stripes, in the latter.
The Great Hall glittered with pink and gold light. Streamers waved against the old rippled glass of the tall windows. The disc jockey seemed to favor the thrashing guitar-driven music I hated. I stood near the door, craving Rodgers and Hammerstein, or at least the Thompson Twins.
Tom sidled through the crowd, a beer in each hand. How, as a freshman, with an enormous Magic Marker “X” on the back of each hand, had he managed to get not one, but two, beers? Resourceful, this one.
He wore a slouchy black T shirt and acid-washed jeans. A big square hole in the denim revealed his bony left knee. The tongues of his black high-top sneakers flapped against his shins. He walked with a stiff-legged, wide-stepping gait. Maybe it was the looseness of his shoes. Maybe he was already drunk.
“What’s up?” he said. He offered me one of the beers.
I shrugged. “Not much.”
He looked at me. He stared for so long that I thought I might have said something unwittingly cruel, or something surpassingly insightful. He grinned and raised his glass, as if in a toast. I raised mine.
We stood side by side, watching the pastel lights play across the slow-moving bodies of the dancers. He leaned against me, shoulder to shoulder. The insufferable rock music seemed to vanish, and it was as if I could hear only my own slow pulse. It was as if our breathing and our heartbeats had fallen into the same rhythm, as if our bodies, though barely touching, had become intertwined, interdependent.
I’ve just added an online press kit with info and blurbs about the book, and a longish bio of me, and so on and so forth. This sort of thing needs to happen, because just today I approved the final print proof. The book will be available for sale within a couple of weeks. Woot!
Meanwhile, I’m all stoked after a weekend writing retreat, at which I met a very engaging young man named Oliver. I think I’ll be spending quite a bit of time with Oliver in the near future.
No, Todd doesn’t need to be worried. Oliver is a fictional character, not an actual person. He appeared to me in a writing exercise and basically took over all the weekend’s writing activities. Good thing, too. NaNoWriMo is coming up.
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is a certain economy with characters. Of course, there are always bit players, walk-ons, spear carriers, but I try to keep their numbers small. In general, I like to feel that every character has some clear purpose. 
