Attack the Block

Yes, yes, it’s coming. The new book will be along soon-ish. Just keep—or start—watching this space. Okay, now that’s out of the way…

I recently came across one of the best quotes about writing that I have read in a long time. It was said by American novelist Richard Bausch, whose books include Take Me Back, The Last Good Time, Hello to the Cannibals, and Peace. His words were quoted second-hand by another novelist, Devin Murphy, in an interview about his debut novel The Boat Runner, which is out this month. Though Murphy’s name sounds as though he should be from Cork, he actually hails originally from upstate New York and currently teaches at a university in Illinois. His novel is inspired by his Dutch grandfather’s experiences during World War II. I am hoping to get time to read it one of these days.

Anyway, here is Bausch’s writing advice, which was delivered to a room of other writers: “When you’re stuck, lower your standards and keep going.”

Now that is brilliant. It is simple, to-the-point, and in fact has basically been my own personal philosophy for as long as I can remember. In fact, I have even taken it a step further. In my case, I lower my standards and keep going even when I am not stuck.

I am only half-joking. Yes, life would be easier if everything I wrote was perfect—or at least really, really good—at the moment it was first entered on the keyboard, but the practicality is that it is often easier to go back to fix and improve later than to interrupt the creative flow or, worse, get discouraged. Yes, that makes more work—something that is all too apparent to me at present as I try, with help, to get my latest in some sort of shape so that I am not completely embarrassed. If I write something bad, at least there is the possibility of making it better later. If do not manage to write anything, then there is nothing.

I have read other writers’ accounts of their struggles with writer’s block and consider myself blessed. I have no memories of ever being paralyzed by the blank page (or blank screen). Eons ago in school, I may have fretted over selecting a topic for an essay or story, but on the whole my problem has always been the reverse of writer’s block. I have too many ideas for things to write, and the dilemma is always to settle on which one to go with next—whether it is the next chapter or the next book. Actually, even choosing what to write next is less a problem than just finding enough time for writing, as well as for doing all the other non-writing things I want or need to be doing.

It is definitely not the worst problem to have.

As I say, watch this space for proximate information on the new book…

Brain Activity

The strangest thing happened over the weekend.

On a two-and-a-half-hour car journey to Dublin, my brain went into hyper-drive. This happens every so often. I cannot predict when it will happen or what will bring it on. If I could make it happen at will, I would—and at a convenient time.

By hyper-drive, I mean that my mind began writing out scenes and storylines for a long-planned book. It was like a fax machine that suddenly came to life and started spewing pages.

This usually happens in the summer. More typically, it will happen late at night or early in the morning while I am lying in bed. This can happen in my own usual bed in Connacht, but it is more likely to occur in the bed where I sleep in Munster when we have gone down there for a break. It seems to have something to do with getting out of my usual routine and/or being cut off from my usual distractions, which tend to involve some combination of computer and internet access.

One memorable morning during such an episode, I wrote in my head the final seven pages of Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead pretty much verbatim. Immediately afterwards, I had to get out of bed and grab a smart tablet to type it all out before I forgot any of it. Those pages wound up in the book with very little change, even though I still had several chapters left to write to work my way toward those final pages. Something similar happened as I neared the end of my first draft of the upcoming book, the sequel to Max & Carly, which I hope to be able to tell you all about—including where and how to acquire it—during the month of September. I know there is light at the end of the tunnel when I suddenly find myself writing the ending to a book. While I have the major plot points nailed down before I begin any writing, I do not always have a clear idea how I will end up getting from point to point along the way. While I know the ending, it remains vague and fuzzy to me until that strange moment when it begins playing out in front of my eyes like a leaked on-line spoiler video clip from a yet-to-be-released movie.

The scenes that played out in my head during the weekend’s drive to Dublin were from the upcoming third installment of my Dallas Green trilogy. (Yes, it’s a trilogy.) New characters he needed to meet and old ones he needed to meet again told me who they were and how they were going to fit in. More vividly, certain key scenes played themselves over and over until they burned themselves into my memory, just as I hope they may do for the eventual readers.

It is a strange thing this writing process.

It is, of course, way too soon to be talking about the third book when the second one has still to see the light of day. The good news is that it is very, very close to being unleashed upon the world. It feels as though it has been forever since I began writing it and even longer—as illogical as that will sound—since I got to the end of the first draft. I honestly could not do this without my good friend Dayle, who somehow manages to take my writing more seriously than I do and who helps me and supports me and challenges me to respect the nuts-and-bolts craftsman part of the writing process.

If you enjoy—or not—the stories I try to tell, I will shamelessly accept the credit—or blame. If you find you can read my books without them totally doing your head in—or even being pleasurable to read—then you can thank Dayle.

Inspirations and Checkpoints

Nothing gets the creative juices flowing better than devoting a week to gorging on the creative works of others. My favorite place to do that is at a film festival, which just so happens to be where I was last week.

The annual Galway Film Fleadh has become the one film fest that I usually manage not to miss. It was a nice break from the day-to-day routine and from the weight of worrying about all the shortcomings I keep imagining—or maybe not imagining—in my just-about-ready-to-release new book. The strange thing—actually probably not that strange—was that, everywhere I turned during the festival, I was reminded in some way of the book. The first film I saw, Jennifer M. Kroot’s documentary The Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin, was about one of the writers whose work was firmly in my mind when writing the sections that take place in San Francisco in 1980. Nobody has captured the spirit of that time and place better than Maupin. I suppose you could say that my protagonist Dallas Green plays more or less than same role in my book that Ohio transplant Mary Ann Singleton plays in Tales of the City.

It was interesting to see how a filmmaker like Tom Collins approached the weaving of a fictional story with historical events in Penance, something I attempted to do—admittedly less ambitiously than him—in my book. I got a new appreciation for readers who accuse me of leaving details in my stories hanging or not finishing certain side plots. I found myself feeling the same way while watching Liam Ó Mochain’s Lost & Found. In a couple of his interweaving plots, he did not answer the questions there were foremost in my mind. When asked about this after the screening, he smiled and invited viewers to fill in the details however it best pleased them. I guess I got a taste of my own medicine.

A couple of the movies reminded me in different ways of The Three Towers of Afranor, particularly Brendan Muldowney’s Pilgrimage. Like my own fantasy novel, it told the story of a callow young man on a real and metaphysical journey in a dark and dangerous landscape. (If only I could get Tom Holland to play Prince Chrysteffor in a movie adaptation!) Catherine Gund and Daresha Kyi’s affecting documentary Chavela, about the singer Chavela Vargas, did not itself remind me of my own writings, but the title was certainly evocative for me. Chavela was the name I chose for the princess of Afranor way back in that high school Spanish story that eventually became The Three Towers of Afranor. Chavela is essentially a nickname for Isabel, the Spanish equivalent of Elizabeth. In the final version, I decided to go for Gaelic names for the Afranor characters, so the name Chavela became Eilís.

My sense of cinematic déjà vu in regards to the new book was actually strongest while viewing a movie I saw after the film festival. My wife and I watched the 1965 Martin Ritt adaptation of John le Carré’s novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. The very first scene takes place at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin. It was strange to see on screen the iconic crossing, which figures in my new book—especially after having visited the real place for the first time only last year. It would have been problematic for the filmmakers to have filmed that scene where it was meant to take place, at the newly built Berlin Wall, in 1965. As it happens, studio filming for the movie was done here in Ireland at Ardmore Studios in County Wicklow.

It was surreal to realize that the Checkpoint Charlie scenes were actually filmed in a place I know fairly well, the Smithfield Market in Dublin.

Sequels, Series and Sequences

Is it just me or do there seem to be a lot more sequels showing up these days?

I am not talking specifically about movies playing at the local cineplex during the summer. After all, the marquees at those places have reliably been filled for years now with the titles of sequels, remakes, remakes of sequels, sequels of remakes and the occasional spinoff of franchises full of sequels. No, I am talking about movies and television shows from long ago that we thought were done and dusted but which are unexpectedly and belatedly brought back for another go.

Probably the most prominent example in our house is the quarter-decade-later resumption of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks saga. Fans of the show had long given up hope of seeing the abruptly curtailed story of supernatural doings in a fictional corner of northeast Washington state after the series’s cancellation in 1991. A 1992 feature film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, did not advance the plot much, but at least there was the promise of more movies. They did not, however, materialize. Now Showtime is airing no fewer than 18 new one-hour episodes. This is quite a bonanza, considering that the original series took only a bit over 34 hours to watch, according to a binge watching website. (Yes, there is such a thing.) The feature film added 135 more minutes. And Twin Peaks is by no means the only old series to get revived years after the fact. The sitcom Full House, which went off the air in 1995, is back as Fuller House. The sitcom Roseanne, which went off the air in 1997, is also coming back. There are probably other examples.

As for movies, did anyone expect there to be a Trainspotting sequel two decades later? I didn’t. I caught up with it recently and enjoyed it, although it was largely fan service. But that’s what we fans want, right?

I feel obliged these days not to be too harsh on sequels since the universe has played a trick on me by conspiring to get me, after criticizing more than a few sequels in public over the years, to write my very own sequel. Keep watching this space so you can be among the first to know when it is available for purchase. It could be any minute now. Well, maybe by the end of the summer.

Allow me to dissemble. I am not sure I really consider Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead: Part 2 (as no one, including myself, will call it) strictly a sequel. Let us consult a dictionary definition of the word sequel: “a literary work, movie, etc., that is complete in itself but continues the narrative of a preceding work.” Okay, so it is a sequel, but I do not consider it the second in a series. The question of whether the two books plus any future ones dealing with the adventures of Dallas Green constitute a series is not academic. When I acquire an International Standard Book Number (ISBN) for a new book, one of the fields that must be completed is whether the work is part of a series. You know, like one of the Harry Potter books or any other of the numerous examples of fantasy YA lit that, seemingly by decree, cannot be told in a mere single tome. I have no plans to list Max & Carly or its sequel as part of a series. Any sequels to The Three Towers of Afranor, however, along with the original book could well be listed as a series—if I ever get any encouragement to write them.

In my mind, the Max & Carly sequel is just another book that will stand or fall on its own and which just happens to include some characters that also appeared in Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead. As it happens, at least two of the characters in the new book will also appear in my long planned novel about Seattle in the 1980s—if I ever get around to writing that one. Dallas, however, will not appear in that book. In other words, I fancy myself (with typical lack of humility) as a modern-day Honoré de Balzac. He was the 19th century French author of nearly a hundred novels, which included many of the same characters and told overlapping stories. Some of his better known books are Eugénie Grandet, Le Père Goriot and Illusions Perdues. These scores of interweaving books by Balzac are not referred to by academics as a “series” but as a “novel sequence,” and the name of the sequence is La Comédie Humaine. So that is what I am writing: a novel sequence. Just do not expect me to write as many books as Balzac did. The scary thing is that he would have probably written a lot more if he had not died at the age of 51—five months after getting married.

If you are having trouble getting your head around the whole “novel sequence” thing, perhaps because you are more of a comic book person than a French literature person, then think of it this way. It’s kind of like the Marvel Cinematic Universe or the DC Extended Universe but with French people instead of superheroes. But my novel sequence comprises only my books set in the real world. Do not expect a future book, for example, where Dallas shows up in Afranor.

Or wait… maybe he could. Hang on, I just might have an idea for the best cross-over ever!

Scott Does Dallas (again)

It’s out of my hands.

I am talking about my book and, no, it is not really out of my hands. It is just that I am waiting for comments, feedback, corrections and general reaction before doing anything else. After the most recent pass, I am happy with it. That is not to say I feel it is perfect. Perfection is an ideal and by definition unachievable. I have too much of a journalist background geared to deadlines for me to get hung up on perfection. At this point my to-do list includes listening and acting on whatever I get back and then undertaking one last pass in an attempt to catch the previously uncaught. Then comes the “easy” part, that is, the technical part that is satisfying in that success can be measured objectively instead of subjectively. I am talking about the formatting, press prep, uploading and business end of the whole book process.

It is something of a relief to have my brain freed up for things like the occasional blog post and spinning ideas for upcoming books. (Unless reaction to this book is such that I am convinced to give up writing altogether and go into full-time subsistence farming.) Next up is still my gothic supernatural opus or what I keep calling (and will most likelyy inevitably regret calling) my Dark Shadows homage. I need something completely different in tone and theme from Dallas’s end-of-Carter-administration exploits. Toward the end of writing the second Dallas book, though, I was getting quite keen to launch into the third Dallas novel. Now that I have had a chance to decompress, however, I do not think I can face into him and his dipsomaniac existence quite so soon again. I am now, instead, tending toward finally tackling my long-planned epic of the lives of multiple charactes in 1980s Seattle. Perhaps the new season of the brilliant but profane HBO sitcom Silicon Valley is infusing me with a need to revisit the world of software people.

A warning. A blog post is not a legally binding contract. Any of these intended plans could be altered or eliminated at any time. Even the third Dallas book is optional. I was perfectly happy with one single Dallas book—until people kept telling me they could not wait for the next installment. Apparently, what I thought was a neat, tidy resolution of the story was, in the eyes of most other people, a cliffhanger. The early word so far from at least one beta reader of the second Dallas book is that it is in even more need of a follow-up.

Is this going to be my curse? Writing an endless series of books about Dallas, trying each time to finally wrap up the series—and failing?

Something to look forward to: I have distilled a playlist of music—to which I listened a lot while writing the book—into an eighty-song five-and-a-half-hour Spotify playlist, which I will make public at the same time the book is released. If any filmmakers out there are looking for a project, allow me to point out that this playlist could easily be adapted into a film soundtrack. Hint, hint.

What's in a Name?

Imagine my shock. Suddenly the hero of my first and third novels was dead. The author is always the last to know.

Okay, my protagonist is not really dead. Actually, I guess I am only presuming he is not dead since I have not yet worked out where Dallas Green would be today in 2017 and what he would be doing. Obviously, though, I have worked out where he is at least as far as the end of the upcoming book and, truth be told, a good few years after that, since I have already been plotting out the third installment in his prospective trilogy. I hope that is not a spoiler to be divulging he survives for that amount of time. I figure that, when the protagonist of a book is narrating the story in the first person, he necessarily cannot narrate past the end of his own life. Well, unless he is narrating from beyond the grave like William Holden’s character in Sunset Boulevard.

The shock I mentioned above had to do with an obituary I came across in The New York Times last month. It reported that Dallas Green had died on March 22 at the age of 82. Of course, the story was not about my fictional creation but about a real person.

The real Dallas Green (actual full name: George Dallas Green) was born in Delaware and had an undistinguished baseball pitching career before going on to manage to the Philadelphia Phillies to their first-ever World Series title in 1980 (coincidentally the very same year in which my upcoming book is set). He later was a manager for New York’s Yankees and Mets. He was known to be tall and hot-tempered and to have a booming voice. His life was marked with sadness that went beyond simply being one of numerous people fired by George Steinbrenner. His nine-year-old granddaughter was one of six people killed in the shooting that injured U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson six years ago.

One of the tricky things about writing fiction is coming up with names for characters. It is pretty much impossible to come up with a plausible-sounding monicker that does not already belong to some number of real people. Generally, one avoids using the same name as someone particularly famous—unless maybe it is a plot point or important detail for building the character. (“Unlucky enough to be named Frank by his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Sinatra, he was regularly beaten in school by bullies who insisted he sing for them with the same voice quality of his famous namesake.”) Not being much of a follower of sports, I do not think I was even aware of the existence baseball’s Dallas Green when I came up with that name for a teenager in a California farming town in the early 1970s. As for his best friend, Lonnie McKay, I don’t know how that name came to me but, after the book was published, a childhood acquaintance mentioned with some amusement on Facebook that his cousin had the very same name. Had I met or heard about the real Lonnie and then had the name stick in the back of my head somewhere?

I did learn of another real-life Dallas Green not long after Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead came out. I was listening to Weekend Edition on National Public Radio one Saturday when Scott Simon interviewed a Canadian singer/songwriter named Dallas Green. If I had missed hearing about him up until then, it may have been because he was a vocalist/guitarist in the hardcore band Alexisonfire before setting out on his own seven years ago. He has since recorded under the name City and Colour—because his name is a city followed by a color. Born in St. Catherine’s, Ontario in 1980, he was actually named after the baseball manager who achieved his World Series triumph that very same year.

I am sure there are many more Dallas Greens out there. A quick web search, for example, turns up a couple of men (a DJ in the Washington D.C. area and an Australian athlete and father who died way too young last year) and a couple of women (a technical administrator in northern California and a recent bride in North Carolina).

It is always worth doing a search on a character’s name before committing it to print but, as I say, you are never going to come up with any kind of normal name for a character that is not already being used by a whole bunch of actual real people out there. I suppose the best you can hope for is that your fictional creation does not resemble a real person to the extent that you could be looking at lawsuits—especially if your fictional creation is not very well behaved.

After the Ides

Unlike Julius Caesar, I had little to fear from the Ides of March. That was the day I officially finished my first draft of the Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead sequel. And just in the nick of time too, since two days later came St. Patrick’s Day, and that is when all the brain cells that had been holding all my pent-up prose for the final chapters were subsequently and tragically destroyed.

I am still keeping the book’s title to myself, but I can confirm that it definitely will not be Julius and Calpurnia Are Dead—at least not unless the manuscript undergoes some serious rewriting and thematic changes.

The story turned out to require 32 chapters and, at more than 116,000 words, the page count for the paper edition should be in the neighborhood of 350, making it the longest of my three tomes to date. Of course, all these statistics—as well as the title—are still subject to change, but I tend to resist too many major changes once I get to this point. Much, much work remains, but the book feels complete to me in terms of how it reads in my head if not actually on virtual paper. With a bit of ruthless editing, it could well shrink back down to the 100,000 words that had been my original target.

I have actually done this enough times now that the stages I go through mentally are very familiar to me. With the creative work of plotting pretty much over—and weeks of crafting and polishing ahead—the imaginative part of my brain has already skipped ahead. My brain is thinking about everything from what would make a nice book cover to how the story might continue in an eventual third volume. (It’s good to be thinking about that while there is still time to drop some foreshadowing into the second book.) I am also now free to develop ideas for my next project which, if I heed the reader feedback I have gotten thus far on Facebook and other places, will turn out to be the supernatural gothic tale that has been knocking around in my head since high school. (Yeah, another one of those.)

As I think I have mentioned before, I had not really intended to write a sequel to my debut novel. I thought the story of Dallas and Lonnie’s ill-advised foray into Mexico stood on its own and was complete on its own terms. After getting much prodding and continual inquiries about a follow-up, though, I began to think what kind of story might flow out of Dallas’s future life and, lo and behold, the story ended up writing itself. (Well, I can only wish it had written itself. That would have been a whole lot easier.) I hoped the effort would, in the end, feel worthwhile artistically and not end up as a mere completionist exercise. Happily, by the time I got to the end, I had a similar emotional involvement and investment as I had when I got to the end of Dallas and Lonnie’s original story. (“Of course, you would say that,” says you. “What else could you say after all?” Fair point.) Hopefully, it strikes the right balance between reproducing what readers may have liked about the first book while offering something new and different.

Do you need to have read Max & Carly in order to understand and/or enjoy the new book? All I can say is that I wrote it as if the reader had not perused the previous novel. Strangely, in fact, there were times when I thought this new book would actually be more enjoyable if you had not read the first one. After all, what you need to know gets filled in along the way. On the other hand, there are references back to the first story that will be best appreciated by those who have indeed read it.

As with the first book, the story involves a journey that is both geographical and trascendent—not to mention an inordinate amount of alcohol consumption. Dallas grew in the course of his adventures in Mexico, and the same is also meant to be true about his experiences in Europe. Just as the first book gave me an opportunity to visit places I had never been as well as to revisit places where I had been, the new book has provided me the chance to revisit places like San Francisco and Bordeaux as well as, through research and imagination, do things I had not done, like attend a film festival in Deauville and experience Berlin as it was during the Cold War.

I hope the people who pestered me into writing the book will be happy. They will definitely get the answer to some of their lingering questions. Some answers, though, they may still be pestering me to provide—in the prospective third book.

Being There

I am happy to report that I have only a few more chapters to go on the first draft of the Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead sequel. (Yes, it has a title and one that is much shorter than repeatedly calling it “the Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead sequel,” but no point committing to it publicly until I have to. After all, I might think of something better in the meantime. Also, no harm in maybe building a little suspense?)

When I say “a few more chapters,” I do not actually know for sure how many. My target page count is around 300, and I estimate that I am at about 278 but with still a lot of story to fit in at the end. My wife always says that my books feel to her like they are rushed at the end, and maybe this is why. Personally, as a reader, I like a bit of accelerating narrative pace coming down to the climax of a story, but that is just me. Anyway, either the final few chapters will be packed with story or else this book will be a bit longer than I had planned.

I hope to have the first draft wrapped up fairly soon, once I get back to it. As usual around this time of year, I have been interrupted by the midterm school break, which this time around will end with the annual all-nighter to obsessively watch the Academy Awards in real time.

As with the first book, this one has been, alternately, an exercise in jogging the old memory and spending a fair bit of time in research. Both books deal with eras that I remember well, but the story in each case brings my protagonist Dallas to places that I happen to know and also to places that I do not. For example, in Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead the locations in California are all places I know well, including Tijuana across the border. His journey with his pal Lonnie as far as Guaymas also traces a journey I myself made, although to get there my friend Rich and I actually traveled there from Mexicali by train rather than by driving a ’65 Chevy. South of Guaymas, however, that part of the journey was entirely concocted from research and imagination. I like to hope that I got away with it since a number of readers have indicated that they assumed I was writing about a road trip I had actually taken myself.

In the new book Dallas travels to France. That was pretty easy to write about—and in fact quite a bit of fun—since I have been to France several times and lived there as a student in the early 1970s. I was never there, however, in the year 1980, which is when Dallas goes, but that has not been hard to deal with. Much of his time is spent, though, in the resort of Deauville, which is a place I have never been. So back to the research and imagination. From there he travels to the city of Bordeaux, which is precisely where I myself lived so that was, relatively speaking, a piece of cake. I spent many months walking the streets of that city and its suburbs, although a few years earlier than Dallas. And, I should note, that Dallas has a few experiences there that I most certainly never had. It is important to get that on the record at the outset.

So the question that comes to my mind is this one. Is it better if a fiction writer has actually been in the place (and at the time) he is writing about, as opposed to going the research/imagination route? Or does it matter?

Armed with the above information, readers who care about this can judge for themselves when they read the book. I can tell you one thing, though. After I have written about traveling to these places in Dallas’s first-person voice, I end up having the strange feeling that I have been in those places—the same way any reader feels that she or he has been to a place after reading a vivid description of it in a novel. This is not meant to be a sneaky way of praising my own writing. It is the combination of researching, going through the imaginative process and writing it all down in another person’s voice that makes me feel as though I was in these places—kind of in a dream world or alternative reality sort of way.

It is really interesting what the mind can make itself do in the process of telling a story.

Things That Get Bumped in the Night

Years ago Jimmy Kimmel began a running gag on his talk show about Matt Damon. It started when Kimmel was wrapping up what he felt had been a very lame show (“I think my guests were a ventriloquist and a guy in a monkey suit”) and at the last minute, in an inspired fit of show business gallows humor, he threw out the line, “My apologies to Matt Damon; we ran out of time.” Thereafter he frequently repeated the line, much to occasional viewer Damon’s confusion—so much so that the actor eventually cornered Kimmel to get the explanation.

I think TV chat shows nowadays are generally too carefully scripted and produced for this to happen much any more, but I remember many occasions of getting all the way to the end of Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show and hearing him apologize to some hapless unseen comedian or singer about running out of time. I imagine it was the dread of any rising newcomer who finally got his or her big shot at the coveted late night television audience.

That very thing happened last Friday night to my wife’s cousin once removed. An accomplished musician and performer, she was scheduled to play her harp on RTÉ’s Late Late Show in order to promote Dublin’s upcoming TradFest festival. She was even featured in televised teasers earlier in the evening. All of us friends and family were huddled around the telly in anticipation—except for certain ones, including her parents and her nearly-90-year-old grandmother, who were actually in the front rows of the studio audience. We waited and waited for her appearance. We waited through a moving tribute to Ireland’s seaborne rescue services, a chat with a couple of veteran actors and an interminable on-stage performance of a botox procedure. Then, after literally hours, host Ryan Tubridy said the dreaded words. He apologized to Lisa and said they would have her back on a future telecast. Sigh.

Strangely, I myself could emphathize quite sincerely with her. As it happens, I was bounced from a potential spot on the airwaves just a few days before Christmas. The saga began a few weeks earlier when the wife alerted me to the fact that Joe Duffy was soliciting self-published books. If you do not listen to Irish radio and do not know who Joe Duffy is, well, it is kind of hard to explain. Basically, he is a sympathetic ear in the afternoon. While any current event, whether international or local, can be up for call-in discussion, most of his shows seem to involve listeners ringing in with stories about personal problems, travails and frustrations. Whether it is a problem with an incalcitrant bank or government red tape, Joe—a plainspoken presenter with a classic Dublin accent—can reliably be heard to utter audible sounds of sympathy and concern. Usually on Fridays the show is a forum for a panel of codgers to bring out their corny jokes.

On the day of the winter solstice, however, the topic was to be self-published books. The idea was to chat with some of the authors, and the collected books would be donated. I dropped my two in an envelope, sent them off to RTÉ and then forgot all about it—all the way up until a couple of hours before the program was to air. The phone rang, and it was Richie, a nice researcher from Joe’s show, wanting to do a pre-interview with me. He had lots of questions, mainly about Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead, and I was happy to answer all of them. It was gratifying that Richie had spent enough time with the books to be familiar with them. He took my mobile phone number and asked if I would be available if they rang me during the show. Of course, I was. When the show began at 1:45 we listened intently, keeping an ear out all the time for a phone call, knowing the radio would have to be shut off before answering it. We continued listening until the program ended at three o’clock. It turned out that they had more—way more—authors lined up than they had time for, which of course is the prudent thing to do.

The vast majority of authors interviewed had written memoirs. A lot of Richie’s questions had been about how much of Max & Carly had been based on my own experiences. I suppose it was natural for an inveterate people person like Joe Duffy to be most comfortable talking to authors about their own lives rather than their creative process. Also, in contrast to the books that got featured, neither of my books has very much to do with Ireland. One had a single secondary Irish character, and the other had characters with Irish names but were not Irish. In any event, it provided a few hours of excitement in the house to break the usual daytime routine.

As it happens, that was not the first time I had been approached about going on the air only to be cut when it came down to the wire. A few years ago a producer for an RTÉ afternoon TV show got in contact with me. It was a few days before the annual Academy Awards telecast. He had spotted my movie blog and wondered if I would be interested in participating in a panel discussion the day after the Oscars. I may not have sounded overly enthusiastic since it would have meant a three-hour drive to Dublin after little or no sleep since the Oscar telecast typically ends around six in the morning in this time zone. Besides, I had the distinct impression that I was being lined up as a contingency in case the person they really wanted could not make it. In any event, I was subsequently informed that I need not trouble myself.

I guess when it comes to Ireland’s state broadcaster, I am just its answer to Matt Damon.

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I am fascinated by book-selling web sites that use an algorithm to suggest books that may also be of interest to you, presumably based on titles you have previously searched for or links that you have clicked on.

So it was particularly exciting for me when I was able to start searching for my very own first published book and see what sorts of books got suggested for people who had searched for it. Here is a typical result.

I have to say that at least the software deduced the historical reference fairly logically.

More interesting was the result from an Australian web site.

Stephen King? Art Spiegelman? Kate Grenville? Now that’s one eclectic reading list. At least this time the algorithm was smart enough to also suggest my other book as well.