Upcoming Events

Late summer and beyond
Lenox, MA Saturday, July 24 1st Annual Berkshire Wordfest	The Mount, 2 Plunkett St Lenox, Mass www.berkshirewordfest.org Info: (413) 551-5111
Sharon, CT Friday, August 6, 2010, 6-8 pm	Hotchkiss Library 10 Upper Main St. Sharon CT 860-364-5041
North Caldwell, NJ August 18, 2010 Reading and signing	GreenBrook Country Club (973) 228-1800
Sioux Falls, SD September 24-26, 2010 Panel Discussion	SouthDakota Festival of Books SiouxFalls, SD
Denver, CO Thursday, September 30, 2010 7:30 pm Conversation with Diane Meier	Tattered Cover 2526 East Colfax Avenue Denver, CO 80206
Steamboat Springs, CO Saturday, October 2, 2010 Master of Ceremonies	Literary Sojourn: Steamboat Springs' Festival of Authors 1289 Lincoln Ave Steamboat Springs, CO 80487 Contact: Chris Painter, 970-367-4904 www.literarysojourn.org
Chicago, IL November 5 & 6, 2010 Reading, talk, signing	iBAM! Chicago Irish American Heritage Center www.ibamchicago.com

NPR with Scott Simon

Frank will be on NPR’s Weekend Edition with Scott Simon tomorrow (Saturday, June 19) morning! He’ll be discussing World Cup soccer—its drama and theatricality. It airs from 8-10 am in New York City. Click here for local listings:

Re: Joyce, Episode 1. We Meet Buck Mulligan

Re: Joyce, episode 0 - Introduction to James Joyce's Ulysses

The Tweeple at Lillies

Last night we celebrated with Tweeple who came to Lillie's Bar on E. 17th st., New York City, and the people who came there tweeted their friends to say where they were. (see David Goodwin's photographs). The big disappointment? Nobody among my Tweeple in the bar tweeted me (@fdbytheword) to tell me that they were there with me. Had they done so, I'd have tweeted back to say, "Yes, I'm here with you, one and a half feet away tweeting about the fact that I'm here with you, one and a half feet away." Do you remember those boxes where you see a picture of the box on the side of the box, and that picture has a picture of the box, and so on, until the box image stretches down, down into tiny infinity? Or Russian dolls? That's what our close-at-hand tweeting felt like! But I loved it - and we had fun. And I can report that Tweeters and Bloggers are real - they have faces and hands and feet and they smile, and it was a delight to meet them. And I thank them for turning out in the rain.

Tweeting each other at the bar. (@nasuyaki, @acc73, @leahpaulos)
© David Goodwin

Frank and his tweeps, @booksnyc and @leahpaulos
© Ben Goodwin

@fdbytheword and @tarastra
© David Goodwin

Through the window at Lillies
© David Goodwin

The End--Come Celebrate!

The English language contains two words superior to all others - “THE” and “END.”

I can attest to their beauty because I’ve just typed them – I’ve delivered to my publishers a new novel, The Matchmaker of Kenmare; it’ll be on sale in February, 2011.

They speak volumes, those two darling words. They tell me that the light peeping through the tunnel wasn’t an oncoming train. They tell me – no more waking up and grabbing a notebook at four in the morning because, Oh, God! there’s a contradiction in a major characterization. No more worry that such-and-such a scene stinks (and that there’s major alliteration running riot). And no more shrieks of profanity as my fatigued memory asks: Haven’t you repeated a passage verbatim somewhere?

Yes, it’s lovely, the relief of “THE” and “END”; an adorable feeling of, “Well, I finished it. Despite all the hopping and trotting – I finished it.” But then I had to hit “send” in order to transmit it to Mark Tavani, my editor at Random House - and that's not totally a nice feeling.

It’s not unlike the moment that you take your oldest child to school for the first time. For three or four or five years, you’ve been able to regulate how the world sees him, and therefore you can control how he reflects the work you’ve put into his upbringing, but now you walk him into the school, with his little cap and his knee-socks – and, yep, there he goes, on his own! But now they can say what they like about him. Your only consolation is that you tried as hard as you could, and given the limited access you have to him now, you’ll continue to make such improvements as you can.

Am I being cheesy? Oh, yes. Do I exaggerate? Of course – and quite a lot, especially as I’m too grizzled now to feel unfettered anguish. But would I have held it back if I could? And re-written it? Indeed I would. And there are perhaps only two words in the entire book that I wouldn’t change – and you’ve guessed what they are: “THE” and “END.”

FOOTNOTE: I’m going to do a little reading aloud from it in New York on Wednesday afternoon around 6. Join me at Lillies from 5:30 to 7 or so!.

http://www.lilliesnyc.com/HOME.html

And The Twallenge Winners Are...

Here are the Twallenge winners - and a surprise! We have a Top Three and more. In the democracy of Frank's team, Emma Gibson had votes from everybody. Jon Sadler had enough votes to make it into the Top Three. Much lobbying went behind Heatherhaze, so she's a winner too. And here's the surprise. So many of the team - and the lobbyists - voted for each of JeanLouise Finch's first sentences that we're awarding her an extra prize - in fact, if you want to make a hierarchy of winners, Finch is Number One, Emma Gibson Number Two, Jon Sadler Number Three and HeatherHaze Number four - and each will receive an audiobook of Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show written and read by yours truly.

Thank you everybody - for all your tweets and twitters and good nature and excellent lines - I wish there could have been more prizes but I'm only a poor struggling author like the rest of you! 

@jeanlouisefinch Dad was only halfway through his first scotch and he was already crying.

@jeanlouisefinch Edward Witworth went to Yale and he did not wear it lightly.

@ealvarezgibson She was out swimming the night Carrickton burned.

@JON_SADLER The legend about a century old private sanatorium hidden deep in the Jungfrau was probably just that, but I had to be sure he was dead

@HeatherHaze Cries of joy erupted as the last lotto ball came up on TV. We just won $40 million, and all I could think of was, "Oh God, not again."

Top Ten Entries in My Writing Twallenge

Midnight oil by the gallon, pounds of candles burned at both ends, teeth gnashed down to the root canals, brains cudgeled with baseball bats (Frank's Team says: "OK - that's enough - we get it") I've finally chosen my Top Ten entries in the Twallenge.

Remember what the contest required? That you write the first line of a novel I would want to read. Some of the best entries came from Ben Goodwin - who is automatically and TOTALLY disqualified, because he, as a member of the Team, helped design the Twallenge. But he'd now better hustle and write the novels whose first lines he entered:- "You don't know me, but your children call me 'Mr. O.'" And - "On the occasion of our second wedding anniversary, I presented her with a baby giraffe."

Here are the non-disqualified, that is to say eligible, Top Ten, from which I will go on to choose the Winning Three, each of whom will be sent an audiobook of Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show, read by the Author (that'd be me).

Much though I like autocracy (my own, naturally), I love democracy more, so please weigh in and try to influence my decisions in the comments below!

@VisceralWriting: You're going to commune with a centuries-dead ghost, take him by his poets balls and castrate him?

@PauletteJaxton Celeste licked a drop of blood from the corner of her mouth and smeared it across her lips. Then she smiled at the King and spat blood

@HeatherHaze Cries of joy erupted as the last lotto ball came up on TV. We just won $40 million, and all I could think of was, "Oh God, not again."

@jeanlouisefinch Dad was only halfway through his first scotch and he was already crying.

@JON_SADLER The legend about a century old private sanatorium hidden deep in the Jungfrau was probably just that, but I had to be sure he was dead

@ealvarezgibson She was out swimming the night Carrickton burned.

@TamsynTweetie I knew it was time to move on when a tramp peed on my uggs.

@jeanlouisefinch Edward Witworth went to Yale and he did not wear it lightly.

@theJoeGriffin Life is a serious of blissfully uneventful stretches in between moments of humiliation.

@ShirtnTie Alfredo's situation was hopeless. She was his soulmate. Their love was boundless. Yet he didn't flinch as he pulled the trigger.

The Writer's Writer

The death of the English novelist, Alan Sillitoe, aged 82, has robbed all professional authors of a superb role model. Although famous in his thirties for the novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and the short story, The Loneliness of a Long Distance Runner, Sillitoe didn’t step off his own chosen path and pursue that fame; he stayed at his workbench, kept his head down and wrote novels, short stories, plays, poems, essays, memoirs and English/Spanish translations in the worlds of Shakespeare and Chopin – an enormous output and exemplary energy.

I had the pleasure of interviewing him more than once for the BBC. Warnings preceded him, from the broadcasting and publishing worlds: “He’s difficult,” they said; he’ll bite your face off if you ask him about having been an Angry Young Man; you won’t get a word out of him – he’s so taciturn; he’s a class warrior; don’t even mention Albert Finney  (who starred in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning) – and so forth.

None of this came to pass. He arrived prepared and co-operative. I didn’t find him prickly or abrupt – in fact, he remains one of the most generous interviewees of the 3,500 or so writers that I’ve interviewed. Quiet, thoughtful, neatly and mutedly dressed, he put his head to one side when listening to a question, and then settled himself with an air of eagerness, almost rubbing his hands, when the time came to answer it.

I shall remember him principally as among of those writers who falls into the mode of “teacher.” For one of the interviews, my colleagues and I had asked him to choose and muse upon a book that had proven especially important to him, and he chose The Ragged-Trousered Philantropists, by Robert Tressell, a work of thinly disguised fiction set in the poverty-stricken lower working classes of Britain in the nineteen-teens. In this choice, of course, Sillitoe was sewing his own politics on his sleeve like a chevron.

Yet his passion for Tressell’s emphatic socialism waned like the moon before the dawn when he began to talk about writing, and what it can do, and how it must be done. I recall him saying, “The effort must never waver. It’s all about being truthful, and you must experiment, and you must change and duck and dive into every kind of written form to find ways of making truthful content.” Or words to that effect.

And he told me a story that I still repeat when speaking in public about the power of the creative process. He was writing a novel called The Death of William Posters, published in 1965, and taking its title from that well-known warning, “Bill Posters Shall be Prosecuted."

“Things,” he said, ”got out of hand.” His protagonist falls in love with a local nurse, and moves in with her. One weekend, they have an argument, the character storms out, slams the door, and goes down the pub, where he meets two other characters - whom Sillitoe had to fight all the way to stop them taking over the novel!

Alan Sillitoe is a loss, but he left a lot behind, the fruits of his quietly-conducted, powerful, insistent and completely professional career.

The Woman I Love, by Frank Delaney

When I first met Diane, in the early 1990s, I was impressed by the same things that strike me now: her energy, on all fronts; her friendly, democratic good manners to everyone at every level; her quite remarkable desire to be helpful – in any gathering she’s still at her best (and she will agree with this) if you give her a job to do. Her inventiveness performs like a very expensive car - revving silently, getting to top speed fast, capable of taking every twist and turn with safety; it’s how she runs her business, it’s how she runs her half of our life. And her generosity is by any standards extraordinary — almost reckless; I know of many cases where she has subsidized clients who became friends, and I frequently have to try and stop that exploitation (if she lets me).

Read the full article.