Thursday, September 2, 2010

prepare to be boarded!

That's pretty much the best possible title for the pic below... "prepare to be boarded." What could be more menacing than our band of 11-year-old pirates stalking a rusty shipwreck? Nice. (Ignore the drowning 40-year-old novelist in the foreground.)


Many many thanks to Marrit and Anneke Gorter and family for hosting us in Aruba (and the trip to the secret beach!). What a cool place, and what a cool family.

A good summer all around. Busy, like no summer before. But no shortage of nice moments. My nephew and niece CJ and Samantha Wagner are kicking serious butt
in the world of golf. They passed through Pennsylvania last month and we got to see CJ play (that's him to the right). I don't know much about golf beyond cocktails and golf carts, but sure am proud of those two.

What else? Matt Walker and I are valiantly progressing at snail's pace toward a finished screenplay for The Ice Beneath You. It's been a cool experience, working with Matt on this. It almost doesn't matter if we ever finish...the process is a good time. But finish we will, and soon, I think.

And I've set a goal for end of autumn to finish The Dog House. And I mean it. Really. I do. And I will. Watch me.

I have to, actually. Because I'm ready to go back and finish The Night Door. It's had enough time to marinate. But that's a winter book, so I need to be ready to do it by winter. And I can't do it until I finish Dog House. So there it is.

And that's about it, I guess. Except: I can't stop listening to Peter Mulvey's Notes From Elsewhere and Kitchen Radio albums lately. Check em, if you haven't. Peter's as good an album as any to slip into autumn with, and those two in particular are good slip-into-autmn albums. Know Peter's stuff? No? You should. Really. I wrote about him in this piece I did for The New York Times around the time when In Hoboken came out. He's the most, indeed.

Additional note: Over at Ward Six, the blog of novelists J. Robert Lennon and Rhian Ellis, a discussion on Kindles and iPads and Hardbacks and Paperbacks. My comment to this discussion was easy to write because it seems this is Topic #1 these days for many writers. And then a conversation about why we (writers) do this, and who do we do it for.