Christopher Meeks's Blog, page 15
March 2, 2011
A Quick Question -- Your Thoughts Needed
span> The Quick Question Edition YOUR THOUGHTS NEEDEDIn January, I happened to finish what feels to be the best book I've written, Love at Absolute Zero. It's the story of Gunnar Gunderson, a 32-year-old physicist at the University of Wisconsin. With his two partners, Gunnar is in a race against MIT to create new forms of matter called Bose-Einstein condensates, which exist only ...
February 26, 2011
MARKETING YOUR LITERARY NOVEL THROUGH INDEPENDENT PUBLISHING
A few years ago, I found myself talking to a marketing guy. It was just before a handful of authors and experts at the University of Southern California were about to present a panel on book marketing. I expected to hear the usual, that marketing nonfiction and genre fiction such as mysteries, thrillers, and romances, has always been a little easier than literary fiction. I didn't expect to ...
January 19, 2011
Kurt Vonnegut's Time, My Time, Your Time
"I love George Roy Hill and Universal Pictures, who made a flawless translation of my novel Slaughterhouse-Five to the silver screen," said Kurt Vonnegut in Film Comment in 1985. "I drool and cackle every time I watch that film because it is so harmonious with what I felt when I wrote the book." In 1971, I was just a kid on a bicycle riding to my grandmother's house in a ...
January 4, 2011
PARENTING AND WRITING -- CAN THE TWO MIX?
April Davila, a writer and one of my former graduate students, wrote me asking if I could be a guest blogger and write about "being a writer while being a parent" -- as she was about to give birth to her second child and could guests to help her with her blog. Having two children, now ages 23 and 12, the following is what I wrote. I happened to be one of Aprils professors at USC ...
December 27, 2010
THE LETTER: "ON THE EVENT OF MY DEATH"
In my mother's funeral file was a note that there was a letter for me in her safe deposit box. She said the letter had originally been intended for my stepfather, and after I read it, I could give him a copy. The note wasn't in the safe deposit box. I speculated that she changed her mind and ripped it up. Of course, I was incredibly curious what she might have written and when. What was so ...
December 26, 2010
On Such a Winter's Day (Laying Down My Mother's Ashes)
I knew my mother had a file in her desk labeled "My Funeral," where she had made her choices known. The trick was to find that folder since her desk and her whole house were gone--the latter bashed down, no less--when she sold her Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired Usonian home to pay for her assisted living. After I told one of my brothers about the file, his wife found it in storage, and we ...
December 22, 2010
Literary Hot Spots L.A.
New York City embraces literary landmarks the way vermouth and gin saddle up to each other to create a classic martini. The city's Metropolitan Museum of Art, for instance, connects with J.D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield when Holden goes there to wait for his sister Phoebe. The windows of Tiffany's conjure Holly Golightly eyeing the jewelry in Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. On the ...
December 6, 2010
AFI PART 3 - "Barney's Version" - Fabulous
I wrote about the AFI Fest two weeks ago, and said Part 3 would be next. As my previous blog notes, my mother died in between, so I now bring Part 3. Barney's Version is in a few theatres now (maybe only Los Angeles and New York), but keep it on your radar.Of the five films we saw the week of the AFI Fest film festival, I'd put Barney's Version as the most surprising—i.e. I was ...
December 2, 2010
ON THE RECENT DEATH OF MY MOTHER
I was just finishing my first Santa Monica College English class of the day, and I had ten minutes before the next one started when I received the call. My mother had fallen out of bed that morning and hurt so much, she asked to go to the hospital. She'd been ambulanced off, and my wife, who had talked to one of my brothers, said my mother's condition now seemed critical. "Her kidneys and ...
November 25, 2010
Like Mushroom Soup for Casserole
I happen to teach college English. My class and I just discussed Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate, and after we finished, the book, still ringing with me, inspired me to write the following piece about Thanksgiving. Here's my true memory about an event five years ago.INGREDIENTS:1 can of mushroom soup2 cans of green beans1 can of dry cooked and canned onion rings2 wives, one present, one ...
