Thomas Mullen's Blog, page 5

My Favorite Review Ever, and Other Thoughts on Newspapers

What a great weekend -- the new book got a wonderfully enthusiastic review from the Los Angeles Times, which called it "a stunning work of fiction that is intense, deeply satisfying and always uniquely American." And they compared it to one of my favorite writers, Michael Chabon, in the opening paragraph -- not bad at all.



The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers also got another strong review from the Associated Press. One of the only upsides to the shrinking of newspapers' Book sections acr...

Robert B. Parker, Boston, and the Hard-Boiled World He Leaves Behind

Robert B. Parker died yesterday at age 77. His Spenser novels were the first adult fiction that hooked me--by the time I was a high school sophomore, I had read everything he'd written up to that point. I haven't read him in close to 20 years, as, like so many self-serious teenage would-be writers, I started to look askance at "genre fiction" like mysteries. The Spenser novels were old-fashioned, hard-boiled private eye stories narrated by the good-hearted, modern-age tough-guy Spenser--an ex...

What Not To Say To A Bank Teller

A recent article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on the prevalence of bank robberies in the wintertime made me think not only of eerie parallels with my new book but also about an unexpectedly interesting encounter I had at a bank last year.



I had just moved to the Atlanta area and had finally gotten around to setting up a local bank account. I was sitting in the office of one of the bank managers, and in setting up the account I mentioned that I couldn't do direct-deposit paychecks, as ...

New Year, New Book

Hope everyone's New Year is off to a great start. When I hear "2010" now, the first thing I think of is my new book. I know that sounds insanely self-centered, but allow me to explain:



I had lunch with my editor back in July of 2008 during a visit to New York. I had recently sent her a second draft of The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers, and things seemed to be moving right along. I asked her when Random House was planning to release the book, and she explained that, given the long lead ...

The Firefly Brothers Are Coming!

If you're reading this, you've doubtless noticed that the Web site has undergone some changes. I've redesigned things to hype my new book, The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers, which is now only a few weeks away from hitting the stores! The book will be released on January 26, 2010, so hang on to all those Amazon and Barnes and Noble gift cards you get for the holidays.



I'm incredibly psyched that the long wait is over. The hardest part of the writing process, I've found, is deciding what...

Quarantines and Blogs

I recently was contacted by Geoff Manaugh, the brains behind the Web site BLDGBLOG. Geoff is an architect who will be leading, in New York, an 8-week "design studio focusing on the spatial implications of quarantine." For part of their launch, Geoff and Nicole Twilley of Edible Geography interviewed me for their Web site. I warned them that I know almost nothing about architecture (much to my art-historian-mother's horror); they said that was okay. They weren't so much interested in talking a...

Body Bags

(I know, I know, I haven't blogged in like forever. But with a book on the way and a new baby on the way, it's been a bit crazy at the Mullen household. But since I'm struggling through the latest toddler virus my son loving shared with me, and I don't seem to have the verve for fiction at the moment, back to the blog I come! I promise to be here more often in the coming weeks, as part of the launch for the new book, for which I am totally and incredibly excited. And on to today's post.)



I s...

I Heart Freshmen

Tomorrow morning I'm off to Rutgers, the first of three visits in the next three weeks to colleges that assigned The Last Town on Earth to their incoming freshmen as their common summer read. I'm big with 18 year-olds, apparently. No, more accurately: I'm homework with 18 year-olds, which is such a weird thing. Here's hoping they liked the book and didn't feel the way I felt when I had to slog through The Caine Mutiny oh so many summers ago.



Seriously, it is hugely flattering to have the boo...

Juiced Writers

Alex Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez, and (please, God, let it be untrue) David Ortiz are merely the most recent baseball players to be outted by the ongoing steroids scandal -- which began, curiously enough, with the publication of a book: former slugger Jose Canseco's expose, Juiced.



Which has me wondering: What if writers doped, too?



Experts now trace the birth of baseball's Steroids Age to roughly 1995-1997, when the sport was suffering from fan disgust after the 1994 players strike. Today's p...

My Toddler, The Copyeditor

I recently received the copyedited manuscript of my second novel, The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers. A manuscript wearily proceeds to the copyeditor only after it has valiantly survived numerous rounds of edits and revisions at the hands of the editor; the editor and writer strike this metaphor, eliminate that repeated verb, compress this chapter or that paragraph, remove this unnecessary character, clarify that plot point, etc. By the time the writer has finished an umpteenth draft and...