Neal Thompson's Blog: Blood & Whiskey, page 11

Alan Shepard's golf shot on the moon…

This May will mark the 50th anniversary of the flight in which Alan Shepard became the first American in space. My publisher (Crown) and I will be re-promoting my 2005 biography of Shepard, Light This Candle. (Kindle edition is here; an excerpt here.)

Meanwhile, here's a fun story on Shepard's lunar golf shot, which occurred 40 years ago, at the end of Shepard's Apollo 14 flight, when he became the 5th man on the moon.

Also in May, the US Postal Service will unveil an Alan Shepard stamp. They sent me a preview:

 

My interview with Jonathan Evison

I'm embarrassed to admit that this footage of Evison is more than a year old. It sat on digital ice while I finished work on my Robert Ripley biography. Now that my book is done, and Evison's latest is out – West Of Here, getting great reviews and named among Amazon's Best Books of the Month – it seemed a good time to dust this off and share.

I'd met Evison in late 2009 when his previous book, All About Lulu, was awarded the Washington State Book Award for fiction. After the ceremony we had a couple beers and talked about paper waste, red pens, bong rips, writing drunk, and kuckleballers. Favorite lines: "Rewriting is the process" and "I have to write. That's what it is, it's a mania."

He's a smart writer, savvy promoter, and pretty damn funny. I expect to hear much more about Evison. (He lives on Bainbridge Island, as does Bruce Barcott, whom I'd previously interviewed. Hoping next to interview Barcott's wife, Claire Dederer, author of Poser).

Evison will read at Elliot Bay Books in Seattle on Feb 16.

Links: West of Here and a Powell's Q&A.

 

Sipping moonshine with Warren Etheredge

I'm on the other side of the lens for a change in this recent interview with Warren Etheredge, on his cool show "The High Bar." We sipped two kinds of moonshine I brought along and talked about NASCAR, the South, and Driving with the Devil. (Note to self: next time, before appearing on camera, look in mirror and check for hair clots.)

-Warren, on NASCAR's colorful, whiskey-soaked history: "It combines the two things we're not supposed to do – drinking and driving."

-Warren, on plum-flavored moonshine: "That's actually pretty good. I like that."

Watch more High Bar episodes online (Seattle author Garth Stein was Warren's guest just before me) or visit Warren's website, The Warren Report.

And here's the YouTube version of my visit with Warren: part 1 and part 2.

 

Paris Review author interviews, now online = gift to writers

In my basement office, among the rows of books about writing, are three well-thumbed volumes of author interviews collected from The Paris Review, whose issues have featured one or two interviews since the magazine's founding in 1953 (by a group of writers and editors, including George Plimpton and Peter Matthiessen).

A New York Times story today describes the magazine's decision, which I'd discovered a few weeks ago, to put all of it's interviews online, available for free. The Times calls the decision  a "radical act." Said the writer, Dwight Garner: "If there's a better place to lose yourself online right now, I don't know what it is."

The focus of many of the interviews (like my own fixation in this site's author interviews) is "prying into how writers physically get their words onto the page," as Garner puts it. "Things like No. 2 pencils are turned into fetishistic totems. Hemingway, we learn, wrote standing up; Capote, lying down; Raymond Carver often composed in his car."

When Hunter S. Thompson was interviewed in 2000, he was asked: "Are there any mnemonic devices that get you going once a deadline is upon you — sharpening pencils, music that you put on, a special place to sit?"

He leans back and replies, "Bestiality films."

The interview archive – might want to have a few beers nearby, because you can get lost exploring this gold mine – can be found here.

 

My interview with author Steven Johnson

Steven Johnson (author of "The Ghost Map" and "The Invention of Air") visited Barnes & Noble in Seattle's University Village last week to discuss his latest book, "Where Good Ideas Come From." Afterward, I asked him about the routines of his daily writing life.

Because his new book explores the history of ideas, particularly the circumstances and spaces in which creativity grows and hunches are nurtured, it seemed appropriate to learn where his own ideas and words come from. In his book, Johnson shows how coffee shop culture has traditionally been a breeding ground for innovation. For Johnson, working solo in his Brooklyn studio, it turns out a huge cup of coffee helps him reach his 500-word-a-day quota, as does a little wine and a software program called Devonthink.

MORE…

To learn more about the new book, here's a fun book trailer video for "Where Good Ideas Come From." Here's Johnson's TED talk at Oxford in July of 2010. Here's an interview with Publisher's Weekly. And here's the author's website.

 

Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa, on writing

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

When the 74-year-old Peruvian novelist won the Nobel Prize for literature this week, I checked The Paris Review's amazing online trove of archived author interviews and found a 1988 interview in which Llosa talks about writing routines…

He writes in longhand, 7 days a week, for about two hours (or until his hand cramps up), and always in the morning. "Those are the most creative hours," he said.

Like many writers I know, myself included, he prefers rewriting to writing. "I think what I love is not the writing itself, but the rewriting, the editing, the correcting . . . I think it's the most creative part of writing."

Like Hemingway, he leaves something unfinished each day, so he start where he left off the next day. He forces himself to stay in his office until 2 p.m. each day. He explains: "These hours are sacred to me. That doesn't mean I'm always writing; sometimes I'm revising or taking notes. But I remain systematically at work. There are, of course, the good days for creation and the bad ones. But I work every day because even if I don't have any new ideas, I can spend the time making corrections, revising, taking notes, etcetera… Sometimes I decide to rewrite a finished piece, if only to change the punctuation."

For the full interview, click here.

 

Archived astro-photos & the visual digitization of history

One of the more enjoyable phases of writing a non-fiction book is reaching the home stretch and compiling photos. I'm not quite at that stage yet in my biography of Robert Ripley. (Although here's a sampling of pics that'll likely end up in the book).

It's been seven years since I collected photos for my first book, Light This Candle, my bio of astronaut Alan Shepard. I scored some nice shots from NASA (free of charge, thank you very much) and from Corbis and Getty Images (not so free). At the time, online access to free digital photos was pretty limited. Recently, a blogger named Laura (who posts astronaut photos at her Tumblr site) introduced me to a trove of outtakes from Life magazine's archives. Life profiled Shepard in 1961, after he became America's first man in space. I had a blast skimming through these unreleased images of Shepard, his fellow astronauts, and family, extras from that 1961 photo shoot. So I thought I'd share…

Batch one ~ Batch two

Great stuff, and I wish I'd had access to these for my book. (My thanks to Laura and her appropriately named astro-fan site, LightThisCandle; also thanks to Space and Stuff)

 

Agatha Christie's Notebooks

In a recent New Yorker I read about the matron of mystery's recently discovered notebooks, children's school exercise books in which she worked out some of her novels' plots. Some of the pages had already been scribbled on by her daughter – penmanship practice and other school work – but Christie used the blank pages for her own work, making lists of possible victims and culprits and motives.

I love coming across such insider information about writers. It's like I've been let in on a secret. It also demystifies the writing a little, which for a reader might not be so satisfying – we like to envision authors working rapturously in a cluttered but sunlit office with a soundtrack playing overtop. But for me, it's encouraging to learn how other writers get the job done, and to know they sometimes employ the same techniques as me. At the end of each school year I save my sons' black-and-white composition notebooks. I recycle the blank pages and save their writing to look back on some day.

Herewith, assorted collections of notebooks, some full and some waiting for words:

 

End-of-summer updates – and an exhale

So ends a summer of wackiness – house guests, van-driving kids around to skateparks, and the passing of a loved one. (One summer highlight was a road trip with my dad and two sons to Utah's Zion & Bryce national parks. Here's a slideshow of our adventures. Plus two summer skate vids: 1 & 2.) Kids are now back at school and I'm finally ramping back up to a full writing schedule and catching up on some neglected career management.

On the book front, there's good news: Simon & Schuster has announced the release of a Hurricane Season paperback on Oct 1. The bad news: it's a cut-rate "print on demand" edition, which means it won't actually be in bookstores, unless all of New Orleans descends on B&N at once demanding copies. Still, it's nice the book still has legs. Or a leg.

My Robert 'Believe It or Not' Ripley biography is progressing, and I'm hoping for publication in 2011. Meanwhile, you can sample this strange man's life at my online gallery. Also next year I'm hoping for a new Light This Candle paperback release in May and a Driving with the Devil audio book.

On the web front, I decided to sh**-can my short-lived PenAndPencilClub.com blog and focus on improving NealThompson.com. I'll still post videos of author interviews, etc. In social networking, I've created a Facebook page for Driving with the Devil. You can 'like' it here or click on the FB box to your right. I plan to start sending out a quarterly email newsletter next month. If you need another inbox distraction, there's a signup form in the box to your right. I've also updated my Amazon author page.

In publishing… New York Times columnist Timothy Egan's "The Big Burn" and Olympia author Jim Lynch's "Border Songs" (both great) have just won Washington State Book Awards. Last year I'd chatted over beers with 2010 fiction winner Jonathan Evison following the award ceremony at Seattle Public Library. I'll post that interview soon, but in the meantime here's a fun interview Evison recently did with Warren Etheredge on Warren's new cable TV show, "The High Bar." (I was also a recent "High Bar" guest, talking with Warren about NASCAR, moonshine, and Driving with the Devil – we even sipped some corn liquor together. I'll post a link once the show airs.)

Another Evison video: http://vimeo.com/9113317

And here's an Evison interview in this week's Seattle Stranger .

 

Author Gary Shteyngart loves Seattle – and cheese

Shteyngart spoke at Ballard's Sunset Tavern about his impressive third book, "Super Sad True Love Story." (His confession: after modest sales of "Absurdistan," featuring an obese "holy fool" suffering a botched bris, he was proud to get "love story" in the title of his new book, which is selling well). I was glad to catch Shteyngart with a few questions beforehand – the Sunset was packed by showtime. He was joined musically by Orkestar Zirkonium. The event was sponsored by Elliott Bay Books. For a fun and raunchy look at part 2 of Shteyngart's gig at the Sunset – an R-rated Q&A with The Stranger's book editor, Paul Constant - visit vimeo.com/nealthompson

Author Gary Shteyngart loves cheese from Neal Thompson on Vimeo.