Literary Agent News!

It’s finally, at long last, happened (I credit the chicken that I sacrificed the other night in a vat of boiling water with onions, carrots, leeks, and more)!

IFR Literary
IFR Literary

I have signed with I.F. Raud Literary Agency LLC, whose illustrious clients include J.K. Rowling, Stephen King, Lenny the Bowler, Dan Brown, and Danielle Steele.

Butterfly, a novel, which had been retitled William Murphy’s Trip to the Quiet Room, has been retitled Lunchtime at the Sancho Panza Hotel, and is no longer about an ex-hockey player but a young female lawyer in the Northwest who finds love in all the wrong places and then in the right place, but the wrong time. Her twin sister, a basketball star for the WNBA’s Sacramento franchise, also finds love, not the same love… or is it? The part formerly played by William’s ex-teammate Germaine has transformed into a puppy, with whom the lawyer spends many poignant hours speaking to in a Dear Diary-type fashion as she walks the mist-shrouded beaches of a suburb of Seattle.

 

I.F. Raud, herself, will be representing me and not her (by all accounts) useless intern, Mathilda. Already we’re in talks with Harper Collins about a sequel and Paramount for the film rights. As you can imagine, I’m over the moon about this news and can’t wait to start pumping out sequels for you folks.

“I miss Dunkin Donut”

Michael Joyce, he of the “no longer maintaining a web presence” fame (oh, and afternoon, a story, and Twilight, a Symphony, The Sonatas of Saint Francis, and Going the Distance, and, and and), once compared my latest novel to Haruki Murakami (“Murakami in Massachusetts,” specifically).

Am attempt to cope without a real Dunks
Am attempt to cope without a real Dunks

Well, I’ve yet to start an agony uncle column/website like Murakami, but I have to say, having read some of his advice (from an article in the Washington Post), I feel a new kinship with the author.

The question is “Do you have any cafe chains you like to go to?” To which Murakami answers, in part:

I miss Dunkin Donut.

Oh me too, Mr. Murakami, me too.

Who Should Play Where for the Red Sox in 2015?

NB. Title shamelessly borrowed from Paul Swydan for the Boston Globe.

Further Fenway Fiction

I figured, since I’ve written three (at least) stories about the Red Sox, I had something of a connection and authority to speak on the lineup for the 2015 Red Sox. Especially seeing as each year one of our anthologies (Fenway Fiction, Further Fenway Fiction, and Final Fenway Fiction) has been published the Red Sox have either just won or are going to win the World Series. John Henry, John Farrell, give me a buzz, we’ll talk.

I appreciate Paul’s practical approach in this age of sabremetrics, but I think he missed out on some glorious opportunities. You don’t need the big power hitters of yesteryear, not since the Red Sox have signed each and every outfielder in Major League Baseball, leaving the remaining teams with scraps, the ghost of Johnny Damon’s arm, and a wind-up toy which houses a holy relic of Dom DiMaggio’s eye glasses inside a hollow in its head.

 

Catcher: Christian Vazquez/Rich Gedman
1B: Mike Napoli
2B: Dustin Pedroia
3B: Pablo Sandoval
SS: Xander Bogaerts
LF: Hanley Ramirez, since they can save money on the jersey and engraved bucket Manny used to pee into when he would take his breaks
CF: Mookie Betts
RF: Brock Holt
DH: Jon Lester
Speechwriter and Microphone Man: David Ortiz
Guitar: Allen Craig
Bench: Daniel Nava, Jemile Weeks, Dan Butler/Blake Swihart
Bench in Charge of Hot Foots: Shane Victorino
Drums: Shane Victorino
Bench in Charge of Hamming it Up for NESN’s Cameras: Yoenis Cespedes
Short Right Field, If No One is Paying Attention: Rusney Castillo
Bench in Charge of Interviews: Will Middlebrooks
Vice Chairman of Just Sitting on Top of the Dugout and Making Us All Smile: Dave Roberts, who will receive a golden throne and a standing ovation before each and every home game and most away games

Final Fenway Fiction
Final Fenway Fiction

According to statistics, the Red Sox played 784 players last year at the Major League level, which is more than any other team in the history of baseball. For such a record, they were awarded 27 more “pity wins,” which Larry Lucchino has assured the Nation ensures them a playoff spot and, in advanced simulations, they won the 2014 World Series against the Pittsburgh Pirates. In order to fit that number of players on the roster again this year they will also employ David Ortiz, who has been relieved of his DH duties by an adamant Jon Lester, who will only return if he gets a chance to hit (according to Ken Rosenthal’s brother Ken), as a designated leg breaker. Legs will be broken to ensure each player gets equal playing time in an already crowded situation.

To Chad Finn’s delight, Giancarlo Stanton has agreed to waive his contract altogether and will play the ukulele for the Red Sox in the clubhouse and host a reality show with Billy Costa and Tito Francona on NESN. He will no longer play baseball, though, for legal reasons, he has to say he plays for the Florida/Miami Marlins, which no one will be able to verify, since all their fans are at the Florida Panthers games.

Can’t wait for 2015 Truck Day!

Butterfly: A Trip to Sturbridge Village

Booklovers' Gourmet Reading - Fenway Fiction
Booklovers’ Gourmet Reading – Fenway Fiction

So Butterfly, a novel is about more than just hockey and people beating each other, and ultimately themselves, senseless.

It’s also about Old Sturbridge Village, a 19th century New England village. Anybody who grew up in Central Massachusetts in the 80s probably visited the Village three, four, a dozen times on school field trips.

A Vernon Hill Three Decker
A Vernon Hill Three Decker

Well, if you’re out that way, perhaps visiting the sights of Butterfly, a novel, by your favorite author, this will likely be one of your big ticket stops (along with a certain three decker on Hillside St. in beautiful Worcester, Massachusetts). And the Boston Globe have a few suggestions for other things to do in Sturbridge while you’re out there, in addition to some 19th century fun and games.

To add to that list, you might as well pop a couple towns over and visit The Booklovers’ Gourmet, in Webster, Massachusetts. We did some readings for Fenway Fiction, the original, here, and Deb, the owner is the best. I believe she may have a mug to prove it.

Enjoy your trip to the Far West, as I certainly thought of it, as a kid, and we’ll be back soon in another installment of the Butterfly, a novel literary tour.

Cerebral Commotion

Charles Pierce has an addition to the literature on athletes and concussions with an article on one of my favorite active players, Patrice Bergeron.

Fight Night at the Garden
Fight Night at the Garden

I always enjoyed Pierce’s columns for the Boston Herald and his work for the Globe and would seek him out — he’s a fellow Worcesterite*, Saint John’s Pioneer.

After all Patrice has done (we’re buddies, I can call him Patrice), you almost forget, or I did, anyway, that he had that horrific concussion so early on in his career. The guy is nearly synonymous with pain, his legend growing after that heart breaking Stanley Cup Final against the Blackhawks. “Patrice was playing with a punctured lung!” “Patrice’s heart had technically stopped in the middle of the third period.” “Bergeron played half the game with only his liver and stomach in reasonable working condition.”

But I remember when he had to take time off for that Randy Jones hit. I was in the middle of writing Butterfly, a novel, and the protagonist was already a hockey player, a far less accomplished player than Patrice Bergeron, even at that stage of his career. It was an awful, awful thing to watch a player out on the ice, just laid out and unmoving, for as long as he was. And his press conference. It’s rare to see the vulnerable side of a hockey player, but there it was, on full view for all to see. I was already interested in the effect that retiring had on these elite athletes, yes, even the ones who never quite make it to The Show, whatever their given show is. But I think that moment, watching Bergeron out cold next to those boards, before Marc Savard’s injury at the shoulder of Matt Cooke, before Derek Boogaard’s death, I think that helped get me thinking even more about what it was these guys were leaving on the ice. For us, for themselves.

I have a huge amount of respect for Patrice Bergeron and how he plays the game, and it’s nice to see Charles Pierce take a moment, too. It’s a short and sweet little piece, not asking for action, just honoring a player, his work ethic, and showing you the “behind the scenes” costs that player may have paid already.

 

 

 

 

* I have an urge to scream “Woos-taaaah!” and shake my fists, possibly in defiance? At the sky. Don’t mind me.

The Music of Butterfly, a novel

Butterfly, a novel is a book. It comes with words for reading and very few pictures, if any.

When one of my first readers gave me feedback one of their comments was “I can easily see this being a movie, and I know exactly the soundtrack!”

Well, the book is hardly a book, yet, so let’s not get ahead of ourselves, but she picked some excellent songs that captured the mood of Butterfly, a novel.

One you might have guessed, particularly if you’ve watched the trailer, is One eskimO’s excellent “Givin’ Up.” The soundtrack for our super low budget, indie made book trailer was a toss up between “Givin’ Up” and Imagine Dragons “Nothing Left to Say.” It’s meant to capture a man on the run, who may have just seen his wife and daughter die, to borrow a plot trope from afternoon, a story, by one of my personal favorites, Michael Joyce.

As I’ve been writing (and editing, and editing, and editing) Butterfly, a novel I’ve also had a soundtrack. Usually I write to classical music, without any words to give me a Barnes & Noble-esque atmosphere in my little writing hovel. But as I sat down to finish out the fourth draft/heavy editing, I ran ear-first into Tanya Donelly’s Swan Song Series. It was the fourth volume, the one that includes “Salt” and “Cape Ann.” I’ve been a fan of Tanya Donelly from her Throwing Muses, Belly, Breeders days and I just love the mood she evokes. It’s a little bit wistful, joyful, so so good. So I went back through her back catalog of Swan Song Series and collected them all.

Tanya Donelly's Swan Song Series is a big repeat listen
Tanya Donelly’s Swan Song Series is a big repeat listen

I kept all 5 volumes (the fifth came out in the middle of slogging through yet another edit, a welcome addition) on constant play during my early morning editing and writing sessions. It’s a story about a man losing his family, possibly irrevocably, and their attempts to get back together again, so there’s that little bit of hope and remembering the good times that I get from Ms. Donelly. In fact, should it be turned into a movie (whoa, chief, let’s not get ahead of ourselves or our hunt for an agent yet), I would beg plead and grovel to get her to write the soundtrack.

Mix in the odd song that sounds like it would belong in a hockey arena and you have the recipe for writing Butterfly, a novel. The latter songs in the iTunes playlist, in particular, got heavy rotation when I would spend half an hour to an hour at the rink, thinking through various plot points, scenes, that sort of thing. William Murphy was a professional hockey player, in his former life — a goon who dispensed and received great punishment on the ice. So some of those raucous anthems got me going through fight scenes (much easier than picking somebody at the rink to tussle with).

So there you have it. I have no idea if this is interesting or not (I suspect it’s not terribly), but the music behind the novel.

Now back to waiting for agents to get back to me. And working on the next book.

A Subliminal Signal Detector from the Kids at Supertart.com

As I’ve said before, these guys are on fire. The Supertart kids have launched a brand new social network, my own personal author scoreboard, and now they’ve shipped a little project we worked on together back in the Spring a few years ago.

It’s called the Subliminal Signal Detector and it’s based on a passage from Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

“In moments of great stress, every life form that exists gives out a tiny sublimal signal. This signal simply communicates an exact and almost pathetic sense of how far that being is from the place of his birth.”

It was conceived during one of those terrible news stories events, and Douglas’s sentiment just kind of rang true. You never feel so disconnected from the place of your birth as you do in times of great stress.

A long way from home.
A long way from home.

So we figured we’d throw together a little web app to help other people figure out what their own subliminal signal might be at any given location. And then they waited… and waited… and waited. And now, for some reason they’ve decided to make it public, at long last.

It should look good on your iPad, your iPhone, your standard web browser. Heck, give it to a friend, an enemy, somebody having a bad day, figure out maybe why they’re having a bad day.

Go check it out.

My Own Personal Author Scoreboard

Those damn cute kids at Supertart.com have done it again. They’ve launched a social network, and now they’re dipping into the Author Scoreboard market, I suppose.

The Scoreboard at the Moment
The Scoreboard at the Moment

These are, yes it’s true, my current stats, with regards to queries sent out, responses I’ve received, and responses I haven’t received. I’m not quite sure how it works that I’m the one at bat but the Empty, Soul-Sucking Void of No Response is scoring all the runs, but this isn’t baseball, and there is crying in pitching to agents and publishers, so there you go.

All I’m aiming for is one run. Just one little run.

A Brand New Social Network from my Buddies at Supertart.com

Perhaps inspired by Ello and the rise of a myriad of alternative social networks which promise to right all the wrongs of the previous generation of social networks, my buddies and bunch of scamps at Supertart.com (inventors of the Price of Tea in China calculator) have launched their own social network.

Social! the Social Network
Social! the Social Network

It’s likely going to be my preferred network, since it seems to be relatively free of advertising, data collection, and social stuff. Perfect for the writer or human who just wants to stop messing around on the internet and get stuff done.

So go on and check it Social!. I would send you an invite, but I’m still waiting for mine.

Meeting Joseph O’Connor (and Anne Enright)

So, by pure chance I got to see Joseph O’Connor at the Listowel Writer’s Festival in beautiful Listowel, Co. Kerry, Ireland back in May.

Joseph O'Connor at the Listowel Writers' Festival
Joseph O’Connor at the Listowel Writers’ Festival

But this makes it sound like a Bigfoot sighting. Well, this Bigfoot stood in front of a room of a couple hundred people or so. He talked a little bit about the way he writes, the way he wrote his last three or so novels (Star of the Sea, Redemption Falls, Ghost Light, The Thrill of it All) — which was painstakingly slow, audible, and meticulous. It was a great relief to those sitting on the other side of the podium that those books didn’t just pour out of him like some unstoppable torrent of beautiful whole cloth prose. And so he talked, he read aloud from his new book, and then adjourned to the back to sign books and meet and greet the punters.
Thankfully I’d thought to bring my bodyguard and number one bulldog along, who barged us ahead to nearly the front of the line. They didn’t think to give Joseph a table or chair or bodyguards of his own — perhaps the flak-jacketed, Uzi-toting sentries at American book readings and signings don’t translate overseas well — so he stood at the back of the hall, awaiting the queue like a Bigfoot at the DMV.
My bulldog/bodyguard prepped me — Don’t sound like a fool when you step up to meet Joseph O’Connor. I can’t tell you whether or not I succeeded. All I can tell you is I told him about Aer Lingus going on strike and causing us to miss our flight and be able to attend this Bigfoot sighting.
“In Ireland we call it ‘Ahn Far Lia More.'”
“Oh?”
“Sure, why not?”

At some point I wasn’t talking to the Bigfoot any more, having retired, or been retired, by my minder, to the Listowel Arms’ hotel bar. She patiently waited for me to regain consciousness.
And I did, eventually. But that’s not *all* of the story.

A couple pints of Guinness settle in for a good read
A couple pints of Guinness settle in for a good read

When I recovered my senses (I would say it fell short of a swoon), I marveled at my newly signed copy of Joe’s new book, sipped my glass of Guinness, fraternized with my minder. After a time, as was our wont, we left the bar, headed for some night air when who should we spy, in that same night air, but Joseph O’Connor, erstwhile Bigfoot, brother of Sinéad, vanquisher of empty pages.
“Invite him in for a drink,” said my minder in an uncharacteristically permissive mood.
So we approached. The man stood, still, as if he resented ever bending his legs, given that his profession likely involves lots of that, smoking a cigarette, as you’re still allowed to do in Ireland. I was about to hail him with something no doubt witty, despite my minder not giving me the timely reminder to not sound like a fool, when Anne Enright, eminent Irish author and resident, leapt out of a nearby tree, or possibly flew down from the ramparts of the hotel. She wore a purple cape, stood about five foot even, when she landed, and was also smoking a cigarette.
“Ah!” I exclaimed, whether of fright or delight, I can’t tell you.
“Ah, this is Anne Enright,” said Joseph O’Connor.
I nodded. The great intertwined Æ emblem emblazoned on her jumper made that bit more sense, then.

She said somethings which traveled far too fast, far too erudite for me to catch. Puffed on her cigarette. I goggled.
“She’s an Irish writer,” Joseph said. “From Ireland…”
“I know,” I choked. “The Gathering.”
“Oh! You’re American,” she said. “The Americans know me.” She gave Joseph O’Connor a knowing look and a nod and pulled on her cigarette. Looked warily around the courtyard, the street, as if looking for trouble.
“Oh!” My minder poked me. I had also been scanning the street for trouble, purely out of peer (or if not peer at least proximal) pressure. Looked at my minder, at a loss as to what the poke meant. “I… umm.” The cape was distracting, as was the way it wafted on a nonexistent breeze. “Oh. Would *you* like to, ah, join us for a drink?” I also realized I hadn’t asked Joseph aloud to join us, so I turned to him and awkwardly bowed in a way that I suppose meant that the question was also for himself.
Anne Enright shook her head solemnly. The cigarette flung its ash in a small arc. Joseph was also shaking his head.
“Maybe later,” they said, “we’ll see you in there. But for now…” They looked at each other, stubbed out their cigarettes and flew off into the still bright Irish night air.

The author, Anne Enright, and Joseph O'Connor. Not drunk, I swear.
The author, Anne Enright, and Joseph O’Connor. Not drunk, I swear.

Thought I heard them discussing the hassles of moving house in the Dublin suburbs as they receded into the distance.
As we watched them fly out of sight, Kevin Barry emerged from the shadows of a bush people had been pouring the remains of their drinks and spent cigarette butts into. He cackled like a madman and wore a gravity-defying mask. He scuttled towards the hotel, but was tackled before he could get to the door by a spry David Mitchell, who apologized for butting in, being English, but he lived just down the road, you see. Kevin Barry was tumbled into the open door of a gray van, which appeared to have the ghost of Seamus Heaney at the wheel, a disgruntled John Banville/Benjamin Black seated in the passenger seat.

Illuminati wuz here
Illuminati wuz here