News Flash! NEIL-O OFFICIALLY ACKNOWLEDGES MY EXISTENCE! WHEEEE!!!!
Yes, friends and the neighbors, the plotting, planning, scheming and careful consideration of every word so as not to revea-… I mean, “inadvertantly present” stalker-ish tendencies has been rewarded!
NEIL-O ANSWERED MY E-MAIL! YEEEEEHAWWWW!!!
This could be the start of something truly embarrassing, hopefully. Maybe someday, years from now, when we’re super good friends and we’re sitting in a bar and he thinks I’m a long winded, annoying whiner and I think he’s a curmudgeonly old Limey who needs a shave, I’ll inadvertantly quote this right back to him and he’ll think to himself, “This sounds bloody familiar…” and then he’ll get it and say, “Wait, I remember! Yeah, you were that weird sod who kept calling me ‘Neil-O’ all the time! Bloody hell, that was you?!?”
To which I’ll grin sheepishly, mutter “Eh heh, heh… heh heh heh…” and light the bottle of vodka on fire as a distraction to cover my escape.
The entry itself, which will probably only be readily visible for a couple of days from this posting, is found (After some scrolling) here.
And for the inevitable day when it vanishes into the archives, here is the question in its entirety (complete with typo) with reply from the one, the only, Neil-O (!) to none other than me (!):
Hey Neil-O (Which is your super secret name in the more obscure circles of the literati),
As a writer who is hoping one day to have books enthused about by people other than his loved ones and agent, it occurs to me on several occasions you have mentioned some of the behavior you think is good for writers to exhibit to their fans/public and some that is not.
Which got me to wondering, do you think that a writer necessarily has an obligation to be a Face to the public? One the one hand there really isn’t a novelist if there isn’t an audience buying and enjoying the novels, but on the other hand, the audience usually values the novels and not the novelist, so how necessary (if at all) do you think the “PR” experience is for writers and what should they do to graciously receive their public (if at all)? I mean, in today’s climate, I doubt Emily Dickinson would have been trotted out on David Lettermen and asked to drop a watermelon on Paul, but would that necessarily detract from the quality of her work?
–Shoeless Wayne Santos, Stranded in Singapore
No, I don’t think anyone has any obligations at all on this stuff, apart from writing the books, and making them as good as they/we can.
Lots of authors are shy. Some of them are much happier with paper than they are with people. Being a writer can be the next best thing to being anonymous. You don’t have to do anything that you don’t want to. Nor should you.
I quite like getting out and saying hullo to readers. I like turning numbers into people, and anyway I have some really cool readers. So I’ll do signings from time to time. I like eating interesting foods and seeing strange places, often at the same time, so I try to yes as much as possible when asked to visit strange places. (I also like being at home and being a dad and that stuff, so I say no to many offers of exciting travel to distant places.)
Publishers tend not to want to pay for big adverts for books, and the cheapest way to tell a lot of people your book is out is to be interviewed.
(Once the late summer madness of everything coming out at once is over, I’ll probably stop doing interviews, for a little while, or a long.)
What an author does or doesn’t do in life certainly has something to do with how their work is remembered. While many of my favourite authors lived colourful lives, just as many of them didn’t. And the day David Letterman starts asking poets onto his show, because they’re good poets (and don’t have a line of greetings cards, or a movie of their life or something coming out) will be an odd day but a good one, whether watermelons are dropped or not.
Does that help?
Oh yeah, Neil-O…
Does it ever.
Today is officially a kick. ASS. Day…
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