"Charming"! - Publishers Weekly

I won't lie to you. The first review of Precarious was ... not great.

The first line was OK: "The lovelorn characters in Riske's debut collection are riven by confusion, to sometimes charming, sometimes infuriating effect."

But then the reviewer chose to focus on the (apparently) infuriating parts. The charming parts? Not so much.

Still, I suppose, it was somewhat of a coup to be reviewed in Publishers Weekly at all. (I'm including a link, but I'd really rather you didn't go there. See this instead.)

But there was good news, too.

Based on PW's not-so-great review, someone named Erica contacted my publisher to see if movie and TV rights are still available.

Which is interesting because, coincidentally, the first story in the collection. "Sleeping with Smiley," started out as a screenplay.

If anything comes of the inquiry, I'll let you know.

From the Shadows to the Marketplace

Though he's only been writing fiction for a short time, my good friend Mark Richardson writes with the assurance of a seasoned professional, and in just the past year he's had his first three short stories published:

> Tattoo Woman
"She had no tattoos when she left him. Just white twenty-two-year-old skin..."
> Boardwalk Gypsy
"From the balcony of my highrise Santa Monica condo, I looked down at the cars and bike riders and T-shirt clad pedestrians moving freely..."
> Moaning
"Orgasmic moans float through my open window and I get horny. It’s just before dusk in late September..."

Mark's non-fiction has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, Reuters, Literary Traveler, and Dusty Shelf.

Keep up the great work, my friend. Can't wait to see what you come up with next.

Writers on Writing

Wit and wisdom from some of the best ...

• “Easy reading is damn hard writing.” —Nathaniel Hawthorne

• "The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough." —William Saroyan

• “The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between the lightning bolt and the lightning bug.” —Mark Twain

• “I hate writing. I love having written.” —Dorothy Parker

• "Kill your darlings." —William Faulkner

• "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."—Douglas Adams

• "Take out the sentence you love best. You're trying too hard." —David Sedaris
  

• “There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” —W. Somerset Maugham

• “So the writer who breeds more words than he needs is making a chore for the reader who reads.” —Dr. Seuss
  
  
• “The goal of writing is not to be understood but to write so as not to be misunderstood.” —Cicero

• “I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.” —William Faulkner

• “It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” —E.L. Doctorow
  

• "Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards." —Robert Heinlein

• “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” —Stephen King

• “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” —Ernest Hemingway

The Informers

I love the way Brett Easton Ellis writes; I just don't like what he writes about.

He takes things too far.

I was fascinated by the world he created in The Informers — not so much a novel as a collection of overlapping stories, each vignette told in the first person by a different character — but a few of the later chapters conveyed more than I wanted to know about human nature.

The violence was too real, too depraved.

Worse, there was no hope. Not a shred of optimism anywhere.

That said, I did come away with one positive observation. It seemed to me that, without saying so, Ellis may have been trying to show us — in graphic and convincing detail — that riches, fame, and the ability to do whatever we want are not enough to satisfy.

Not unless we have better imaginations than his characters.

Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

David Eagleman's Sum is the most surprising, delightful, and thought-provoking book I've read in a long, long time.

In its far-flung flights of imagination, it reminds me of Einstein's Dreams, by Alan Lightman (who is quoted on the back cover). Instead of concepts about time, though, the subject of Sum is the afterlife.

What I like most, I think, is that many of the forty possible afterlives Eagleman dreams up turn out to be lessons in unintended consequences. For us and for God.

Beach Cabin

This post is coming to you from my private ocean-side cabin.

The one in my head.

In reality, I'm in a shed in my backyard.

I call it a shed because it was built by an outfit called The Shed Shop, but it's much more than a shed. It has a real door and windows and electricity and wi-fi access.

I like to think of it as a rustic beach cabin, though. That's why I have a window-size picture of Haystack Rock on Cannon Beach, Oregon, hanging on the wall.

But I also have a bulletin board covered with postcards from New Mexico. I'm working on a novel set in Taos and the postcards are supposed to put me in a New Mexico frame of mind. Not sure how well that has worked but it hasn't hurt. The novel is coming along nicely.

The cabin ... I mean, shed ... was my wife's idea and has provided a very real retreat ever since it went up last year.

Thanks, Joanne. I never would have done it without you.

Why Did I Write These?

I got an interesting question from my publisher yesterday: Why did I write the stories in Precarious?

Believe it or not, I never really thought about why I wrote them.

The stories in the collection (due out in February) were written over a period of 30 years and are all very different, but as it turns out, they're all about the same thing. Women and men. An endlessly fascinating topic. I suppose I wrote them to figure out how I felt about certain things.

The great thing about stories is they can make you feel what someone else felt. The better the story, the more subtle and nuanced the feelings. Anyway, that's what I look for as a reader. The surprise as a writer is how you can make yourself feel things you never felt before or never knew you felt.

Writers are like actors. We get to play a lot of different roles, try out a range of personalities, and live lives very different from our own.

I wrote these stories to find out what would happen to the characters and how things would turn out for them.

I wrote them because I felt like I had some things to say that I couldn't say any other way.