In My Hands

I'm holding it right now.

An advance copy of my book, Precarious.

It looks great and feels, well, substantial.

I like feeling the weight of it, the glossy cover. I like flipping through the pages, all 242 of them. I even like the slightly musty smell.

And I love the design. Thank you, Joanne.

Electronic books are cool, but give me ink on paper. Nothing could make a writer's first book more ... real.

Out Loud

The first time I read one of my stories in public, I was in the basement of a bar in San Francisco and there was a live band playing upstairs.

I didn't have a microphone and had to shout to be heard.

That was back in March when Switchback was celebrating the launch of Issue 9, which included a story of mine called "Skittish," about a woman who is attracted to a man with muscles because it makes her feel safe … until it doesn’t.

Not the kind of story I wanted to shout. Especially since I was writing from the woman's point of view and saying things like:

I catch Paul watching me, but just as quickly I pretend not to notice. I don't know what it is about my neck. Guys are always kissing it or wanting to kiss it.

Shouting that felt surreal. Try it, if you don't believe me.

I got another chance to read Friday night, and I again found myself shouting. But this time it was because the story, "Disengaged," called for shouting.

They were quickly out of town on the two-lane to the coast. Noise from the engine and the rush of hot August air made it necessary to shout.
"The wedding if off!"
"I just got the invitation today."
"It's off."

This was at the Gallery House in Palo Alto, and I was one of several writers taking part in the Peninsula Literary Series.

Naturally I flubbed a few lines — saying "big sure" when I meant "Big Sur," for example — but the reading went better than I had imagined. Better than I had rehearsed it.

I even remembered to look up at the audience from time to time.

Of course it really helped to have friendly go-to faces out there, so many thanks to the friends who came out to hear me. You made it fun.

Rediscovering Carver

I've been rediscovering Raymond Carver. Turns out he wasn't a minimalist after all. Even though that's what he's famous for.

His editor, Gordon Lish, was the minimalist, slashing many of Carver's stories by half. Others by even more. This was especially true in the case of the groundbreaking collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.

Now, in a new volume called Raymond Carver: Collected Stories, we get to see the writer's original drafts along with the cut-down versions of those stories.

The originals are better.

I say that even though I've always been a big fan of minimalism.

(For a good visual of Lish's edits, check out "Beginners," Edited in The New Yorker.)

It's hard to say how successful Carver would have been without Lish. It was Lish who gave him his first national exposure in Esquire and championed him with agents and editors.

And Carver was forever grateful to him for changing his life.

Because of Lish, who moved from Esquire to Knopf, Carver became known as "the foremost practitioner of minimalist fiction," as the new dust jacket indicates. But the original stories were not only much longer, they were far richer and, for me, more deeply felt.

Lish was clearly a talented editor, and I admire many of his changes (as did Carver). Still, I seriously doubt that we would know the name Gordon Lish if it weren't for Carver.

So both men benefited, I suppose, but it's heart-breaking to read the long letter Carver wrote to Lish — included in the notes to the new volume — begging him not to move ahead with his radically altered version of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.

It's hard not to think of Lish as an ass.

The contract for that book gave Lish the final say, but that changed for the next collection, Cathedral, and Carver accepted only minor changes.

So, clearly Carver had a boatload of talent all on his own, but he still might have labored in obscurity without the big break Lish gave him.

And now we get to see the original versions and Carver is back in the news and selling more books and it all turns out for the best.

I love a happy ending.

"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's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.” —Red Smith

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.