Los Angeles Times Festival of Books - Day 2

Another gorgeous day at UCLA campus. The organic coffee stand, where I typically grab a java before the first panel, was fresh out when I got there this morning. No matter, I patiently waited the twenty minutes (even though they said it would take five) until the jugs of freshly brewed hot stuff arrived on a golf cart. Suffice it to say I had to slurp it down in a hurry, scalded tongue be damned, while huffing it back to where I'd started yesterday.

Fiction: Laugh Track

Franz 1178 - 10:30 a.m.

Sarah Dunn - Author of Official Slacker Handbook and the novels The Big Love and Secrets to Happiness. Dunn was the executive story editor for Spin City and is now a full-time novelist. She lives in New York.

Merrill Markoe - Emmy-winning author of humorous essays and novels. She has worked as a radio host and TV correspondent, and has written for television, movies and an assortment of publications. Her newest novel is Nose Down, Eyes Up.

Bill Scheft - Former head writer for Letterman and nominated for thirteen Emmys. He has also written for the New York Times and other publications. Everything Hurts is his first novel.

Maria Semple - Used to write for several TV shows including Arrested Development, Mad About You, and Ellen. Her first novel is titled This One Is Mine.

Moderator: Amy Wallen - Author of the Los Angeles Times best-selling novel Moon Pies and Movie Stars. She teaches creative writing at UC San Diego Extension and hosts the monthly open-mic prose reading sponsored by San Diego Writers Ink, for which she also serves on the advisory board.

Notes

This panel's draw for me was Sarah Dunn. When she published her debut novel, The Big Love, back in the summer of 2004, I read a very positive review of it in Entertainment Weekly. It was her first novel so of course I'd never heard of her, but the EW critic compared her writing to that of Sex and the City. I was a big fan of that show. It had some of the snappiest writing around. As a writer myself, I appreciate how tough that is. So when this critic made that comparison, my ears sort of perked up. And then, a few weeks later, Sarah did a signing at Vroman's in Pasadena. At the time I worked just a mile down the road from Vroman's. So after work on the night of the signing, I headed down and met her. It wasn't a big turnout. And yes, I was the only guy. But I still got to hear her read an excerpt before meeting her and having her sign my copy. She was sweet about trying to make me feel less self-conscious. "I really love it when guys come to my signings, I do!" I thought it was cute. And she's pretty cute herself. An adorable blonde.

The Big Love was quite successful. It's been translated into twenty-three languages. And it was the last I'd heard of her until I read the Book Fest program in last Sunday's paper. Sure enough, she just published her second novel, Secrets to Happiness, and was going to make her first-ever Book Fest appearance to promote it. A lot's happened in five years. She moved from L.A. to New York, and she and her husband just had their first child.

I'd never heard of anyone else on the panel, but so what? If you read yesterday's post, you'll know part of the joy of these events is discovering new authors. First and foremost, this panel was hilarious. Of course it should've been, what with five comedy writers, but comedy is so hit and miss sometimes. Probably the funniest up there was Amy Wallen, the moderator. She's this adorable gal with long brunette hair. Couldn't've been older than, say, thirty-five or so, although she needed reading glasses when looking at her notes.

In discussing her novels, Sarah talked about cutting out all of the one-liners when revising The Big Love. It felt forced to her, as there was already enough comedy with the situations and relationships in which the protagonist found herself. While revising Secrets to Happiness, she almost took them all out again but decided to leave in a few. She didn't think The Big Love would've suffered much if she'd left some in there as well.

When Amy asked them about how much of their own lives they inserted into their work, Sarah said without a doubt that The Big Love was very autobiographical. Of course that's not much revelation since it was her first novel. Many first novels contain a lot of the writer's own life. Sarah wasn't worried about that, but what nagged her about The Big Love is how shallow and shitty the men characters are. It's been five years since I read it, but I do kinda sorta remember the men getting short shrift. It didn't really bother me because the protagonist was hilarious. Plus, does anyone really expect well-drawn male characters in chick lit? At any rate, whether you expect it or not, Sarah made more effort in her follow-up to create men who are three-dimensional and sympathetic. That's cool, I look forward to reading it.

Maria Semple, as it turns out, is close pals with Sarah. She's about the same age, only brunette. They live near each other in New York City and hang out a lot. Like Sarah, she's got a lot of TV writing experience. They pretty much all do except Amy. This One Is Mine is Maria's first novel. While she was writing it, she'd call Sarah quite a bit for advice and feedback. Sarah told us that she'd call their mutual gal pals and wonder if Maria was doing all right and whether or not she was cut out for the fiction racket. Maria, for her part, says she loved the novel writing experience. The TV world is too brutal and competitive for her. She spoke a few minutes about that and couldn't emphasize enough the cut-throat atmosphere of working on a TV show writing staff. "I don't even want to repeat a lot of what people said to each other in the writing room." Wow, that bad, huh? It's funny, none of that would occur to me when watching my favorite shows.

Bill said he actually prefers writing for TV. Sure, working for Letterman could get competitive, but he didn't mind. It's just a TV show, right? Bill's in his fifties or so with glasses and graying hair. He referred to himself as a Jewish guy from Boston. I'm actually a longtime Letterman fan so it was kind of cool listening to his stories. You take the Top 10, for instance. If you just got one of your jokes as one of the ten on any given night, it was a badge of honor.

Everything Hurts might be an apt title. As with Maria, this is his fiction debut, but whereas Maria loved the peace and solitude of working on her novel, Bill couldn't stand writing for more than two hours. Not only did it strain his attention span, but it would leave him drained when heading out the door to the Ed Sullivan Theater in the afternoons. Even his wife would caution him from overdoing it. Apparently one time he'd worked pretty hard on his novel and then walked out the door looking completely dazed. His wife was afraid he'd get hit by a cab or something.

Bill's mom sounds as funny as her son. He told a couple hilarious anecdotes about her. She said she'd love him unconditionally, but first he had to earn it. And then this other time he was giving an interview on the radio in Boston about Everything Hurts and told Mom about it ahead of time so she could tune in. Well, she listened to the first part, but as soon as Bill started talking about the characters, Mom turned it off because, as she explained to her son, he was talking about people she didn't know.

Bill could be a stand-up comic. He tossed out a bunch of one-liners. As did Merrill. She'd be awesome at stand-up herself. She even looks funny. In her fifties like Bill, she's got this head overflowing with bushy black hair. And she wears these huge tinted glasses. Her main thing was about her dogs. Merrill's got four dogs who mostly lounge around the same room she writes in all day. At one point she thought about writing a story from the point of view of a dog. Let's say you've got this woman with a dog whose husband just left her. She's baffled as to why he'd leave, but then the dog asks her, "Didn't you ever smell the other woman on his pants?" Stuff like that. Merrill had us all rolling on our asses with her dog shtick.

Merrill wasn't as facetious as she seemed at first. Why not write a story with a sympathetic dog? Amy asked all of them if they were sympathetic with all of their characters, even the bad guys or the characters the readers aren't supposed to like. They all agreed unanimously that yep, since they sort of give birth to all these people in their heads, they sympathize with all of them, including and sometimes especially the antagonists. Maria was especially passionate about this. It's impossible not to be sympathetic with everyone in her book, she said.

As soon as the panel was over, I hurried out to the corresponding tents, scooped up a copy of Secrets to Happiness, and waited for Sarah. I was second in line. This was probably the highlight of the weekend because when it was my turn to get my book signed, Sarah and I chatted at length. We're talking five or ten minutes or so. The people behind me never complained. They must not have had other panels to go to because I may have complained in their shoes. Anyway, Sarah's originally from Arizona but went to college at Penn, the other side of Philly from Temple U., where I went. I told her how I'd seen her five years earlier when she was plugging The Big Love at Vroman's. She asked me about my writing. I told her that she should come back to the Book Fest next year and that it was the best weekend to be in L.A. A photographer from Getty Images snapped our photo while we were chatting. And we talked about other stuff. It was awesome. She's a cool chick.

Fiction: Exiles and Outsiders

Young CS 50 - Noon

Gioconda Belli - Originally from Nicaragua, Belli's poetry and fiction have been published all over the world. Her works include the bestseller The Inhabited Woman. Her latest novel is Infinity in the Palm of Her Hand: A Novel of Adam and Eve.

Aimee Bender - Author of three books: The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, An Invisible Sign of My Own, which was a 2000 Los Angeles Times pick of the year, and Willful Creatures. Bender lives in L.A. and teaches creative writing at USC.

Mary Gaitskill - Best-selling author of the novel Veronica and, most recently, the story collection Don't Cry. She has written three award-winning story collections, including Because They Wanted To and Bad Behavior.

Dylan Landis - Author of Normal People Don't Live Like This, a novel-in-stories forthcoming in September. Her fiction has appeared in Do Me: Tales of Sex and Love from Tin House and Best American Nonrequired Reading.

Moderator: Carolyn Kellogg - Lead blogger at the Los Angeles Times book blog Jacket Copy, as well as a writer of book reviews. She blogs about books and more at carolynkellogg.com. Her radio stories have been heard on NPR.

Notes

This was my least favorite panel. I didn't say it was bad, okay? I'm not sure I've ever attended a panel in my ten years going to the Book Fest that I'd qualify as bad. When you attend eight panels, though, and then you rank them, one of them's gotta be at the bottom, right? Well, here you go. Remember how I said that you can discover talent when you attend panels that include authors you've never heard of? Well, there's a flipside to that coin: You can also attend panels that are sort of underwhelming and don't include anyone who's engaging.

That fact, coupled with riding a high from my awesome chat with Sarah, meant that I wasn't paying attention very much. When I decided to get a ticket to this panel a week ago, it wasn't clear to me what was meant by Exiles and Outsiders. But again, maybe I'd discover something or someone interesting. Nah. And what's more, I don't think anyone on the panel really knew what it meant.

Perhaps the best thing about this panel was that Gioconda and Mary kept squaring off about one thing or another, including the idea that we're born alone. Gioconda posited that we're all born alone, and then Mary piped in with her opinion that of course we're not born alone. Our mom's right there. The doctor's there. Nurses. Come on. We're hardly alone when we're born.

Aimee Bender, the only author on this panel I'd heard of, tried to address the panel title. She said that in fiction, the protagonist usually has to be an outsider in some way, shape, or form. The protagonist is the one who's observing, and what better way to make keen observations than to be an outsider? And having an outsider, almost by definition, is a great way to engender conflict. It's the conflict that makes any novel's world go round.

Dylan said something interesting, speaking of outsider-observers. She talked about a friend of hers whom she's known for years, this guy who's very extroverted and has a ton of friends. At least she assumed he was an extrovert. As it turns out, this guy just confided in her recently that he has to keep reminding himself that he's not alone. Interesting, huh?

Seriously, though, back to that whole thing about being born alone, their discussion really did get metaphysical at one point, talking about birth and so forth and that we can't get beyond our bodies and that's why we all feel so alone. Gioconda said it's like kissing through a handkerchief. I never would've thought of solitude that way, but it was obvious to me that this woman's got a very unique sensibility. I take it back, what I said about not engaging with any of the authors on this panel. I'd love to get to know Gioconda. She talked about being exiled from Nicaragua and how that was the impetus for writing about Adam and Eve. "God creates so much and then forgets about it," she said. Did I mention that this panel could get kind of deep?

The conversation veered away from the panel's title when they started talking about their writing process. Mary, for instance, said she churns out her first drafts as quickly as possible. That's cool. So do I. It's nice to see an award-winning fiction writer approach her stuff the same way I do. I don't remember what the others said on this topic. That must mean they said things I couldn't relate to, like, "I take my dandy old time writing first drafts and get all obsessive over each and every page and don't move on to the next page until I'm satisfied." No one said that. Or if they did, I don't remember. As I said, this wasn't the best panel.












Fiction: New West
Young CS 50 - 1:30 p.m.
Marianne Wiggins - Wiggins is the author of ten books of fiction including Evidence of Things Unseen, for which she was nominated for a National Book Award as well as named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her most recent novel is The Shadow Catcher, which was a finalist for the 2007 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction.
Nina Revoyr - An Edgar Award-nominated author, Revoyr was born in Tokyo and grew up in Japan, Wisconsin and Los Angeles. She is the author of three award-winning novels. Her most recent, The Age of Dreaming, is a finalist for the 2008 Mystery/Thriller Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Marisa Silver - Silver has written a collection of award-winning short stories called Babe in Paradise as well as No Direction Home, her debut novel. Silver's latest novel, The God of War, is nominated for a 2008 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction.
Moderator: Susan Salter Reynolds - Reynolds is a Los Angeles Times staff writer. She writes the Discoveries column for the Books section as well as frequent full-length reviews. She is a regular contributor to the Calendar section of the Los Angeles Times.
Notes
Susan Salter Reynolds is someone I try to see at every Book Fest if I can. As it says in her bio above, she writes a section in every Sunday book review called Discoveries. It's basically two or three capsule reviews of books you'd otherwise never hear about. I've been reading her reviews pretty much since I first moved out here and subscribed to the L.A. Times in '98. I first saw her in person at the Book Fest in 2002 when she had a one-on-one interview with Steve Martin in Royce Hall. Steve had just finished a draft of The Pleasure of My Company, his follow-up to Shopgirl. He brought in pages and read them and talked about them and otherwise made us all laugh our asses off. Susan, though, kept a calm composure. I remember being really impressed by that. I haven't seen her at every Book Fest since, but I've tried to. I've seen her at a few. Last year she was all set to moderate this one panel, I forget the topic, but she ended up skipping the whole weekend because of the flu or something. Yes, I was pretty disappointed.

Nina's another gal I try to catch every year, although she doesn't go nearly as far back with me as Susan does. I first came across Nina two years ago on a panel about writing while holding down a day job. That panel also included Steve Lopez, who's in the limelight now because of the movie The Soloist, based on one of his Points West columns for the L.A. Times. Of course at that time I had no idea he'd sold one of his articles to Hollyweird, nor that Robert Downey Jr., of all people, would play him. Steve Lopez is a soft-bellied white-haired guy. He looks nothing like Robert Downey. But whatever. I'm digressing.

Even if I knew about The Soloist back then, Nina would've still been the standout for me. She's a tall, olive-skinned, bespectacled, thirtysomething gal equipped with a very eloquent schoolmaster's voice. If that makes any sense. In other words, she has this sort of firm, authoritative tone, paired with an adorable face with black-framed glasses. It's almost like she's cute against her will. It's funny, I've yet to read any of Nina's novels. I've read excerpts, and the writing definitely is strong, which I sort of figured it would be based on how articulate she is. When I first met her two years ago, she only had two novels to her credit. The second one, Southland, was named one of the best books of the year by the L.A. Times. Just before the Book Fest last year, she finally and at long last published her third novel.

Nina's a working woman. Her novels seem critic proof yet I suppose they haven't been selling well enough to live on. She's got a nine-to-five day job at a nonprofit. She has to find time very early in the morning and/or at night to work on her stuff. That's awesome. In a strange way, it's comforting to know she's achieved so much success with her writing yet still has a life pretty much like mine. Of course, viewed another way, it might be depressing. Are you telling me that I could write a novel that's named one of the best books of the year, and I'll still have to keep burning the oil?

Yet another cool thing about Nina is that she didn't know anyone who helped her achieve success. Like me, she cold-queried people with letters and phone calls. And it was with one such call that she convinced an agent to look at her material. Cool, huh? Shit, if Nina can make it that way, there's hope for all of us. I forget the name of the panel I saw her on last year. It was a fiction panel like this one but, like the panel just before this, it had one of those goofy subtitles that doesn't necessarily mean anything. And I got to chat her up a bit afterward at one of the sponsor tents, Vroman's or Book Soup or one of those kats. Unfortunately I didn't have time to talk to her after today's panel. I had to haul ass to the Michael J. Fox event. More on that later.

Marianne Wiggins is yet another repeat author from last year, when she'd just published her novel The Shadow Catcher. Well, now The Shadow Catcher has just come out in paperback, giving her another excuse to show up here and plug it. Marianne's a great talker. Hell, they all are. Writers are often the most well-spoken people you'll ever meet. Marianne, though, she's like the super-literate grandmother you never had. One thing I learned about her at today's panel that I didn't know last year is that she lived in England for a good long while, almost twenty years. She mentioned this when talking about how tough fiction writers have it these days. When she was in her thirties, about thirty years ago or so, you could make a decent living as a fiction writer. Writers in Europe today are doing better than their American counterparts. In the Scandic countries, writers get royalties even when their books are checked out of libraries. In Ireland writers and other artists don't have to pay taxes. I knew there was a reason I loved Ireland.

This isn't an issue for Marisa. Her fiction hasn't sold well enough for her to live on, but fortunately for her, she's married to a man who's done very well in his line of work. She didn't elaborate on that, but I've since done my research. Her husband is Ken Kwapis, a movie and TV director. You ever see Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants? He directed that. And he's directed episodes for The Office and a bunch more. So yes, I can see why Marisa doesn't need to work. Another thing I didn't know until after the panel is that Marisa used to make movies herself. She made her first feature when she was in her early twenties studying at Harvard. It won the top prize at Sundance. And then she made that movie He Said, She Said with Kevin Bacon and Elizabeth Perkins. That's pretty cool. She and Ken made that together.

Susan asked them how they decide on the plots of their novels, a fair question since these three authors represent quite a broad range of subjects. Marisa referenced her latest one, which is set in the 1970s Salton Sea. She talked about reading somewhere about trailer parks on the Salton Sea and how people preferred to live there. They'd live in trailers right on the edge of the sea itself. Fascinating. Marisa's protagonist Aries is based on such people.

The main character of Nina's newest novel, The Age of Dreaming, is a Japanese silent movie star from the 1920s. She said it wasn't as hard as you'd think for her to walk in the shoes of someone like that. For starters, the nonprofit where she works is located inside the former home of a Japanese silent film star. How cool is that? So she can do some research right there, just going to work every day. More research included reading about how the Japanese were targeted for racial discrimination in the 1920s, something she'd be sensitive to, being half-Japanese. She talked about how in the 1940s Santa Monica Beach was racially segregated. The Asians and whites weren't allowed to hang out together. Man, you talk about a different world from today. Also, Nina's protagonist is a Japanese guy in his seventies who's telling his story to the reader many decades after it happened. Nina's father just so happens to be a Japanese guy in his seventies. That especially made it easy for her to write in such a voice. In fact, speaking of voices, Nina talked about giving a reading last year when the book had just come out. After the reading, her father commented that the protagonist sounded an awful lot like him. She had to reassure him he wasn't. This led Nina to talk about her own childhood, which was split between Wisconsin and Tokyo. She said it didn't matter where they lived, she never felt like she fit in. This is what made her extra-sensitive to hearing about how the Japanese in 1920s L.A. were so targeted. Not fitting in is also how she fell into books. As you'd imagine, reading helped her escape the doldrums.

One thing that struck me was when Nina talked about life after Southland won that huge award. At the time that happened in 2000, she was thirty years old and felt drained and exhausted and that her career was over. You should've seen Susan's expression at that. I'm guessing Susan's pushing fifty, and hearing someone much younger talk about being burned out must've taken her aback. Shit, it took me aback and I'm six years younger than Nina. Anyway, that's one reason it took seven years for her to write her third novel. She had to recover from Southland. Another thing that struck me was when she said she always felt like an amateur when starting a new novel. Marisa said this too. And they all said they felt like a different person when starting a new work, whatever that means. Although, as a writer myself, I have a feeling that has to do with trying to relate to a new protagonist.

In Marianne's newest book, The Shadow Catcher, the protagonist is a real person, photographer Edward Curtis. He's famous for a lot of Old West photography in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Marianne has two plots going, one revolving around Edward's wife and another around a fictional version of herself. Hmmm..... Okay. Anyway, as for how she arrived at Edward as a protagonist, Marianne talked about her daughter Lara being a professional photographer. Lara is especially into black and white photography. Thanks to that, Marianne's known of Edward Curtis for a long time and has always toyed with the idea of using him and his wife as characters in a novel. As for why she'd cast herself as a character, I'm not sure. But hey, if it works, go with it, right? It's interesting that she'd use herself as a character because she said that writing a novel provided just as much escape for her as reading does.

Susan's husband and kids were sitting in the front row, which I thought was nice. I'd never seen her bring her family before. Her one daughter, who was maybe ten, asked a question at the very end of the session about how much of the story they each had in mind by the time they sat down to start writing. I can't remember if Nina answered. Marisa said she'd have a nugget of an idea and that the first draft would help her figure it all out. Marianne's only requirement before starting is knowing the end.

Michael J. Fox in conversation with Mary McNamara

Ackerman Ballroom - 3 p.m.
Michael J. Fox - It's Alex P. Keaton!

Interviewer: Mary McNamara - Mary's worked for the Los Angeles Times for nineteen years, writing extensively about the inner workings of Hollywood. She lives in L.A. with her hubby and three kids. Oscar Season is her debut novel.

Notes

Now how cool is this? To cap off another awesome weekend, I got to see in person for the first time a man with whom I practically grew up in the eighties. Alex P. Keaton! The shameless Republican son of hippie parents! Are you kidding? I never missed an episode. It was the second show on Thursday nights when NBC had that dream lineup: The Cosby Show, Family Ties, Cheers, and Night Court. I never did watch much of his nineties stuff, like Spin City, but I thought he was hilarious in The American President and The Frighteners. As for Mary, she's the main TV critic for the L.A. Times. I've been reading her reviews for years. Her tastes are compatible with mine so I always take her reviews to heart.

I was sitting too far back to see if Mike was twitching very much. I could definitely hear his voice tremble a little. Of course that could've been stage fright. This ballroom is huge, and it was filled to capacity for this event. Whatever the case, Parkinson's hasn't slowed down Mike's TV work. Dude's still at it, most recently with a guest stint on Rescue Me. That was one of the first things Mary asked him about. Mike and Denis Leary have been friends ever since they met on a talk show many eons ago. They're both hardcore hockey fans. In case you didn't know, Mike's Canadian. In fact, before he fell into acting, his dream was to play in the NHL. Anyway, to get him on Rescue Me, Denis just called Mike directly and said he wanted Mike to play a paraplegic. While at first that might not seem like much of a stretch, Mike explained that the opposite is true. Paraplegics are nothing like Parkinson's patients. Whereas paraplegics literally can't move a muscle, with Parkinson's your muscles are going haywire, what with the twitches and involuntary kicks and so on. Mike said Denis knew this when he offered him the job. "He's a sick guy that way," Mike said.

While Mike was talking about paralysis versus Parkinson's, we had our own health scare in the audience. I had a hard time seeing from far back, but apparently an elderly woman up front passed out. It took me a while to make sense of it. One minute Mike's talking about Rescue Me, the next an old guy stands up near the front and yells for someone to get a doctor. And then we all just sat there while a medic showed up to help. Luckily the Book Fest keeps such people around just in case. Not to worry, the woman recovered, and she even insisted we get on with the show. That's awesome. I mean seriously, I was kind of scared.

As you'd expect, Mary didn't waste much time in asking Mike about the Parkinson's backstory. I'm glad she did. I knew he'd held off on telling the public for a while, but I was never clear on how long he'd waited. Well, today he said he first noticed symptoms in 1990. 1990! That's crazy, just a year after Family Ties ended and just after he did the second and third Back to the Future films. Damn. And then the official diagnosis came the following year, when he was thirty. Mike said it then took him another two years to accept it. Can you imagine? Two years of denial while the symptoms manifest themselves twitch by twitch? Even after he accepted it, he kept it under wraps for several more years. Meanwhile he did stuff like The American President, The Frighteners, and Spin City. Mike did two seasons of Spin City before he finally went public with his condition. During those two seasons he said one of his tactics to camouflage his symptoms was to keep that twitching left hand in his pocket as much as possible. He'd also do things like lean against a desk or walk a certain way. One anecdote he related was about how, shooting this one scene on Spin City, he was required to walk through a door the same time as someone else was walking through in the other direction. The way he told it, his brain had a tough time doing that. And so during rehearsals, he'd tell the other actor to hurry up and get through the doorway before he had to. Of course that other actor had no idea why Mike would want that, but Mike had to be insistent, which in turn made the other guy think he was a weirdo.

Mike's a busy man, and not just because of Rescue Me. He did an interview with Katie Couric recently. Katie's dad has Parkinson's, which is why she instinctively knew Mike would need help straightening his tie before the interview. For his part, Mike said he kept his hand on his leg during the interview so he wouldn't accidently kick her. He said he's "kicked a lot of people in a lot of places." Hilarious. He was also on Letterman earlier this month. Did I mention he was busy? His wife Tracy is busy too. She just went to South Africa for a Lifetime movie. She's directed episodes of Medium. They met, by the way, on Family Ties. They got married in '88, just before the seventh and final season.

Mike and Tracy have four kids. The youngest is seven. The middle two are twin girls who start high school this fall. And the oldest is in college, also a girl. Mike joked about her using the disability loophole when applying, saying she was related to someone with a disability, or that she was first-generation American. As for Mike himself, he'll be forty-eight this June. Man, he so does not look forty-eight.

Speaking of his kids, he gave a lot of credit to his oldest, Sam, who turns twenty next month. Back in the mid nineties when she was six or so, she convinced him to get his GED. Mike also talked about how he and Tracy got a lot of flak for having another child in their forties, but he said he loves having the kids around. Screw the critics.

As you may have picked up by now, Mike's hilarious. It's no accident. For starters, comedy's his background. He also said he makes an effort to be an optimist at all times, Parkinson's be damned. He just did a TV documentary in Bhutan of all places, a country whose government actually includes a Minister of Happiness. Still, Mike has his bad days like we all do. You can't escape your gene pool, right? And for him, that would be his hot Irish temper. Nonetheless, when his younger kids leave for school in the morning, he tells them to "choose to be happy." Not surprisingly, he says his kids hate it when he says that. As for how he and Tracy even have the time to raise their kids, Mike compared it to war. Not in a bad way. Mostly in a boring way. Raising kids involves very long, interminable stretches of boredom and nothingness. And then chaos erupts when he and Tracy suddenly have a lot to do in terms of their TV and movie careers.

One of the most interesting factoids I learned today about Mike is that his father-in-law, Tracy's dad, is none other than author Michael Pollan. You ever hear of him? I wouldn't have any idea if not for my father's ongoing dieting adventures. My father seems to discover a new food book every year, and more than one have been by this guy named Michael Pollan, books like The Botany of Desire, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto. When Mike wrote his first memoir, Lucky Man, a few years ago, his father-in-law became his writing mentor. Mike said he couldn't've done it without him. He also helped with this new one that just came out last month, Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist. Mike confessed to having days while working on this second memoir when he didn't know how he was going to finish it. Thank God for Michael Pollan, huh?

Los Angeles Times Festival of Books - Day 1

Another year, another L.A. Times Festival of Books. This is my tenth one, which is kind of amazing. Have I lived in L.A. that long? And it's only the fourteenth one overall. So despite the fact that I wasn't even living here during the first three, I've managed to attend two-thirds of them. Hey, what can I say? I love books.

As I said in my Book Fest posts last year, this is hands down and sans exaggeration THE weekend of the year for me. It's this event above all others that keeps me in L.A. Every time I give even a modicum of thought to moving back east, the first question that pops up is, "Well, what about the Book Fest?" As a bonus, and like last year, the weather was perfect. Seriously. Not too hot at all.

If I had to surrender one gripe, it would be about the horrendous traffic in Westwood Village at the end of the day. Seriously, it took me a friggin' hour to go what? A mile? South on Westwood Blvd. from UCLA to Wilshire Blvd. Ugh. Well anyway, I'd gladly go through that again if it means I get to keep attending Book Fests. This is the only event for which I'd say such a thing.

A new addition to this year's Fest was the ubiquity of Twitter. While they told us to silence our cell phones during the panels, which they always do, they also encouraged us to tweet. I don't have Twitter, but that's awesome. They even had signs in front of each panel venue to the same effect.

Okay, enough gushing. Let's get to it. I attended four great panels today. For each I've listed the panel title, venue, time, authors, and my notes, thoughts, opinions, whatevers. The author descriptions are taken verbatim from the festival program.

Status Update: Social Networking and New Media

Franz 1178 - 10:30 a.m.

Otis Chandler - Founder of goodreads.com. He is a software engineer at heart and loves tinkering on his website to make it the best product possible. He graduated from Stanford University. Along with a passion for building websites, he's also a voracious reader.

Wil Wheaton - Wheaton's acting career began with roles in Stand by Me and Star Trek: The Next Generation. He is also an author, blogger, voice actor and social commentator. With more than 300,000 rollovers on Twitter, Wheaton is one of the best-known users of social media. His latest book is Sunken Treasure.

Sara Wolf - Co-editor of Itch, an evolving art project/artist forum/journal/zine. She is also a doctoral candidate and teaching fellow in UCLA's department of World Arts and Cultures and a freelance dance critic for the Los Angeles Times.

Moderator: Andrew Nystrom - Nystrom, on Twitter at @latimesnystrom, is the Times' senior producer for social and emerging media. His Yellowstone & Grand Teton National Parks hiking guide won a National Outdoor Book Award for Best Adventure Guidebook.

Notes

What better way to kick off the weekend than to attend a panel in a brand new venue? Franz Hall isn't a new building or anything, but this is the first year the Book Fest has used it to stage panels. It's also, by the way, the first year the Book Fest didn't use Royce Hall, that huge building over in the center of the festival grounds. On the Friday night before the Book Fest they usually put on the book prize ceremony there. I blogged about that last year, but I couldn't this year because, well, Royce Hall was unavailable. I meant to ask one of the volunteers about that but forgot. It's weird. I know it's still usable. This is where the UCLA Live theater company puts on all their stuff. When it was still being used by the Book Fest, they'd have the big names there. Over the years I've seen the likes of Michael Crichton (RIP), Steve Martin, and Gore Vidal at Royce. Last year I saw Julie Andrews there, which was awesome. Anyway, it's a bummer they're not using Royce this year. I read on latimes.com that they did have the book prize ceremony last night, but instead of a big public gala affair, it was an "intimate ceremony" at the L.A. Times building downtown. Man, I'd been going to those prize ceremonies every year for years, not as long as I've been going to the festival itself, but still. It was a tradition! I suppose it's also tradition that traditions must end, huh? Okay, let's move on before I get too existential on you...

I have to say it was an unexpected treat when I saw that Wil Wheaton was part of this panel. I don't think I noticed his name in the program that came with last Sunday's paper, which is also when I got all my panel tickets online. If you're not much into sci-fi, then you probably have no idea who he is. After playing the main character in Stand by Me in 1986, he played a regular on Star Trek: The Next Generation. He wasn't there for the show's entire seven-year run, but he was there a good while. His character, Wesley Crusher, was the son of the ship's doctor, Beverly Crusher. Since then he's been acting sporadically, mainly lending his voice to cartoons and what have you. And, per his presence at the Book Fest, he writes stuff. This new book he just self-published, Sunken Treasure, is a collection of various essays, sketches, and excerpts from his past books. Anyway, Stand by Me is one of my favorite movies. And I was a big fan of The Next Generation. It was neat seeing him here.

Wil's also a big Twitter guy. I had no idea about that. Like I said above, I don't use Twitter. And I don't plan to. I am a big Facebook user, though, and that was my main reason for attending this panel. Wil must've had a lot of his hardcore fans in the audience, including people who subscribe to his tweets. When Andrew introduced Wil and mentioned how often Wil tweets, Wil leaned into the mic and said, "Sorry." Dude tweets a lot apparently.

Speaking of the moderator, Andrew ranks pretty high up there at the L.A. Times. He's basically their top dawg for all things social media. At one point during the panel he mentioned that his desk is literally right outside the office of the paper's top editor, Russ Stanton, who just took that position a year or so ago. Andrew said it's not as stressful as you'd think because Russ travels a lot. This past week, for instance, Russ was visiting Harvard for a social media conference.

One of the things he asked Wil was about his (in)famous tweeting. Seeing as how hockey season is in full steam right now, Wil said that he tweets all the time during hockey games. He never did tell us his favorite team. I'll have to assume it's the Kings because he's an L.A. native. Anyway, he's a diehard hockey nut, and he likes to Twitter about what the score is, which player he's mad at, what he thinks of the commentators, etc.

Wil told us about this one time when he tweeted his wife during a flight to Seattle. Kenny Loggins was on the same flight, and Wil told his wife that he hoped he didn't get caught in the danger zone. That got a good laugh. Any eighties reference is awesome by me, and I'm pleased to see most everyone else got it too. Just before the flight took off, Wil tweeted his wife one last time before turning off his cell, telling her he loved her the most. And then when he landed in Seattle and turned his cell back on, he found zillions of responses from his subscribers saying how much they loved him too. He hadn't just tweeted his wife, he'd tweeted everyone. Hilarious.

He talked about how happy he is with self-publishing. He founded his own little press called Monolith. If you want to buy his stuff, his site is pretty much the only place you can do it. He did have hard copies of Sunken Treasure in stores, but it sold out. If you're interested, make sure you've got the Adobe Acrobat Reader. His site also lets you give feedback. He confessed that sometimes he lets negative feedback get to him, but he is getting better at letting it go. Lots of people are buying his books so he figures he must be doing something right. At least it's better than the editor reviews on Amazon. This is where everyone else on the panel chimed in. They collectively agreed that those so-called official reviews on Amazon are ridiculous. Of course those are sugar-coated because Amazon just wants you to buy the book, right? I always thought that was weird too.

Wil talked about his personal life a bit. He's been married to the same woman, Anne, for about ten years now. They don't have kids of their own, but Anne has two kids from a previous marriage, Nolan and Ryan, which means either she and/or her ex-husband is a huge baseball fanatic. Wil talked about having heart-to-hearts with his stepkids about Internet fundamentals. Nolan and Ryan are in college now. Wil just wants them to think hard before putting anything online. Because once it's out there, as Wil said, it's out there "until the lights go out on planet Earth." Part of his sincerity is based on his time working as a scout at Propeller, a company that handled spam filtering for AOL. He was like, "You wouldn't believe the stuff I saw." He was just blown away by a lot of the, well, spam that people would send out into cyberspace. A lot of it was juicy stuff too, like people spamming their ex-lovers and so on.

Wil made an interesting point when Andrew asked him about the impact online media was having on the downfall of traditional newspapers. Wil doesn't blame the Internet for that. He was very critical of the corporations who own the newspapers and who pressure them to churn out shallow content at the expense of in-depth stories. Newspapers are so worried about going out of business that their parent companies apparently lean on them to churn out articles to keep the ad dollars flowing, right? But a lot of papers have been going out of business this past year, including big city ones. They committed a self-fulfilling prophecy, according to Wil. But then Andrew pointed out that the L.A. Times just published a series of articles that was the culmination of several years of research and won the paper some prestigious recognition.

Otis Chandler is not related to the Chandler family that founded the L.A. Times back in 1882. So no, he's not related to the Otis Chandler who was part of that same family and was publisher of the Times during the sixties and seventies. Nah, he's just this software geek and avid reader who just happens to have that name. He was a pretty interesting guy. This Otis was blond and looked the same age as Wil, late thirties or so. He was soft spoken and always began his answers with "sure, sure."

Otis pointed out that reading is not mass media because we're alone when we do it. His motivation to create his book networking site, goodreads.com, was that it bugged him when he'd completely forget what a book was about two or three years after reading it. He also talked about this dating site he used to run, and how the difference in reader feedback is night and day compared to goodreads. For the latter, "people actually think before they write." Indeed, Otis is a fan of his goodreads community. I haven't used this site so I don't know much about it, but as far as I can tell, it's an online book club of sorts where people talk about books they've read, rate them, post reviews and so on. One anecdote he told us had to do with when he changed his site's five-star rating system to a four-star system. Immediately a ton of goodreads members sent him mostly scathing feedback. It meant all the books' ratings had to be changed. If a book had originally gotten five stars, it would now be four stars. Readers were complaining about having to go back and redo all of their reviews. It was the proverbial can of nightcrawlers. Otis changed it back to the five-star system, but he was thrilled to have such a passionate literary crowd.

Sara Wolf looked to be in her fifties or so. She rubbed me the wrong way pretty much right off the bat when she slammed L.A.'s literacy. She didn't give any statistics or anything. Nah, to her, the people who came to the Book Fest are the only people in L.A. who read. What bullshit. I know a ton of people in this city who read, but they're not big on the festival either because they have other plans, they live too far away, or they're not a big fan of crowds or something. Over a hundred thousand people attend the festival throughout the weekend. If you don't like crowds, it won't be for you. Call me sensitive, but I really resented her assertion there. How can you make a blanket statement about a city of four million people?

Anyway, Sara's big thing is Facebook. She's primarily a dance critic, so it was the Facebook dance community that she talked about most. At one time her list of e-mail contacts was on one sheet of paper. Then she joined Facebook to try to build a dance community online, and it's worked like gangbusters. Well good for her. I'm not big on dance, so I don't really care. Sara said more, but I sort of phased her out after she dissed L.A.

Memoirs with a Twist

Fowler Auditorium - Noon

Gustavo Arellano - Arellano's !Ask a Mexican! column has a circulation of more than two million nationwide. His aptly titled first book, !Ask a Mexican!, was a national bestseller. In Orange County, A Personal History, he sheds light on a topic near and dear to him: Immigration.

Chris Ayres - Ayres joined The Times (London) in 1997 and has since been posted in New York, Los Angeles, and Iraq. He is the author of two books, War Reporting for Cowards, which is now being developed as a motion picture, and his latest, Death by Leisure.

Rachel Resnick - Resnick's first book, Go West Young F*cked-Up Chick, was a Los Angeles Times bestseller. She has published articles, essays and celebrity profile stories nationally and is a contributing editor at Tin House magazine. Resnick's most recent book is Love Junkie.

Marion Winik - Author of eight books including her latest memoir, The Glen Rock Book of the Dead. A longtime commentator on NPR's All Things Considered, she lives in Glen Rock, PA.

Moderator: Erika Schickel - Schickel's essays, reviews and reporting appear in the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, L.A. City Beat and Bust Magazine. She writes online for LAObserved, HipMama.com, 23/6.com and thedailyreel.com. She is the author of You're Not the Boss of Me: Adventures of a Modern Mom.

Notes

I have no plans to write a memoir. I'm pretty much a fiction guy. However, and speaking of fiction, I do have plans to write, and fairly soon, a collection of linked short stories that will take place in 1986 New Jersey and will be largely drawn from my childhood experiences (I grew up in Jersey in the eighties), complete with characters based on myself and my family. So I guess I saw some relevance to this panel. Plus, when I decide which panels to attend in general, sometimes I like going to those that ostensibly have no connection to my writing. Because isn't it true that we can gain insight in the unlikeliest of places? Besides, just about all of the panels are fool-proof if you're looking to sit for an hour and listen to intelligent people, experts in their field, talk about what they do.

Another draw for me was Rachel Resnick, an author I've never read but know somewhat by reputation, which just goes to show how effective authors can be at advertising themselves if their publishers back them up. Her publisher must have an awesome marketing department because I remember quite clearly when her first memoir, Go West Young F*cked-Up Chick, came out about ten years ago. And I think I've read about her or quotes by her in various feminist-related articles over the years, not that I've read many of those unless they were in TIME or The Economist or Entertainment Weekly.

When I first saw her up at the panel table, I thought, "Gee, she looks a bit older than I expected." I mean she looked to be in her forties. Hardly old, right? But I guess with a title like Go West Young F*cked-Up Chick, I was expecting a chick who was, well, young. But then I was like, "Wait, that came out ten years ago!" At any rate, just looking at her, you could tell she's toughed out a lot, two memoirs' worth and probably more. Her short blonde mushroom-style hair was cute 'n all, but her tanned face had some lines you could see even from my seat. Not just the simple lines of age. Lines of experience. Life lines, if you will. Those eyes seemed to say, "I dare ya!" But with a smile.

It's just as well I mentioned TIME above. Erika Schickel is the daughter of long-time movie critic Richard Schickel. I've been reading this guy's reviews for a long time, both in TIME as well as the L.A. Times. Sure enough, he was there, sitting a few rows in front of me and to the left. I recognized him because he himself has sat on movie-related panels at the Book Fest over the years. As someone who wants to be a father, I have to say it was kind of touching seeing him there to watch his baby girl moderate her own panel.

Gustavo Arellano was a scream. He mentioned he was thirty at one point, which might be one reason I really connected to everything he said. He was the closest one to my age on this panel. In another life he must've been an actor. When he spoke, it seemed like a performance. His voice projected quite well. It wasn't deep or anything. It was more like a stand-up comedian's voice. A kid's voice. At one point he said that all aspiring writers should reach out to as many established writers as possible to find a mentor. When he was starting out, he sent e-mails to tons of writers. Only two responded, but he only needed one. Both of those writers became mentors of a sort and ended up helping him a lot. Having grown up in Orange County, Gustavo was very critical of all the TV shows that are set there. He was mostly targeting the reality stuff since, as a writer, nonfiction is his domain, specifically as it relates to the O.C. The only O.C.-related show of any kind he's fond of is Arrested Development. It's fiction, yet he thought it was pretty realistic, which in turn is what made it so hilarious. That's pretty awesome that he liked that show. I watched all three seasons a couple years ago. It's comedy gold.

Chris was also hilarious. An Englishman, and equipped with that oh-so-English self-deprecating humor, he talked about first living and working in L.A. for his London paper. He said he purposely sold furniture on Craigslist because he knew a lot of the hot aspiring actresses in L.A. shopped for furniture that way. Sure enough, he ended up marrying one of them. Much later, long after they'd gotten married, he told her this story. She didn't talk to him for days.

What makes him really funny is that he's the first-ever reporter who deserted the unit with which he was embedded in Iraq. The Times sent him to Iraq, and he was there for all of nine days before he was like, "Fuck this. I'm outa here!" At that point he was already the Hollywood correspondent for The Times so I'm not sure why they'd tap him to cover a freakin' war. And he still covers the Hollywood beat. I suppose it's appropriate that he'd write a memoir about being a war reporting coward and then sell the movie rights. God damn if that isn't perfect.

Erika talked about how the research for You're Not the Boss of Me required her to go to strip clubs. The first couple times she went with girlfriends, and then she kept going back on her own for so-called research. Tough research. I hope I don't have to write a book someday that requires me to frequent strip clubs. Heaven forfend.

Marion's been living in Glen Rock most of her life. She talked about doing all the research for her Glen Rock Book of the Dead. By research, I mean researching all the dead people from her hometown, including those who died before their time. We're including young kids who died of an illness or something. It was pretty depressing stuff, and she confessed it's one of the toughest books she's ever had to write. If I were the moderator, I might've asked her why she would want to take on such a grotesque assignment if she didn't have to, but that's just me. Not to sound cynical, but maybe Marion was out of ideas. It does sound like a beautiful book, though, don't get me wrong. An original idea, if emotionally taxing.

And now let's get back to Rachel, shall we? She seemed like a pretty cool chick, if a pretty scarred chick. When her father read her new memoir, Love Junkie, he told her he wouldn't be able to talk to her for two years. Ugh. Naturally there were many an audible gasp from the audience when she said that, including from me. She also talked about attending a ton of Book Fests over the years since publishing Go West Young F*cked-Up Chick. It was during these years that she was living through the experiences that ultimately became the fodder for Love Junkie. She talked about having this one relationship where she and the guy e-mailed each other something like sixty times in the first day or two after they started dating. She had no problem confessing to being a love addict. Well, the first step to recovery is to say aloud what it is you want to recover from, right? She's got that down. Rachel referenced her love addiction several times.

She also said she had a hard time figuring out what the "twist" was in the panel's title. She may have been facetious, I'm not sure. Of course the twist is that most of the authors on this panel have written memoirs that aren't exactly your traditional chronicle type of memoir. Take Marion's book about dead people in her home town. That's not a memoir about her per se so much as a memoir about her town. And a collective memoir about a bunch of people who've lived there over the years. Perhaps the twist, Rachel said, was her, in that she's the only one on this panel whose memoirs are of the simple straight-ahead classic type. Then she said that's the only way she knows how to be. No bullshit with Rachel, which is why she's a cool chick.

As with all the panels, when it's done, the authors go out to tents on the festival grounds. The program lets you know where they'll be. Well, I went straight out there and was first in Rachel's line. She and I had a great chat. No copies of F*cked-Up Chick were on sale, but I scooped up a copy of Love Junkie and had her sign it for me. And get this, she actually invited me to sign up for her writing workshop. She lives in L.A., which I didn't know. And she had this yellow legal pad where I put down my name and contact info. She had this other sheet with some info about her private workshops. It was the only copy so I couldn't take it home, but I did skim enough of it to see that it costs about a thousand dollars or something. I dunno. I can tell she's awesome and that we'd get along famously. We hit it off and could've talked much longer if her adoring fans hadn't lined up behind me. If I ever do have that much disposable income, I may just take her class.

Clive Barker in Conversation with Gina McIntyre

Broad 2160 - 2:00 p.m.

Clive Barker - Barker began his creative career writing in Liverpool, directing and acting for the stage. Since then, he has gone on to pen such bestsellers as The Books of Blood, The Great and Secret Show, and the acclaimed fantasy series Abarat. As a screenwriter, director and film producer, Barker has worked on the Hellraiser and Candyman films.

Interviewer: Gina McIntyre - McIntyre worked at the Hollywood Reporter for seven years before joining the Los Angeles Times. She has an extensive background in film and TV journalism. McIntyre currently works as an entertainment editor of the Calendar section.

Notes

Broad Hall is another new venue for the Book Fest. Perhaps they figured they needed both this and Franz Hall to make up for the humongous Royce Hall being unavailable. Broad is also the most remote venue for the Book Fest. To get there, you have to huff it all the way to pretty much the northern end of campus, well removed from the rest of the festival.

I wouldn't be a writer if it weren't for Clive Barker. Seeing as how a devotion to writing can be both a blessing and a curse, part of me should be really mad at him. Nah, seriously. Even without that, his books also got me into reading as a hobby. Before I picked up The Books of Blood volume II in the summer of 1989, I avoided reading the way little fishies avoid sharks. I hated it. Nothing could seem more boring. But then, browsing the bookstore at the local mall with Mom one day, I saw these horrible monster faces on the covers of these paperbacks. They were part of a display of paperbacks near the cashier, promoting the first three volumes of The Books of Blood by some guy named Clive Barker. I didn't have a clue who he was, but as a huge horror movie buff, I really dug those gruesome covers. I determined that the second volume had the best (i.e. grossest) face, and made Mom buy it for me. I didn't read it right away, but eventually I did. First I read The Three Musketeers, which my grandparents got me for my thirteenth birthday in August of '89. I enjoyed it, and I found reading wasn't so bad, so I picked up The Books of Blood volume II, which by that point had been sitting in my bedroom untouched for a few months. I read that, loved it, and made Mom take me back to the bookstore to buy the other two volumes.

So I suppose I should also thank my grandparents for getting me to read. And Alexandre Dumas. Shit, you know what? Maybe I should write out an acknowledgement page. Whatever. At any rate, fast forward to the following summer. By that point I'd devoured Clive Barker's entire oeuvre and had also decided what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

I don't read him so much anymore. My tastes have changed and expanded somewhat over the past twenty years. Unavoidable really. But I do read him now and again. The last book of his I read was Coldheart Canyon back in the fall of '03. I have his first two books of Abarat, but I haven't gotten to them just yet. Don't worry, I will.

Not that Clive needs me, though. There was a long line of ticketholders outside Broad when I arrived a good half-hour early. It started at the entrance and sort of snaked and wound around to keep people from spilling south onto the rest of campus. I was thrilled to see the guy's fan base is still rock solid.

As for the man himself, he looked awful. I'm sorry, but I can't sugarcoat it. He was a good ten minutes late, which is one thing. I didn't think anything of that at first. A lot of these authors are very busy, in-demand people. But now that I think about it, maybe the poor man was late because, well, his health is for shit. First off, you've got his buzz cut. His hair was cropped to the scalp like a new army recruit. That has nothing to do with his health, of course, but it wasn't flattering either. Then you've got his face. It was very drawn and worn out, as if all his facial muscles had just stopped working. One of his eyelids drooped. Most startling of all, and most noticeable at an event where authors are called upon to talk about their work, was his voice. That is to say, he almost didn't have one. Now I'm not sure if he's suffering from something like laryngitis or a bad cold or something. He did have to take a timeout now and again to wipe his nose. That's one thing. But something told me his dreadful and exhausted appearance was symptomatic of something more ominous. I sure hope not. Gina didn't ask him about it so I'm left to speculate.

Gina, by the way, is an editor for the Times' Calendar section. That's awesome because Calendar has been my favorite section by far ever since I subscribed to the paper upon moving out here eleven years ago. She was a great interviewer, but she apparently had to abide by some rules I'm guessing Clive's handlers set up. For starters, I can't imagine how she wouldn't ask about his health unless she was specifically told not to. Also, she didn't ask him about his movies. Not that his movie oeuvre is that big, but when she opened the floor to questions toward the end, she told the audience to ask only about his books. Weird.

Despite his raspy voice, Clive still gave great, elaborate answers. He still keeps his same ambitious schedule that he's had for as long as I can remember. He writes longhand from eight in the morning to six at night, and then he paints until eleven. As far as Abarat, it's longer than he anticipated. When he published the first book back in 2002, it was supposed to be the first of four, what was to be called the Abarat Quartet. That was still the plan when the second book came out in 2004. Now, apparently, while working on the third book over the past five years, he's decided it needs to be a quintet. Speaking of the third book, he said it's one of the most difficult books he's ever had to write. He didn't really elaborate on that only than to say that perhaps it's because it's the middle book. It's the hump. The good news is that he's just ten or so pages from wrapping up the final draft.

Disney is no longer pursuing the idea of a theme park based on the Abarat books. Again, this was the plan when the first book was published. Clive had apparently struck some monster-sized deal with Disney to do a whole park inspired by the archipelago where these books are set. I thought it sounded rather ambitious at the time and so can't be too surprised it didn't pan out. The official story as to why it fell through is that the Disney executive who championed Abarat is no longer with the studio.

This led Clive to bitch, albeit with his usual trademark eloquence, about the Hollywood corporate culture. As a fan of The Lord of the Rings movies, he says Peter Jackson was able to get away with so much control because he produced it in New Zealand, far away from Tinseltown. It's funny that he'd like those films because later on, in response to an audience question about the cinematography in his films, Clive said he loathes CGI.

Of all the things he talked about, what struck me the most is when he said that the more he writes, the less he knows about where it all comes from. The reason he writes fantasy is because, to him, fantasy is a good way to get into people's heads and explore very real issues. One timely issue he mentioned is corporate greed, represented in Abarat by the father of the main character, Candy Quackenbush. Candy's dad makes a killing (pardon the pun) at slaughtering chickens. I can't tell you more than that because, like I said above, I haven't read these books yet. Besides Tolkien, he also talked about his admiration for Philip Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials trilogy. He doesn't agree with Pullman's anti-Christian message, but he loves the stories. Speaking of his distaste for CGI, he talked about disliking the film adaptation of the first His Dark Materials book, The Golden Compass. Clive was amazed at how badly they screwed it up. I have neither read that trilogy nor seen the film, so I can't comment on that.

Besides the Abarat books, he's also got a book coming out called Journeyman, which is a collection of various things, including poems. He read us this one poem from it about angels. And yes, he does still intend to do a Third Book of the Art, but it's at least four years away or so. For you non-Clive fans, he wrote a novel back in 1990 called The Great and Secret Show: The First Book of the Art. As far as I can remember (it's been a while), the Art refers to a kind of magic. Then in 1994 he published the sequel, Everville: The Second Book of the Art. And that was that. It still had a lot of unresolved stuff at the end, and he's said at other signings that there will be a third one. Obviously it's proven quite elusive.

Someone in the audience asked about his painting and how long it takes him to finish one. He said it depends on how big the painting is. Some of them can be quite massive. His favorite-sized canvas to work with is five by four. For a painting that big, it usually takes him a solid week. He admitted to wasting a lot of paint and canvas with rough drafts.

I hope the guy feels better.

History: Unknown Los Angeles

Haines 39 - 3:30 p.m.

Frances Dinkelspiel - Award-winning journalist who spent more than twenty years in the newspaper business. Her first title, Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California, captures the life of her great-great grandfather Isaias Hellman.

Chip Jacobs - Jacobs has written for the Los Angeles Times, The Daily News and LA Weekly. His book Smogtown: The Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles, written with William J. Kelly, was published this year. Jacobs lives in Pasadena.

D.J. Waldie - Received the California Book Award for nonfiction for his book Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir. His latest work, California Romantica, was a Los Angeles Times bestseller in 2007.

Moderator: William Deverell - Director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. He is the author of numerous studies on the history of California and the American West.

Notes

William Deverell was an excellent speaker, the best I heard all day. When he mentioned in his intro that his duties as director of the Huntington-USC Institute included teaching classes at USC, it made perfect sense. Dude's either a natural born lecturer or he's just gotten good at it over the years. He had dark hair, balding on top, and looked to be in his forties or early fifties.

D.J. "Don" Waldie is an author I've seen a few times over the years, going back to when I first started attending the Book Fest ten years ago and he'd recently published Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir, about his growing up in Lakewood. Don's a bespectacled guy who still has a boyish voice despite his being in his fifties or so. While his forte as a writer has always been Southern California suburbia, his new book is about Spanish colonial architecture in Southern California from the 1910s and '20s. If that sounds a wee bit specialized, well, that's what agents and publishers want if you're going to write a nonfiction book. Don't try to teach people stuff that's already been written about. Find a topic no one's thought of. I'd say it's a safe bet no one's written about Spanish colonial houses from the '10s and '20s. He talked about the white Protestant majority of that era, the primary demographic that was interested in this kind of architecture.

But then Frances, whose book covers a time period that overlaps with Don's, said wait a second. L.A. wasn't just Protestant, it was actually quite heterogeneous. Then as now, L.A. was a hotbed of immigrants and minorities. We're talking blacks, Asians, Native Americans, European Jews, you name it. She said the European Jews were able to settle all right, but the blacks, Asians, and Native Americans had a tough time. I sort of already knew about the Europeans. What a lot of people don't know is that the Hollywood studio system was mainly founded by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. And they weren't coming over here expressly to create movie studios. They were fleeing persecution. Interesting, huh? Whites were still the majority, though, unlike today. I'm pretty sure Latin Americans are the majority in L.A. these days. As for the white Protestants, Don said that one of the primary motivations for the architects to use so much Spanish colonialism was specifically to counter the majority white Protestantism.

Like the other two guys, Chip Jacobs looked to be in his fifties or so. He had a full head of gray hair. While a book about smog might sound like a cure for insomnia, I have to say I was fascinated when he spoke about it. At one point in the 1950s, the smog had gotten so God-awful that the authorities considered evacuating entire sections of the city. It got so thick sometimes that people would get lost while walking around their neighborhoods. Can you imagine? Many people got fed up and moved to Denver. It's not that they didn't know their cars weren't at fault, but their cars were the only way to get around. Today L.A.'s got a somewhat decent transportation system. They've got a vast bus network as well as a rail system that's slowly but surely expanding. Back then, though, none of that existed, and L.A. was just as spread out as it is today. As a youngster growing up in the San Gabriel Valley, he remembers going outside during summer and being confused as to why it became so difficult to see the San Gabriel Mountains, which really weren't that far away. If you live in Pasadena, for instance, they're practically right in front of you. Chip said that one of the points he's trying to make with this book is that it doesn't matter how clean and efficient automotive technology gets. In the end it's the people who have to be the primary catalysts for change. Technology is a supplement, not a panacea. It's a good point that I think gets lost sometimes amid human complacency.

I saved the most fascinating topic for last. Frances Dinkelspiel is the great-great-granddaughter of Isaias Hellman, the Jewish Bavarian who's the subject of her new book. He's the guy who co-founded Wells Fargo and, according to Frances, has his fingerprint in so much of L.A.'s history. Other titans of local lore, such as Edward Doheny and William Mulholland, couldn't have done what they did without support from this guy Isaias. That's kind of amazing really. Wow. And that's just the tip of it. She rattled off a bunch of stats, most of which I can't remember. Suffice it to say that the course of history L.A. took in the nineteenth century was largely determined by this guy. And no one really knows that. His life story is one of those amazing true stories that make you wonder what took so long for someone to tell it. Leave it to one of his descendants to shed the light.

Frances also mentioned some other interesting things about L.A. For starters, did you know L.A. supported the South during the Civil War? That's amazing! I had no idea. California didn't support the South so it never occurred to me that this city would. Sure enough, it sparked riots, and Governor Jim Downey had to come down from Sacramento to quell the unrest. Simply amazing if you ask me.

I was so taken with Frances and her story (and she's a terrific speaker) that I immediately went out to the tent after the panel, bought her book, and had her sign it. I tried talking to her but didn't get to say much before the woman behind me took her turn. Frances did tell me about her blog. Anyway, smart gal. I look forward to reading this.