Vacationing in My Ride

So I guess what I was saying is that first book o' mine  was basically about those awkward moments like  like the parish priest shows up at your door and your dog comes downstairs with half a box of tampons in his mouth.Or when your children’s poor daddy, as sleep-deprived as you are with your two little girls under four, opens his briefcase at the big presentation to find the frilly underpants of Baby Crawl Away tucked carefully into one corner.

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That’s I Thought He Was a Speed Bump, the book I was waxing nostalgic about yesterday. I wrote it when I was young and almost everything in life struck me funny, aside from the sudden death of my only parent, which threw me for a loop that looped for four long years.

With the passage of time however, I began to see how death fits into the larger scheme. That’s when I wrote this book whose cover you see here.I had two themes in mind for it: that everything returns if you wait long enough - like spring for example - and that you can find a wonderful kind of calm in this crazy modern life if you can just manage sit there for a minute when you pull up outside your house – just sit there and let the inner waters clear for a bit instead of rushing inside and bossing everyone around, including yourself ('Start the dinner!' 'Fold those clothes!' Why do we shout these things to ourselves all the time?)I love a double theme, in this case the theme of the seasons AND the theme of learning to chill out more, and come to think of it so does my littlest grandson who can’t resist being two things on Halloween. (This year he was a Power Ranger AND a Vampire.) But they say what you need to sell a book or movie is "high concept," the ability to sum it up in a sentence and that’s where I might have gone a little wrong with my two themes. It did OK though; I got it into all these Barnes & Noble stores and then drove all over the map giving funny talks about it.Then of course it all slowed down and the books gradually came back to me.This happened right after I had gone to a second printing so I still have almost 3,000 mint copies which is why I’m offering them here.As I say, this book is funny like Speed Bump AND has some death in it but what doesn’t, right?YOU can have a copy for just $10 bucks too if you like.One of my favorite chapters is this one about letters to Santa, taken right from the pages of an actual newspaper. (You'll have to click on this first image to see it in a readable size..)and the last page of the chapter:

This story makes me laugh even today . Kids huh?

Sell Sell Sell

You can’t listen to the radio for 10 minutes without hearing claims for miracle products dreamed up by the enterprising. I'm talking about  everything from products designed to enhance your love life to products to inflate your skin so your wrinkles simply disappear. Come to think of it my sister got her face inflated once when a scorpion stung her on the inside of her lip. For a solid week her face look a dome of Jiffy Pop but hey, nary a wrinkle!We Americans have a long tradition in the old hustle game. Look at all the people selling stuff on E-Bay and Craig's List. Was it P.T. Barnum who said there's a sucker born every minute?But listen to me, trying to sound like I’m above it all. If fact I joined the selling game when I began publishing my own books back in the flannelly 90s. I thought it would be fun.And it was fun, some of it. Selecting the blurbs was totally fun, though hard to take seriously. My all-time favorite came along when an angry woman wrote in to her paper after seeing a long-ago column I did on Liz Taylor’s latest nip-and-tuck job:  “Who are YOU to talk about looks?” her letter said. “Your eyes are beady, your hair is out of style and your teeth look false!” I put that one right on the cover of Book One.But making a book is always easy. It’s selling a book at a book signing that's hard. Over the years I've done signings both at the big chains and in the smaller independents, where actual refreshments sometimes served and you get to give a real talk and the audience talks back.At the big stores they just set you up at a table out front and make you ambush the people coming in. In fact they call them “ambush signings” and they're awful. The people coming in don’t know you. They’re just there to get the book they need and leave - and are you really going to leap out at them and shout, “Here’s a cute little read!”?My little author site shows how many signings I did when Vacationing in My Driveway came out - a zillion in short - but I'm pretty much done with such events now. Maybe I’m more Irish than American really: we Irish tell our stories non-stop anyway and for free too.My pal Jerry Zezima just came out with a funny book called “Leave it to Boomer,” a signing for which he announced in an email blast last week. His "contribution to the decline of literature" he calls the book.  “Good news for masochists and insomniacs!” he went on in the email, adding that the books were $15.95 each with signed copies being “practically worthless.”Maybe Jerry's part Irish himself. With a last name like Zezima you wouldn't think so, but you never can tell. Who could guess that a dark-haired girl named Marotta could trace every ancestor for 200 years back to the Emerald Isle?

Thanks From a Seventh Grade Class

This is the sweet letter I just got from a 7^th grade class from Arkansas whom our honorary son Gary brought to Boston and New York for an extended field trip – a really extended six-day, Iron Man kind of field trip and how he found the vision and the energy to plan it I don’t know.

Here in the Boston area he took the kids out on the Freedom Trail, to the Kennedy Museum, to Concord and Lexington, to the Boston Common, to Atwood's Tavern to hear artist/author Matt Tavares talk on the making of his book Lady Liberty, to tour Phillips Andover AND Harvard AND Yale before it was on to Manhattan for more sites and sounds beyond my ken.

Ah but I was the lucky one: I was their first ‘presenter.’ As soon as they’d dropped their bags in their hotel rooms they gathered to hear my talk. I gave each student a copy of my very first book I Thought He Was a Speed Bump, a read-‘em-in-any-order account of life with small children and chock full of the great things little children say, with chapter titles such as “When Will DAD Become a Woman?” and “I’m Not Naked, I’m Wearing My Penis!”

My talk was about how anyone can write if they can get to that joyous state where everything seems cool and interesting. I thought the story Kaela mentions here about the hamster and the two photos would work well for opening with and so had the pictures blown up big and stuck on foamcore and weren’t they a darling audience as they looked and listened and laughed. I’m not exactly sure where the little originals of those two pictures are but I’ll see if I can put my hands on them and post them tonight.

In the meantime here at the bottom is a Christmas Day '07 picture...

...of their teacher, Mr. Gary De Young, who came into our family in 7^th grade and more than any other kid hangin' around this place kept me company making the dinner. He’s also smart, that Gary: he was asked to give the big Honors Day address on graduating from UMass Amherst some six or seven year ago; AND so universally beloved by the women of my alma mater, nearby awesome Smith College, that at Commencement, which by the way was the last Commencement of our wonderful then-President Ruth Simmons, he got cheered as much as anyone by the 500-plus members of that graduating class.

So here’s to you, Gar. And as for you, sweet Kaela, I would LOVE to come down to your school in the Delta anytime - just invite me - and I’ll bring 30 copies of my second book Vacationing in My Driveway, just as sweet and funny as Speed Bump and together we’ll all try to get into that same joyous state where everything seems cool and interesting. Because I’m pretty sure that’s where God wants us to be, every single day, enjoying this world and feeling grateful.