I heard that my publisher had a booth at Book Expo America (BEA) and had a mockup of my forthcoming book on display. Very cool. I’m waiting for until booksellers are set up to take preorders before announcing it. Or until word leaks out through some other source.
The notion of the crossover between television shows has been around for a long time. Characters from Law & Order used to drive down to Baltimore to appear on Homicide: Life on the Street, for example.
I’m especially amused, though, by the way USA lets things crossover in their advertising. Goran from Law and Order: Criminal Intent “drove” all the way to Albuquerque to deliver a pie to the main character in In Plain Sight when it was getting ready to debut. And this year, Michael Westin from Burn Notice sent a care package to the doctor in the new USA series Royal Pains in a recent ad. Along with his sympathies over the doctor’s unexpected change in jobs, he sends sunglasses, sunblock and a block of C4, because you just never know when you might need a stable plastic explosive.
I finished A Ghost in Love by Jonathan Carroll this weekend. Review to come. It revisits some themes that have appeared in a number of his recent books, especially the notion that we are the sum of every version of us from our past, and features a meeting between a character and younger versions of herself, the type of incident I first noticed in Wooden Sea. It’s very surreal and metaphysical at points, and very talk-y, but I liked it.
I started This is not a Game by Walter Jon Williams, and I really like it. It’s set in the world of companies that create RPGs, ARGs (alternate reality games) and MMORPGs, and it’s a geek’s delight. Act I has one of the creative engineers trapped in Indonesia while that country is undergoing a fiscal and leadership meltdown. A friend who has connections to mercenaries tries to get her out, but she enlists a group of players of one of her ARGs to put their collective minds together to solve the problem. It is a lot of fun to watch the discussions on the related message board go off topic, enter into flame wars and all the sorts of posturing and annoying tics that happen in “real” message boards. Later, one of her colleagues is murdered and she comes up with a way to tie the investigation into the current ARG, getting these resourceful and numerous players to dig for clues. I like this book a lot.
We watched Cadillac Records last night. It stars Adrien Brody as Leonard Chess, the owner of a startup record company in the 1950s that discovered the likes of Muddy Waters, Little Richard and Etta James. As a white man, he had connections that let him catapult these blues musicians into fame and essentially launch rock and roll. Beyonce Knowles is one of the producers and plays Etta James. I wasn’t at all familiar with some of the musicians (Little Walter, Howling Wolf), but it’s an interesting look into an era of music that developed somewhat ahead of Motown. I don’t know anything about its historical accuracy–it makes Chess look like a mostly decent guy, but of course questions arise about him making his fortune on the shoulders of his musicians, most of whom do stupid and outright dangerous things once they become famous.
