Into The Fray
Tour Starts Today
In 1996, on the book tour for Fight Club…
My book tour for Fight Club consisted of three cities: Portland, Seattle, and Livermore (it’s in Cali). The Portland kick-off brought out about forty friends, followed by a wonderful1 party hosted by Suzy Vitello-Soule. In Seattle, six friends came to the Barnes & Noble—that’s it. In California—zero, zilch, nada. No one. Crickets. A strange anticlimactic way to blow my week’s vacation from Freightliner.
This go-round, a small mountain of props and prizes await me at each tour event—the nine big off-site events, that is. The in-store book signings will have their own merits. Especially Salt Lake City.2
The above photo comes to us from Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi, the very last stop on my tour. This will feel like a very, very long victory lap.
P.s. Don’t bother to blow up the photo for the return address. It’s a UPS Store.3
Forever grateful to Suzy and Dwayne for the cake under the grape arbor in August 1996. Likely the best night of my life. All of the Dangerous Writers were there, including Candice Mulligan. I miss her most of all. All of her stories about Great Falls, Montana and the alien cattle mutilations. Everything since then feels too impossible to ever depict in a “believable” story. Suzy, thanks to you also for going with me to see Candi in hospice. It seems like yesterday that we were all drinking on the beach at Haystack, all of Tom’s students, so late that the townsfolk came out and yelled at us to shut up and go home. Nothing in my life has been happier than those student days.
Bringing a strange present for General Manager Rob Eckman. Thanks for telling me the hilarious stories about Paul Lynde trapped in SLC as the gay staff comedian for the ’70s Donnie & Marie Show. America’s pervert yoked in harness to America’s most wholesome brother and sister act? To make the plot more ludicrous, forty years later I was at CBS Studios taping the Late Late Show (Craig Ferguson talk show) with Donny Osmond. Life is an acid trip.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Lynde
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donny_%26_Marie_(1976_TV_series)
My huge thanks to James at the UPS Store for helping me ship the stuff. We’ve been working on this project since April. (April!!!)
Hello Brandon. Thanks for your question about the science fiction book I'm working on. I've hit the wrong button and deleted your post and my own answer by mistake.
I grew up in the long shadow of the Seattle World's Fair -- a space age mock-up of the world as it would appear in 2001. All white spires and science exhibits, including the Space Needle. The fair was decreed by the government to excite kids and drive them into STEM careers so we'd have engineers to throw at the Russians. Very successfully, it seems, because the founders of Microsoft loved it as kids. Like "The Devil in the White City" the Seattle fair created the tech we know now. Those kids were driven to manifest what was modeled for them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DmDs6rEhGc
My next book will be about the disillusioned folks who took matters into their own hands to create the "perfect" world they'd been promised on another planet. Forty pages so far. It seems fitting that I'll be writing most of the first draft on airplanes. So modern.
Break a leg, Chuck, Erin, and Krissy!!!