Happy Birthday to me
People kept telling me that turning 31 is harder than 30. From a
psychological perspective, that is. Because physically, neither is exactly
a struggle. You just keep doing what you’re doing and the birthdays
organize themselves. But the thought of being 31 years
old was, according to these people, more of a shock
than the thought of turning 30.
Now I’m 31, I can say for sure: that’s a load of crap. Thirty-one has nothing on 30. When I turned 30, my body discovered age overnight. I swear, it was like while I was sleeping someone had broken into my body and taken it for a joyride. The vehicle was clearly no longer in showroom condition. There were scuff marks and discolorations. The radio was missing. My analogies had stopped making sense. And just to rub it in, everyone kept calling me up and saying, “Ho ho ho, the big three-oh!”
But 31, so far, has been fine. I’ve checked and everything seems to still be in working order. Nobody has tried to mock me with numbers. It’s a good day.
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Fun with web statistics
One of the cool things about having a web site is seeing
what people typed into search engines to bring them here.
“Jennifer Government,” is, as you might expect, the runaway
winner here (43%). But there are also some truly bizarre phrases.
My all-time favorite is “coke fuck shoes”. But this month’s winner is:
let me try on your lingerie and high heels
It’s hard to imagine exactly what this person was looking for. In fact, it’s probably better not to. But it really does match a page on my site*.
The other fun thing is seeing which sites link to mine. Because occasionally—just occasionally—there’s one that makes no apparent sense and has as its logo a guy blowing bubbles out of his pipe. Don’t tell me what it’s about. I like it better not knowing.
* [Update: Well, it used to. Google now seems to be rebuilding its index of my site. For the record, the match is this page.]
It’s a neeeeeeew novel
I don’t talk about books I’m working on.
This is because I once posted a diary on this site about a book
I was working on, Girl Makes Headlines, and it
turned out to be a baaaaaad novel, very bad, and when it became
clear that I shouldn’t even attempt to get it published, I had to
quickly pretend it never existed. Talking about future books, I realized,
is begging the publishing gods to smite you down.
So now I don’t do it.
Until, that is, I sell them to a publisher. And that’s what’s just happened: Doubleday has ponied up for Company. It will be published in hardcover sometime next year.
I wasn’t sure exactly what I should say about the book at this stage, but fortunately I received an e-mail from a guy called Luke who is very sure what he wanted to know. Luke has 18 questions for me. They start out about my novels, then get into NationStates territory, so I’ll just take the first ten.
1. Is “Company” going to be unique and insightful like the first two books, or is it going to be meant solely to be painfully funny to people in offices, sort of like a Dilbert in writing?
I’m not sure those things are mutually exclusive. I love Dilbert. I’d be very happy if people thought I had written the Dilbert of novels. But I think you’ll find Company to be very recognizably a Max Barry book. I haven’t changed much since I wrote Jennifer Government.
2. Have you finished it and your publishers are just making us wait, or are you still working on it?
I’ve finished the latest draft. My editor is writing up his thoughts on what I should do for the next draft, which, if all goes well, will then be pretty close to the published version. This editing process will probably go for two or three months. The rest of the time is the publisher fooling around with cover designs, sucking up to bookstores, and trying to arrange all the fiddly little die stamp letters in the printing press into the right order.
3. Do you plan on writing more books afterwards?
Yes.
4. If so will they be coming out more or less frequently than your first books?
It depends. It was three and a half years between Syrup and Jennifer Government, and will be roughly two years between Jennifer Government and Company. I’d like to have books published more regularly than that, but only good books. I’m not sure how long I’ll take to write my next good one.
5. If answer to #3 is yes you expect your quality of writing to increase or decrease?
I expect my writing quality to increase as I get more experienced, then taper off sharply once I get rich and famous, descend into a incoherent lifestyle of drunken debauchery, and start pulling out old, rejected manuscripts to meet publishing deadlines. You’ll know this has happened when you see Girl Makes Headlines on the shelves.
6. How many books do you think that you could write before runing out of original ideas?
Forty-two. No, actually, that’s a fair question. John Grisham has just published his—what—17th legal thriller? And apparently it’s good. I really don’t know how you find anything new to say in your 17th genre novel. But I’m only up to book three. I have plenty more stories.
7. Will you be doing any more IRC sessions do you think?
Yes.
8. Will you be doing any more book tours?
If the publishing gods smile, yes.
9. If you will, do you think that you could persuade your demographically blind publishers to make a few more east coast stops?
I can ask them. I may not be able to persuade them. How this works (I think) is that the publisher lets bookstores know that they’ve got a particular author on tour soon, and any stores that want to host him/her put up their hands. So the best way of getting me to tour your city may be to find the bookstore that does the most author events near you and say, “Me and all my friends want you to host Max Barry.”
10. What about Western Massachusetts? I think if you could publicize it, our being a large chunk of land out of touch with reality would cause a book tour to be very succesful. ;p
I tell you what, I’ll mention it on my web site.
Mysterious Packages
People are mailing me strange things. A couple of weeks ago
I got an envelope that had nothing inside but a small
card with “THANK YOU” printed on the front and “Jennifer
Government #75” hand-written on the back.
Now, it’s nice to be thanked. People should thank me more often. But—wha-huh? What’s it for? For writing the novel? Who’s it from? And what does the #75 mean? Did I miss the first 74 notes? Is it a series of clues? Is it someone who writes thank you notes to all the authors they like, and I’m the 75th?
Then a few days ago I checked my mail box and inside is a DVD of the movie Office Space. Everybody’s been telling me I have to see this film, but I’ve never gotten around to it. Now somebody anonymously mailed it to me. Who? God?
I’ve heard that the best thing about being famous is that you get a lot of free stuff. This I can believe. But I’m quasi-famous, at best. And not many people know my postal address.
Microsoft & me
Nothing inflames hatred of Microsoft quite like redesigning your web site.
Except, I guess, having your innovative internet business crushed through
monopolistic abuse of market power. Yeah, that’s probably worse. But
designing your web site means having thoughts like this: “Okay, I can
work around Internet Explorer 6’s float bug using absolute positioning, but
that means I run into IE5’s positioning bug—which I guess I could fix
by exploiting its CSS bug—” And so on.
I tell you, if everybody didn’t use Internet Explorer as their browser, nobody would use it.
When Doubleday asked me for an author photo for Jennifer Government, I e-mailed them a whole bunch of snaps. Most were of me looking like I thought authors were meant to look like: serious, thoughtful, smoking a pipe and rubbing my tweed elbow patches, that kind of thing. But one was this one I took of myself with my tongue poking out—which, of course Doubleday chose for the book jacket.
Now that’s okay—people get the impression that I like smashing up hotel rooms, but that’s actually kind of cool—but the problem is I’m sitting in front of a standard Windows desktop. I can protest that I dual-boot Linux all I like; it makes no difference. In the eyes of geeks around the world, I am forever shamed.