5/19/2009
Today is the official launch date of the book. We'll see what happens. You never know.
Thanks, everybody, for writing to us. Soon, the Beautiful North artcards will be sailing to you. I'll try to fill the requests as long as I can, so drop me a line w/ your address. As always, the Urrealists promise not to sell your data to spammers, porn sites, or male enhancement marketers.
We are leaving for Kankakee. Hope to see some of you there, Tuesday and Wednesday nights. Oh no--I won't see who wins American Idol! (Go, Adam.) Then back here for Anderson's Books in Naperville Thursday. After that--crack of dawn--Denver. See some of you at The Tattered Cover on Tudesday next week.
The schedule should be posted here on the new website. Wish we could all go together. Maybe for the paperback tour--we'll get an old Greyhound bus and take 40 pals with us! Everybody blogging and Twittering.
I'll be looking for you....
Swag! Merch! Goodies!
Thanks, everybody, for writing to us. Soon, the Beautiful North artcards will be sailing to you. I'll try to fill the requests as long as I can, so drop me a line w/ your address. As always, the Urrealists promise not to sell your data to spammers, porn sites, or male enhancement marketers.
We are leaving for Kankakee. Hope to see some of you there, Tuesday and Wednesday nights. Oh no--I won't see who wins American Idol! (Go, Adam.) Then back here for Anderson's Books in Naperville Thursday. After that--crack of dawn--Denver. See some of you at The Tattered Cover on Tudesday next week.
The schedule should be posted here on the new website. Wish we could all go together. Maybe for the paperback tour--we'll get an old Greyhound bus and take 40 pals with us! Everybody blogging and Twittering.
I'll be looking for you....
5/16/2009
Pssst! You wanna get a present from us? Send us your mail (street address) and we'll ship you a teeny tiny bit of Into the Beautiful North memorabilia. The Twitter folks are already on it.
Hit "contact," above, send me an email w/ your data. I promise not to sell it to a porn spammer.
Here Comes the Flood
Hit "contact," above, send me an email w/ your data. I promise not to sell it to a porn spammer.
It's almost quiet around here this morning. Cinderella's off getting her Book Tour Hair done. I dreamed last night I dyed my hair black--Adam Lambert Fever? Oh, maybe the book tour jitters. I've put myself through book tour boot-camp with America's Top Personal Trainer, Nicki Anderson (TM, Patent Pending). My quads and my lats and my blatz and my shats are all stronger now.
And we've been preparing some merch and swag for fans--yes, there are copies of "The Magnificent Seven" for raffle. Yes, we are making a big stack of "Nayeli and Tacho's Drive-Time Playlist" of all the favorite songs of Tres Camarones and the main characters in the book. Yes, we have hand-fans made (if you've been in a tropical Mexican moviehouse, you'll recall these cardboard fans) with the logo of Tacho's "La Mano Caida" restaurant and internet cafe. We're having 500 post-cards made to give away and/or mail to fans. Thinkin' about t-shirts.
We're arranging for the tour to be a Twitter-fest: I'm hoping Cinderella and whatever Twitteroos present will keep up a running record of each gig--and we hope to use the twits to run some of the raffles. (It's the First Inaugural Tweet-Up Tour, for those of you who follow: never tried before. My small addition to the Twit alternative history being brought into the world 140 characters at a time.) Twitta Hatas don't "get it," but I always tell long-time fans of the blogs here that Twitter is a continuation of "The Wastelander's Notebooks," one of the most popular features of this website. I can't think of a better, more immediate way to peek into a writer's mind/soul/lunchbox. So, I guess, it's a way for us to whisper secrets, enjoy pillow-talk, laugh, share notebooks and journals. It's the phone call at midnight I might have made to you when we were 16--before we were respectable and married and too sleepy to play Leonard Cohen and Shawn Phillips songs over the phone.
A Tweet-Up is when Twitter folks meet face-to-face. I'm hoping to have at least one meet us at each gig. I also hope readers of this blog will come--a Blog-Up? Ugh... That sounds like stomach flu. "Mom! Chayo just blogged-up!" Anyway, if you want to follow the scribbles and the jottings, you can always see it all: Twitter.com/Urrealism. Join us!
I will "Wasteland" the trip as best I can on here, too. We'll have a teeny tiny notebook computer w/ us.
So. I'm not ready, but I never am. The clock runs out and we'll have to leave, ready or not. As the saying goes, "No choice, no problem."
So far, Into the Beautiful North has gotten generous, sometimes ecstatic, reviews. Except for Kirkus reviews--which often ahs the same guy review my books. Anonymously. It's easy to drygulch a cowboy when you have a mask over your face! I would take the review to heart and mend my bad-writer ways, except the review is full of crap. I do listen--though paying too much attention to reviews good or bad will drive you crazy.
One of my Twitter pals calls the book Into the Tweetiful North. Ha ha ha! Or, as my Mexican readers say it: Ja, ja, ja!
First stop: Kankakee, Illinois. May 19/20. Why? Because the book ends in Kankakee, and we have a long sweet history with that fine town. (I wrote a NY Times piece about them once.)
May 21: Anderson's Books in Naperville, IL. Home town, locals coming. We'll adjourn to a pub afterwards so I can say hey.
The next day, we leave for Denver. The Holy Rocky Mountains! Home of my Eternal Soul! The Bella Luna gang is having a wedding! And afterwards, The Tattered Cover. May 26, 7:30. B there or B square.
Tempe, AZ the next day...and on and on. Updates here.
I'll be looking for you.
Hope you win the raffle.
XXX, OOO, XXX
Ludwig Aethelbert Urias
Review
And we've been preparing some merch and swag for fans--yes, there are copies of "The Magnificent Seven" for raffle. Yes, we are making a big stack of "Nayeli and Tacho's Drive-Time Playlist" of all the favorite songs of Tres Camarones and the main characters in the book. Yes, we have hand-fans made (if you've been in a tropical Mexican moviehouse, you'll recall these cardboard fans) with the logo of Tacho's "La Mano Caida" restaurant and internet cafe. We're having 500 post-cards made to give away and/or mail to fans. Thinkin' about t-shirts.
We're arranging for the tour to be a Twitter-fest: I'm hoping Cinderella and whatever Twitteroos present will keep up a running record of each gig--and we hope to use the twits to run some of the raffles. (It's the First Inaugural Tweet-Up Tour, for those of you who follow: never tried before. My small addition to the Twit alternative history being brought into the world 140 characters at a time.) Twitta Hatas don't "get it," but I always tell long-time fans of the blogs here that Twitter is a continuation of "The Wastelander's Notebooks," one of the most popular features of this website. I can't think of a better, more immediate way to peek into a writer's mind/soul/lunchbox. So, I guess, it's a way for us to whisper secrets, enjoy pillow-talk, laugh, share notebooks and journals. It's the phone call at midnight I might have made to you when we were 16--before we were respectable and married and too sleepy to play Leonard Cohen and Shawn Phillips songs over the phone.
A Tweet-Up is when Twitter folks meet face-to-face. I'm hoping to have at least one meet us at each gig. I also hope readers of this blog will come--a Blog-Up? Ugh... That sounds like stomach flu. "Mom! Chayo just blogged-up!" Anyway, if you want to follow the scribbles and the jottings, you can always see it all: Twitter.com/Urrealism. Join us!
I will "Wasteland" the trip as best I can on here, too. We'll have a teeny tiny notebook computer w/ us.
So. I'm not ready, but I never am. The clock runs out and we'll have to leave, ready or not. As the saying goes, "No choice, no problem."
So far, Into the Beautiful North has gotten generous, sometimes ecstatic, reviews. Except for Kirkus reviews--which often ahs the same guy review my books. Anonymously. It's easy to drygulch a cowboy when you have a mask over your face! I would take the review to heart and mend my bad-writer ways, except the review is full of crap. I do listen--though paying too much attention to reviews good or bad will drive you crazy.
One of my Twitter pals calls the book Into the Tweetiful North. Ha ha ha! Or, as my Mexican readers say it: Ja, ja, ja!
First stop: Kankakee, Illinois. May 19/20. Why? Because the book ends in Kankakee, and we have a long sweet history with that fine town. (I wrote a NY Times piece about them once.)
May 21: Anderson's Books in Naperville, IL. Home town, locals coming. We'll adjourn to a pub afterwards so I can say hey.
The next day, we leave for Denver. The Holy Rocky Mountains! Home of my Eternal Soul! The Bella Luna gang is having a wedding! And afterwards, The Tattered Cover. May 26, 7:30. B there or B square.
Tempe, AZ the next day...and on and on. Updates here.
I'll be looking for you.
Hope you win the raffle.
XXX, OOO, XXX
Ludwig Aethelbert Urias
5/09/2009
Into the Beautiful North got a nice review in the Chicago Tribune this morning. Saw it before I had coffee--didn't need coffee anymore. The reviewer (the thoughtful Alan Cheuse) wants a sequel. Hmm. I like it. Good idea, Alan.
Anyway, here's the tiny URL, if you're interested:
http://bit.ly/M4LaS
Illinature
Anyway, here's the tiny URL, if you're interested:
http://bit.ly/M4LaS
5/05/2009
(I dedicate this blog to my twiiter-pal, bermudaonion, who has a neighborhood bullfrog they call Jeremiah. Twitter.com/bermudaonion.)
You know the joke they tell un us in Illinois? "It makes you ill and it annoys you." Of course, you'd better be an insider to tell it--Chicagoans at least will give you a good trimmin' for cracking wise about their region. Sometimes, Illinois makes me ill--but not right now. Spring. It's a big green festival on Cinco de Mayo. Nature is bustin' loose.
I've been out there for two days, pulling weeds. Stocking up on my vitamin D and reasserting those ab-crunches. Mostly, it's quiet time for me to ponder things. Any gardener in Illinois knows the secret of the place: our rich black earth longs to become prairie and forest again, and it tries every chance it gets. That prairie, man--it's sneaky. It'll come into your back yard while you sleep and start an insurrection. The prairie can't figure out when we moved in, and it can't figure out how soon we're going to leave. We put all these boxes in its way, and run our metal buffaloes around on the black roads and just mess up the big bluestem and the thistle's day.
My lawn is pocked with hundreds of dandelions. Neighbors stop by to announce that they have lawn services that squirt "natural" and "green" pesticides and herbicides on their yards. I say to the finger-length earthworm I just woke up, "Can you believe that happy crappy?" Natural herbicides? The truth is, the lawn is what's unnatural. Let's face it--Illinois wasn't designed to be covered in green pool table felt. What's natural is those bright yellow dandelions. And here I am, grunting and pulling, removing the festive flowers so my lawn will look like it farted out of a machine. Any child knows that dandelions beat grass, but we adults like ORDER.
Now, I do not live in the woords. I no longer live in my beloved Rockies; I have left the mystical Sonoran desert; I no longer wander among drowsing gators in the Lousiaiana swamps. Yet...and still...we are inundated in nature right here. My trees have a seasonal woodpecker that gives them a serious workout. Sounds like a kid's machine-guy: ratta-ratta-ratta-ratta. We have the world's fattest possum and a quarrelsome Manos Family of coons that maraud at night. Our owl hangs in the tree outside my upstairs bathroom and whoots when I'm peeing--voyeur. The street has a redtail hawk that moves in around May and starts to remove squirrels and rabbits. I thought chipmunks were cool before I had tulip bulbs for them to detsroy.
We live about three miles from 75th St., with its prairie paths and open space--deer. About five miles from us in another direction is the semi-pristine forest owned by the Girl Scouts--deer. A mile from us is a golf course, forest preserve, and railroad right of way--deer. My old neighbors in Boulder would laugh at deer enthusiasm; how many gardens vanished overnight thanks to those damned mulies? When I first moved to Boulder, I was awakened by the sound of prowlers coming in my bedroom window--it was only deer, eating plums off the bush. Deer! Plums! I was up all night scribbling about it. I didn't know the real world was so...real.
According to the tracks, we have foxes and coyotes that sneal through on certain evenings. I keep the cat on my bed at night. All that, and dendelions. But long-time readers of my blog will know that I am most in love with our semi-wild, deeply paranoid, neighborhood turkey. It's weirdly love-lorn: it sits for long moments with its beak touching the front of our Honda, asking it, "Gurk? Gurk? Gurk?" It screams for me to come outsoide, and when I do, it hides behind our van and frets, "Whug? Whuuug?" Sometimes, it sees me coming, runs full sped to me, hits the brakes, and runs away. In good weather, I am always gratified that it shows deep interest in what we're watching on our TV. It pauses at our glass door and peers inside and seems to be insulting our chihuahua.
I write poems about the turkey, though it doesn't care:
hello wild turkey
you wander the neighborhood
talking to yourself
Or:
wild turkey in yard
was never deeply impressed
the provost called me
I put the turkey in my new novel! (Into the Beautiful North, out May 19--MAKES A GREAT GIFT, ahem.) When you see a post-card with a deeply paranoid turkey mentioned, that's him!
Ah, blessings, blessings everywhere. It's all writing. All of it. Writing is dandelions, waiting for that puff of air to spread the blossoming. My butt is muddy and my fingers black, my back hurts and my abs are achin'.
And I write.
I'm A Publicatin' Fool
You know the joke they tell un us in Illinois? "It makes you ill and it annoys you." Of course, you'd better be an insider to tell it--Chicagoans at least will give you a good trimmin' for cracking wise about their region. Sometimes, Illinois makes me ill--but not right now. Spring. It's a big green festival on Cinco de Mayo. Nature is bustin' loose.
I've been out there for two days, pulling weeds. Stocking up on my vitamin D and reasserting those ab-crunches. Mostly, it's quiet time for me to ponder things. Any gardener in Illinois knows the secret of the place: our rich black earth longs to become prairie and forest again, and it tries every chance it gets. That prairie, man--it's sneaky. It'll come into your back yard while you sleep and start an insurrection. The prairie can't figure out when we moved in, and it can't figure out how soon we're going to leave. We put all these boxes in its way, and run our metal buffaloes around on the black roads and just mess up the big bluestem and the thistle's day.
My lawn is pocked with hundreds of dandelions. Neighbors stop by to announce that they have lawn services that squirt "natural" and "green" pesticides and herbicides on their yards. I say to the finger-length earthworm I just woke up, "Can you believe that happy crappy?" Natural herbicides? The truth is, the lawn is what's unnatural. Let's face it--Illinois wasn't designed to be covered in green pool table felt. What's natural is those bright yellow dandelions. And here I am, grunting and pulling, removing the festive flowers so my lawn will look like it farted out of a machine. Any child knows that dandelions beat grass, but we adults like ORDER.
Now, I do not live in the woords. I no longer live in my beloved Rockies; I have left the mystical Sonoran desert; I no longer wander among drowsing gators in the Lousiaiana swamps. Yet...and still...we are inundated in nature right here. My trees have a seasonal woodpecker that gives them a serious workout. Sounds like a kid's machine-guy: ratta-ratta-ratta-ratta. We have the world's fattest possum and a quarrelsome Manos Family of coons that maraud at night. Our owl hangs in the tree outside my upstairs bathroom and whoots when I'm peeing--voyeur. The street has a redtail hawk that moves in around May and starts to remove squirrels and rabbits. I thought chipmunks were cool before I had tulip bulbs for them to detsroy.
We live about three miles from 75th St., with its prairie paths and open space--deer. About five miles from us in another direction is the semi-pristine forest owned by the Girl Scouts--deer. A mile from us is a golf course, forest preserve, and railroad right of way--deer. My old neighbors in Boulder would laugh at deer enthusiasm; how many gardens vanished overnight thanks to those damned mulies? When I first moved to Boulder, I was awakened by the sound of prowlers coming in my bedroom window--it was only deer, eating plums off the bush. Deer! Plums! I was up all night scribbling about it. I didn't know the real world was so...real.
According to the tracks, we have foxes and coyotes that sneal through on certain evenings. I keep the cat on my bed at night. All that, and dendelions. But long-time readers of my blog will know that I am most in love with our semi-wild, deeply paranoid, neighborhood turkey. It's weirdly love-lorn: it sits for long moments with its beak touching the front of our Honda, asking it, "Gurk? Gurk? Gurk?" It screams for me to come outsoide, and when I do, it hides behind our van and frets, "Whug? Whuuug?" Sometimes, it sees me coming, runs full sped to me, hits the brakes, and runs away. In good weather, I am always gratified that it shows deep interest in what we're watching on our TV. It pauses at our glass door and peers inside and seems to be insulting our chihuahua.
I write poems about the turkey, though it doesn't care:
hello wild turkey
you wander the neighborhood
talking to yourself
Or:
wild turkey in yard
was never deeply impressed
the provost called me
I put the turkey in my new novel! (Into the Beautiful North, out May 19--MAKES A GREAT GIFT, ahem.) When you see a post-card with a deeply paranoid turkey mentioned, that's him!
Ah, blessings, blessings everywhere. It's all writing. All of it. Writing is dandelions, waiting for that puff of air to spread the blossoming. My butt is muddy and my fingers black, my back hurts and my abs are achin'.
And I write.
5/01/2009
We had a great experience this week. In rain--Illinois is getting Seattle weather...looks like 14 days of rain around here--we had to drive down to Lebanon, Indiana to the Hachette warehouse to sign hardcovers of Into the Beautiful North. This is a treat reserved for few authors, and I was thrilled to get into that club. I was not thrilled to get up at 5:00, though. Nor to hit the road by 6:00 and toddle off in weather and Chicagoland traffic. But we hit it and quit it, in the timeless words of George Cilnton and P-Funk. We booked on down toward Indiana and coffeed-up at a Starbucks, then promptly sped past the I-65 turnoff toward Indianapolis.(These are stacks of the new book! Pretty!)
So, here's what you have to do--you have to go to a shipping warehouse for a major publisher. If you love books and also movies like Star Trek--DUUUUDE. First of all, it's a thing of wonder, that building. We were placed aboard a golf cart, and we drove through the vastness of stacks and forklifts and ramps and chutes and pallets and books, books, books, books. The whole building is intelligent, and spends the day talking to itself via computers. A muttering, fussy building the size of the Mexican town in my novel! (OK, maybe not Trek. Maybe it's more like a mid-60s James Bond movie--where ninjas will break through the roof and try to blow up Blofeld and SMERSH.)
We went to a workroom at the far end of the maze, where two huge cart-loaded mountains of books awaited me. 2,000 copies. It was funny to see how this operation worked: we had four people unloading the carts and stacking books on the table; one person sat next to me, opening the books and putting the cover flap on the title page and passing the books to me; a women names Jesusa beside me taking the books and pulling the flap out; a woman named Mickie taking the books from jesusa and putting them in boxes. It was a clatch! Poor Cinderella, watched. And watched. And watched--I signed for five hours. (C edits to add: She wiped the sweat from my brow, took pictures and made wry quips)Afterwards, we posed for pix in front of the pile--looking like hunters that had just brought down an elephant. I signed books for the employees. Then our hosts took us through the entire building to see how these books get from the publisher to you. It was astonishing.
They took me to a room where every Little, Brown first edition ever published is stored. Yes, Hawthorne. Yes, Louisa May Alcott. Did I want to steal? Ohhhh yeah. I got to sign the wall where some of the authors write their names. Michael Connelly, Preston & Child, my ol' compadre Sherman Alexie. The folks there asked for a cartoon, so I drew one on the wall. Just like high school. Except in high school, I was drawing sheep on bosoms and bellies. A wonderful job, if you can get it.
Three hours down; five hours there; three hours back. A marathon. I learned how cool twitter really is on the drive, by the way. I twitted about the purple trees along I-65, and somebody twitted me back with the botanical info about the trees!
Whew. My hand was sore. But the book is gorgeous. I can't attest to what's written inside the book, mind you. I did my best. What else can you do? So far, the response has been awesome--except Kirkus Review, who said you expect more of me than a lame-ass book like this. I reject that. But you will be the judges. (This is me with the awesome Hachette crew of Doug, Alicia, and Kim. Thanks guys!)
Book tour is starting soon. We'll kick off in Kankakee, Illinois. (If you've read the book, or if you're going to read the book, you'll know why.) Then here, at Anderson's Books in Naperville. Then, all hell breaks loose. I'll try to keep you updated here. But if you want to come along, be with us on the road, in the readings, in the radio station studios, in the hotels, you're just going to have to bite the bullet and join us on twitter.
www.twitter.com/Urrealism
AS always, wish you were here.
XXX, L
Book tour is starting soon. We'll kick off in Kankakee, Illinois. (If you've read the book, or if you're going to read the book, you'll know why.) Then here, at Anderson's Books in Naperville. Then, all hell breaks loose. I'll try to keep you updated here. But if you want to come along, be with us on the road, in the readings, in the radio station studios, in the hotels, you're just going to have to bite the bullet and join us on twitter.
www.twitter.com/Urrealism
AS always, wish you were here.
XXX, L
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