Ted Mooney, author of The Same River Twice (June 1-13)

Please welcome Ted Mooney, author of The Same River Twice. Ted will be chatting on LibraryThing until June 13th.

Hi, everybody. I'm Ted Mooney, the author of the novel "The Same River Twice," which Alfred A. Knopf published on May 11. I'm here to answer your questions about the book--or anything else that's on yr mind. (Sorry to be late, but in addition to LT's momentary shutdown, I had my own computer misadventures.)

Somewhat to my surprise the general take on TSRT is that it is both a literary work and a "thriller," which seems to be regarded as a good combination. Really, though, I know little about "thrillers," my idea of which is probably best exemplified by the extraordinary Spanish writer Javier Marias's three-volume opus "Your Face Tomorrow." It seems to me all writers share the same basic obligation to the reader: to compel him or her to turn the page--again and again and again--and continue reading. That's the job. Otherwise, I'm not big on categorization, but then few writers are. That's why they're writers.

Anyway, I'm here for the next two weeks, and will be checking in every couple of daylight hours, and at night irregularly. So please feel free to ask about or comment on anything that interests you. Hope you all had a great weekend--the official start of NYC summer. My favorite three months. Cheers, Ted.

Hi Ted,

I noticed on your author page that you've got another novel already underway, Shadow & Silhouette. Now that you're no longer the senior editor at Arts in America, has fiction writing become more what you'd consider your full time occupation?

(still waiting for TSRT to arrive **sighs**)

Hi Brent,
Thanks for checking in. I've *always* considered writing my full-time occupation (from, say, the age of 8) and the "Art in America" gig was just a particularly fortuitous day job. Unfortunately, I was one of the earliest and most viciously bitten victims of the financial meltdown. "Art in America" was bought in 2008 by a hostile party, who let both me and my boss "go," explaining that we were simply too experienced, too good and too expensive for him to retain. After working for the magazine for 32+ years, I was "laid off" in a nanosecond--something that would be illegal in most Western European countries. So, paradoxically, I have *no time* at all to write at the moment. Between doing the usual promotional things for TSRT (each time I publish there are more such things) and scaring up a little extra money, I am insanely busy. But I hope to get back to "Shadow and Silhouette," which is a kind of sequel to TSRT, soon. Thanks for asking.

And having read how you'd rise at 4:00am every morning before work to write, I probably should have deduced that writing was indeed your full time occupassion, sounds like.

I'm curious, have you always published w/out an agent? What do you like best about representing yourself and, if you've worked w/an agent previously, what do you miss most, if anything, about them?

"...each time I publish there are more such things".

Yeah, you probably didn't have to worry about things like having a promo book trailer video for YouTube back when you were storming the scene with Easy Travel to Other Planets, eh? ;-) It's a great clip, by the way.

Ah, agentry.I have had only one agent in my life, though I had her for many years. She had a very respectable list, including Saul Bellow and Oscar Hijuelos among others, many of them people I brought to her. At first she was great--inventive and gutsy--but gradually (over years) she stopped doing what I told her to, lied about it, lost the rights to my first book for reasons never explained but soon to be resolved (by me), and basically became utterly unreliable. She had forgotten that she worked for me, not the other way around. I kept a log of every phone call I made to her, what I told her to do, what she actually did. The disparity became so great that I fired her, not realizing that the business had changed so much that NO other agent would take me on until the MS of TSRT was finished. Only then, when it *was* finished and I started putting out feelers for a new agent did anyone bother to tell me (apparently agents don't rat out other agents) that she had been stealing from all her clients, mostly mid-six-figure sums, more if she could. Ah-hah, I think. The news got around fast after that, a class-action suit was being brought against her by a well-known fellow client, she dissolved the agency suddenly and disappeared, supposedly to an expensive upstate sanctuary for the mentally unsound. Bad, no? But looking into the practice of agentry as it has evolved to its present state, I began to think--who needs them? I know almost every editor in town, and they'll be straight with me. So I did what every other corporation in America has done since 2008, I eliminated the middle man. It's intuitively obvious that agents (always with the magnificent exception, of course) will not do things that don't earn them the money they think they're worth--foreign rights, etc., which do nothing for them but are essential for the author--and I wanted more certainty about how things were proceeding. I wanted to do it myself. So I just called Gary Fisketjon at Knopf, asked if he would take a look at the manuscript, and he said he would. A few weeks later, on the day that one-fifth of all people working in publishing here in the U.S. lost their jobs, I signed the contract with Gary and Knopf. Less money than I had planned on, but the economy was tanking, and Gary's enthusiasm was genuine. The money I thought (and think) could be recouped in other ways.

Of course it's more work without an agent, and I may well take one on again if I find one I like, but the best thing about not having an agent is that I now know pretty much everything that's going on. I know more about how Knopf works than most people working there do because I just follow the book form one phase to another--editorial, publicity, marketing, film rights, foreign rights, etc.--getting to know each of the principals in each department. And it's a great house. We communicate.

Most agents have a curiously inflated notion of their own importance to the writer. I don't know where that came from. But a surprising number of literary agents now have backgrounds in Business Administration and have simply decided, for some reason, that literature might be a good hunting ground. Translation: they are *only* in it for the money (again, with a number of magnificent exceptions). It's strange that you have to remind them that without writers they would have absolutely no function whatsoever. But you do.

So there is nothing I miss about having an agent except the money she stole from me. God's truth.

In #2 you said, "It seems to me all writers share the same basic obligation to the reader: to compel him or her to turn the page--again and again and again--and continue reading."

I know what you mean here, but I would quibble with that statement in this way, I have read books that were not particularly well-written that have "compelled" me to turn the page, simply because I wanted to see what happens next. I read Angels and Demons that way, and the large part of The Left Behind series. But the entire time I'm reading such a book I'm generally appalled at how atrocious the writing itself is. This is, in it's own way, distracting to me. So, that said, I think rather than compel, which is related to propel, and is pretty much the result of plotting and structure, and I have no problem with that, as long as the writing is at least decent and there is some effort to draw realistic characters, after all, I gobble up the collaborations between Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, particularly the Pendergast books, which are all heavily plot driven, I would say the author should make the reader want to turn the next page. Wanting to continue reading, to me, at any rate, implies a certain cooperation between the text (a kind of transparency that carries the elements of the story, the people and the events along) and the reader that is destroyed by the not necessarily voluntary compulsion to turn the page. George Eliot, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Josef Conrad, Henry James, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, all make me want to turn the page, Stephen King, James Fennimore Cooper, Dan Brown, not so much. A good novel is built on four pillars: plot, pacing, construction and characters. If any of those four elements is missing the book just isn't going to be that good.

I've never read any of your books, I make no judgments about your work. I'm just riffing on the idea of being compelled to turn the page.

Ted:

Congratulations on your success--a fellow LT member (hey, Gene!) turned me on to this discussion and I'm enjoying what I've read so far. It's a pleasure to hear the comments and opinions of someone who has practical experience--too many wannabes out there are quick to render their opinions on matters of which they know nada.

"Most agents have a curiously inflated notion of their own importance to the writer."

I love that one. I have had little contact with agents over my 20+ year career and the few encounters I've had with them left me utterly unimpressed.

Many agents these days are ex-editors or people in the publishing biz who got into repping because they thought they could make a decent coin out of it, NOT because they love writers or the printed word. With the continuing downsizing in the industry, we're going to see more of those types of individuals (sadly).

I'm curious what kind of input you allow editors to have re: your work. Do you turn in a finished manuscript and the editor is, as Nabokov put it, more like a "proofreader" or do they serve a more material role in your creative process? Do you send them works in progress to get their feedback?

Having an editor with the profile of Gary Fisketjon seems, to me, to have positive and negative implications. He's highly respected in his field but, at the same time, does that make you TOO prone to take his suggestions, trusting his aesthetic sensibilities over your own? Sometimes an editor of that stature has his own imprint he wishes to put on a book, regardless of the author's take on a particular work. Your thoughts?

Hi CliffBurns,

No. Gary's editorial process is ingeniously designed to keep the author from feeling pressure to accept his suggestions. (By the way, I never accept editorial suggestions from anybody unless I consider them an improvement on my original text. Take your power back, writers! Nothing happens w/o you!). But. as I say, Gary has foreseen and eliminated the problem of writers less intransigent than myself. His process is this: He takes the writer's MS down to his cabin in Tennessee, reads it *very* closely--max five pages an hour--and begins to make editorial suggestion (in his famous green ink). They are his suggestions, but only suggestions. Some seemed right to me, many not. This takes months. Then he returns the whole green-ink annotated MS to you, and you are free to accept or rejects his changes. which are often excellent. But the key is this: once you've made your choices. HE NEVER LOOKS AT THE MS AGAIN. That way any subliminal ego conflicts are entirely eliminated. He never tries to discover whether you've accepted his changes or not, so you are free to consider them without rancor or resentment. To be (forgive me) less than modest, I was an editor at Art in America magazine for 32+ years and had always wondered what it would be like to be edited by someone as good--or better--than I am. (Most editors are lousy and lazy these days; they simply can't provide any help for me.) But now I know *exactly* what it's like to be edited by someone who really knows what he's doing. We both learned things that after a lifetime of editing had not yet occurred to either of us. We corresponded by e-mail throughout, and I was finally able to ask questions I had always wondered about (concerning fine points of grammar, style, strategy, etc.), but which NO editor I have ever worked with even understood before. E.g., you know what the most overused word in English-language prose is today? "Way." I couldn't believe that I, who am so careful not to repeat words or formulations, did not know that: there were at least a hundred of unnecessary "ways" in the MS. When I complimented Gary on his perspicacity in noting this peculiar tendency (common to virtually all writers), he said that it had taken him ten years to notice this simple issue himself: "I shudder to think how many millions of "way"s I unleashed upon the world before I finally caught on." He had also developed ways to simplify pluperfect tense usage, tactics I had never thought of. At the same time, I pointed out certain regionalisms in his own usage that he had previously been unaware of. It was without question the ideal editorial experience. Then, when it was over, I moved on to my publicist, and so on. I am very happy with the whole production process Knopf has mounted for TSRT and *know* that an agent could never have summoned up the resources to make it happen. Remember that *no one* cares as much as you do about how things turn out. Stay receptive but never give in when you know you're right. (But you must *know*.)

Now, my LT friends, with all the promotional social networking I've been doing on my computer, it has, poor thing, caught a *serious* social disease (despite my having installed the best anti-viral software available), so I am typing this at the local cyber bistro. That's why I've been absent. But things should be back to normal later today, and I will again be more available. (You wouldn't have wanted my company during the last 48 hours of teeth-gnashing and computer surgery anyway.)

One last thought. Considering what agents have become, I think that probably the only people who really need them are first-timers (unknowns), the termperamentally timid, and those authors who earn millions every time they write a book. But you have to be ready to really get to know everyone at your publishers, a task few agents would dream of undertaking. They (I suppose reasonably) consider what each phone call is worth to them financially, then make it or not accordingly. Yet again, though, I must add that there are a decent number of magnificent exceptions (most of them fully "booked" already ha-ha--i.e., no new clients.) So this just a general observation, even if it is likely to grow truer by the minute.

Writers! Take back your power! You are the ONE indispensable element in the publishing industry!

Now. Back to computer hell.

Ted

Ted: GREAT response and thanks for taking the time to reply in depth.

Your post should be mandatory reading for young and upcoming writers everywhere.

Well said.

#9 ... "you know what the most overused word in English-language prose is today? "Way.""

No Way! Way?

6> apparently agents don't rat out other agents

How considerate of them.

Regarding "way," perhaps a "way" count is in order for Ted's first three novels - Easy Travel to Other Planets, Traffic and Laughter, and Singing Into Piano - so that the LT audience can learn how far Ted Mooney has matured, linguistically (sans "way"-wise), as an author, no?

9> Remember that *no one* cares as much as you do about how things turn out.

Ted, TSRT just arrived last night, I'm fifty pages in and enjoying it (I can see why the "thriller" label applies, though it's more complex than that)...

Anyway, considering your quote above about no one caring as much as you do, I was curious, considering your experience and expertise in the art world (and you've certainly taken advantage of that knowledge with events in the plot so far in The Same River Twice, how much input and/or control have you had with the designs of your book covers? They've all got that extra artistic "somethin'-somethin" about them, and your latest too is quite evocative in imparting a certain mood and atmosphere of time and place. I've got to believe you've had some say there too. True?

Hi Geneg. Abiut "way." Yes, this one surprised the hell out of me too. But it is true--not just of me but of most American writers (maybe less so with British writers, I don't know). It just seems to by a "way" of eliding or avoiding a more precise expression of what's needed. This overuse was, as I say, not at all evident to me until Gary pointed it out, and not at all evident to *him* until he'd been editing major writers for ten years. Watch for the word's appearance, and you'll see. . .

Well. I think the dust jacket designers are aware of my background and make a special effort, but it's a little more complicated than that. For "Easy Travel," I just asked David Hockney if I could use one of his paper-pulp "pool" works for the cover, and he very kindly assented. Then the designer had to figure out a way to use the image without overlaying it with type or anything else. Carol Carson at Knopf, who designed the jackets for both "Traffic and Laughter" and, most spectacularly for "The Same River Twice" may be one of two or three graphic designers left who actually read the whole book first, absorb it thoroughly, then come up with the image. (With "Traffic and Laughter," I inhibited her options somewhat by deciding on the Peter Alexander painting--which, again, forced her to avoid cropping it or putting type over it.) The Steichen photograph for "Singing into the Piano" was unearthed by my editor at the time, and I thnk it's visually successful though not very representative of the book's concerns.. But if you look closely at Carol Carson's design for TSRT, you'll see how brilliantly it reflect the book's contents. The image is manipulated, of course, with the right side a mirror image of the left side--reflection the "twiceness" theme that permeates the book. But to throw the viewer off a little, she inserted a figure at the left, walking into the deep space portrayed (a common device in painting of centuries past: the figure is a stand-in for the viewer/reader. The words of the title are surrounded by a slight halation of the sort that Odile usually experiences before one of her occasional episodes of deja-vu--"nothing happens at all until it happens twice," as she thinks to herself early in the book. And the small spots of tangerine in which "a novel by Ted Mooney" and the reminder about "author of Easy Travel" serve to make the overall image really "pop" without killing the deep space depicted. Imagine, for example, if the title had been rendered in that same tangerine: it would have flattened everything out to such a degree that you really wouldn't even *see* the deep space behind it.

Oh, right--and I always insist in the contract that I get cover approval. Just a precaution, because I have *never* had to reject a cover presented to me.

Oh, and Geneg. You are completely right that *just* getting the reader to turn the page is not even close to enough. I assumed we were talking about highly ambitious, literary fiction. I don't read the other kind. As Susan Sontag used to say, the only books worth reading once are the ones worth reading at least twice. Time is short. (I shoulld have made the distinction clear. Some very ambitious--and artistically successful--works never seem to take the reader into account at all. That doesn't affect their quality in any material way, but today, with the minute attention span most people, especially Americans, bring to whatever they do, it's self-defeating to be *unnecessarily* difficult. Be as difficult as you *need* to be, but not gratuitously so. That, I guess, is the unspoken 21st-century artistic contract, at least in the U.S.)

I think maybe being difficult is a matter of taste. I'm famous in these parts for "not getting" Nabokov for instance. I don't have time for the games and puzzles he sets his readers. They all seem to me to come off as intellectual braggadocio. That's fine for people who like to slap themselves on the back because they "get it". That's just not what I'm after in what I read.

As for non-literary fiction, very little of it appeals much to me. I'm not looking to have my mind expanded as much as I am to be immersed in the world of the work, to be able to believe in it, and to have the story flow as if I were an intimate associate in the mind of the author, the object of the author's desire. To me this is what distinguishes the literary from genre. To my mind so many genre writers can tell a whopping good yarn and compel you to turn the page, but they don't take the time to craft the world, populate it with characters who are of that world, and immerse the reader in the world as an unseen character. As I said earlier, with some writers I feel as if I've been invited into their world and engaged in an episode or two from that world. It's what Dickens does, or Eliot, or Tolstoy, or Henry James, or Wharton do. They invent worlds and make me feel an integral and even necessary part of that world without allowing the text to interfere. Authors like Nabokov, to me, anyway, are more than happy to beat the reader over the head with the text. Just not my cup of tea.

As I said (since nothing is said until it is said twice), I think it's more a matter of taste than different rungs on the quality ladder. The top rung of the quality ladder is the one who plays without allowing the play to interfere with the business at hand, the one who can take you deep or skim the surface and still provide an enjoyable piece. The reader can play or not as they choose. I place Heart of Darkness in this category. Is it a jungle adventure to find a madman, or is it a tale of madness and darkness on every level of being that Conrad invites us into, with Kurtz being, possibly, the only sane one of all, the only one able to live in the world as he finds it without having to dominate it, to overpower it, and ultimately to remove himself from it. That's my idea of a satisfying read.

I'm currently reading Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child's latest Pendergast book Fever Dream. These two are just about the only non-literary fiction I regularly read. Everyone needs their gold leavened with a little dross, otherwise it never solidifies. So, given the above what is one, after all to make of taste?

Geneg (msg 16), I think you and I are very much on the same page about this issue. (I have no use for "in" jokes of the Nabokovian kind, for instance--though that doesn't ruin Nabokov for me because there is so much more to him than that.) And I do think the ideal is to play (sometimes) but never make that play the key to the work or allow it in any substantial way to "interfere with the business at hand." It was my explicit aim in "The Same River Twice" to provide the reader with a novel that he or she could enjoy and benefit from at whatever level seems most appealing. There is a "thriller" style plot near the surface of the book, one that I hope would intrigue people and draw readers along if that's all they want, and I would be perfectly happy with that reading. But it goes much, much deeper than that, if the reader is willing to pursue the markers and consider the darker and more complex implications of what I present. Ideally, a novel of this kind should be bottomless, since I am presenting some of what I, at least, consider to be the most pressing issues literature can address. For example, the contemporary secular mind is unlikely anymore to entertain "fate" as a serious or even realistic factor in how human affairs work themselves out. These days, chance is the preferred determinant for this kind of mind (mine, perhaps), and yet why shouldn't chance simply be fate's most useful disguise? (Remember "Appointment in Samarra"?) We can never know these things, and to many people they aren't worth a moment's thought. But if someone reading my book finds this line of inquiry intriguing, there's plenty to consider. And that's only one among many strands woven into "The Same River Twice." That's what I try to provide: a cupboard that's never bare, whatever your appetite. (The emphasis, of course, is on "try" here. But I do my best. I do try.)

I look forward to reading The Same River Twice, and, what with fate and chance being so closely related, and me being a Fate man myself (I won't go so far as to describe myself as a fatalist), I guess I should get busy soon with Appointment in Samarra.

I think there are deeper currents running through our lives, both collectively and individually, than we realize or can begin to explicate. That's what makes prophecy so much fun. It changes the dynamic from "if you do this I will be mad and punish you", to "if you do this, this will be the ultimate result". Looked at in that perspective there is much wisdom out there for those who believe in Fate over Chance. The oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico is fate, not chance. Aircraft delays due to the Icelandic volcano are fate, not chance. The sinkhole in Guatemala (?) is fate, not chance. Our planet being hit by an extraterrestrial object I will rack up to chance.

All any of us can ever do is "our best". Some folks' best is better than others, that's all. If we do do our best, we got nothin' to apologize for. I'll agree with Ayn Rand on one thing: we are not worthy if we don't give our best. (Please, please, please don't turn my use of Ayn Rand here into an excuse to get all political on the discussion.)

Thanks, Ted, for that fascinating synopsis on the origination of your bookcovers. And I agree that Carol Carson nailed it on TSRT. I'm glad to hear you've got that veto power, even if you've never needed to use it.

Gene,

Now that I'm about halfway into The Same River Twice, I'd say Mooney's work here is in that similar literary league as what you describe going on with Conrad in Heart of Darkness. There's levels and layers and hidden passageways (if not Paris sewers per se) leading to authorial themes and a subtext, and to a point, it's up to the reader to decide how much she can decipher when discovering that word or turn of phrase or descriptive which, when deciphered, recognized, opens that trapdoor descending into corridors of themes and deeper meanings and motifs.

On the Seine River surface, TSRT is a convoluted and complex mystery crime thriller involving the illegal smuggling of certain Soviet-era artifacts into Paris to be sold as art among Parisian wheeler-art-dealers (or so it seems). Beneath that, something else is going on. A lot of something else is going on! But what? Aren't you going to tell us, Ted!? Do I really have to read the whole book?

Meanwhile, the marriage between Max and Odile seems fine on that Seine River surface too, but to quote a song from yesteryear, "they're alone and yet together like two passing ships," they're not on the same page when unsettling, and then life threatening events, soon transpire. Odile has her complex of secrets under lock and key. While Max, the auteur, mostly maintains detached, though thoughtful, regard throughout.

The river is seen through fantasy and reality perspectives simultaneously; or, rather: twice, when Max films the possible Nachtvlinder catastrophe of its unmooring in risen Seine waters (his fantasy being caught on film), and while Groot, being filmed by Max, risks it all - his hardcore life-and-death reality - to save the boat. The Same River, then, is being perceived twice - completely different perspectives concurrently, one "artful," perhaps less real? and one excruciatingly realistic.

Ted, can you comment on how you conceived this duality narrative, and why it was important to you to do so (I mean, besides just keeping us hopefully very careful readers on our toes).

I really like too, Ted, what you're doing with that Chinatown reference. Chinatown, with its obsessions over water and who controls the water and hence has the power over a city's ultimate demise or destiny, could conceivably be subtitled, The Same River Twice, imo, as both titles evince similar, dualistic preoccupations regarding opposite perceptions of that singularly important river central to the narrative.

How do these allusions you insert, Chinatown and such, or most obviously, Nachtvlinder, come to you in the course of crafting and drafting your novels?

Ted, I love the fact that you insist on cover approval. I'm a control freak when it comes to my work and one of the reasons that I started my own imprint (besides two decades of frustration dealing with editors and agents) was the capability it gave me of selecting fonts, layout and the cover art.

I've always had wonderful luck with cover artists--they're thrilled to have their artwork utilized on a book, giving them the opportunity to have their work featured in bookstores and on folks' shelves.

Brent, you are a very astute reader, and thanks for taking the time to see TSRT clearly. I almost never tell the reader what to think of what I present and I try not to provide markers suggesting what to regard as quotidian reality ("fact") and what to take some other way. There is always "some other way." This is not a notion that "came to me," but something I've arrived at only very slowly, simply through living. As I said on last week's NYTimes podcast, it has taken me this long to know what I believe, and I only learned it now by writing TSRT. My view is this: Every second of every day, people believe, often in perfectly good faith, that they are doing one thing when in fact they are doing something entirely different. To me this is the true poignancy of being human: it's tragic, it's comic, and in its own peculiar way (after all, I'm human too) it's beautiful.

In a sense, this sort of misunderstanding is what makes the world go round, or a least makes it bearable. The most familiar model for this dynamic is the romantic relationship: by misunderstanding the nature of their own actions, two people are able to become intimate in ways (there's that word again) that would otherwise be completely unavailable to them. I just propose that this same dynamic applies to all things human. Everything is subject to creative re-interpretation.

A lot of the smaller things that find their way into my books are just the result of thinking through tiny incidents that occur during the day. For example, all the mazy implications of the "Chinatown" reference (about which you are completely right, Brent) just grew out of an off-hand dinner conversation with Salman Rushdie in which we agreed that "Chinatown" really *is* the best American film ever made. So the next day I got to thinking about "Chinatown" yet again and saw how it might fit very nicely into the scene I happened to be writing that day. The mind, after all, is not *completely* anarchic.

Oh, and Gene, upon thinking further about why I so dislike Nabokov's delight in referential puzzles, I realized that it's largely because one of my firmest rules about writing a novel is that it not depend on some exterior esoteric knowledge. It must be self-contained, so that it doesn't seem to be shutting the reader out at every turn. What's the point of abusing the reader in that way, when there are so many better things to do with someone's attention?

(Sorry that my presence on this chat has become a little unpredictable, but since the podcast last week and the Sunday NYTimes Book Review's very generous notice of TSRT yesterday, I've been more or less at my publisher's urgent command. All the same, I'll check in at least once a day. so fire away, and I'll get back to you. Thanks.)

Thanks Ted!

I've just gotten to the section where some more movies are mentioned. I've never seen Knife in the Water, so I'm going to have check that particular Polanski film out to see what you're doing there with it in the novel. The title alone adds to the ominous atmosphere you've created.

Quick question: You're not going to make us wait another decade (give or take a year or two) for your next novel are you?

And congrats, btw, on that podcast and all the press you've been getting of late. Well deserved. TSRT is a phenomenal read.

It sounds like you've had the "storybook" experience with the Knopf team, you are so lucky to have Gary Fisketjon, he's the best in the business. I agree with you about agents, I have given up on finding one and have taken matters into my own hands. Thanks for such an indepth reply, a most excellent chat.

Laura

Laura, no publishing experience is a "storybook" experience but, yes, mine with "The Same River Twice" has been as close to ideal as makes no never mind. The editorial side, with Gary, I have spoken of above, but like any large publishing house (no matter how much they protest to the contrary), Knopf is split into various departments that do not communicate with each other more than absolutely necessary; they each have their own function and a whole lot to do.. So this is where dispensing with agents really pays off (though you have to work hard at it). Once the hand-off is made from editorial to publicity, you have to start completely over again: getting to know your publicist, gently letting her know that you will be in frequent contact, etc. In my case I also made it clear that I would be expecting to communicate by phone, not e-mail, because Knopf's spam filter has the tightest sphincter in town. Plus e-mail is a very poor medium for serious business, because the e-mailer is ALWAYS at a big disadvantage, since the intended recipient can simply deny ever having received the e-mail if he/she doesn't want to do what you suggest, etc. From publicity to marketing to domestic sub-rights, to foreign sub-rights, to film rights. etc. Each department requires its own careful cultivation on your part--as much as the editorial department got--and as I make my way along the chain, I see how even the few devoted and reliable agents who exist in this town today would simply see little reason to make these calls--no money in it for them. What agents are interested in is the one big payout when you sell the book, then their interest (understandably, from a financial point of view, I guess) just drops off a cliff (except for movie rights). What cut do they get on foreign sales for example, where even the gross figure is likely to be quite small simply because the book-buying population of any given country might be commensurately small, compared to the US. Why would they kill themselves, for example, to sell the Swedish rights, which might net them $750? But for the writer, foreign sales are essential for name recognition, if nothing else. And there is always something else. (For example, I don't know about you, but $10,000, the gross price that would yield yr agent that $750--after she has split a 15% commission with her co-agent in that foreign country--is *quite* significant to me.) But most of all, by taking charge of all these aspects of publication yourself, with no lying (or soothing, comforting, reassuring) intermediary between you and the main players, you KNOW what's getting done and how it's getting done. All agents lie; it's their job description. I like to know the truth and work with it myself. It is a great deal of work (too much for yr agent to want to undertake) but it is, I'm increasingly convinced, by far the best way to handle publishing your work. As that Hendrix song goes: "I want to hear and see everything, I want to hear and see everything." Otherwise, it's guaranteed you'll *never* really know what happened. Or what could have and didn't.

Ted, your candor and in-depth answers are a joy to observe. Thanks for taking the time out of a busy schedule to yak with book-lovers...and fans.