PAUL MICHEL

I'm working on setting up a book release party for Houdini Pie on April 17. The exercise thus far is a lesson in Why I am not a Professional Party Planner. After weeks of dithering I've settled on a venue, a hair salon/gallery in my neighborhood that wants to do more evening events, so I am a guinea pig of sorts. It's a very cool space with lots of art on the walls in an open, angled, many-windowed room that did prior service years ago as a dry cleaner and before that a gas station. I stopped by today to talk to the owner and start hashing out the details, which after all should not be many. It's just a party, after all. People, food, drink, music. Nothing exotic--no pole dancers, jugglers, wild animals, light shows or mud wrestling. So why am I so apprehensive? Because I fear, as I suspect everyone does in my position, that I will be throwing the Party to which No One Comes. (more…)

To conjure an image of the world before computers is to invite a sympathetic tsk and a bemused smile, naturally from the young but often from analog age-mates as well. It's like evoking the days of stagecoach holdups, ice-storm outhouses and surgery without anesthesia: *yes they managed, but how?* Frankly, we can't remember. We were too busy splitting wood, trapping beavers and trudging through snowbanks to one-room schoolhouses to have time for the formation of frivolous childhood memories. So I was plenty stumped this weekend as I attempted to recall how in the world commerce occurred in the days before Craigslist... (more…)

Okay, I have been sucked into the Vancouver Games. Is it the drama? The angst? The lack of other ideas of what to do on a Friday night? Am I that pathetic? In a word, yep. I get that.

But the upside is that I have found my sport, or what might have been my sport in a more sporting time of life. I want to be a bobsled brakeman. I mean, what could be better? (more…)

I'm trying to get into the Olympic spirit, but the more I see and read and hear on the radio, the more I wonder if everyone up there--the athletes, the media, the families and the crowds--aren't wishing they all could just pack it up, go home and come back when it's colder, and there's decent snow, and everyone (along with the Canadians) has had a chance to practice, and no one has just died, like, right over there... ("Oh look! It's much safer now!") (more…)

I've been encouraged to engage more with the "virtual world" on behalf of promotion of my new novel: to explore online marketing, publicity and presence. With all the enthusiasm (and comprehension) of a toddler getting a vaccination, I'm shutting my eyes, gritting my teeth and giving it a whirl. Folks of my generation typically take to the cyberwaves with trepidation. (more…)

I'm nearly finished with a collection of short stories, All the Men Are Sleeping, by D.R. MacDonald. I had not run into him before, but picked the book up in a big sale when Epilogue Books in Ballard closed last fall (another independent R.I.P. No matter how much or widely one reads, there's still the chance for those encounters--"chance encounters," let's call them--with writers who inspire one to run-don't-walk to the nearest (extant) bookstore and snatch up everything else the man/woman has written, and such is the case here with me and MacDonald. (more…)

Yes, I'm watching it...sort of. And writing, cooking and doing the Sunday NY Times crossword. At the moment the half-time show is on, the Who giving an anti-lesson in Growing Old Gracefully. One of the true advantages of playing old time fiddle music is that you don't look pathetic doing it in your 60s. (more…)

I stole this blog title from my friend Dale Neal from Asheville, whose novel "Cow Across America" recently was published by Novello Festival Press. It's a phrase he used to describe the weird waiting period between an author's signing a publishing contract, reviewing galleys and so on, and the actual appearance of (and reaction to) the book. Authorial black humor, I guess. (more…)

With luck my new site will go live today, or perhaps tomorrow. I have approximately the confidence setting up this sort of thing as I would performing an emergency tracheotomy in a windstorm. The results, hopefully, will be different. Let me know if I've made a hash of the whole thing.