Keith Snyder Newsletter Half Newsletter · Half Journal · All Blatant Self-Promotion July/August, 2001 More writings  Email me to receive my next newsletter It's been too long since my last full newsletter, but so much has happened that if I don't write about it now, I'll never get out from under all the news. The last six months have been a very weird and exhausting year. January: Shooting in Los Angeles In December and January, I had just barely recovered from my second MS exacerbation, and I was in Los Angeles for the holidays. I'd been there a few months previously, shooting "Sell in Hell," another short film with a couple of the same people with whom I made "1 is for Gun." Blake Arnold (the detective in "1 is for Gun," and my writing/producing partner) plays a telemarketing demon in this one. Blake and I had something of a blowup after the September shoot—you can read about it here. But there we were, shooting it again on my last vacation day, because I'd managed to, uh, lose some of the footage from the September shoot. Luckily, the entire set cost $67 at Home Depot, so rebuilding it wasn't a major problem, and nobody took the opportunity to make me feel bad. February: Visiting the Arctic Kathleen and I managed to scrape together frequent flyer miles from three different accounts so that I could attend Left Coast Crime in Anchorage and appear on the panel "Stop, Stop, You're Killing Me Here! or just how funny is murder, anyway?" with panelists Linda Berry, Elizabeth Daniels Squire, Nathan Walpow, and Bill Fitzhugh. The good part, though, and the real reason we scraped together the frequent flyer miles, was what came afterward: As part of the Authors to the Bush program, I ended up above the Arctic Circle in a town called Selawik. My job was to walk into classrooms and tell kids they can be writers if they want. We ended up writing stories together. Click here to read them. From my travel journal, Feb. 2001 I see kids from school everywhere; there's only one school, and all the kids go to it, and I visited almost all of the classes yesterday and today. So everywhere I go, kids greet me by name, and I greet them back. Two little girls today in the store giggled shyly when I asked them to tell me the name of the hero of their story. I couldn't quite tell what they said, but I said yes, that's right! And they giggled some more. Leaving the store on the snogo, we go down a slope by where kids are tobogganing. One adorable little boy, maybe four, is wandering around in his little parka. He looks at me as we go past. "Yes" is raised eyebrows. "No" is a wrinkled nose. I started using the eyebrows quickly, since it's also Filipino, but I didn't use the wrinkled nose until the 3rd graders wouldn't leave me (and my camcorder) alone in the gym today. During the incursion, a few of them stroke my one-day stubble. "Freaky!" a boy exclaims. "Like flounder!" On the way down to the river, I meet Tommy Ballot coming up the bank on his Honda. "You're all bundled up!" he says. "Look like you're planning to walk to Buckland." I tell him I hope to come back some time. "You become a billionaire, come back to Selawik," he says. You take care of the billionaire part, I say, and I'll take care of coming back to Selawik. He laughs. "See you later," I say. "I'm gonna walk to Buckland now." Where I came out of the village to the river, it was a hundred yards or so to the bridge entrance, so I decided to just walk across the river instead. The things people just leave lying around as junk are interesting; caribou antlers and busted snogo drive belts are discarded equally. I walked over to the store and post office, since they're the only things I know are over there. At the store, I asked for postcards—they didn't have any. I asked if the post office had them. She looked amused and suggested that I could walk over there and ask. Bought two 20-cent postcards, which means I've now got 60 cents, and sent them to wife and sister. I learned that if your socks are shorter than your bunny boots, the zone between top of sock and top of boot gets abraded to raw flesh. Kept stopping and pulling up my socks, decided not to walk around anymore. Ended up in the teachers' lounge most of the day. Met Buddy, janitor, been to Mannheim, Germany. Told me that not only is the weather now weird, but there's a South Wind. He's never heard of there being a South Wind before. Told me about picking salmonberries, which are orange, and the legend about the Northern Lights cutting off people's heads if they're too loud. He suspects this is because the elders wanted the kids to shut up. I suspect this is pretty well universal. I'm hoping to return to Selawik. Talks are underway. March: Writing in Paris When I got back from Alaska, Kathleen gave me my birthday present. She'd gotten a few friends and family members to chip in and send me to Paris for a week, where I was to be installed in an apartment to finish the fourth Jason Keltner book. So two days after I returned from Selawik (four hours behind NY), I was on a plane to France (six hours ahead of NY). If you have disposable income and questionable taste, you can now buy a Robert Goldstein coffee mug or "1 is for Gun" mouse pad at my silly merchandise shop. The apartment was in the 11th arrondissement, not a particularly touristy area: a few greengrocers, cafes and brasseries, bars, and a McDonald's. I love being in Paris, but I speak no French at all, so I have to get by on earnestness. This works fine—I've never been treated poorly by French waiters, though I've seen some American tourists I've wanted to smack—but the inability to speak is an isolating thing. Luckily, I was there to write, so isolation wasn't a problem. What was a problem was double-whammy jet lag. It took two days to feel almost normal, and then I developed my routine: Wake up whenever, go to a cafe for breakfast, back to the apartment, write for a long time, go sit in a brasserie and work on plot, go back to the apartment and write some more, and around midnight, walk to the Restaurant Miami and eat a crepe (oeuf, fromage, merguez), buy a pear on the way back, write some more, fall asleep. Sprinkle with random walking tours, bake until golden brown. The French dictionary Kathleen included in my little travel gift packet did not to include les conjugations des verbes, so by the time I left, I was on pantomime-and-verb-infinitive terms with Kamel and Hassan at the Restaurant Miami. They'd pour a te a la menthe when they saw me coming each night, and I'd try out some new bit of conversation I'd constructed from the dictionary before leaving the apartment. They were closed one night for the Fete Mouton. Festival of Sheep. It took a while before I was sure I had it right. I was completely worthless for a week when I returned to New York. I'd tried to stay on NY time, but somehow hadn't managed it. Still, it shouldn't have taken me that long to recover, and I couldn't figure out why I was in such bad shape. It wasn't exactly a difficult puzzle, though. When your friends and family—who can ill afford it— send you to Paris to finish your book, you finish your book. Coffee was my drug of choice for alertness, and being in Paris, I was drinking wine during the last part of the day. When I'm home, I drink a cup of tea in the morning and that's it. In Paris, I was up to seven or eight cups of coffee and three glasses of wine a day. Then I came home, where I don't drink wine, and we were out of sugar, so I stopped drinking coffee. Gee, I wonder why I was so trashed. April: Concert Theatre in New York I'm a member of a group of weird "concert theatre" composers called FUSE, and we had an April show to put together. It was my first event with them, and as usual, I started with a manageable idea and let it turn into an insane number of all-nighters. March and April disappeared into this project. "I'll just get temp work when it's over," I reassured myself (and my wife). The show was at the Frying Pan, a decommissioned lightship docked permanently at the Chelsea Piers in New York. I won't detail the many exhaustions and travails of mounting it, since I might want to use them in a story at some point, but here is a web page all about the final event. As part of my piece, I asked writers of my acquaintance—professional and amateur—to contribute stories about the Frying Pan. Some of these names are probably familiar to you: Deborah Whittaker, Joseph Wallace, Karin Slaughter, Aileen Schumacher, Lori Snyder, Jamie Scott, S.J. Rozan, John Pond, Kris Neri, Wendy Monk, Coyne Maloney, Jan C. Maher, F.R. Lewis, John Leech, Gwen Lauterbach, Ben Lieberman, Jane Haddam, Kathleen Haaversen, D.M. Fratini, Ken Cheney, Barbara Brown. Speakers were mounted on the interior of the Frying Pan, and the recorded stories were played at low volumes, as though the ship itself was telling you its history. That, by itself, would have been the "manageable idea" I mentioned. But I also wrote a 15-minute "mini-opera," using text from the stories as the basis of a libretto, and this was performed down in the hold, where there is a stage and a sound system. (The Frying Pan is usually used for raves and parties.) Larry Picard and Kathleen Haaversen sang the roles of "Boat" and "Other" (Boat's conscience), and explained why all the stories contradicted each other. The performance was well received, but I'm not satisfied with it, so the world will have to wait to hear it until I can manage a studio recording. However, pictures from the performance, all the story text, and a link to most of the story audio are up for your entertainment at this page. The rest of the audio will be added as soon as I can manage it. I got my first grant for this concert, a very small one from "Meet the Composer." I recall distrusting grants when I was in my twenties. I think I've changed my mind. Where the hell's my genius grant? Writings Mixed up in there was the deadline for The Night Men, the fourth Jason Keltner book and a departure from previous departures. I'd finished a draft in Paris, but considering all the coffee, wine, and exhaustion, and the speed with which I'd written the last 10,000 words, it wasn't suitable for publication. So it got pounded, finessed, and kicked into shape, and it stumbled over the Walker doorjamb more or less on time. You should see it in stores this November. It's got the best dustjacket design I've seen in a long time. My story "Instructions" will appear in an upcoming issue of Blue Murder magazine. Charles Griffin, a composer friend with a new CD out, is Tuckerized in it. "Tuckerized," for those not hip to the mystery jive, means your name's used in a book. Several unwitting victims are also Tuckerized in The Night Men. I'm starting to put articles and essays—formerly published at Themestream, which folded—up at my website. One of the pieces I've put up there is Robert is a Genius, a one-pager with my series characters. May: Feynman Songs in New York May was pretty quiet except for the desperate sounds of job-hunting (the economy had collapsed while I wasn't looking, and every freelancer I know was—and still is—hurting) and the premiere of my Five Feynman Songs at Riverside Church in NYC, part of the concert "Sounds of Science." The text was from Genius, James Gleick's biography of the Nobel-winning physicist, and QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard Feynman. It went very well, and once I'm not exhausted anymore, I will find out what I'd have to do legally in order to let people hear the recording. In the meantime, you can hear "The North Star," from the song cycle "Looking Up at Night," recorded during the same concert. (Composed by Denise Broadhurst, from text by Sue Owen, sung by Kathleen Haaversen.) Click here. Around that same time, the CD Lucid Dreams was released on the Cybermotion label, and is now getting nationally syndicated radio airplay and industry buzz. The group name is Alias Zone; the basis of the CD is live tracks by the Cosmic Debris, the live electronic music and spoken word group I played with in Los Angeles. I'm on several cuts. Check it out here. I've mentioned the Cosmic Debris' inclusion in the Sonic Circuits music festival, and I've mentioned their CD A Small, Out-of-the-Way Cafe before. There are now two new Cosmic Debris CDs, Reluctant Color (with a beautiful cover courtesy of weaver Vivian Cheney) and Natural Selection, with a somewhat less beautiful cover courtesy of Richard's cat. (I'm the keyboardist on these tracks, which were recorded live in various bookstores and art galleries.)         June/July: Looking for work Well, that's how it goes. Good art years are bad money years.   ©2001, Keith Snyder, all rights reserved.