"Ma'am? You over there, with the cats on your lap? Do you have a candidate for bestseller? A series perhaps? To protect us from the next GrishamCrichton?"

I do! I reallyo trulyo do, damnit!

And the cover is in the new fall catalogue, and it's gorgeous, and on theme, and me happy now.

Oh, and I have a book to share, speaking of mystery/ghost story crossovers. I read a wonderful thing on the plane to DC, called "Land of Echoes" by Daniel Hecht. Different style than mine - his character, Cree Black, is actually a psychic investigator - but he did a gorgeous job on it and I highly rec the thing. I'm going back to read the first one, as soon as I get back to SF and finish up with BayCon and have thirty seconds to actually read something, instead of writing something.

And the inhaler-puffing in the beginning is a great comic device (not so much for real asthmatics, I know).

Crusie is a real asthmatic, has nearly died from it, and so is entitled. ita, I think WTT is far sexier than Faking It. Strange Bedpersons had so many changes forced down Crusie's throat that she wound up writing the book all over again, as The Cinderella Deal.

Can we have a new best seller please, preferably something with an entertaining plot AND quality writing?

Kavalier and Clay. It does sometimes happen.

I've not read it. Yet.

Anyone read Strange Bedpersons? I read that after Crazy For You, and was less happy with it. I know she had publisher issues with it, so maybe that's why, but it seemed a little... forced, maybe, in parts?

I read it, and it seemed forced in the same way that Crazy For You felt forced.

Me, I'm currently reading Snow Crash

Oooh, fun! After that, you can graduate to Cryptonomicon.

After that, you can graduate to Cryptonomicon.

I've read it.

His books do not stick in my mind. Character names, if that. The odd visual.

I babysat for Annie Dillard's daughter when I was in high school. What a little hellion. Like, climb out of bed, go down the back stairs and GO OUTSIDE at 10 pm hellion. (Age 5).

Nope, I got nuthin'.

Flea, dude, what kind of Mom was Annie Dillard? Was she flaky, did she pay on time, was her house a mess, or was she a hippie Jane Goodall saint??? Tell tell tell.

Picked up Annie Dillard's The Living at a library book sale last night, too, for all of a dime. Anyone read it? I had a friend awhile back who kept telling me to try her, especially Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, but I hadn't up till now.

I think her fiction is middling, but that she's one of the best non-fiction writers of the last fifty years. Love Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek and An American Childhood particularly.

I only sat for Rosie, the Dillard sprog, once, I think. I got the gig in a roundabout way - I think it was a dinner party that a family I sat for were also attending, at Dillard's neighbors, and they drove me over and home. She lived right near Wesleyan (this was in the late 1980s) in a biggish house that memory is painting as sort of a 1910s foursquare, Decidedly messy. Middle-class, absent-minded professor-y - books and wineglasses and coffee cups and napkins and crumbs on the table. I remember a hunt for the checkbook when it came time to pay me. Dillard struck me as vague and distracted, and seemed very laissez-faire in her child-rearing - Rosie ran a bit wild, and was also wily and well practiced in talking her way into things. I tried to read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek following the exerience, but couldn't get into it at 17 - too slow. Should try again now that I am slower.