Gearing up for a Book Tour

It’s two months until my book comes out, and I have been getting some good news:

Redroom.com, the author and reader social networking site, has named me its “Rising Star” this week. My picture and profile are featured on the site’s home page. Please check it out and pay me a visit.

Towers of Gold has been chosen as a selection for both the History Book of the Month Club and the Military Book of the Month Club.

So far, I have about 25 speaking engagements set up. I will be speaking at the Commonwealth Club on Monday Oct. 6 as part of Litquake, in a panel called Scandal, Intrigue, and Drama in California history.

I will be on West Coast Live, the radio show, on October 4th. Some of my other speaking engagements include various Jewish book festivals, the California Historical Society, the Mechanics Institute, and the Huntington Library in San Marino.

My website is about to launch. It will not only focus on me, but will include a large section with lots of photos. I am trying to capture the atmosphere on the West Coast during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

This is starting to get fun!

Dirty Words, more Dirty Words, and Even more Dirty Words

There were a shocking number of women – and men – in red silk corsets at Sunday night’s Litquake fundraiser. The theme was “Dirty Words: An Evening of Smut” and many participants dressed in the spirit of the evening.

The Twilight Vixen Revue – a group of four queer women who dance burlesque – started out the evening by modeling fashions by Stormy Leather, the place to go for all your dominatrix needs. This was sexual titillation at its most refined –beautiful women wearing leather corsets, silk underwear, and high heels. One even wore a mask and carried a whip.

The emcee for the evening, Kirk Read, got into the spirit as well, with black leather pants that showcased a large brass zipper from front to back. His red silk bustier (named the Sergeant Corset, retail price $365.95) had a masculine, military touch – a few rings and buckles that can be put to some other erotic use.

But the real focus of the evening was words – Dirty Words. The organizers got the title for the fundraiser from the new anthology edited by Ellen Sussman, and many of the contributors read their pieces.

The scope of the dirty words were surprising. Did you know James Joyce was a dirty old man? Well, I guess the censors of the time did, since Ulysses was banned for obscenity in the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1920s. Alan Black, the author of the memoir Kick the Balls, read, in his delightful Scottish burr, a 1909 letter Joyce wrote to his wife and muse, Nora Gallagher Joyce. It can’t be repeated here but I will say that Joyce was remembering certain intimate acts with Nora and encouraged her to be even dirtier. I swear he used that word over and over again.

Michelle Richmond, the author of the newly-released No One You Know, dressed demurely in a blue denim scoop-necked dress. She gave her proclivities away, though, by wearing red, open toe high heel shoes. “Whenever I read about sex I feel compelled to dress like I am on the way to Sunday school,” Michelle told the crowd. “Whatever I know about sex I learned on the Baptist Youth bus in Tennessee.”

Stephen Elliot read an excerpt from his new memoir, The Adderall Diary. While it is definitely a Stephen Elliot book – he read a scene where he went to a bondage spot and was videotaped as a submissive bottom – the book apparently also explores the murders that have tangentially touched Elliot's life. He shared some girlfriends with a man named Sean Sturgeon, the one-time best friend of self-professed wife killer Hans Reiser. Sturgeon at one point confessed to killing eight people – a lie, as it turned out. Unfortunately, Reiser did kill his wife, Nina, who had left her husband for Sturgeon. Elliot touches on all these complicated relationships in an article in Salon, but they didn’t really come into play during his reading, which was characteristically funny and uncomfortable for those into vanilla sexual practices.

The fun went on. Kim Addonizio read her piece from the Dirty Words anthology. I never knew necrophilia could be so funny. Helena Echlin's demure British accent made her lusty words somehow more respectably lusty. Daniel Handler ended the evening by reading from his 2000 novel, Watch Your Mouth. Dressed in a brown suit with white shirt in tie, his brown crew cut graying slightly, Handler’s appearance was incongruent with the descriptions of sex and mirrors and incest coming from his mouth.

There are lots of wonderful writer organizations in the Bay Area – The Grotto, 826 Valencia, Redroom.com. Writing Wild Women, North 24^th Writers (my writing group.) But no organization brings the community together like Litquake. Every year the group puts on a fabulous literary festival, once that is inclusive and daring. It creates an environment that showcases established and up and coming authors. And this year Litquake plans to have an open mike during its LitCrawl, which makes it that much more democratic. See you there in early October.

Literary Tidbits

Doris Lessing wins the Nobel Prize for Literature. This is a choice I can relate to, as I read and reread The Golden Notebook numerous times in my early 20s. I haven’t read her recent books, I confess, which are science fiction.

Jeffrey Toobin blames the success of his new book on the Supreme Court, The Nine, to his ineptitude as a novelist. (via Galleycat)

Litquake is upon us! I intend to go to the pub/reading crawl on Saturday with my writing group, North 24^th. One of the members of our group, Julia Flynn Siler, will be reading from her House of Mondavi. It’s about the winemaking family and they have put her with a group of other authors who write about food, including Davia Nelson of the Kitchen Sisters. The panel's title is Tasting Course: Authors Write About Food & Wine.

Once again the Lit Crawl is an embarrassment of riches. (The schedule is here.) There are too many authors to hear and the ones I want to see all seem to appear at the same time. Some conflicts I am mulling: do I go to the panel on Heydey Press and California history or the one on bad girls acting out? The latter is sure to be a hoot with Joyce Maynard, Ellen Sussman, Mary Roach, Lolly Winston and Lisa Taggert. But I am writing a book on California history and consider the Heydey authors my compadres.

In another time slot, it’s writers from the Grotto versus writers from Bay Area Word of Mouth, a group of highly accomplished published women writers. (I am nominally a member although I mostly lurk and read their emails.)

Last year I adored the Grotto presentation. Marianna Cherry was a special surprise and she will be reading again this year. I’d love to hear Gerard Jones and Andy Raskin as well.

The WOMBA list is equally tempting. There’s Meredith Maran, whose work I have adored since What It’s Like to Live Now, Harriet Scott Chessman, who I just met the other night, Lalita Tademy, a class act if I ever saw one (I did a profile of her for People Magazine about Cane River. It was a wonderful assignment) and many more.

Of course I could skip those and hear mystery writers Cara Black and Cornelia Read, two more authors whom I enjoy.

Help!