By Louise Ure

We all know that famous Number Eight on Elmore Leonard’s list of tips for writers: try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. I agree with Leonard but then I read about Jonathan Safron Foer, who goes him one better.  Foer not only wants to take out the parts folks might skip, but then proposes to write an entirely new book from the leavings after deletion. He started with Bruno Schulz’s book, “Street of Crocodiles,” and then deleted words to not only write new sentences but create an entirely new story.

My first thought was, “Dang, some publisher sprang for big bucks to produce this.” The second thought was, “Why?” Aside from topping the list for “Amusing Things You Can Do With an Exacto Blade” I don’t see the purpose. And the resulting “new book” is nowhere near as good as “Street of Crocodiles.”

In an effort to be more open-minded than usual, I tried to do the same with one of my favorite books, Barbara Kingsolver’s “Poisonwood Bible.”

Here’s her original opening:

“First, picture the forest. I want you to be its conscience, the eyes in the trees. The trees are columns of slick, brindled bark like muscular animals overgrown beyond all reason. Every space is filled with life: delicate, poisonous frogs war-painted like skeletons, clutched in copulation, secreting their precious eggs onto dripping leaves. Vines strangling their own kin in the everlasting wrestle for sunlight. The breathing of monkeys. A glide of snake belly on branch. A single-file army of ants biting a mammoth tree into uniform grains and hauling it down to the dark for their ravenous queen. And, in reply, a choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. This forest eats itself and lives forever.”

Now my strikethrough version (Exacto blades not being available yet as an Apple app):

“First, picture the forest. I want you to be its conscience, the eyes in the trees. The trees are columns of slick, brindled bark like muscular animals overgrown beyond all reason. Every space is filled with life: delicate, poisonous frogs war-painted like skeletons, clutched in copulation, secreting their precious eggs onto dripping leaves. Vines strangling their own kin in the everlasting wrestle for sunlight. The breathing of monkeys. A glide of snake belly on branch. A single-file army of ants biting a mammoth tree into uniform grains and hauling it down to the dark for their ravenous queen. And, in reply, a choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. This forest eats itself and lives forever. “

Resulting in:

“ First, I want to be like muscular animals, clutched in copulation, strangling their own kin, sucking life out of death.”

Meh. I don’t think Kingsolver has anything to worry about.

And I started thinking about other things that were not as good when they were cut, and that brings me to Singapore. Singapore is one of those hybrid countries that like to think of themselves as democracies but behind the democratic mask is a conservative, authoritarian government that makes all the rules for how its citizens should live their lives, based on the Prime Minister’s own proclivities and preferences. Lee Kuan Yew was Prime Minister of Singapore when I lived there. His son, Lee Hsien Loong, is today.

Lee Kuan Yew didn’t like long hair on men, so any man arriving at the international airport got a haircut if his locks were longer than his collar. Bruce used to have to tuck his ponytail into a baseball cap to get into the country.

Lee Kwan Yew once stepped on some bubble gum getting out of a subway car. Soon enough, the sale of chewing gum was banned and arriving visitors were limited to “two sticks for their own personal use.”

And Lee Kuan Yew didn’t like public displays of romance or violence. My Time magazine would arrive in the mail with half the stories and ads blacked out with a Magic Marker or sliced out with scissors. No kissing. No revealing clothing. No blood, no gore, no guts. (This, in a country that has long held my personal award for Best Newspaper Headline Ever when The Straits Times ran with the 18-point type screaming: “500 Tiger Penises Seized!”)

Imagine my surprise when I got to see the real version of “Silence of the Lambs.” Granted, I couldn’t make out much of a storyline in the Singapore version of the movie (all 40 minutes of it), but I kept thinking, “Why are all the U.S. and Australian papers warning about how scary this is?”

Much like Foer’s cut up book, the Singapore-edited versions didn’t match the originals.

What about you, ‘Rati? Would you ever read a book like Foer’s? Or want to create one? And does anybody have an example of something that was better in the abridged version?

P.S. I’m heading to Australia for a couple of months to spend time with a covey of old friends who are eager to help ease me back into the land of the living. Since I’ll only be posting from my iPhone, I can’t promise that my Tuesday posts will be timely, long or articulate, but I’ll give it my best shot.

P.P.S. And don’t any of you burglars even think about a visit while I’m gone. I’ve got two friends with a very big dog staying here in my absence.



By Louise Ure

I had an email chat with an old friend a couple of weeks ago who said that her scheduled signing at a local bookstore on election night did not turn out as well as expected. “There was one person there, and I think he was homeless.” This from a woman who has published dozens of books in our genre.

I can understand her disappointment. The economy has taken a toll on the purchase of new hardcover books for many folks, the bookstore had not done a good job of publicizing her appearance in advance, and frankly, there were probably lots of people who just wanted to stay home that night and watch the election results. And who needs a signing to sell an electronic copy of a book, anyway?

Her signing failure is not uncommon. I remember attending one event for Laura Lippman several years ago that had only five attendees; all but one of us budding mystery writers ourselves.

The terror of my first book signing event is still with me. Yeah, me, the girl who had for three decades given hundreds of budget and strategy presentations to senior level clients all over the world. But that was easy by comparison, because all those years I was talking about/selling somebody else’s ideas or product. This time the product was all mine and I was selling myself.

Kirk Russell, sensing my angst, came over and said quietly into my ear, “Remember there is no one here that doesn’t want to be here. They’re happy to be here.” Kind of like that job at Dairy Queen I wrote about a couple of weeks ago: everybody who came in was happy to see me.

It got easier after that, whether I was doing solo signings, partnering with another author, attending conventions and panels or signing at libraries, clubs or festivals. I know I’ve done well over a hundred … maybe two hundred … appearances like that now.

But that doesn’t mean I like them.

I’m perfectly happy to converse with readers and get to know them as well as having them get to know me and my work. But I’ve become such a hermit these days that even telephone conversations – let alone a real social interaction – have become difficult.

And then you add in the money.

With my first book, published by Time Warner’s Mysterious Press (now Grand Central), I was treated like royalty. My book tour was set up and paid for by their PR team, and they even included media escorts to drive me around each city. My current publisher (St. Martin’s) does not offer those same kind of perks to many of their authors. My guess is that the big name authors still get a fair amount of PR support from their publishers, but ninety percent of authors pay their own freight on publicity tours. In my case, that’s meant thousands of dollars of contribution for gas, flights, hotels and meals, for little reward.

Is the two-person turnout in Portland or the one-audience-member-who-bought-six-books in a Seattle suburb justification for all those dollars spent? Not for me it isn’t. Not anymore.

And I’m not even sure who I was reaching with those book tours. With the first book, there were a preponderance of friends, acquaintances and family members who showed up. For the more recent books, many of the attendees already knew my work and came prepared to buy the next book. I don’t think it’s the way to reach a lot of new readers.

If I publish again, I doubt that I would do a book tour. Maybe I’d concentrate on conventions or libraries or a massive internet effort.

So what say you, ‘Rati ‘Riters? Do you continue to think book tours are integral to your marketing? Do you go to the same places with each book or different geographies? And does your publisher help with any of it?

And for our ‘Rati ‘Readers: are personal signing events important to you? Are you attending more or fewer of them these days?

PS: Have a great Thanksgiving everyone. I’ve got 31 people coming here. It will be the last of three decades of Ure/Goronsky household Thanksgivings. It’s somebody else’s turn now.



By Louise Ure

In today’s climate of high unemployment rates and few job openings, it’s probably not very nice to talk about jobs you hated. But there it is. We’ve all had a few. That office intern job where the boss wanted to guess your bra size. The summer you and your brother decided to make a little extra cash picking cantaloupes, until you realized how truly backbreaking that work was in 110 degree heat.

There are a lot of reasons to hate a job. Sometimes it’s financial, sometimes it’s the arduous nature of the work and sometimes it’s just a lack of dignity.

I got my very first job at a Dairy Queen when I was thirteen and I was paid twenty-five cents an hour plus all the ice cream I could eat. (That’s the joy of being an intra-state company versus an interstate company. They can start ‘em younger.) Not a bad job, right? Over the years, I’ve often cited that job as the only one where everybody who came in was happy and wanted to see me. (That’s no longer true. I feel the same way about book signings now.)

But then you get to the dignity part. My boss was a one-eyed man named Jack. Yes, he took full advantage of every “one-eyed Jack” reference he could, adding “I’m keeping an eye out for you” or “I’ve got my eye on you.” Then he’d threaten to lift up that black eyepatch like he was a flasher in a raincoat.

And he had the nasty habit of planting a quarter somewhere under the big ice cream machines to see if we’d find it when we were closing up at the end of the day. If you didn’t find it, it meant you hadn’t cleaned well and you were fired. If you did find it but didn’t turn it in, it meant you were a thief and you were fired. I already recognized I wasn’t the best cleaner around so I wound up just handing him a quarter every night.

The next job at Arby’s wasn’t bad until my friend Ellie cut her finger off in the meat slicer. I had to root around trying to figure out what was Ellie and what was rare roast beef so I could give it to the surgeon to try to reattach.

I found the next job just two blocks down the road at Phoebe’s Pie Shoppe. First there was the indignity of the uniforms. A floor length flowered skirt. A poofy-sleeved blouse in Tweetybird yellow. And a little linen cap like Martha Washington wore. That outfit would have been perfectly at home on Sister Wives.

One day a man came in and asked for a piece of banana cream pie. Ten minutes later he called me back over with only half the slice eaten and said there was something hard and crunchy in the pie. I took it back to the kitchen to investigate and found a half a dead cockroach. Half a cockroach, right? You know where the other half was.

“Here’s another piece,” I told him upon my return. “You’re absolutely right. There shouldn’t have been any pecans in that pie.”

And then there was Warner’s Bembridge Holiday Hotel on the Isle of Wight: a downmarket British version of a Catskills resort. The staff was housed in dorm rooms with eight beds to a room and we were expected to serve three meals a day then do all the dishes. And did I fail to mention that we were also the “talent show” in the evening? Ay yi yi. Think Dirty Dancing without the dancing.

I put up with that for all of three weeks until one old codger went down face first in the tomato soup I’d just served him and the guy at the next table only complained that his kippers were cold.

My jobs haven’t all been awful.  And most of them were not as bad as they could have been. I remember once race weekend that Bruce and I got to the track early while they were still setting up the paddock. A sunburned young man in his twenties wheeled around the paddock in a big truck with a vacuum hose on it. He’d pull up to each Porta Potty, vacuum out all the shit inside, they wipe down the walls and the seats and the floor with disinfectant. And he whistled the whole time.

“I’m never going to complain about my job again,” I told Bruce.

Compared with the Porta Potty guy, I’ve had some great jobs. One job in Singapore came with a car and full-time chauffeur. Hell, I even got paid for sitting on the banks of the Loch Ness and watching for monsters. But of all of these jobs – forty or more by my count — writing is still the best job I ever had.

What about you, my ‘Rati brethren? What’s the worst job you ever had?