Nancy Rommelmann

In the Mood for a Good Time?

What do you have planned this weekend? Some LA sunshine, some sex, some frolicking with movie stars and maybe, offing them? No? Would you like to?

Download Shooting Stars now. It's free, until midnight.

"Shooting Stars: A Carlotta Novak Mystery," by Hillary Johnson

Shooting Stars is out today in paperback. It's funny, sexy, shockingly smart. Yeah, yeah, Hillarys my sister-in-law, but don't take my word for it, see for yourself.

 

Shooting Stars trailer from Dymaxicon on Vimeo.

Dazed and Confused, in the New York Times Magazine

The Times asked me to write an essay based on The Queens of Montague Street. The excerpt, "Dazed and Confused," runs in tomorrow's Magazine. Yes, yes, I am thrilled, and thankful to all (you know who you are) who sluiced the way to this happening. And I love the icon they chose; wow, when they sent the tear-sheet, I flipped, I was so happy.

Want to read the whole piece?: It'll cost you, 99-cents. Click here.

And thanks everyone for reading xx

Reading Reading Reading

Three for today:

A Detailed Man, David Swinson's crime novel about a DC detective with a half-frozen face and a few too many people he knows dying brutally. Download it for free through midnight tomorrow.

"The Autumn of Joan Didion," Caitlin Flanagan's (to me) spot-on essay about what Didion does best, and worst. Essay at Atlantic.com. Eager to read Flanagan's new book, Girl Land.

Come hear me read from The Bad Mother, this Sunday, when the incomprable Pascal Sauton will throw a Dinner with the Author event, at his really smashingly gorgeous new spot. Food, wine, a little reading, my handsome husband. Come! Details here, and yes, so reserve.

And speaking of downloads: The Queens of Montague Street, 99-cents kids. Digital only... for now.

I Write, You Read, For Free

Okay kids, my publisher is running a special: for the next 48 hours, you can download The Bad Mother, for free, and I wish you would, because we've watched the book go from #negative-googolplex to #18 in Kindle Fiction. Which is pretty cool. And while you are there, you can borrow The Queens of Montague Street for free, if you are a Prime member, 99-cents for the rest of us plebes.

It's been a pretty exciting week, watching this happen. Happy. Thank you for making it so xx

Bestselling on Amazon [Kinda Sorta]

I never followed Amazon ranking on any of my books, except one time when I looked at The Bad Mother's, and it had something like "the 60th billionth bestselling book of all time, and what the hell are you doing here?" But! My publisher, she's smart, and she knows how to position these things, and The Queens of Montague Street is now #6 for Journalist Biographies. If you want to link it, or buy it, or leave a comment (it has no reviews yet), or otherwise plump it, click this link.

If you'd like me to shut up about this for a minute, then you can do that here x

Ristretto Nicolai Opens

We will be open today, 8am-6pm, pulling shots, selling beans, letting you bask in the gorgeousness. Want to shop? We have Hario kettles and pourover systems, and Schoolhouse Electric, well, I want everything. 2181 NW Nicolai St., PDX, 503-227-2866. More info at www.ristrettoroasters.com. See you there.

David Swinson, "A Detailed Man"

Dymaxicon author David Swinson gets a fantastic review of his new crime noir novel, A Detailed Man in the Press-Telegram of Long Beach. A former booker of punk bands in 1980s Los Angeles, as well as the producer of the iconic punk flick Roadside Prophets (starring X's John Doe and Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz), Swinson ditched the scene, and LA, to become a detective in Washington DC. For his third act, he's writing noir. A clip from today's review:

"And there's no reason to think that Swinson won't be as successful as a writer as he's been at everything else. While it's difficult to find a retired cop who hasn't written a book, it's rare to find one as beautifully written as 'A Detailed Man.'

"It doesn't fit cozily into any of the established subgenres of crime writing. It's not a stringing together of bawdy capers, that's for sure. It's as detailed (naturally) as police procedural novels, though without the maddening mystery. It's closer to the newish genre called Nordic crime, which has expanded beyond the geographical realms of Per Wahoo/Maj Sowell, Henning Mankell, Jo Nesbo and, sigh, Stieg Larsson...

"Swinson writes with the soul of a poet more than a policeman mining memories. His style is fluid and sharp, his protagonist, Detective Ezra Simeon, is, in the Nordic style, complicated, brooding and introspective."

A Detailed Man is available now on Kindle, early next year in paperback. I have a few of the latter for review copies. Let me know if you want one. And congratulations to David.

Flannery O'Connor Reads "A Good Man is Hard to Find"/Storytelling

In which you hear the humor in this remarkable story, as did the audience at Vanderbilt University to whom she read it, in 1959, until nearly the very end. I will be grateful to anyone who can name another writer that captures voices, terror and humor the way O'Connor does.

Speaking of reading one's work: I just enjoyed the morning's first cup of coffee while watching a four-part video series by Ira Glass. In part three, he made me laugh out loud by playing a segment he recorded at age 27, and explained just why it was so awful, including his habit, at the time, of putting EMPHASIS on every THIRD WORD, as if this SOMEHOW gave the STORY gravity. I recently heard something similar, an author reading from her book, and though her medium was prose, she had the familiar if not to my ear (as yet) successful cadence of the poet, where the ends of sentences go UP, as if it's all in QUESTION.

Next week, I go in to do a sound recording of The Bad Mother.

 

Wordstock!

So many reasons to go! Here are a few:

• Jennifer Egan, author of A Visit From the Good Squad, which deservedly won about 6000 literary awards in 2010, in conversation with Wordstock Executive Director Greg Netzer (Saturday, 1pm, National Endowment for the Arts Stage)
• Lili Ristagno, author of the true crime graphic novel, Short Fuse, will appear on the panel, “Graphic Novels: Not Just for Geeks” (Saturday, 1pm, Oregon Cultural Trust Stage)
• Mega-brilliant author Barry Lopez (Saturday, 3pm, National Endowment for the Arts Stage)
• Blake Nelson reading from Recovery Road (Saturday, 4pm, Wieden + Kennedy Stage)
• Ursula Le Guin (Sunday, 11am, Attic Institute Stage)
• Chelsea Cain reading from her latest thriller, The Night Season (Sunday, 3pm, McMenamins Stage)
• Nancy Rommelmann, reading from her novel The Bad Mother, and Jennifer Lauck, reading from Found. (Sunday, 5pm, Oregon Cultural Trust Stage)
• Ristretto Roasters, coffee of the literati, pouring cold brew and selling beans. (Saturday/Sunday, Beer Garden)
• Please stop by Dymaxicon, booth #705, where we will be raffling a new Kindle loaded with Dymaxicon’s 2011 fall list, including Short Fuse, The Bad Mother, BeBop Garden, The Sushi King’s Daughter, Physical Culture, The Elements of Scrum and others.
• For a full Wordstock line-up and other details, www.wordstockfestival.com

Susan Orlean's "Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend"

My review, in the Sunday Oregonian. Short version: loved it.

Buy the book.

Wordstock is Coming

I will be reading (from The Bad Mother), with author Jennifer Lauck, at 5 PM, Sunday, October 9, on the Oregon Cultural Trust Stage. (Sounds pretty fancy, huh?) My publisher, Dymaxicon, will have a booth [#705], so I will be around much of the weekend. Ristretto will be there, too, by the Beer Garden. Full list of readers, events, vendors on the Wordstock site.

Speaking of The Bad Mother: As of last week, you will now be buying the second edition, with author blurbs on the cover (thank you Madison Smartt Bell and David Rensin and Erica Schickel and Mark Ebner), as well as a photo of the author.

A Shape of Things to Come

Breathing...

Madison Smartt Bell has written about Dymaxicon, Hillary Johnson, The Bad Mother and me, in a Huffington Post essay, "A Shape of Things to Come." A snip:

The Bad Mother, by Nancy Rommelmann, is a sort of devil's riposte to Sue Miller. For those of you who remember those irksome analogies on the SAT, Sue Miller is to Nancy Rommelman as Wordsworth might be to... Iggy Pop. That said, both novelists are, in different ways, unsparing. Miller's justly celebrated novel The Good Mother (1986) is a Tolstoyan study of a life if anything too meticulously examined. Miller's heroine, out of excessively delicate conscience, pulls on a thread that causes her whole domestic life to unravel. Her one false move is so grotesquely magnified that in the end a safe situation for her child can only be reconstructed by her sacrificing hope of any happiness beyond motherhood.

The larger question Bell addresses is publishing, how we do it well and better.

At a moment when conventional publishing is faltering on the brink of extinction, the Dymaxicon venture puts Johnson, for once, in tune with her time. "Dymaxicon doesn't accept 'submissions,'" says she. "I'm not a particularly submissive person, and I have always resented that writers were always cast in a submissive role... no one should ever be in the position of accepting or rejecting." Instead, the company offers the writer a partnership--a place on an agile team that can use print-on-demand and digital resources to create books in the same nimble process by which new software is normally produced.

Go read the whole thing.

The Bad Mother: Q & A in the LA Weekly

I have written several hundred pieces for the LA Weekly, but this is only the third time I have been written about there. Libby Molyneaux read The Bad Mother and did the Q & A.

A tease:

Portland has street kids, too. Why did you choose Hollywood as the setting?

I started writing the book when I lived in Hollywood. I never considered changing the location. Not to give anything away, but the bad mother of the title is Hollywood. People come here thinking, "My real and starry life will be waiting for me!" That all they have to do is show up and meet their destiny. But Hollywood does not take care of you in the ways you think it will.

Read the whole thing.

... And Then There Were Six (Books, That Is)

 Check out Dymaxicon's fall list. Will we be at Wordstock? Oh, yes.

 

Author Author

My work life has become completely about books: writing them, editing them, reviewing them (latest: A Covert Affair: The Adventures of Julia Child and Paul Child in the OSS, by Jennet Conant), reading them (currently, Erik Larson's In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin, which is spectacular), and doing research for the next two books of my own.

There is also time to interview authors about their work, for instance, Molly O'Neill on her latest book, One Big Table, and what's wrong with $8 bunches of organic arugula tied with twine, and why she needed to get out of "the little girls' ghetto" where cookbook writers tend to be corralled. The interview posted today, on Culinate.com, and it is one of my favorite ever. All props to Molly, for being so smart and so tart.

And then there is the author elbow-rubbing, such as last night's, with John Sayles, before his reading at Powell's from his latest novel, A Moment in the Sun.

 

Sayles and Maggie Renzi are friends of my mom's. I told her yesterday, I would be going to the reading, and she insisted I introduce myself. I told her, mom, it's going to be mobbed; I am not going to bother them. And then I walked in and Sayles was standing right there, so I did, and he was very nice, and Maggie put her arms around me and said, "We've heard so much about you," and insisted a photo be taken of she and I, to post on the blog for the book and their latest film, AMIGO.

"Now you and John," Maggie said, and scooted us together, making me as you can see very happy, and prompting a woman in the audience to ask, "Are you one of the actresses in his movies?"

 

 

"The Bad Mother" vs: a Bad Mother

Cross-posted at LA Observed

Most writers have someone to whom they show their works in progress. Mine is Victoria, the lady that works the cash register at the donut shop. Victoria is maybe 5-foot-nothing in the 6-inch mules I have never not seen her tottering on behind the counter. She is also always, by seven in the morning, in full make-up, her processed blond hair rippling like a mermaid's to her waist. Victoria and her husband, who makes the donuts, moved to Portland from Mexico; they have seven children and own three businesses and work seemingly all the time. Despite this, Victoria is perennially cheery and a big reader, something I learned when I used to pick up the donuts every morning for my husband's coffee business.

As wives will do, we discussed our lives. When Victoria learned I was a writer, she asked to see some things I had written. I brought her two features I wrote for the LA Weekly. When I stopped in a few days later, she took my hands and said, "I need more." I brought her more. And more. She wanted to see everything, she professed to love the way I wrote and the topics I chose. How can this not be the best things a writer can hear?

Two years ago next month, I began to write about Amanda Stott-Smith, after she dropped her two young children from a Portland bridge at 1:43 AM, killing her four-year son. Her seven-year-old daughter survived for an hour in the 45-degree water and essentially saved her own life by screaming so long and so loud that two residents along the river motored their boat into the darkness and found her. I knew almost immediately the writing would become a book, if not how long it would take to get members of the family to trust and speak with me.

Victoria, who I would see every two weeks when I paid the donut bill, and I talked about Amanda, about the children. She asked when the book would be out; I told her, not for years. She said, she could not wait that long. And so last December I gave her the book in progress, about sixty pages. When I next saw her, she said, "I need more." I promised her that more would be forthcoming.

It was not, not for lack of material, but because The Bad Mother, a novel I finished writing in March 2009 -- two months before Amanda dropped the children from the bridge -- was slated to be published. I found this out in late December; there was editing to do, and once it was published, in March, pushing the novel into the world, what a writer friend refers to as, "rolling that log." There was and is travel, and appearances, things one does not anticipate, or that I did not anticipate, that make you portage from one writing stream to another.

When the novel was released last month, I brought a copy to Victoria.

"My god," she said. "You wrote it so fast!" I explained, as I would wind up doing with many people, that the novel was not the book about Amanda, and that while I understood why people would, from the title, imagine it to be about a mother who drops her children from a bridge in the middle of the night, it was actually about homeless kids in Hollywood. That the confusing coincidence of the titles was just that, coincidence, and that the book about Amanda is called, "To the Bridge."

Last Thursday, I stopped into the donut shop. I had not seen Victoria for a month, as I had been out of town on readings. She was interested in these, saying, "I bet when people hear you read it, it changes their opinion about what happened."

I told her, that was true. That some people read the book and are scared of what happens to these kids and the dangers they are in. But when they hear me read it, they understand I feel only tenderness for these kids.

Victoria nodded. "You are also showing that the mother is a human being," she said. "That they didn't get the whole story in the newspapers."

Victoria had another customer, and so I had about two seconds to tell her, it was the novel I was doing readings for, not "To the Bridge." 

She looked puzzled, as though the overlaps in the stories were causing vexation, and it put me in mind of something my mother often asks: why are you always writing about dead children?

I left the donut shop thinking about this, as well a question I receive at each reading of The Bad Mother: was the novel inspired by your experiences as a journalist in Hollywood? I answer that, while it makes sense this is the case, it is not. That the characters are made up; that I have never interviewed a homeless or dying teen; that it must be the osmosis of driving through Hollywood every day for eighteen years that created the book.

I was pressing the clicker that opens my car door when I realized the genesis of the work is quite the other way: that I began writing nonfiction books and articles about murdered children after I began addressing them as fiction. That "To the Bridge," in fact, grew from The Bad Mother.

"The Bad Mother" Book Trailer

The Bad Mother from Dymaxicon on Vimeo.

Reading "The Bad Mother" at Skylight Books, April 7

We are going to file this one under "dream come true," Skylight in Los Feliz having been my local bookstore for 12 years, and many were the reading I attended, thinking, someday...

Someday is next Thursday, April 7, at 7:30 PM. Details on the Skylight Events page.

After posting the reading on Facebook, my pal and author Mark Ebner posted what's below, with the note, "Window display props @ Skylight." Wow. Please come if you can; I would love to see you xx

 

Ristretto Reading Series, "The Bad Mother" - March 30, 7 PM

Come join us for a reading of and book party for my novel, The Bad Mother, set among Hollywood's transient population of street kids.

Also joining us will be Dymaxicon publisher Hillary Johnson, to discuss what it takes to build an imprint in the new world that is publishing.

Wine graciously provided by Anne Amie Vineyards. Books will be available for sale and signing. This is my first stop on the book tour - hope to see you.

Wednesday, March 30 · 7:00pm - 9:30pm

Ristretto Roasters

3808 N. Williams Ave.

Portland, OR

This event, as are all Ristretto Reading events, is free and open to everyone.