What's in a name?

Faithful readers of this blog have been anxiously waiting Bagnoose Media International's new designs and, yes, new titles for the book series featuring hapless writer Tom Huttle. The wait is over, dear readers! Steven Booth of Genius Book Services--www.geniusbookservices.com--has done a wonderful job of capturing the tone of the series, which is now known as The Chronicles of Huttle. 

There are currently three books in the series: The Spy Who Loathed Me, set in 1982, introduces Tom, although he is not the central character in this story.

In Huttle We Trust, Book Two in the Chronicles, is set in the mid 1990s, and finds Tom with his wife and family in the quirky town of Echo Valley as he struggles to complete Garbage, his first book.  

Book Three, Huttle to the Rescue, occurs in the late 1990s, as Tom and his wife, Amy, are swept into various intrigues in the Middle East. 

Currently in progress is the fourth book in the Chronicles, Huttle On Fire. 

All are currently available in Paperback! Kindle, Nook, and Apple Editions coming soon! See the images to the right.  

Dinner Questions

Every year, my brother Bruce hosts a lobster feed at his lovely house in Maine. He invites only men. After eating and drinking, everyone gathers ‘round the campfire and there’s a set question for everyone to answer. One of the best questions, as legend has it, was to describe your first kiss. No, it’s not a question, but you get the idea. Around the fire, everyone’s guard is down, and people speak freely and candidly.

This summer, was my first year at the event, and I knew only Bruce and his good friend Schultz, so I felt uneasy. There were five questions this time, sent via email to Bruce ahead of time by his friend Eric. The idea was that each person would choose one question. I’ll try to recreate them, though I don’t have the originals:

1) Describe a particularly difficult repair job on an engine, when something went wrong. What did you do? 2) Does your name fit you? What does it say about you? 3) How would your oldest friend say you’ve changed over the years? 4) What do you feel when you wake up in the morning? Fear? Curiosity? Guilt? and lastly, 5) Why do you think you made good money? Was it hard work? Lucky timing? Just dumb luck? Did the gods play a role?

When I read the questions I felt more uneasy still. They seemed to be largely related to business, or at real mechanically oriented people, or aimed at people, like my brother, who have made their professional marks in life. At least that’s how it seemed to me; not so now as I recall them. In any event--just call it my own insecurity--I felt my answers wouldn’t measure up. So, I decided I would just lie. That is, make up a story that answered not one but all of the questions, in order. I told Bruce what I was up to and he suggested I go last, out of deference to the others who—and here’s the irony—might feel intimidated. That wasn’t my intention, but I can see how it would seem I was showing off. And perhaps I was, but it definitely didn’t start out that way. There’s a life lesson somewhere in there, I’m sure. In any case, I had fun writing this, and bear in mind, it is not a PC story. This was addressed to a bunch of half drunk guys sitting around a campfire on a beautiful night in Maine.

1) It was 1974 or 1981. I was staying with my friend, Nick, who had a place around the Superstition Mountains in Arizona. Nick and I had worked together many times over the years, and he was the type of friend who could disappear for a few years at a time, but every time we saw each other, it was like he’d never left. I suppose he was my best friend.

Nick’s girlfriend Donna was there, and after a night of drinking and talking over old times I went to bed, and had almost drifted off to sleep when I heard the creaking of floorboards. My door opened and Donna slipped between the sheets with me.

She wasn’t there because she was cold. And no, I shouldn’t have, but I did, and when we were finished Donna said, “Take me to Mexico.”

I didn’t have any other plans. So early that morning I hotwired Nick’s 1962 Ford Town & Country station wagon, figuring he wouldn’t miss it, and soon Donna and I were headed south across the desert. We’d driven for an hour or so when the car started wheezing and chugging, then stalled. We were dead on the side of the road, a hundred miles from nowhere. Donna popped a stick of gum in her mouth. “What’s wrong?” she said.

“Wait here,” I said. Where was she gonna go?

I popped the hood, and a family of rats flew out from the air filter and headed for their new home in the saguaro. The air filter was caked with rat shit, so I spun off the wingnut and popped off the housing, then banged it on the fender to get it cleared out. As I started to put it back on, I dropped the wing nut right down the throat of the carburetor.

I stuck my finger down the hole, but the nut was just out of reach. I opened the back of the car, hoping to find a tool kit, but all I found was Donna’s hot pink travel case, and a bunch of junk: a flimsy tire iron, an old vacuum cleaner, and a hedge clipper. I cried. I cursed. Nick would wake up soon, and it wouldn’t take him long to catch up with us.

I took a look at Donna, fanning her face and loosening another button on her blouse, a little sweat glistening off of her tawny skin. She said, “Do you have any diet coke?”

God I loved her. I took another look at all the shit in the back of the car and gave the matter some thought. Then I had an idea. I clipped off the cord from the vacuum cleaner and stripped out the wires, then I wrapped them around the tire iron. Going to the engine, I hooked the wires to the battery. Now the tire iron was an electro magnet. I poked the shaft down into the throat of the carburetor—God, Donna and I were going to have a wonderful time once we got out of this heat—and snapped up the wingnut.

2) Soon we were underway. Donna sidled up to me and twirled my hair around her finger. “You know, Chris, your name really fits you.”

“How’s that?”

“Well, etymologically, Chris is derived from Christ, isn’t it?”

I told her it was.

Her lips brushed my ear as she spoke. “Christ the savior,” she said, then ran her hand up my leg. “You’re my savior,” she sighed.

3) I put my arm around her, but I was already starting to have doubts. Did I want to be this girl’s savior? How much saving did she need? I hardly knew her, and began to regret leaving with her at all. The truth is, if she hadn’t been Nick’s girlfriend I wouldn’t have. But Nick is my oldest friend, and our relationship is complicated. Back in our days as roustabouts in the Gulf of Mexico, maybe Nick would have thought of me as a savior, too, just like Donna. I pulled him off barroom floors to earn the name. But one night, he stole Sue from me, which really pissed me off. So I stole Jenny from him. He made off with Ruth, and I took Della. Then it was Sybil and Elaine and Meredith—I loved Meredith—and Joan, Leslie, Jessica, Bernadette. Amelia, another Betty, three Jennifers, two Tracys, a Monica, and on and on. Nick and I stole so many girlfriends from one another that I lost count. So, I suppose Nick would have seen me as more of a Judas by the time Donna and I drove off that night.

4) With Donna resting her head on my shoulder, I woke up the next morning in a cheap Nogales motel. I looked around and didn’t recognize the place and my heart pounded with fear. Then, as my eyes adjusted to the gloom, fear gave way to curiosity. Why was there a cheesy black velvet portrait of Jesus on the wall? Who the fuck drained a fifth of Jack Daniels? Who hung their panties on the mirror?

I looked over at Donna a wave of guilt washed over me. She opened her big blue eyes and smiled. I ran my hands up and down her naked body, then between her legs, and soon, guilt had given way to passion.

5) The sun was blazing when Donna and I emerged from the room and climbed into the Town & Country. We hadn’t gone a half-mile before I heard the throaty roar of motorcycle catching up to us. I’d know the sound of that Harley Panhead anywhere, and looking in the rear view mirror I saw Nick, wearing leather pants, cowboy boots, and a white tank top, roaring up behind us, his long blond hair flowing in the wind.

He caught my eye in the rear view mirror and flipped me off. I stomped on the accelerator and wheeled the town & country onto a narrow dirt road, headed toward Mexico.

Of course, I didn’t get far. As we charged across an arroyo, the car got high centered and in seconds Nick was at the drivers door. I rolled down the window.

“You stupid shit,” he said.

I was about to respond—it wasn’t like we hadn’t had this conversation before—when I heard Donna’s voice. “Give me that motorcycle or I shoot,” she said.

I turned to see she was pointing a Walther 9mm at my head. And her grip was steady.

“Donna… what the fuck?”

“Her name’s not Donna,” Nick said. “She’s Natasha Mechenko—or at least that’s what one of her passports says—if you’d bothered to look into her travel case you’d know all her names. I’ve been tracking her for four years.”

Donna got out of the car, her pink travel case in one hand, the Walther in the other. 

Donna climbed into the saddle. The Mexican border wasn’t more than a mile.

   She gunned the engine once or twice, then clicked the bike into first. Then, in a cloud of dust, she headed down the road, her miniskirt fluttering up around her waist. I never understood why women wear thongs, but I’m glad they do.

She hadn’t gone more than a hundred yards before she lost control of the bike. No one should ever to drive a Harley wearing high heels, but more importantly they should always put the kickstand up.

Nick had drawn his weapon by that time and as we walked up to her—there was no rush; she was pinned under a six hundred pounds of iron—he explained that his long absences were times when he was on assignment: Cairo, Moscow, Helsinki, Beijing. “I thought you were a surveyor,” I said.

Nick shrugged. “It’s a good cover.”

The reward for Donna’s capture was a half-million dollars cash—good money. Other than filling out the papers and all the questions, I wouldn’t say it was hard work, JUST a lot of dumb luck and lucky timing. Maybe the gods—or at least Jesus--played a little role, too.

Dying is easy. Comedy is hard

This from a letter I sent to my brilliant son, Drew, as he started doing standup comedy in New York:

"As a kid, people always told me I was funny. In fact, I competed with my across-the-street neighbor, Bruce, to see who was funniest. We each had an audience of one. One time when I was about 9, my sister was sick and I did a little spontaneous comedy routine to make her laugh and feel better. I wanted to make people laugh for as long as I can remember. 

When I moved to LA, it took me nine years to break into TV. I made a lot of people laugh along the way, and I'd sold columns and the like, but I'd never really been a paid comedy writer until then.

So, finally, I was on staff at a sitcom. It was a big deal, and it was a blast.

Besides writing,  the primary activity of a sitcom writing staffs is eating. 

One day, we all went to a deli. Everyone was standing around the counter waiting to order, and we were all making jokes. Finally, our number comes up and we're still riffing on whatever was making us laugh that day. The guy behind the counter looks balefully at us as yet another joke is made--probably about the food. "Everyone's a comedian!" he said. 

I thought, "Yes! We really are!" It was so exciting for me to be able to own that.  

So, all of this is a long-winded way to say--as you've probably detected--that I really respect humor and the ability to make people laugh. Comedy is a weird profession: at once, it's not well-respected (there's no Academy Award for Best Comedy). However, the ability to make others laugh is one of the most desired attributes that a person can have. To be able to do it professionally is really an accomplishment, and I think that you are eminently capable of doing it, lad. I hope you're as proud of all the work you're putting into it as I am." 

It's All There

I've been taking an improv class in San Francisco, with Doug Kassel. We're working on objects. "Objects?" you say.
Here's how a typical exercise worked. We held our hands in a shape, imagining we held some object. Then, we move our hands to different positions--it becomes dancelike after a while--and let another object appear.
It probably looks strange to a bystander. But in the experience--at least for me--it verged on hallucinatory. It wasn't as though I actually saw the objects... but then again, I did. That is, outside of their lack of actual physical form, they were there.
To any artist, I don't think this seems so strange. If you're going to do a painting, it is entirely in your imagination. Or, as Michaelangelo is alleged to have said about sculpture, the form was already present in the stone; he was only chipping away the parts that were not the sculpture.
The stone, in the case of improv, is space, of course. I heard a recent Radiolab bit about the Chicago improv artists known as TJ and Dave. They do a 50-minute-long improv, five nights a week, entirely developing the characters, the story, the themes, and everything fresh. Their idea is, like Michaelangelo's, that the people and the stories are already there. As artists, they intersect with them for this brief time (though a 50-minute improv would be HARD!) and bring it to life.
I have had this experience doing improv on occasion, and working with objects added (excuse the literalness) a new dimension to this experience. The objects are already in the space. And it isn't an intellectual experience to find them. In fact, if you start to think about it, they disappear. Improv of this sort is experiential, and more than a little mysterious. As for the objects already being in the space, it got me to thinking about Dark Matter, which composes 30-something percent of the universe. The visible universe comprises only 4 percent of the universe. Dark Matter can neither be seen, nor can it be measured outside of the effects it has on things that we can see and measure: radio waves, gravitational fields, light, etc.
So, working in space, identifying and manipulating "objects" that are found there, feels a little other-worldly, as though one has entered that realm of Dark Matter. It becomes fleetingly visible when you need it, and then it recedes into whatever dimension it resides.
What does any of this have to do with writing? Quite a lot, in fact. Of course, writing fiction begins, like all art, in the imagination. A novel begins on a blank page. Like improv, you "make it up as you go along" (thank you David Byrne for putting that phrase to music in Naive Melody) but I would argue that you don't really make it up. When I'm engaged in the process of writing, it feels more like I'm watching and listening to and feeling the emotions of the characters and just writing down what happened. On a larger scale--the scale of a novel--the whole story, the interplay of the characters, and the multitude of moving parts that make up a good and compelling story, are already there, just as the objects that one uses in improv are already there, or the form of a sculpture.

Reading Scheduled!

Dear Faithful Followers:

The Marketing Department at Bagnoose Media International has done it again! They've set up a reading of The Spy Who Loathed Me near the BMI Northern California Headquarters in Montclair, California.
When: June 28, 7 p.m.
Where: A Great Good Place for Books, 6120 La Salle Avenue, Oakland, CA 94611. Tel: 510.339.8210.
What will happen? Chris Westphal will read selections from the book, the audience will revel in hilarity, and after everyone catches their breath, he will answer questions and give brief shoulder massages, if necessary.
Please come! Please tell everyone you've ever met to come!
Thanks,
Bagnoose Media International Public Relations Department

What's in a name?

Shakespeare said it best, and I quote: "Echo Valley would still be the same hilarious book if it had a different title."
Well, that may not be an exact quote, but the bard's point is well taken. At least in terms of sales, the title Echo Valley is about as exciting as the title A Book.  (In fact, for my money, A Book might be a pretty good title. "What're you getting your wife for her birthday?" "Oh, I don't know. I think I'll get her A Book." But I digress)
What is all this talk of titles and sales? Well, as a part of the vast marketing push on behalf of The Spy Who Loathed Me, our intrepid leader, Chris Westphal, found time in his busy schedule to put in an appearance at Ojai's Word Fest writing conference. He did a well-received reading from the book, ran a humor-writing workshop, and then participated in the book fair. It wasn't really a fair, to be honest. Fairs have rides, and cotton candy, and fat people eating corn dogs. This was basically just a bunch of tables covered with books for sale.
In any case, the event went pretty well. Many people stopped by the Bagnoose Media International table, which displayed copies of The Spy Who Loathed Me, and of Echo Valley. Visitors would chuckle at the title The Spy Who Loathed Me, and they'd read the jacket copy, and they'd laugh at that. Many bought the book. Then, they'd look at Echo Valley, and shrug.
After the book fair, Bagnoose Media International's Board convened at Ojai Coffee Roasting Company to discuss the event. Now, the BMI board is a stuffy, conservative lot. If you could smoke cigars at Ojai Coffee Roasting, you can bet that all of them would have lit up.
The chairman stirred his black coffee contemplatively, then looked up. "The inventory was there," he said. "The visitors came by. Yet not a single copy of Echo Valley sold." Then, he bored into Chris Westphal with icy blue eyes. "Why not?" If he'd had a moustach, he would have twisted it. Instead, he just pinched his upper lip a little.
Well, Chris Westphal does not like to be accused--even implicitly--of not making his best effort. "Oh, I touted the book, you can count on that," he said. "But the fact is this: Echo Valley is a lousy title."
The Chairman harrumphed as only a portly chairman can do. The Secretary spewed his lemonade all over the table. The Treasurer said, "This is an outrage!"
But Westphal stood his ground. "Echo Valley doesn't say anything. What's an Echo Valley? And the cover art is a disaster too, by the way."
"But what about people who've already read the book?" asked The Secretary. "If they want to refer a friend to it, well, it will no longer exist!"
Much grumbling ensued. Westphal, ever self-effacing, said, "It's not Gone with the Wind," by which he meant to indicate that sales had not been so robust that a vast fan base would be forsaken. The Board seemed to understand.
Well, that was only the beginning. Of course, over the ensuing weeks, the Marketing Department, the Sales Department, and of course the Legal Department had to get involved, each of them contributing their part to the discussion. Ultimately, consensus was reached: Echo Valley will be retitled In Huttle We Trust, and will be redesigned for a new paperback, in a style complementary to The Spy Who Loathed Me. In the annals of publishing overall, this is of course a minor development, but for a fledgling company such as Bagnoose Media International to embark on such a bold course of action bodes well for its future success.
Keep an eye out for In Huttle We Trust, and also for its sequel, at this point tentatively titled What We Talk About When We Talk About Huttle, but there is a powerful faction within the BMI Power Apparatus that is lobbying for Huttle to the Rescue.
As always, Bagnoose Media International is open to suggestions from loyal followers.

Adventures in Self Promotion

I wrote this email to the editor of the Ventura County Star:

Hi, Mr. Moore,
I'm an Ojai writer, and have been published a couple of times in the VC Star, first a Christmas essay about Santa needing a federal bailout. A year or so ago in the travel section, writing about a horseback ride into Lesotho. Now I've published a novel, and I am hoping that you'd be interested in either doing a review of the book, or an interview with me. Here's a link to the book: This is my fifth novel.http://www.amazon.com/The-Spy-Who-Loathed-Me/dp/0615767672/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1362628107&sr=8-1&keywords=the+spy+who+loathed+me.
This is my fifth novel. They're all on Amazon. I'm also a television comedy writer, with credits on Murphy Brown and Baby Talk.
I would really appreciate the coverage, and I give good interview!
Telephone, if that's faster: (I put my phone number here. I'm not going to put it in the blog.)
Thanks for your consideration.
Chris Westphal

A couple of days later I got a call from Amy Bentley, a reporter for the Star, asking me if I'd be willing to do a phone interview. Absolutely. So, Amy interviewed me for an hour and a half on Monday, and the story should appear sometime before April 6, ahead of the Ojai Word Fest, in which I'm also participating. More on that below. 

What, you may ask, is the common thread of these two momentous events? It is this: I put myself out there. Now, certainly, I could have sat at home and waited for people to call me and invite me to do readings and be the subject of newspaper interviews. I have tried that strategy in the past. It isn't very effective. In fact, it doesn't work at all. 

My participation in Word Fest worked much the same way. I saw an ad for it in the Ojai Quarterly. I thought, "You know, I could probably do a reading or something for them." I called them a few minutes later, and one thing led to another. Now I'm scheduled to do a reading on April 6, from 2:30 to 3 at the library. I'll lead a humor writing workshop from 1 to 3 on Monday the 8th, also at the library. 

Today, up in the Bay area, I stopped into a bookstore to set up a reading. I've been here a week, and they haven't tracked me down on their own, so I figured I had nothing to lose. And they do seem interested. 

I have a collection of letters to prominent authors that I'll be sending out with the book in the next couple of weeks, asking them to blurb on the book in upcoming editions. It may work. It may not. Like most things, some of it will probably work, some of it won't, and some of it will transmogrify into something else entirely. It's very rewarding when one casts one's line and hooks something, but after a while the anticipation that something may bite is an exhilarating experience in itself. You never know what you might reel in.