HERE I'LL POST my schedule of book signings and other events that you may find of interest.

------------------

FEBRUARY 2008

Well, I'm guilty. The worst of it is, I'm guilty of a sin that didn't even exist a couple of decades ago, but I believe has now become one of the most frequently committed sins of this new era. That sin is website neglect, rising almost to the level of abuse. I know I'm guilty, and I know I'll fall again, but I would like to try to get myself, at least for a time,
straight with the lords of cyberspace.

Who would be the only ones to know how long it's been since I updated this domain. From the number of Current Events appearing here, you'd think this was the History Channel. Have I been nowhere? Have I done nothing?

Well, earlier this month we spent a week in Chiapas, the southernmost state of Mexico, to look at the Mayan ruins, to speak of neglected sites. (The Mayans we saw there didn't look at all guilty. It must be cultural.) Last October we went to London to watch the dollar die, and while there met with my new British publisher, Quercus, and my perennial British (and much of the world) agent, Andrew Nurnberg, and to attend the book publication party for SELECTIVE MEMORY, the memoir by our old friend, Katharine Whitehorn, longtime columnist for the London Observer. Going back even further, last September I attended my last meeting of the Council of the Writers Guild of America East, a body I'd been on for twenty-some years, including through the '88 strike. I was out just before this strike, but the decision had been made months before and was not a case of ducking a fight. When the Board discussions, a year ago, began to center on mobisodes and webisodes I knew it was time to retire to the OJ.

I think that's as far down memory lane as we need go. In print at the moment are Richard Stark's ASK THE PARROT and my own WHAT'S SO FUNNY?, both now in paperback. I believe the four Samuel Holt books, originally by Samuel Holt but more recently commandeered by me in a naked power grab, are also in print, also in paperback. In April, Richard Stark's DIRTY MONEY, concluding the trilogy I didn't know was going to be a trilogy until I did it (always know where you're going and what you're doing, is my advice), will be published in hardcover. At the moment I am working, far too slowly, on what happens to John Dortmunder and friends when they become the subjects of a reality show. GET REAL! it's called, and I sure hope that fad isn't over before the book is published.

Oh, and speaking of publishing, my publisher is no longer Warner Books, though the personnel remains the same. Everybody named Warner got together and sold the publishing company, which then had to have a new name. I believe the new owner is a duty-free shop somewhere in eastern Europe, but the new name of the company is Grand Central Publishing (part of the Hachette conglomerate.) In New York I say to cabbies a lot, "Grand Central," and so far not one of them has asked me if I mean my publisher. I guess it'll take a little time.