Christopher Meeks's Blog
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Jun.29.2011
Perhaps the biggest touchstone in my life--though I didn't know it at the time--was when President John F. Kennedy spoke at Rice University's football stadium in Houston, Texas, in the late summer of 1962, the day before my tenth birthday. He said, "We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go...
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Jun.21.2011
Set your sites (or your DVR) for HBO during July and August (or On Demand) for the documentary Hot Coffee. It will change your perception of justice in America as well as how you sign contracts. My son and I saw it by accident at the Los Angeles Film Festival in June. We couldn’t get into Drive,...
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Jun.12.2011
I might even go farther and ask what do I want from any story? I happened to see two films this week, Terrence Malick's Palme d'Or-winning The Tree of Life and Edward Zwick's Love and Other Drugs, co-written with frequent partner Marshall Herskovitz and Charles Randolph. I liked both movies and yet...
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Jun.08.2011
Normally I'm not prompted much by blog suggestions, but I just read, "What would Shakespeare blog?" That instantly got me to thinking is the question as if Shakespeare were alive now or as if he were blogging on June 8th, 1601?
If he were alive now, would he get so wrapped up in...
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Jun.04.2011
As much as I've written about how the book industry is changing, there are changes about to happen that you may not be prepared for. First, think how much technology has shaped our lives in the last ten years. People have home movie theatres now with large flat screens and surround sound systems,...
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May.30.2011
I just finished reading Moist by Mark Haskell Smith. A friend had suggested his books, saying Smith writes funny ones as I do. I don't think of myself as a humorist, just that funny things pop out of serious situations.
The same is true in Smith's fiction as I quickly learned in the first novel I...
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May.28.2011
If you listen to NPR, you know the voice: the upbeat, inquisitive, even comical voice of science correspondent Robert Krulwich. I recently heard his story about honey bees. He explains well--as he always explains everything well--how when bees are in search of a new hive, it’s an absolute democracy...
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May.22.2011
There’s a recently installed bust of Bruce Springsteen in Asbury Park, New Jersey, that’s getting the wrong kind of attention. That’s because the bust is just garish. The concrete statuary has a red bandana painted on it, and if people don’t know who he is, the placard says he’s a “soulful...
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May.16.2011
In doing research for the post I put up yesterday on “How to Market Your Book or Watch It Die,” I came across the name Seth Godin a few times, and I’d heard of him before. He’s worth knowing.
He’s a futurist in ways that remind me of Alvin Toffler (remember 1970’s Future Shock?—we’re in that...
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May.15.2011
Today is my new novel's publishing day, so I thought I'd write about the marketing it took to get here.
I won’t bullshit you. The publishing industry is changing fast, and what to do is confusing. Like a bar magnet, the industry has two strong poles: traditional publishing and self-publishing. If...
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Apr.18.2011
This is a story about book returns. It's also a story about the bookstore system and what's not working. You'll also hear how success can crush the self-publisher.
It's not my story. I didn't go bankrupt--but I could have. What I aim to do here is tell you my experience of publishing well-...
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Apr.05.2011
Think of a great literary novel that has science or a scientist as background. I'm not talking science fiction, but rather a contemporary novel where, say, the protagonist is in search of love, and rather than his being a boarding school student as in Catcher in the Rye or an architect as in The...
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Apr.01.2011
Wednesday night: My daughter's Siamese Fighting Fish, Sammy, is dead.
She's had the exotic fish with its curtain-like fins for nearly three years--bought it when she was ten. The fish has been rather lethargic for two weeks. Then again, yesterday, it zipped all over its little bowl, more than I'...
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Mar.20.2011
Long ago, I'd read The Laughing Policeman, a great novel by Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö, Swedish journalists who married and started writing great crime fiction together. Later the book became a movie starring Walter Mathau. Thus, when Stieg Larsson, another Swedish journalist, came along with The...
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Mar.13.2011
I swear, what you see in Las Vegas can't stay there--you have to talk about it. Or at least I do. My wife Ann and I took a trip there right at the end of the year, and its pleasures and oddities have been on my mind. It's as if Las Vegas is our country's canary in a coal mine, and we have to watch...
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'Love At Absolute Zero' is a gift--and one of the many that continue to emerge from the pen and mind and brilliant trait for finding the humor in life that makes him so genuinely fine a writer.”
—Critic Grady Harp, Top-Ten Amazon reviewer
About Christopher
Christopher Meeks writes short fiction and novels. His book of short stories, The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea earned great reviews including the Los Angeles Times ("poignant and wise") and a blurb in Entertainment Weekly that said, "A...
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