⇒I interviewed Don Weise, one of the most respected publishing industry pros caught up in Perseus‘s acquisition of Avalon Publishing Group, to find out what he’d be up to next. (Months later, everyone was glad to hear of his involvement in the Open Door Project.)
⇒A few weeks before she was convicted of defrauding a Hollywood producer by pretending her fiction had been written by a twentysomething transgendered male hustler, I interviewed Laura Albert, who regretted nothing. “What happened was that somebody felt punked and decided he was going to get me for it,” she said of the hoopla surrounding her unmasking; I was informed months later that this statement was quoted during the court proceedings.
⇒Richard Schickel grumbled about blogs again, and so did Romantic Times CEO Kathryn Falk, and the argument over her complaint was a lot more entertaining, especially when she tried to rationalize it away.
—Novelist Sheila Kohler also took a swipe at blogs, but quickly came to realize the error of her ways.
⇒Maureen Johnson‘s YA novel The Bermudez Triangle scandalized a teenager’s mom in Oklahoma and led to a battle with the school board when the woman declared “homosexual content, unprotected sex, underage drinking, and reckless promiscuity are not values that belong in a school library.” (As I noted at the time, there goes the copy of Romeo & Juliet.)
⇒A used bookstore owner in Kansas City threw his inventory on the pyre as a publicity stunt for his clearance sale, and somebody actually took the bait and wrote it up for the AP.