January 2010
18 posts
(sing) Paperback co-ver, Paperback co-ver....
It’ll be out April 2. As you can see, Janet Maslin’s blurb gets slotted up front, and Larry David becomes first man off the bench. I’m pleased. My goal: Sell 5,000 units and score that first royalty check for (wait for it…) $2.25.
For you fans of padding....
…the folks at CNN liked my Salinger post, but needed it to be twice as long to post on their AC360 opinion blog. Luckily, I found some stuff in the storeroom….
(nice pop for EVERYTHING HURTS at the end)
Given the news at 1:07 pm today, this is...
“I wasn’t watching the game too much. What I was really hanging around for, I was trying to feel some kind of goodbye.”
So spaketh Holden Caulfield as he stood on a hill before he left Pencey Prep and set out to become the greatest literary anti-hero of the 20th Century.
I am a cliche. A lost boy born just after Eisenhower had triumphed a second time over creeping...
Not that you asked for it....
….but I did the annual New York Baseball Writers Dinner Saturday night. It was the fourth time I’ve performed there (1994, 2000, 2007), a record in the lively ball era. Here now is my alleged material. I hope you think it’s something. As always, if you get half the jokes, you are an obsessive sports fan and I’m gonna guess not happily married. If you get more than 75...
Finally, my wife, Adrianne Tolsch, lands on...
Let me know if I am officially losing my mind....
…and already posted this Q&A with the fine people at the Erma Bombeck Writers Workshop, at which I will be a keynote speaker this April.
Not political, not ideological, just history....
The first campaign I ever worked on was in the summer and fall of 1978. Scott Harshbarger, former Harvard football star and long-time assistant Attorney General, was running for District Attorney of Middlesex County in Massachusetts. He was a smart, young, appealing, no-nonsense candidate running in the Democratic primary against 19-year incumbent John Droney. Droney was basically a figurehead. He...
Your witness....
While exercising positively Zen-like restraint of...
….about the demo derby going on at NBC late night, I will instead do service and recommend a movie currently running on Showtime and available on demand. And because I promised not to recommend things like some guy selling jeans out of the trunk of his car, I will back it up with by this one-time double or nothing on-demand fee refund. You don’t like it, email me or comment, tell me...
Last minute booking: Bob and Tom Show tomorrow...
I’m sure the guy who played Squiggy fell out.
As always, I hope you’ll think it’s something.
Let's quickly elevate the discourse from the last...
….with some good wholesome American self-promotion. My latest interview, for a mighty little blog called “Up Close and Personal” that ran New Year’s Day. Some new stuff, some stuff you’ve heard.
The other newsstand was on the corner of my...
….and was one of those full, full stores with out of town and foreign newspapers and every magazine and comic book your could want. Tremendous.
Which, of course, reminds me of when I was working on the road, late 1980s. I was in Houston, headlining at the Laff Stop. The opening act was a guy from LA named Dailey Pike. A real road lifer. Old surfer type, just wanted the work. Pretty funny,...
In the last six months, two newspaper stands on my...
The one across the street from my apartment shut down in June because they are taking down half the block to put up something which I sure will go up quietly and without upheaval. It was a classic storefront manned by three guys from India whose job was to get you to buy one more thing than you needed. Whenever I would go get the News, Post and Times, the lead guy would inevitably say, “No...
So now you may have asked yourself....
“What were the other two cover ideas Bill came up with, since he said he liked the mummy thing least?”
Glad you asked. My favorite was a recreation of the famous drawing of Sisyphus, but instead of a boulder, he’s pushing a giant Vicodin up a hill. My second favorite was another recreation, the evolution of man, which would go up the cover South to North:...
So, a guy emails me, says he loved EVERYTHING...
Explain this to me, win a prize….
Apparently, one of my goals was to be even more...
…. and self-reverential, because here are some questions I answered for my entry in the new volume of CANR (Contemporary Authors New Revisions), an incredibly exclusive reference series that provides information on only 100,000 writers.
What first got you interested in writing?
My uncle, Herbert Warren Wind, wrote for Sports Illustrated and the New Yorker for 50 years (40 at the New...