Texas Book Festival Post-Game Wrap-Up....
Back ensconsed in the house, done with football for the day (I heard the Fox “Favre Cam” got punched out in a Green Bay bar for staring at a girl in a Donald Driver jersey….) and over the back-from-the-road pass-out nap. So, here goes….
This is a big deal, this Texas Book Festival. It is the biggest book festival in the country. I was one of over 200 authors, but was mercifully not on a panel. It was just a one-on-one interview. The moderator, Will Clarke, a fine comic novelist, did an amazing job. Not once, not once, did he steer the discussion to his work or his process, which may get him kick out of the author moderators union. Wonderful, engaging guy. Cannot wait to read some of his stuff.
As I may have said before, expectations are just resentments waiting to happen. So, I keep mine real low. I was looking for 20 people to show and hoping to sell 5 books. Well, we had over 100 in the house and I sold a couple dozen copies of EVERYTHING HURTS.
Many wonderful moments during the interview, but I’ll mention three. The event was held in the capital building in Austin in one of committee rooms, so it had all the trappings of a steroid hearing. In front of Will and myself, we had a young woman doing ASL. Early on, I had to ask her what the sign was for “Jew.” She made a motion in front of her chin like a long beard. So, of course, later on, she was trying to capture my histrionics for the hard of hearing in the audience, I said, ”I know it’s tough to do, because I’m a…and I stroked in front of my chin.”
Lots of very thoughtful questions about writing and my book and the process. One brave young girl asked what I do about self-loathing. I told her to use it was fuel. If we didn’t have it, if we didn’t have such doubt, we wouldn’t be able to overcome it to create. And then I told a story about one day, when Dave said to me, “I am so full of self-loathing.” And I said, “Yeah, but you balance it so nicely with the self-pity….” Big laugh.
And in the “we always worry about the wrong thing” department, there were indeed a lot of questions about Dave and the show, but exactly ZERO about the current situation. God bless Texans and their manners. As it turns out, the last question I got was from a woman who asked if it was true that Dave paid the staff during the Writers Strike. I explained not only that, paid he paid all the expenses of the show, to the tune of $1 million a week out of pocket, and in so doing, kept six other shows off the air and that, along with getting us an interim agreement to come back to work after two months, did more to end the strike than any single person. I got very choked up as I recounted that time, and I said we would never be able to repay his generosity. I remember thinking, “Well, sure I’m crying now, but I’ll get some laughs on the next question.” And then they closed the Q+A, with me in mid-blubber. You know what? That’s fine.
The book signing was great, marred only by a photo my wonderful publicist Nettie Hartsock took of me where I had the escaped mental patient hairstyle.
Last night, I attended the authors cocktail party, and did very well for me at a cocktail party, which means I showed up and stayed. I was rewarded on my way out when Richard Russo, the Pulitzer Prize winner who had given me a glorious blurb (“How rare it is for a novel to be both hilarious and profoundly moving. In EVERYTHING HURTS, Bill Scheft is firing on all eight rumbling, throaty cylinders….” ). We saw each other, and he gave me a giant hug, turned to his wife and said, “This is Bill Scheft. He wrote the funniest book of the year.” So, that didn’t suck.
(By the way, Russo’s latest, THAT OLD CAPE MAGIC, is terrific. The man has some moves).
Okay, enough. Next week, the Detroit Jewish Book Festival. Hang on to your tzitzis!
