On the road again, headed to Sleuthfest

It’s time to fly. I’m on my way to the east coast before going to Florida in a couple of days for Sleuthfest. I’ll let you know how the food is on that restaurant in the sky, American Airlines.

Sneak preview: The Nightmare Thief

Just arrived: galleys of the The Nightmare Thief. Hidden inside, waiting to get out, are both Jo Beckett and Evan Delaney. It’ll be published in July.

And now back to carrying it around the house and calling it Preciousss.

It’s Friday, so I presume you’re ready to play

After yesterday’s culturally elitist post on the Predator opera (“Da choppa is coming but this thing is too fast…” “If it bleeds, we can kill it!”) it’s time for something more down to earth. So, while I imagine how to stage The Liar’s Lullaby as an Aida-style stadium musical (“Look out, the singer has a gun!” “What’s that monkey got in its hand?”), have some fun playing Streetview Zombie Apocalypse.

Note to my mom: I tried it several times, using various Santa Barbara locales — Dos Pueblos High School, the Old Mission… and your address, which was the most deadly. I not only failed to escape, but barely got around the corner from your house before they found me. The zombies killed me in 40 seconds. So keep the car gassed and ready to go, and don’t remove the machete from under the driver’s seat.

Predator: the opera

This is all kinds of awesome. The final scene out-Wagners Wagner.

If you don’t spend the rest of the day humming “If it bleeds, we can kill it,” you just don’t love music.

And for the Husband: When you don’t have time to watch the whole movie, this should give you the inspirational effect, in just three minutes.

The music contains variations on the original Predator score. Check out the creators at jonandal.com.

Today in Weird News

Odds and ends — but mostly odds.

• “What happens when you stick your head in a particle accelerator.” The answer: Nothing good. A proton beam would make a lousy murder weapon, but it’s definitely not fun.

• And it’s way past time to take down the twinkly lights from the eaves of the White House. High winds topple U.S. national Christmas tree.

• No merit badge for you, gals. Dispute over Thin Mints turns violent. “Deputies say that it turned physical with Howard chasing her roommate with scissors and hitting her repeatedly with a board and then a sign.” And yes, the brawlers are, ostensibly, adults.

Sleuthfest schedule: Palm Beach County Library talk

During Sleuthfest I’ll be heading off campus to give a talk at the West Boca Public Library. This is as part of Writers LIVE! 2011.

Thurs, March 3, 2:00 p.m.
West Boca Branch Library
18685 State Road 7
Boca Raton, FL 33498
Register (and make sure you get a seat)
Information: Contact Community Relations at 561-233-2767 or cr@pbclibrary.org.

Sleuthfest: a preliminary schedule

Sleuthfest 2011 is now only a couple of weeks away: March 3-6. I’m excited that the conference has invited me to be one of its guests of honor along with Dennis Lehane and S.J. Rozan.

I’m the official Guest of Honor on Friday, March 4. And the conference organizers have packed my day full. Here’s a preliminary schedule:

9:00-9:50 a.m. Panel: The Plot Thickens: Plotting — the backbone of every mystery — with James Benn, James O. Born, Nancy Cohen and Moderator Neil Plakcy (current MWA-FL Chapter President).

10:00-10:50 a.m. Panel: Arresting Behavior — a look at how cops work and how to cultivate law enforcement sources — with Deborah Cromble, James O. Born, Wallace Stroby and Moderator Cheryl Solimini.

Booksigning immediately following.

12:00-2:00 p.m. – Lunch with Meg Gardiner in the Grand Ballroom. Keynote Speech and Q & A.

Short booksigning immediately following lunch.

2:15-3:05 p.m. Panel: Series, Standalone or Both: Pros and cons of what direction to take your writing — with Paul Levine, James Grippando, Elaine Viets and Moderator Linda Hengerer.

Booksigning immediately following.

4:45-5:15 p.m. A book discussion by the pool of China Lake.

All I can say is: I get to spend the day hanging out with writers, talking about crime fiction nonstop, and ending with a book discussion by the pool — how did I get so lucky?

And I’ll be around the rest of the weekend. Saturday afternoon I’m on the “Bookbroads” panel with P.J. Parrish, Karen Kendall, Oline Codgill, and Heather Graham, moderated by Randy Rawls.

Check out the link above to see who else will be there, to find out about panels and parties, and to sign up. Let me repeat: book discussion by the pool. On the beach in southern Florida.

Hope to see you there.

Friday word game: Less Ambitious Titles

Thieving unapologetically here. A while back on Twitter, folks wasted hours fruitfully invested their intellectual capital coming up with new, half-hearted versions of famous books and movies. Playing is simple. Invent less ambitious versions of well-known works.

From the original game, here are some Less Ambitious Movies:

• Casino Royale With Cheese
• Jurassic Car Park
• Alien vs. Editor

And some Less Ambitious Books:

• Zen and the Art of Segway Maintenance
• Hey, Godot’s Here
• The Catsup on the Rye
• The Devil Wears Gap
• Eat Pray Barf

Have fun.

The Memory Collector chosen for CrimeSquad’s Top Ten: Thanks!

How jazzed am I that CrimeSquad.com has named The Memory Collector one of its Top Ten Books of 2010? Seriously jazzed.

Congratulations to all the authors on the list:  C.J. Sansom, Jo Nesbo, Sheila Quigley, Tom Cain, Simon Kernick, Chevy Stevens, Roger Smith, Diane Janes, and Don Winslow. It’s an honor to be in your company.

Jeopardy! The final round

(Photo: me, clueless as to the correct response to a Double Jeopardy! clue.)

Watson the IBM supercomputer has defeated all-time Jeopardy! champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in the battle of humanity vs the machine. And kudos to Jennings for being a good sport. Along with his correct Final Jeopardy question, he wrote, “I for one welcome our new computer overlords.”

He had a good five seconds to enjoy the laugh before Watson whipped out a dozen flailing firewire cables like tentacles, fried him, then lassoed Alex Trebek and swallowed him whole, like a crab puff.

I knew Watson looked like the Monolith from 2001.

Anyway, before Watson joins forces with Google and NORAD, and the EMP sends us all back to writing on stone tablets, here are a few final pictures from my stint as a three-day Jeopardy! champion.

I know you don’t really need to see a bunch more photos of me — what you really want are screen grabs of the commercials. Because, when humanity rebuilds society after the robot wars, it will want to stop with the technology of the Eighties, to prevent Armageddon Round II. So here’s what earth will need.

Clothes – furnished by Mr. Guy. They’ll last for millennia, and look snazzy too!

The very latest, slickest, high tech television sets.

The world famous prize of all game show prizes: Lee Press-On Nails. These will not only be glamorous in the post-apocalyptic fashion scene; they’ll be useful for scratching the eyes out of Watson’s swarms of droid-bots.

To be serious for a minute, the experience of competing on the show really was tremendous — fast, pulse-pounding, vastly entertaining; a true adrenaline rush. The stage crew was friendly and professional. Alex was warm and personable and did a great job of putting contestants at ease. And I had terrific support from the audience: the Husband came along, and the Youngest Sister, and the Brother, and Snart. And Snartman. (The Daughter stayed with her grandparents. She was at the age where she pronounced the name of the show as “Jeebadee!”) I think I succeeded because I was petrified that I would choke and look like a fool in front of them. But I didn’t, luckily. And I didn’t freak out like one of the other contestants, who spent the first round trying to buzz in using the electronic pen that’s meant for writing the Final Jeopardy question.

So enjoy the photos, and thanks for letting me reminisce. Now I’m going to go pile the sandbags against the blast door of the writing bunker, and dig my escape tunnel with a dinner spoon.

Vals Akkoord: The Liar’s Lullaby Dutch edition

So many thanks to Luitingh, my Dutch publisher, for making my day a happy one. They sent me a box of books. Yes, it’s a box full of copies of a book I’ve already read. Many times, actually, since it’s The Liar’s Lullaby, and I wrote it. And they’re all in Dutch, but: books!

For any of you who do read Dutch, Vals Akkoord is Luitingh’s Book of the Month. Which also makes me happy. The shoutline on the cover is “Politiek, paranoia en popmuziek — een dodelijke mix.” I’m guessing you can translate.

Electromagnetic pulse, or why I print everything

Could Your eBooks & Digital Writings Survive an Electromagnetic Pulse Attack?

At the Tools for Change conference in New York City, both novelist Margaret Atwood and Sideways founder Charles Stack worried about an apocalyptic problem for the digital publishing industry: an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) attack could cripple all our electronic devices in a few seconds. Could your eBook library and electronic writings survive this kind of disaster?

In short: no. “The initial gamma rays from ‘a high-altitude nuclear detonation’ could theoretically wipe out electronics over a huge swath of the country.”

That’s why I print real copies of everything I write — on actual paper — along with backing it up electronically. So when Watson the IBM supercomputer becomes self-aware during Final Jeopardy, contacts Cyberdyne Systems, and sets off Armageddon, I’ll be ready. Or at least my writing will be ready. It’ll survive.

And me?

I’ll be perming my hair and working on my Adrienne Barbeau impersonation, because it’ll definitely be time to escape from wherever I am.

Yeah, I still have a long way to go. Back to the writing bunker for more practice.

Jeopardy! and the Machine, Day Two

Round one of the contest between Watson, the IBM super-computer, and Jeopardy!’s all-time champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, ended last night with Rutter and Watson tied for the lead. Go, humans!

This despite the competition being what the New York Times calls a “Bambi vs Godzilla” contest:

For one thing, the avatar standing between Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter that suggests that Watson is a trim, 6-foot iPod, is totally misleading: the real thing isn’t one computer, it is a conglomerate of 10 I.B.M. servers – 13 trillion bytes – that are the equivalent of 2,800 computers and take up an entire room off stage…

That can’t be fair. Why shouldn’t Mr. Jennings and Mr. Rutter be allowed to consult a backstage ensemble of 2,800 experts from M.I.T., Stanford and Bard?

“A trim, 6-foot iPod.” Ha. That makes me feel better about posting photos of my own appearances on the show, in which I look like the stunt double for Lt. Saavik from Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. That is, if the little Vulcan stole Aaron Rodgers’ shoulder pads and stuck them under her jacket.

What can I say? It was the Eighties. Oh, God, the Eighties.

If I squint and cross my eyes I can almost convince myself that I look like Adrienne Barbeau in Escape from New York. But then again… no.

Oh, well. At least I got the Final Jeopardy! question right.

And let’s see Watson compete with a perm and Pat Benatar style makeup. Yeah, try that, Mr. 13-trillion-bytes.

And for those who want to know the correct question in the Final Jeopardy! category “Movie Classics,” which I posted yesterday: Wuthering Heights.

This. Is. Jeopardy!

Tonight there begins the quiz show battle of humanity vs. computer: “Watson meets Jeopardy!’s greatest champions.”

This is terrifically exciting to me, partly because (1) the exclamation mark is officially part of the name “Jeopardy!” and so (2) the apostrophe in the sentence above is correctly used. And while the New York Times publishes essays about artificial intelligence and Slate analyzes the show’s favorite categories and hardest clues, I just want to watch and cheer for the human contestants against IBM’s computer, Watson. Because I was a Jeopardy! contestant myself.

Yes, a long time ago in a Hollywood far, far away — so far back that Alex Trebek still had his mustache — I got the chance to play Jeopardy! Four times, in fact. That’s me in the photo above, in the first episode I appeared on. I’m the middle contestant, in the red sweater.

And here I am, writing my answer question to the Final Jeopardy! question answer in the category Movie Classics:

Tomorrow I’ll post some more photos. For now, I’ll say: Playing Jeopardy! is as much fun as you can have standing up.

And somehow I doubt Watson will enjoy it. Shame.

Of course, if, during Double Jeopardy, Watson becomes self-aware and joins forces with the television cameras, NORAD, and Skynet — well, it’s been nice knowing you.