Steven Hall: The Road Blog

Steven Hall

Steven Hall, author of The Raw Shark Texts (Canongate), an April Book Sense Pick, provides an entertaining look at his experiences on a cross-country promotional tour.

Friday, April 27

After a week on the road, my Raw Shark tour brings me back to the U.S. and to L.A. -- a city I've never visited before. And what a beautiful, warm, and sunny city it is!

Previous stops have included Amsterdam and Toronto, and a week of gain an hour, lose five hours, lose three hours finally started to catch up with me last night. I'm finding that jetlag affects me in two ways:

1. A two second delay between somebody saying something and my brain understanding it.
2. A sense that everything has been lightly dusted with a sense of the surreal.

While working hard to combat Effect No.1 during my reading at the very friendly and very cool Skylight Books last night, Effect No. 2 snuck up and caught me completely by surprise. One of the principle characters in The Raw Shark Texts is a fat, ginger cat named Ian. It's probably fair to say that he has a touch of the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland about him. Anyway, as I stood at the mike reading from my book, I looked up and into the audience to see a very similar fat ginger cat sitting happily on one listener's knee. The man was stroking the cat absently. No one else seemed to notice. No one else seemed to think a cat at a book reading was strange. I looked down at the book again and tried not to spin out. When I looked up again, the cat was gone. My lagging brain couldn't decide if this was better or worse than the cat still being there.

Later, during questions and answers, the ginger cat reappeared and strolled casually past me. I realized the cat didn't have a tail. That really was a bridge too far. I took a big risk and asked if anyone else had seen a ginger cat without a tail just go past. Luckily, people had. The cat was 100 percent real. She lives at Skylight Books and she's called Lucy. And very nice she is too. Phew.

I'm hugely grateful to the great Mark Z. Danielewski, author of House of Leaves and Only Revolutions, for sending two boxes of very tasty beer down to the event. Not only was that a really kind and generous thing to do for the new kid in town, but it also really helped to take the edge off "the cat incident."

Only, now I'm wondering how long I'll be on the road before I start to see the shark ...

Saturday, April 28

Yesterday was that rarest of things on a book tour -- a free day. And we really, really needed it. It was a day of sitting by the pool at our hotel, staring into space and feeling a little bit out of sorts. I'm beginning to suspect that I don't cope all that well with jetlag, although no characters from my novel made an appearance today. That was a step in the right direction...

I'm afraid I only have a million little, domestic things to report. We figured out the laundry service, had to get a man to come and open the hotel safe when it went wrong, wandered around Westwood and had some Mexican food. All that stuff. All in all not a great blog day, but the kind of day that'll make sure I can keep going forward in the weeks ahead.

Oh, and I met with my film agent and talked about some very cool and exciting Hollywood things, but those are all a secret, for now... ;)

Sunday, April 29

After maybe 12 hours sleep, I was so happy to see that the world had finally returned to normal. Saturday was a great day and another mostly free one. We really wanted to get out to see the sights of L.A. but -- as we didn't have a car and didn't particularly [relish] taking a crash course in driving on the other side of the road in such a busy city -- we were sort of stuck. Luckily, my very cool and generous MySpace friend, Mike came to the rescue.

Mike picked Charlotte and me up from our hotel, and we drove down to Venice Beach, where we spent a very enjoyable few hours watching the world go by outside a bar. Just what the doctor ordered, as they say. Thanks Mike!

We tried to explain to Mike about how different beaches are in the U.K. (they're barely the same species), and Mike in return told us lots of interesting stuff about the Hollywood film industry, where he works. I think we got the better deal there.

In the late afternoon I had another great meeting that I'm not going to write about just yet (I know, I know -- I'm leaving out all the best bits. Sorry!), but it made me very excited about my options in the future. Watch this space...

In the evening we went to the L.A. Times party at Susan Salter Reynolds house, and what an amazing green, winding, and tree-surrounded house it is too. I'd love a house like that one day. Anyway, lots of fun was had (and a few beers drunk), and I got the chance to thank Susan for the fantastic review of Raw Shark she wrote a couple of weeks ago.

Charlotte and I both managed to show rare restraint at the party and were back at the hotel before midnight. I had a panel discussion at the L.A. Times Festival of Books at 11.30 on Sunday morning. Things like that don't usually stop us though, so we were both impressed and a little surprised at ourselves. And then we worried for a while that we might be growing up.

Monday, April 30

I actually did some book-related stuff on Sunday (*gasp*). I was on a panel at the L.A. Times Festival of Books with Eric Jerome Dickey, Mark Haskell Smith, and Dick Lochte. We were talking about blurring the lines between genre and mainstream fiction and, as all three of those guys turned out to be really funny people, it was a great way to spend an hour. We had a great audience and lively audience (thanks for that if you were there!) and I think a good time was had by all. I had a good time, anyway. The high point in the proceedings had to be when someone asked if we had any advice for "expiring writers." I'm not sure if the gag was intentional or not, but it went down a storm.

And then it was time to move on.

Charlotte and I packed up our cases and headed for the airport, next stop -- San Francisco. It wasn't a good journey all things considered. The plane did some pretty scary roller-coaster impressions; we stood for ages at the wrong luggage carousel until we eventually found our bags on an otherwise empty conveyer belt at the other side of the hall; and our taxi driver seemed to think he was attacking the Death Star in Star Wars. It was only when we'd checked into our hotel and were trying to relax after the trip that I realized I'd left the bag with my laptop, digital camera, and ipod in the cab. It's fair to say we felt pretty miserable.

And then, at 2:00 a.m., the front desk rang. The taxi driver had seen my bag, remembered where he'd dropped us off, and brought me my bag back. Almost $3k of electronics, and the guy brought it back. Even if it puts me in mortal danger, I'll never judge a person by their driving again.

Tuesday, May 1

A photo shoot and a couple of interviews took up most of my day on Monday. This was a proper photo shoot too -- we had a backdrop, a couple of those big umbrellas with foil on the inside and everything. The photographer, Michelle McCarron, was from the relaxed do-what-you-want-and-we'll-go-from-there school, which I like a lot (as opposed to the Austin Powers no, 'yes, no, more more more', bend-you-grab-you-and-fold-you-around school). I've seen the shots, and they're really great. Now I just need to persuade my publisher to buy a couple for the Raw Shark paperback...

While I spent the day doing book things, Charlotte headed out to explore San Francisco and came back very excited about the wonders of the city three or four hours later. I was jealous.

In the evening we headed out to The Stanford Bookstore for a reading. Wow, what an amazing place. And it is huge. A nice event and the organizers were really fantastic too -- they gave us some top tips on places to go at night in San Francisco and added to the list of "books I should" read at the back of my Raw Shark reading copy (if anyone suggests a book to me at an event, I ask them to jot it down there, so I can work my way through them when I get home).

On the Stanford organizer's recommendation, we spent the rest of the evening drinking vodka martinis in a rooftop bar on Nob Hill, looking out over the city. I think we both said "Now this is the life" quite a few times as the drinks went down. And it was too.

Wednesday, May 2

On Tuesday, Charlotte and I went to Alcatraz. It's funny how the tourist gene is more strongly activated the further you are from home. The Tower of London? I've never been, even though one of my ancestors was locked up there before being hung, drawn, quartered, and then boiled in oil for good measure. My ancestor even scratched his name into the wall of his cell. You can still see it today. And still I haven't been. But now we're in America things are very different -- I'm in tourist overdrive. I even bought myself some Alcatraz playing cards with all the rules of the prison on them. If I don't keep an eye on this, I could soon find myself wearing one of those hats with a propeller on top.

My reading on Monday night was at the wonderful Booksmith bookstore on Haight Street. I enjoyed the event and got some interesting questions (which is always nice!) and even left with a new book as a gift from the bookstore people (The Crying of Lot 49, which I haven't read -- I know, I know) and my very own author trading card made to commemorate the event. What a great idea!

After the reading we tried to go out for a beer but failed miserably because we were so tired. We decided to forgive ourselves, just this once, and go to bed early.

Watch for further installments in next week's BTW.