The Daily Bookmark

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: It's unusual for a blog to make the national news, but it happened recently when Gawker Media was forced into bankruptcy by a whopping $140 million judgement in an invasion-of-privacy case brought by Hulk Hogan. Now there's a lot of interesting background to this event, including a shadowy billionaire with a grudge who was funding lawsuits against Gawker's owner, but the upshot is that Univision bought Gawker Media's seven websites at auction earlier this week. Six of them remain, but the flagship site, Gawker.com, has closed.

Why this run down of media business? Because I am SO bummed that one of my daily stops on the internet is gone! I'd check in with Gawker every day,usually briefly in the afternoon and reading in depth in the evening. Now it's not there, I struggle with this information-age, existential blankness that has no name. It's like walking down the street to discover a smouldering hole where your favorite cafe was. Or learning that your local library has been turned into a parking lot. Sic transit gloria interrētis.

Fortunately, I still have several must-reads every day. We subscribe to three newspapers online, The New York Times, the Washington Post and the Portland Press Herald. I tend to read the first for opinion and arts, the second for politics, and the third for the gloriously wacky local news (much of it thanks to our governor, who is a choleric nut job.) Of the remaining Gawker Media sites, I love Jezebel, subtitled "Celebrity, Sex Fashion for Women." It has everything from gossip about the Kardashians and Real Housewives to investigative reporting about women in politics, campus sexual assault and income inequality. It has a strong "third wave" feminist slant that keeps me - who absorbed feminism in the seventies and early eighties - on my toes.

Also on my personal blog roll? John Scalzi's WHATEVER, which is, as its name suggests about whatever the award-winning SF author has in mind: science fiction, politics, publishing, cat pictures, ukeleles...the list goes on, and is all entertainingly well-written. On the more frivolous side, I adore home decor/home improvement blogs (you all may recall my home is 200 years old, which means at any given time, something about it needs improving.) Decor, like fashion, is very much a matter of taste, which in my case means no matter how beautiful the pictures or how well-written the prose, I'm not going to be bookmarking anything that features a boho, apartment in Brooklyn, Scandinavian modern or minimalist aesthetic. Instead, my recent faves are all about a bright Southern more-is-more look. I'm particularly enjoying 702 Park Project, about a young couple bringing back his grandparents' 1902 North Carolina foursquare house, and The Pink Clutch, written by a woman who looks a lot like me ten years ago, and prominently features bar carts and cocktail recipes among the decorating advice. My kind of gal!

How about you, Reds? What do you read while drinking your first cup of coffee, or while skimming your tablet before bedtime? What are your must-visit stops on the internet - and have you ever lost one, ala Gawker?

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Oh, I read Gawker, too! So sad... for blogs I tend to go with home design—am a fan of Decor8, Domino, and Design*Sponge. I also follow a bunch of the perfume blogs, including NowSmellThis, Bois de Jasmin, and Perfume Posse. I love it when people write about perfume—it becomes poetry in the right hands....



JULIA: Susan, I confess I have never gotten the allure, but I know several other authors who love to read and write about perfume, including MJ Rose and Denise Hamilton. On the other hand, I enjoy opera and classical music reviews, despite the popular saying that writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

HALLIE EPHRON: I never followed Gawker so I won't be missing it. I do subscribe the Boston Globe, The New York Times, and only recently since I am obsessed with this election, the Washington Post. AND the New Yorker (they send nearly daily posts which are usually excellent reads). Also the Huffington Post, even though there's  never much there that isn't covered better elsewhere. For laughs I read Tom and Lorenzo, fashion bloggers. And I follow my kids on Facebook (does that count?)

In fact, it's amazing that I have time to do anything besides read what's on the web. It's a terrible time sink.



JULIA: I read TLo too, Hallie!


HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Yeesh, this makes me feel out of it. We subscribe to papers: the Boston Globe, and the Boston Herald and The New York Times, which I read out loud to Jonathan the way to work. I get a fabulous email news briefing every day from the Washington Post, with great links, which I am addicted to, and the New Yorker daily posts.  I read TV Spy, about the news business.   And the RTNDA (radio television news directors association) daily newsletter. I follow the NYT, Wash Post and LA Times and The New Yorker and New York Magazine on Twitter, and that is surprisingly worthwhile. Hey, is Vogue on Twitter? Off to look.

JULIA: Yes it is!

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I didn't read Gawker! Now I think I've missed something great. Damn. I do read The New York Times online everyday (and paper Friday-Sunday), and now the Washington Post, because I kept hitting my limit on the political stories. I get the Dallas Morning News on paper everyday because their online format is from the dark ages. I read mostly for local news, and the editorial page. And I get all kinds of things on Flipboard everyday. I subscribe to several cooking blogs but don't usually find time to read them, and just looking at my list so far makes me wonder how I ever get anything else done. Oh, and I try to check out the UK news everyday.

I'd really love the home decor blogs.  Hmm, wonder how I can squeeze a little more in...

JULIA: How about you, dear readers? What would you recommend to us from your daily bookmarks?

On TEASER, the murder mystery

JRW: We can't resist. We want to interview our own Jan! (Here's a special photo of her.)

Teaser is out officially--today! (And here's the cover!) Congratulations. It's so scary, and such a cautionary tale. Just tell us a bit about it.

JAN: Thanks Hank! Teaser is about social networking going horribly wrong. Hallie (the fictional Hallie, my main character. Not our Hallie.) comes across a provocative video clip when she's trolling a chatroom and realizes the young teens are local. She convinces her editors that she's got a great story, a story parents need to hear. Her investigation leads her to some very dark places, and when girls start dying, it becomes a personal crusade -- especially when she loses the newspaper's support.



JRW: How did you decide to write about teenagers on-line?

JAN: Well first of all, I was a difficult teenager who did a lot of stupid things. I actually used to hitch hike just to meet guys and had to bolt from the car more than once. So I feel like I relate to teenagers and understand how easily it is for them to lie and to ignore their parent's warnings. In raising my own teenagers, I began to view the Internet as a sewer pipe, something that could pump really bad stuff into my own home.

JRW: Your four-star review from Romantic Times said TEASER could be ripped from the headlines...is it based on reality?

JAN: It was definitely inspired by two headlines. The first was in Rhode Island, when two young teenage girls posted naked pictures of themselves on MySpace. The attorney general's office did not consider this a teenage whim. These girls were prosecuted for child pornography. Also the Justin Berry series in The New York Times alerted me to how kids could get in really big trouble with a webcam.

JRW: As a parent....does it give you chills? What do you think parents don't know?

JAN: Although I know the Internet is incredibly useful, much of its traffic and revenues are driven by pornography and I think parents should understand that. There is an overwhelming U.S. demand for pornography that contributes to the internationl sex slave trade. And I think exposure all our kids are getting to pornography is changing the culture.

I think parents don't know how vulnerable teenagers are, especially around 13 and 14 years old. Or how lonely for attention or acceptance they can be.

And it was an eye opener for me to learn how adept and patient sexual predators can be at grooming kids on line. They take very small steps, the process is so incremental, it can seem non-threatening to a kid. I really don't think parents should allow teens, especially young teens, laptops behind closed doors.

JRW: This is the third Hallie Ahern mystery--was this one different to write?

JAN: It was a little different in that the teenage characters came easily to me. I didn't fuss quite as much with this book. The odd thing was I didn't think I dwelled as much on Hallie's gambling addiction in this book, but every reviewer seemed to note it more here than in earlier titles.

JRW: Your video is so...edgy. Here's the link, for anyone who hasn't seen it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJNye1b1FIM
What did you think when you met the "real" Hallie? And the "real" girls?
And hmmm....didn't we see a secret actress in one scene?

JAN: It was such a thrill to have my characters come to life. I walked around in a cloud for days afterward. And I felt strangely maternal about the actresses. I was oddly proud that Hallie was so pretty -- as if she were my daughter. They were so much my characters that I had the hardest time calling them by their real names. Jaime, Gillian and Alma. They were all terrific actresses. And about that secret actress -- I have no idea where she came from!

JRW: And now-- The BIG LIE! Tell us four things about yourself--only three can be true! And we'll try to guess which one is a lie...

JAN: Wow, I FINALLY get to play the Jungle Red game!! And you know what?? it's a lot harder than I'd imagined.

I tapped dance before an audience on stage when I was nine-months pregnant
George Harrison was my favorite Beatle
My great, great, great grandfather was a guard in the Tower of England
I'm part Native American

ON REWARDS

BLUME: Is writing easy for you?
ANGIER: No. Mostly it's a question of trying to quiet the dybbuks--all the voices that tell you you're no good, you can't do it, every kind of criticism you can come up with. You're just trying to shut them up and let yourself go.
*******Natalie Angier interviewed by Harvey Blume in The Boston Globe about her newest book "The Canon"

HANK:
(Forgive me for this before I start, okay? It's somewhat sappy and about my own book.)

I had a once in a lifetime experience this week. Really. A box, actually, two boxes, were on my front porch as I arrived home. They were too big to be my new shoes. And they were too small to be my stuff from Saks.

I know they had to be the advance author copies of PRIME TIME. I ripped the tape of the cartons, and with my (Jungle Red) manicure in jeopardy and putting myself at grave risk for papercuts, I ripped open the flaps. One. Two. And there they were, in all their sleek glory. Forty-eight gorgeous books.

(Stay with me here, I promise this has a point.)

I checked the front, great. I checked the back, great. I checked all the little extra stuff that goes in: bio, thank you page, letter to the reader. All great.
But that's not the end of the once in a lifetime.

I could not go to sleep, I was so thrilled to see the results of my two years of writing and revision, years of worry and delight and of stepping out of the TV world of facts and into the writing world of fiction. And I wondered, would anyone like it?

(Point approaching.)

So I stayed up, almost all night, reading the whole book. Pretending to be someone else, someone else who hadn't done the revisions and changes and who didn't know what I took out and someone who didn't know whether the characters turned out to be good or nefarious and who didn't know whodunnit. Someone who had never met my heroine, Charlie McNally. (I also had to be someone who presumably doesn't need any sleep, which turned out to be a mistake.)

Anyway, I loved it. I laughed. I was interested. I forgot I wrote it, sometimes. And I found things, clues, that I hadn't realized were there. I mean, "were there"--things were only "there" because I put them there, right? So how did they get there without me knowing about it?

So as Natalie (above, you've probably forgotten the quote by now) says, "it's a question of trying to quiet the dybbuks."

Thinking back. There were days, writing PT, where I admit I thought things were going along nicely. But there were certainly days I thought, you know, this ain't gonna work. Now, I see you just have to quiet the dybbuks and if they hush and you just go on, you may power through and wind up with the feeling I just did. My first book. It's real.

HALLIE:
Well, that sent me to the dictionary--dubbuk: In Jewish folklore, the wandering soul of a dead person that enters the body of a living person and controls his or her behavior.

Who knew?

Yes, Hank, it is REAL! And it is wondrous to behold and to be holding that brand new baby book. There's nothing like the first one. Not that it gets old; it just gets, well, tarnished. I'm not going there. But anyone who's interested in why no one has figured how to make money in the book business should have a look at the article in the May 13 NY Times, cover of the Sunday Business Section: "The Greatest Mystery: Making a Best Seller." Apparently book marketing is more about voo-doo than research. ("Most in the industry seem to see consumer taste as a mystery that is inevitable and even appealing, akin to the uncontrollable highs and lows of falling in love or gambling.")

I'm predicting Hank's Prime Time is going to break out because it's got such great heart, it's hilarious, and its smart-smart-smart. And because I have sprinkled good juju upon it.good juju: good energy

(HANK: Oh, Hallie. Thank you. Good ju ju is the sort of thing that comes right back to you.)

JAN:
So a dubbuk is sort of a Jewish vampire, eh? I guess every ethnic group needs its evil spirits.

I've known it as the POS syndrome. (piece of shxx - you get the picture). It's when you've been writing, agonizing, rewriting, mispelling, correcting and getting blurry eyes, and you read whatever you've just written and you say to yourself. Ye GODS! whatever made me think I could be a writer?

This is the WORST drivel I've ever read.

But later, the magic starts to happen. And especially when your book is bound, with a smart, flashy cover and looks like... well hey... this is actually a real book. Then all that drivel disappears and you can see that you weren't kidding yourself. You can write. Tell stories, and even transport readers to a suspenseful, climactic even, scene.

It's wonderful stuff! And Hank, I can't wait to read Prime Time! Enjoy the magic!

RO:
Well, the earth hasn't moved for me just yet. Somehow the uncorrected bound manuscripts I'm squinting at (is that really 5pt type??) haven't had that same effect on me, but I'll take your word for it.Is it easy? Nope. The hardest part for me is getting all the other crap out of my head and sticking with my story. I have been known to be distracted by a good looking bird outside my window. But once it's down on paper I enjoy rewriting...again...and again...and again..

HANK:
Oh, Ro. It's going to be so much fun when Pushing Up Daisies comes out and you're all glowy and bubbly (yes, even you) and we can tease you about how cynical you used to be in your uncorrected maunscript days. (Jan--your Yesterday's Fatal is just new to the stores...is it pushy to point readers to check it out? That's what friends are for, right? And it doesn't happen that often..)

I guess my point--yay! she got there!--is that sometimes we surprise ourselves.

(RO: Hank, you are just like human sunshine.)