Wednesday, August 17, 2005

From now on, all TDAOC blog posts will be authored by the fictional character "Darby", who is not me

Tingle Alley stirs up a bit of conversation about authors writing themselves into their books. There's been a clump of books that have done this lately, including Salvador Plascencia in The People of Paper, which is right now on my TBR stack.

And moving up it quickly, due to Tingle Alley's early "Yes, it's a really exciting, original, kickass book" review. I picked up The People of Paper when the McSweeney's crew came through town last weekend, based pretty much entirely on the fact that Salvador Plascencia was one of the most entertaining readers I've had the chance to see. ("And this," he said, holding up a large white card with a big black dot in the middle--and yes, this made total sense in context, "is the saddest of the punctuation marks. It's the end. It makes time stop.")

Also, Kelly Link neatly handles my comment under the Tingle Alley post in that interview I linked in the previous post. Which I'll link again here for your convenience, because I like you that much.


Darby sat back, looked at the words he'd typed, then down at the keyboard. How could he say such things? How could he imply he liked the reader that much? He wasn't even sure he had readers, let alone readers he could confirm that he liked, to any degree. Maybe everyone who read his blog was a total asshole. He didn't know. And here he was, spewing nonsense into the void. He was shaken by doubt and his shimmering, glistening sense of the tentativeness of ideas, identity.

Then he shrugged. "It's just business, baby," he said to the screen, before chugging two bottles of Jack Daniels while having sex with European supermodels.

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