Transition phase

Moving from one project to another, plus my weekly shareables: A con artist in supermax, a dog rescuer who needed rescuing, and BLAZING SADDLES turns 50

This week I had a delightful Instagram Live chat with the Bariatric Book Club, made up of people who have either had weight-loss surgery or are considering it. They had chosen THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM as their book of the month. Before the chat, I had to re-read parts of it to remember what I wrote.

Writing is piecework. Sometimes it’s a quick thing you turn out in half an hour; other times it’s a major project that takes years. But you’re always moving from one thing to the next. As you possibly might have gathered by now, I have a new book coming out—oh, hell, today is March 1, which means DOGLAND will be out NEXT MONTH. Only a few weeks left to preorder through Park Road Books so you can get me to inscribe your copy(ies) any way you like!

Where were we? Oh, yes, piecework. I’ve been so immersed in DOGLAND these last few years that ELEPHANT feels like a part of the distant past (not the topic itself, just the book part of it). It’s been just over five years since it came out. So much of my career was (and sometimes still is) cranking out daily journalism, so five years feels like eons ago. The cool part is that every week, folks like the Bariatric Book Club are finding ELEPHANT for the first time. Talking to new readers about it refreshes it in my mind, too. It’s like taking an old jacket out of the closet and trying it on again.

(Here’s something that happens a couple of times a year: Somebody will send me a kind email about a column I wrote for the newspaper years before … and I will have no memory of having written it. I’ll have to go look it up to find out what, for example, 1999 me was thinking about.)

This is going to sound weird, but I hadn’t thought much until recently about being someone who has written two books. I wrote a book, and then I wrote another one, but I never inserted the equals sign. It was just the other night, when I was putting a few galleys of DOGLAND on the shelf next to my desk, that I realized I had never held it in my hands next to ELEPHANT. That’s when I took the picture at the top of this newsletter. I never knew if I’d write one book in my life, much less two. It’s important for me to remember that, and appreciate it, no matter how many copies they sell.

I hope you saw the announcement of my book tour launch in Charlotte on DOGLAND’s pub day, April 23. More tour dates are in the hopper, and I’m also getting lots of requests for interviews and such. It’s always busy here at the Shed, but it’s about to get really busy. (To request an event or interview, contact Rhina Garcia at rhina.garcia@simonandschuster.com.)

I also got a package in the mail Thursday that I can’t wait to share with you—I just need to think about the best way to do it properly. That’s coming very soon. As always, I’ll be breaking any news about the book right here in the newsletter. And I’ll be doing some special perks for paid subscribers. So now’s the time to get on board!

10 things I wanted to share this week:

1. My guest on SOUTHBOUND this week was Kindred Motes, an Alabama native who works in the field of corporate social responsibility—and guides some of those corporate resources to underserved people and places in the South. We also talk biscuits.

2. My weekly for WFAE was about Charlotte making the wrong kind of weather history.

3. The story that fascinated me the most this week: The federal prisoner who is such a skilled con man that he’s under even more restrictions than El Chapo. (Westword)

4. Great, dogged reporting from NPR’s Dara Kerr on a tech billionaire buying up huge chunks of land in Hawaii … and getting huffy when Kerr tries to find out why. (NPR)

5. DOG NEWS: From now until DOGLAND comes out, I’m devoting this slot to dog stories. This week, one of the best stories I’ve featured in this slot: A rescue dog saved him. So he saves rescue dogs. (NYT)

6. A tribute to Donald Featherstone, who created a work of art everyone knows—and most of us, at one time or another, have owned. (Art Dogs)

7. The brilliant Joel Anderson on the ripple effect that is bound to happen when legal sports betting in America becomes commonplace. (Slate)

8. RIP Ole Anderson, one of the original Four Horsemen of NWA wrestling, and a legendary tough guy both in character and in real life: Among other things, he survived being stabbed by a fan after a match. (NYT, Mid-Atlantic Gateway)

9. Hat tip to Austin Kleon for posting Sarah Moss’ elegant three-paragraph story on watching Shakespeare with her son. (Granta)

10. It’s the 50th anniversary of BLAZING SADDLES, my second-favorite comedy of all time (just a hair behind TOOTSIE) and a movie that would have a very hard time getting made today. A few of the jokes I laughed at as a teenager make me cringe today, but man, are the best parts still great. Here’s the fabulous Slim Pickens:
    

    
    

    Have a great week, everybody.