January, 2006 Edition
Hello everyone!
Did your email system mangle |
Last week my friend invited me out to lunch on Friday. “I can’t,” I told her via email. “I have a Polish TV crew coming to my house.” She wrote me back: “OK, but that’s the ONLY time you can use that excuse…” Well, it wasn’t an excuse. For reasons I’m still not quite sure about, Polish TV decided that they needed to do a feature on me (and also on Jeffery Deaver and Owen King, Stephen’s son). They came all the way to New Hampshire to save me the trouble of going to Poland…for which I was awfully grateful, given all the traveling I’ll be doing shortly! The interviewer and his cameraman arrived late, coming to our rinky dink airport in Lebanon NH on a prop plane – the kind of flight where you fall to your knees and kiss the ground shortly after deplaning. Luckily, the interviewer spoke English. Unluckily, the cameraman did not. He was about six foot six, with a shaved head and Slavic ski-slope cheekbones. The only sentence he said to me came after he put on my mike, and sat me down in an armchair in front of his camera. He pointed up to the antique Civil War rifle hanging above the door – a relic from my husband’s family – and confided, “I like guns.” Hey, I suppose if you’re only going to know three words in English, those can get you pretty far…
Speaking of fish out of water… |
I headed back to Death Row recently to do a face to face interview with an condemned man.
I learned valuable tidbits, like how to light a match with a fluorescent light bulb, and make alcohol (drinkable) out of Purell hand sanitizer. After two hours of explaining to me how you can’t show emotion, because it’s a weakness, I was ending my interview by asking him what he would think of when he is sent to be executed. “My grandfather,” he said. “He’s in Heaven, and he’ll wait for me.” And then he began to cry. I felt like the Barbara Walters of Death Row – you can’t quite hand a guy a Kleenex through a bulletproof glass booth – but I was also deeply affected by his emotion. As it turns out, no matter how much glass is between you – not to mention life experiences -- tears make someone seem so human, so much more similar to you than they are different.
Luckily, I was sprung from Death Row…so that I can gear up for the tour for THE TENTH CIRCLE. As of pub date, March 7, I’ll be on the road again promoting it. I am delighted to report that the tour schedule is set. (Well, pretty much. There are still a few venues being decided, and events being squeezed in by booksellers who beg very well.) I hope to see a lot of you while I’m canvassing the country – not just because I’m excited, but because my publisher is awfully excited as well. We’ll be giving out t-shirts at each tour stop to five lucky winners of Jodi Trivia (start memorizing that website)… and at select locations on the west coast, someone will have a chance to win original graphic novel artwork drawn by Dustin Weaver during the event.
For those of you who want the All Jodi Network (all-jodi-all-the-time) we continue our bid for bandwith domination with the next downloadable series of podcasts.
Podcast: Big Brother Is Watching What You Read
Listen to or download Big Brother Is Watching What You Read
for an interesting commentary about what it was like, for a while, to be the author of a banned book.
» Online podcast player (Flash), or
» Mp3 format
Thanks again for reading – and make sure you check the tour schedule below to see if I’m coming to a library or bookstore near you!
For those of you that like to plan ahead, here are
tentative dates/cities for the 2006 tour :
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© 2006 Jodi Picoult
Hanover, New Hampshire
www.jodipicoult.com