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The research for this book was painstaking. I spent months in libraries, in newspaper archives, in idling cars, preparing to write this book. The novel, as many of you know, concerns a group of intellectuals, all at the top of their respective fields, who are selected as the judges of the Nobel Prize in Literature. As they prepare to carry out their duties, strange occurrences take place, and it becomes apparent that a mysterious writer has targeted them and intends to destroy their lives, in horrible ways, unless he is awarded the Nobel Prize.

Sometimes weird things come up. The other day, I was derailed from everything because some idiot hacked my website. So I had to deal with that (as of this writing it’s still not all fixed). The next day I got a call from Coach House, accepting my poetry book Clockfire. Two different things that needed to be dealt with right away, one bad, one good. But in both instances the writing suffers, the book loses even if I win. I get a lot of calls from telemarketers, and it drives me crazy when they interrupt my work. (It just happened as I was rewriting that sentence.)

Another random time interval, another instalment of the least regular column on virtual Earth. Today we’re going to focus on graphic novels, for absolutely no reason at all. Since Art Spiegelman’s Maus, graphic novels have steadily gained greater and greater esteem amongst the otherwise snobbish reader, and if you haven’t already it’s high time you checked a few out.

What do writers talk about when they get together? Well, in addition to their own work, they talk about money and awards (how they aren’t getting any money or awards, why money and awards therefore suck, who sold out to obtain money and awards, etc.) and then move on to discuss the things that matter to them most—books, movies, music and other artworks.

My worst public readings are those ones where people just clap and clomp away. And my best are those where people fidget, wanting to leave, wanting to fight, or wanting my phone number. But all of those stories are boring, which is why I’ve been talking about cows instead. For a period of about two months I took to spilling water on myself during every reading, which at least made things a little less predictable for the audience. But my strangest reading was both my worst and my best experience, and the tale worth telling.