Here is the first book I published, Pot Planet, from Grove Atlantic in New York. The New Yorker called it “gimlet-eyed and often hilarious.” Since a book can’t have eyes, they must have been talking about me. These days I’m more like weary-eyed and occasionally hilarious. For this book I got to travel to twelve countries around the world and hang out with marijuana users, growers, and activists. A dream trip! Pot Planet was a bestseller in Britain. Did pretty well in North America too, despite the hideous cover.
Here’s the British cover, marginally friendlier…
Next up we have Me, Chi, and Bruce Lee, which was called just Bruce Lee and Me in Britain. The publisher seemed to think that by putting Bruce Lee in the title it would sell itself. Wrong! The Canadian title was longer…
And the American subtitle got ridiculously long…
Me, Chi and Bruce Lee got good reviews, but it tanked. By then we had the daughter, and pretty soon a son was on the way. Someone had to stay home and look after em. Stay-at-home dad writing fiction?? Loads of guys would kill for a gig like that. Here’s what I produced between diaper changes….
A big time Hollywood agent heard about it, loved it, told me it was going to make us high six figures, and sent it out to twenty big time producers and people like Tom Hanks. He had a spreadsheet all set up to track the coming bidding war, and then, crickets. The only nibble was the guy who produced Fight Club. It was a lesson in don’t count your chickens, because my literary agent couldn’t sell the damn book either. Hard to believe, because to me it’s middlebrow escapism at its finest. Eventually I got my crap together to put in up on Amazon myself, where to this day, it spins and spins in a lonely, never-ending eddy of yet another sleepy internet backwater…
Next up we have A Lady Under Siege. Awesome romance novel with a slacker protagonist and characters connecting across time through dreams. Again middlebrow escapism and a lot of people, women especially, really enjoyed it. Men too, and they didn’t think of it as a romance novel. That got me thinking, it’s really a romance novel for men, so I changed the name and the cover, and the ending, and came up All the Romance A Man Can Stomach…
Love the duct tape on the spine. That was my friend Jane Ryder’s idea. The painting is Judith Slaying Holofernes, by the female Italian painter Artimesia Gentileschi, which features in the story.
Then I wrote a book called Stag, and decided to take it on a book tour. Stag is an unapologetically male book, in fact the subtitle is A Novel for Guys Who Haven’t Read a Novel in Years. Now a book reading or signing is unlikely to attract too many guys who haven’t read a novel in years, so I figured I needed to resurrect A Lady Under Siege, and maybe some women would come out, and buy that book, and maybe buy Stag for their literarily wary husbands, boyfriends, fathers, sons, whatever, So I redid Lady Under Seige with a new cover, which turned out pretty sweet.
As for Stag, it looks like this. Love Stag! Cover design and artwork by the late great Troy “Bubba” Cook of Fernie, BC. You can read about my book tour stop in Fernie on the Book Tour page of this website.
Last but not least, The Thousand Year Manifesto. Not published yet…
