Expert Witness's Open Salon Blog

Expert Witness: Jonathan Lethem

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 18:10:12 -0400

As Jonathan Lethem grew into what critics like to call one of our most important novelists, he became increasingly difficult to pigeonhole; fluid across genres, Lethem's biggest books ("Motherless Brooklyn," "Fortress of Solitute") can feel like sparkling new works from a new author rather than someone you've enjoyed before. His latest, "Chronic City," with it's flashes of pot-fueled magic-realism and ripped-from-the-tabloid-headline riffs again reads as something completely different from Lethem, but no less enthralling.

"Chronic City" features one hapless Chase Insteadmen, a former child actor adrift in New York as his fiance, an astronaut, hovers above, prevented from returning to earth by an orbital minefield. He soon falls under the mad spell of Perkus Tooth, a writer and inveterate cultural critic-obsessive, who becomes friend and svengali, sharing with him his love of all things Brando and an increasing paranoia.

Lethem stopped by the Salon New York offices to speak with Salon's Kerry Lauerman about his Brooklynite critique of Manhattan, his MacArthur Genius Grant and the dark side of cultural obsession.

For an extended transcript of this interview, go here.

Expert Witness: Edmund White

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 22:10:47 -0400

Edmund White is one of the few literary giants of the gay world. "A Boy's Own Tale," his autobiographical novel about a closeted boyhood, was one of the pioneering works of gay literature, and he's also the author of "States of Desire," a seminal travelogue across pre-AIDS gay America, the co-author of "The Joy of Gay Sex," and, most recently,"City Boy," a memoir of his time in New York City during the 1960s and 70s.

White's book offers a fascinating look into New York's burgeoning gay cultural life in the years before AIDS, and the insidery world of its literary elite. During the two decades covered by the book, White encountered many of the best-known figures in American culture -- including Jasper Johns, Susan Sontag and Robert Mapplethorpe. White has also recently been the subject of a surprise denunciation by Gore Vidal -- who took offense to White's play "Terre Haute," which fictionalizes an encounter between Vidal and Oklahoma City-bomber Tim McVeigh -- in the British Times.

Thomas Rogers spoke to White in his New York apartment --about Vidal's work, the politics of same-sex marriage, and how blogs are changing literature.

With the progress that's been made on gay rights, I think that in some ways as people's lives become less defined by their sexuality, they also prefer narratives that are less defined by sexuality. Do you think there’s still a need for gay literature?

We're in this post-gay period where you can announce to everybody that you yourself are gay, and you can write books in which there are gay characters but you don't need to write exclusively about that. Your characters don't need to inhabit a ghetto anymore than you do, need to. A straight writer can write a gay novel and not worry about it, and a gay novelist can write about straight people. Michael Cunningham is a good example of someone who is out himself and has written things about gay people but he doesn't feel the need to write exclusively about gays. I mean there are tons like him among the younger writers.

If you were starting your writing career now, do you think you’d be less inclined to write about gay things?

I've written lots of things that aren't gay. Though I'm writing a novel now about a gay man and a straight man who are best friends and I follow them over three decades. That's a subject that is so obvious, and almost every gay male I know has a close straight male friend, but no one's ever written about it as far as I know. It’s amazing to me that such an obvious subject has never been treated and I think there are tons of subjects like that. I still find gay life, or the suburbs of gay life, still very interesting to write about, I mean, where are the sinister destructive gay characters?

Early on after gay liberation there was an almost Stalinist pressure on the part of gay critics and even gay readers, to write about positive role models. We were never supposed to write negative things about gays or else we were seen as collaborating with the enemy. Now I think we've gotten to the point where we could write about that ... there are a lot of subjects that I think are crying out to be touched.

A lot of your rise to literary fame in the sixties and seventies involved networking – and sometimes sleeping with – important figures in the literary world. Do you think the internet has changed the importance of that for young writers?

I think the more ways there are into literature, whether its being published in book form or in any other form, the better. There is always the danger in any society that only insiders who are privileged will have access to publication. I think whenever that system breaks down there is this sudden flourishing of talent. Maybe we’re witnessing that with the blog era.

For a transcript of the whole interview check out the full Salon story.

Expert Witness: Queen Noor

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:10:35 -0400

Queen Noor is the sort of connection between the Western and Arab worlds that only Hollywood could've dreamed up. Born as Lisa Najeeb Halaby in Washington, D.C., educated in the best American schools, she met and married the King Hussein of Jordan while working there as an architect. She soon converted to Islam, married Hussein in 1978 and ascended to that country's throne. Ever since, she's been a charming and glamorous link between worlds that too often eye each other with suspicion and concern.

She's also been a prominent spokeswoman for numerous causes, most recently as an advocate for Global Zero, an anti-nuclear proliferation group with an impressive array of world leaders behind it. As a result of her work, she was invited to last month's U.N. Security Council meeting on nuclear disarmament -- a gathering that ended with a much-lauded, unanimously approved resolution to strengthen non-proliferation.

Queen Noor spoke with Salon's Kerry Lauerman by Skype about Global Zero, Iran's pursuit of nuclear technology and President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize.

I'm most interested in hearing why the issue of nuclear disarmament is such a personal one for you.

Well it would start from childhood really, because I was a member of that generation that was periodically forced to "duck and cover" under our rickety wooden desks at elementary school in California during these Cold War nuclear attack drills. That certainly instilled an enormous fear—an existential fear—for many, many years. And that's something that was the most profound, really, memory in many respects that I have of that moment in time, at least on an emotional level. And then I became very much involved with the anti-war movement and, of course, grew up in Washington during President Kennedy's administration and was very influenced by his call to public service, very much influenced by Martin Luther King and his promotion of peaceful protest and call for social justice and equity.

When I reached the Middle East I found myself in a region that was burdened by the detritus of previous wars and ongoing conflicts, and first of all landmines – or, weapons of mass destruction in slow motion. So that was my first work with weapons of mass destruction, if you will. I became a member, one of the founding leaders, of Global Zero, a year ago. After a couple of years of preparation, this nonpartisan international initiative launched at a summit in Paris. We had 100 leaders from around the world, former heads of state, secretaries of state, national security, defense, military commanders, who had been the architects in many cases of their own country's nuclear weapons programs, and were coming together, recognizing that the dangers of increasing proliferation and the possibility of nuclear terrorism far outweighed the current value that these weapons might have had during the Cold War, and have really no longer, for almost any country on earth. So this is a passion for me because I see climate change and the proliferation of nuclear weapons as the two most serious challenges we face today.

You've talked about how there's a certain "tipping point" for nuclear weapons, after which disarmament will no longer be possible. What is that tipping point and how close to it are we now?

I can't qualify it, I'm not sure anyone can, but the experts believe we are very close to that nuclear tipping point beyond which it would be very difficult to begin to rein in the weapons and the nuclear materials that have proliferated. One of the encouraging statistics is, since the end of the Cold War 20 years ago, at least 40,000 nuclear weapons have been decommissioned or destroyed. That leaves us with another 23,000 that Global Zero's International Commission has laid out a phased, what we believe is a practical and realistic program, to reduce those in the coming 20 years. With the kind of emphasis that the international community is giving to this issue, led by the US and Russia who have 95 to 96 percent of the world's arsenals, and are committing to deep reductions, we're hoping that now a multilateral process will begin as those reductions begin. And that even the United States and Russia will follow the example—I speak for myself here now, it's not on our Global Zero mandate—will follow the example of, for example, China, whose entire arsenal is de-alerted, there's no hair trigger alert for their nuclear weapons, whereas the United States and Russia still have weapons on hair trigger alert . . .

It is our position and the position of other countries like China that once the United States and Russia show their commitment, then the other nuclear states must come on board. And the UN Security Council meeting, which I had the privilege to attend representing Global Zero the other day in New York, requested for all nations to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, to strengthen that treaty, to ensure that there are no double standards, no exceptions, and that every country in the world with nuclear weapons is disarmed.

How do you convey the threat of nuclear weapons to countries like Iran, or even Israel, who feel that maintaining some kind of nuclear arsenal is really necessary for their survival?

A country like Iran, for example, likes to believe that there is a deterrent value of having a weapon when they feel under threat from a country like the United States or Israel, countries that have previously linked them to an "axis of evil," and that being part of a very confrontational and aggressive stance towards the country. And, of course, Israel and Iran have traded very confrontational rhetoric, and Israel has bombed other countries' reactors in the past. They likely believe there is a deterrent value for the moment.

But what I consider to be most important, is that two of Iran's most significant spiritual leaders, first Khomeini in 1979, shut down the Iranian nuclear program, declaring nuclear weapons un-Islamic, because indiscriminate killing of civilians is forbidden in Islam. Khamenei, who is the current spiritual leader and ayatollah, recently reinforced, reiterated that defining of nuclear weapons as being against Islam. I very much hope that this is in fact, the most compelling reason why a country like Iran recognizes that those weapons are not only dangerous, but in fact evil.

So in Iran, I believe, yes, there is likely enormous support for the elimination of nuclear weapons. But, again, in Iran there is a very strong feeling that that needs to be in a regional context in which there is a nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction-free zone that includes Israel and the Arab states and countries like Iran. But that is something that Iran has called for, and the Arab states have called for, they've all signed on to the [Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty]. It's important that Iran fulfill its obligations under the NPT. It's very important that we encourage, as the IAEA has repeatedly and the UN Security Council and General Assembly, that Israel sign onto the NPT as well. That would do a great deal, I think, for sending signals that everyone is working in an environment of increasing trust, and that is critical to this process. . . .

And the Nobel Prize just awarded to President Obama I think is a reflection of many things in the larger global community.… It does reflect an awareness of just how important this issue is to a vast number of people around the world.

Do you correct people when they pronounce it nuke-u-ler, as opposed to nuclear?

[Laughs] I don't hear that! I have to tell you the truth, I haven't been in a situation where I've had to correct that.

Expert Witness: Matt Latimer

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 15:09:17 -0400

The fall's buzzy political read is presidential speechwriter Matt Latimer's dishy memoir of his time trying to craft words for a foundering George W. Bush's final few years in office. "Speech-less: Tales of a White House Survivor," has nabbed headlines for its depictions of Bush's clumsy handling of the emerging financial crisis, and his off-hand whacks at Sarah Palin (doubted her value on the McCain ticket almost immediately), Barack Obama (thought he was too inexperienced to govern), and Hillary Clinton (assuming she'd be the next president, Bush said, "Wait till her fat keister is sitting at this desk" -- though didn't use the word "keister")

Latimer dropped by Salon's New York office and chatted with Kerry Lauerman about the book, putting words in the mouth of the most important person in the world, the corrosive legacy of Karl Rove, and the attacks he's getting from Bush loyalists.

What was your reaction to the article by your former White House boss, William McGurn, in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, really criticizing your book, calling it kiss and tell?

I know Bill very well and it's disappointing that he did that, but after he left the White House early I was promoted to be one of the top speechwriters for the president. Some of the things he said have already been debunked on the Internet. There is a group of people who are former Bush administration officials who had a lot of power and are out of power now and don't like that. And they don't like other people who they don't feel [are] in their club, are allowed to speak. And that's just natural when you lose power.

His spin, which others are picking up, is that: "Left unmentioned is that Matt is on Mr. Rumsfeld's payroll, working on the former Defense Secretary's memoirs." That true?

I don't know if you know Donald Rumsfeld, but anyone who knows Donald Rumsfeld knows that Donald Rumsfeld is writing his own memoirs. Nobody does that for him but him.

But are you working with him?

I'm actually on the publisher's payroll, but they asked me to help him along with a number of other people get his things together, his notes together, and help him write his memoir. But I've never discussed the book with him. He's never asked about it. The only thing he ever asked me about the book was, he said, "Are you gonna dump all over my wife Joyce?" Joyce is beloved universally, and I said, "You know, I've been waiting to get even with her for five years, Mr. Secretary." But that's all we ever said about it.

I wanted to ask about was your relationship between the two men. You clearly never hit it off with Bush. Why do you think that was?

I was with Secretary Rumsfeld in a much closer relationship all the way through the Abu Ghraib scandal up to his resignation. I traveled all over the place with him. But I knew the president pretty well. I was in most of the speechwriting meetings, especially in his last year. And what I tried to do with the book was to offer people a different glimpse of these people than they'd actually seen. People want to know what's it's like to be there. I'm not writing the definitive portrait of Donald Rumsfeld or George W Bush. There'll be a million books that are going to do that, and there are different opinions about both of those people than I may have had. This is just my glimpse of it from a speechwriter's perspective.

I'm curious about the craft of speechwriting itself. You're part ventriloquist, and partly trying to get inside these guys' heads. It seems as though you were able to do that much more comfortably with Rumsfeld than with Bush. I'm curious whether there was a reason you might not have been able to connect with him.

When I got to the White House, the president's top speechwriters said that the president had learned how to write speeches at Yale, when he was a student. And the Yale way of writing speeches was, you have a very tight introduction, Point A, Point B, Point C, a peroration, and a conclusion. I didn't know what a peroration was (it was a summary). It was an organized way of writing a speech, but it was also lifeless, uninteresting, and not eloquent. I said, The president can't possibly want to have speeches like that. And they said, Well, they'd prefer a flat speech to an eloquent speech, as long as it follows this ABC rigid logic. Logic isn't quite the word, because logic isn't so bad. Basically, it's just a very simplistic way of doing a speech. When I first met with the president about a speech that I'd written, it wasn't an exchange where we thought, Let's discuss what your ideas are for the speech. It was more: Here's what we're going to do. A-B-C, this is what I want to say. At least with me, there wasn't this interaction.

The process with Rumsfeld's sounds more collaborative.

Yeah. And I also worked for Senator Kyle and it was much more collaborative too.

You write intriguingly about the way Bush speaks about himself. He's like an actor in a play complaining to the writers about his character. He says (referring to the initial financial bailout plan) "Why the hell did I support it if I didn't believe it would pass?" and later "Why did I sign onto this proposal if I don't understand what it does?" as if he were a character that someone else is writing, manipulating. Was that common?

The president, to his credit, never became a Washington person, whether for better or worse. When he got elected he was very much the same person that he was when he left office eight years later. He tended to be somebody who was very self-aware and blunt. When he was frustrated about something he let everybody know, and expressed it. I do think that, in the economic crisis in particular, he was put in a position where not only he, but most of us who were writing the speeches didn't understand what was going on because we were being told different things.

There's a scene where a few White House counsel tell the speechwriters that Bush really needs a line like FDR's "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Is that going through your mind when you're a speechwriter for the president, that you really need to come up with lines like that all the time? Or that you could solve this problem with the right turn of phrase?

That is really a problem with speeches these days. It's a very easy temptation for a presidential advisor to think, Oh, we'll just give a wonderful eloquent speech and solve all the problems. You see that happening with President Obama now. A speech isn't going to solve anything, especially when you give them a dozen times a week. People just stop listening. But they wanted us to give them an FDR phrase. And here we were being compared with Herbert Hoover! We came up with something like, Anxiety feeds on anxiety. Which isn't exactly a stirring call-to-arms!

Are you haunted by those moments where you think, Oh, if I'd only come up with a better sentence or a different approach?

I always thought that the best approach to speeches was to give less of them, and to put more thought into them. We used to give speeches because the president was going to a political event, and they wanted a reason for him to go so that the taxpayers could pay half the bill or something. St. Patrick's Day is an example. The president gave three speeches on St. Patrick's Day. And people would cover it. So it's hard to come up with eloquent lines when it becomes an assembly line operation.

Are there any great lines that you're particularly proud of getting through?

One of my favorite lines, which I talk about in the book, was a joke about Jessica Simpson. It was a terrible controversy, because the jokes are always so controversial in the White House, because lawyers (and I'm a reformed lawyer) get hypersensitive about everything you say. So the president's going to the USO, and he says, "People credit the turn around in Iraq to lots of different things, but we all know the real reason was that Jessica Simpson was deployed to Baghdad." I just thought that would be funny. And only because the president interceded and thought that it was funny did it make it in. It was the only line remembered from the whole speech. But as a speechwriter, I would watch the audience erasing speeches from their mind as the president was delivering them. That's how dull they'd become.

I wanted to ask about Rumsfeld and Abu Ghraib. You were by his side throughout the testimony and through his resignation. Do you regret anything you worked with him on?

Well, as you pointed out, the goal of a speechwriter is to try as best you can to submerge your thoughts and put their thoughts on paper, to try and explain what they think has happened. So it's not really whether I regret having said something, it's did I do the best I could to reflect what his views were at the time. I tried to do that. I'm sure someone could have done it better, but we did our best, and I think I reflected Rumsfeld's thinking.

Do you think words could have altered the course of his history?

I don't know. In the book, I talk about the moment when we overheard him saying to the president, "I don't want to be a rock in your knapsack," and he'd offered to resign. Apparently he'd offered to resign twice, and the president didn't want to do that. It's up to Rumsfeld to say this, but it may have been for the best. He'd tried to resign, and the president didn't want him to, I think because they knew he'd be a lightning rod. And a lightning rod has a lot of use for a president.

You have a couple of really acid depictions of Karl Rove in the book. You're tough on Bush, but you clearly have a certain amount of loyalty and warmth toward him. Rove doesn't come off quite so well, and I wonder how much you blame Rove for the big political miscues Bush took the last few years.

I wasn't in the Bush administration for all eight years, but I was a Republican. I'd paid my dues. I started working for Bob Dole in 1996, so I say this with some interest in the Republican Party. I thought Karl Rove was going to be great. I was excited when he became the architect, if you will, for the Bush administration. If you look at it, he got a lot of power in the latter years of the administration before he left. He was in charge of policy, of politics, of overseeing personnel. And in every single respect I think that it was an unparalleled tragedy, a disaster.

We didn't advance a single piece of conservative legislation in the Congress, we lost the House, the Senate, the presidency. There was the whole 51 percent mentality of try to get whatever kind of majority you can get and who cares about everybody else, which wasn't helpful. Then of course the personnel issues in the Justice department. I saw the same things happen at the Department of Defense, which I talk about in my book, and it was basically a situation of sending these young people, well-meaning probably, with thin credentials, into these different departments and deciding who belongs in the club or not.

Related to that, I wanted to ask about the speeches that Bush gave during the campaign of 2008. They were presidential trips, but really motivated to help GOP campaigns, and he'd give speeches and make appearances so that they could be funded by taxpayers. You have a great line in the book: "Speeches in effect became Muzak for whatever political event the administration thought important."

Every presidential administration I think does this kind of thing to some degree. It is the way Washington works. But yes, we knew that was happening. But the other thing is we would give speeches just because we wanted something to do. They wanted the president to look busy and act like he was doing something. And that isn't the best use for a speech.

Expert Witness: Gwen Cooper

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 18:09:12 -0400

Nearly a year ago, Gwen Cooper was just another Open Salon blogger. She had a novel, “Diary of a South Beach Party Girl,” under her belt, but her memoir, starring her very talented and adventurous blind cat, Homer, hadn’t gotten any buyers. That is, until she posted an excerpt on her blog in October of last year. In the days that followed, the post, about a close encounter between Homer and a would-be robber, became a viral sensation, and garnered hundreds of thousands of readers.

Fast forward to now, and “Homer’s Odyssey,” published on Delacorte Press, has had a momentous 100,000+ first-issue printing and is entering its third week on the New York Times bestseller list. The book tells the story of Gwen’s first encounter with Homer as a blind kitten in a Miami veterinarian's office, her struggles to build a life with Homer and her two other cats and, most heart-wrenchingly, her attempts to rescue them from an apartment in New York’s financial district in the days following 9/11.

Cooper’s rise from blog to bestseller is yet another example of how the Internet is changing the publishing world – and an inspiring story for aspiring writers everywhere. Thomas Rogers spoke to Cooper via Skype about her viral success, her road to a book deal, and the universal appeal of pet books.

You had a fairly unique road to the book deal. Can you talk a little bit about the experience of writing a blog post and then seeing it go viral? What was that like?

When I first put up the blog post, what we were hearing from some of the people to whom Homer's Odyssey was being sent was that there wasn't anything special or unique enough about this cat. And of course I was like, "Well the cat has no eyes. How much more special does it need to get?" But we were hearing that there was nothing special or unique enough about this cat to set his story apart from other types of stories about pets that were coming down the pike.

When I first put up the blog post, really all I thought was that I would put it up, some other people would comment, maybe maybe it would be an Editor's Pick on Open Salon, and that would sort of demonstrate that yes, there are people interested in this story. Within 24 hours of you guys making it an Editor's Pick, it was turning up on blogs and Reddit. It had 1,500 up votes on Reddit within 24 hours, it was on Digg, it was just popping up everywhere. And so we had sort of an indisputable argument to present back to people who might have said that there was nothing special enough about this story

And it was wild, really, we were all unprepared. I mean, I was sort of the only one who knew I was doing it, so my agent was completely unprepared. I was just shocked. I still sort of am. It's still hard to believe that it's been a year since it went up and the momentum that it gathered after that piece.

And so what happened after that? How did you go from the blog post to actually getting the book deal?

The blog post went up, and within very short order we had a couple of offers from publishers who had already had the proposal but there was sort of a critical mass at that point that was hit. So then we had a couple of offers and the publishers started going back and it became a bidding situation and then finally Random House, Bantam Bell, which is now Delacorte, came through with an offer that sort of effectively took it off the table.

What advice could you give to people who are out there in the blogosphere, blogging away, hoping that some similar thing is going to happen to them?

You want to have a combination of a story that you're passionate about telling, with you can never really fully premeditate. It does have to grow out of a genuine passion and desire that you have to tell a story that you think is worth telling. I think the same thing sort of goes for "Julie & Julia," you know Julie [Powell] was really passionate about a particular project, and the rest grew from there. And I think you also want to find a platform where you're not out to get lost, where there is maybe an audience for you, and an audience that is probably as passionate as you are about the stories that they're passionate about.

What made you so convinced that writing a book about your cat was going to be both a compelling idea and also a sellable idea?

I guess it's a twofold thing. The first thing is that I felt that aside form the fact that it's about a cat, I think there are a lot of genuinely good narrative bones to this story. So I thought, in that sense, the fact that it was about a cat was almost secondary. And then of course there is a whole separate audience of people aside from people who like these dynamic type of stories, people who are really passionate about and committed to their pets.

Obviously there have been a number of very big selling books about pets recently, about cats in particular – about Dewey the library cat, for example. Why do you think that people are so passionate about reading books about cats?

Well I think that it's not so much that people are passionate about reading about cats, I think that there are passionate about reading about pets.

And that comes back to the fact we are more used to the idea of people having these close relationships with their dogs because we see those relationships, while relationships with cats are more intimate and more private, and so it's easy I think to overlook the same depth of feeling that exists in those. In one part of my book I say that I think when you see things like love and loyalty and trust and courage reflected in animals, that it's almost like independent proof of the existence of God.

Which is a very heady idea, that these things that we as humans value, to see them valued also in non-human animals who don't have a moral code, who didn't sit down and write a code of ethics, it really makes you believe that those are things that are innately valuable, and not things that are valuable just because we tell each other so. And I think that's part of why there is such a strong emotional connection to stories about animals, because we see the best of ourselves reflected in a context that isn't there to make us feel better about ourselves, it's general and its' real and it makes us feel like those things are real in us as well. And I think it's emotionally powerful stuff.

I think there might be, among certain circles, the notion that books about pets are successful because they capitalize on pet-owners' sentimentality about their own pets -- obviously you dispute that. What do you make of that preconception?

I think there are preconceptions honestly about any kind of story, action adventure stories are just capitalizing on guys' willingness to see stuff blown up and romantic stories are capitalizing on women's desire to see their romantic fantasies in a book or on a big screen. In any kind of good story there is something universal and there will always be people, who because they see things as universal, they think that they're easily bottled or harnessed and will try to exploit it. But the flip side is that it does come form a very genuine place. It is exciting to watch people doing adventurous and dangerous things, and it is exciting, it makes you feel good, to read a great and happy love story. So I think there are always those elements that think that any story is an attempt to shamelessly plug into some universal emotion. But the flip side of that coin is, any story should plug into a universal emotion, and that's what makes it a good story.

How did other people react when you said you were working on a memoir about a cat?

Most of the people who knew when I was working on it have known the cat. It was really my husband and my closer friends and people like that, so they completely got it because they have always been so intrigued by this cat. The truth is when you tell people you're writing about an eyeless cat, they have the same questions that everybody does when they hear about an eyeless cat. I mean, "What do you mean, he's eyeless? He has no eyes? How did that happen?" and so by the time we got to the fact that I was writing a memoir they were there with me.

Really, eyeless cat is the kind of thing you throw out and people are never going to hit you with "Who cares?" it's just one of those things you immediately want to know more about and so I didn't really mete with a lot of skepticism and I think the couple of people who were initially skeptical, when I would start talking about the cat and his story and how I came to find him, by that point they were so caught up in it they were like "When is the book coming out?" So it was always a good response.

Is Homer aware of his newfound fame?

He's been through a few photoshoots and a couple of videoshoots, and he's sort of genuinely, I think, aware that people who come into our home are more apt to be interested in him even than they used to be. It's funny I actually put up a blogpost the other day. He's gotten a couple of gift baskets from some fans and friends with all of these gourmet cat treats. And Homer is, if he were a person you'd hate him, because he's like really skinny, and has this crazy metabolism, he just never gains weight. But my other cat Scarlett, off of all of the treats that are still in the house even to this day, has sort of gotten enormous in the past month.

So what's the next step for you? What do you plan on doing? Do you have anymore books in the works?

I do. I am working on a proposal which I have been instructed by my agent on pain of death to keep under wraps. It’s not really my desire as an author to keep telling the same kind of story because there are so many great stories out there to be told and I kind of want to try my hand at all the ones that intrigue me. So I am working on something, it is not a cat book, but I think that there is an equally good story there to be told.

I think in the past, people have assumed that you need to work your way up – and get published in the right places – to get a book deal. Do you think that the internet is changing the way that book deals happen?

I'll tell you the truth, when I got my first book published I was more or less unpublished. I had published one or two feature stories in some local papers 10 years early in my hometown. I actually found it easier to get a book published than to try to break into getting feature stories published in a magazine. Not that any of it's easy, but it just seemed to be a more straightforward path.

I certainly think that the internet in two ways makes it a lot easier for writers. Number one is that figuring out the process: Who should I send letters to? What should those letters look like? What should that path be? How does that work? It’s much easier to find those resources. I mean literally three years ago I sat down and Googled "How to find an agent" and that was how I got started. Certainly those resources were always there, but now you can do at work when you were supposed to be doing other stuff and you didn't have to take hours out of your schedule to kind of piece it together. And I think it also does sort of provide another vehicle in which people can be discovered, or again to have their ideas validated.

I mean certainly again with this book, if it were not for the nature of the internet, and the speed with which things can go viral, and where you can see it happening in real time, I don't know that I would've gotten his deal, or I don't know that it would have happened the way that it did. It really was an instance of being able to see that interest unfold and trace it back to a specific source and see it unfold from there.