Hooray Part 2

I just sold the right to my second book "Planet Germany" to China!

That means specifically: I sold the Chinese-language rights to the University of Taiwan.

The money I think in the end will be about 200 Euros. But the pride of having a book of my own in Chinese characters that I can't even say for sure that it is my book because I can't identify a single word will be immense.

Hooray!

I sold an option to the film rights to my first book Nibelungenreise / Driving through the Dark Ages!

First time that's happened. The money is not much, but it's good to know that my rights have begun to work for me!

Time Management for Writers or: Ben Frankin vs. Goethe

In Maira Kalman's wonderful picture-blog for the New York Times she does a nice little thing on Benjamin Franklin and mentions also how Franklin scheduled his working day:

5am - 8am: Wash, get dressed, breakfast, plan the day - "address 'Powerful Goodness' and take the resolution of the day."

8am - 12am: Work

12am - 2 pm: Lunch

2pm - 6pm: Work

6pm - 10 pm: Clean up desk, dinner, diversions and "examination of the day"

10pm - 5am: Sleep.

The schedule is strikingly similar to Goethe's schedule. According to Gero von Wilpert in "Die 101 wichtigsten Fragen: Goethe", it went like this:

5/6am - 10am: "Early coffee" and work

10am - 1pm: "Second breakfast" and administration work like letters

1/2pm: Lunch and nap

After that - about 5pm: Work

Early evening to sundown: Diversions, theater, maybe work

9/10pm - 5am: Sleep.

Benjamin Franklin doesn't say anything about a nap in the afternoon, but it's known that he liked to nap and it's also known that the body has a slump around 2, so I bet he did a bit of power-napping to round off his lunch, though it's not on the schedule. Gothe did, and admitted it.

Here's Franklin's schedule:

The Secrets of Jodi Picoult

Good New York Times article about bestseller Jodi Picoult, who writes gut-wrenching weepies about families and child-rearing and whose "My Sister's Keeper" has been filmed: here.

Runaway Brides on TV

My favorite country band - The Runaway Brides - featuring my beautiful niece April - just did a segment for ZDF: You can watch it here (enable pop-ups):

The report here.

The interview/song here.

MySpace with songs here.

(I love these titles - "You only like me when you're drunk"!)

Laura Bean, another band member, also has her own MySpace site with excellent country songs of her own here.

The Great Jack Vance

Good story about the great Jack Vance, now 92, living in San Francisco, here. I love Vance for his persistant cynicism and his sweet, mysterious language. And it's a tragedy that he is so underrated.

Secret of Success

"I write happy books about good people."

- Janet Evanovich in an interview in the New York Times.

I love that quote and I suspect it's a quote to live up to as a writer.

There was something else in her interview that intrigued me: She said her murder mysteries are about family. Her heroine, Stephanie Plum, is not a genius, but she relies on a group of friends, family and associates (and a little luck).

It is probably true of any kind of story but it is certainly true of murder mysteries that the story is really always about something else. It’s not about the murder – those are a dime a dozen – it’s about the way the character finds a way through life, or about right and wrong, or about friendship or about family. (Lonesome Dove, for example, was not about the West, it was about friendship.) These are the things that truly interest us, that we understand and want to understand. The horror of murder, the details of the crime and the puzzle that has to be solved are all trappings. They interest us too, but in the end they are arbitrary. What touches our hearts and minds is something else.