Domaine du Theron

Just to waste time, I googled "Theron" to see how many pages it would be before the entries stopped being about that actress, Charlize, and whether anything about The Fall of the Kings would turn up. On p. 15 (I skipped ahead) my first non-Charlize hit was Domaine du Theron, a French winery in the Lot valley, near Cahors.

The weird thing is, I've been there. In 2001 we celebrated Delia's birthday by renting a sprawling old farm called Cubertou*, and filling it with all our friends. Of course we explored the local wineries, and when we saw a sign for Domaine du Theron, we tore off in that direction. I think we had just recently finished Kings.

The wine was good. I still have the T-shirt.

* The Cubertou site tells me that the great guitarist John Renbourn (Pentangle et alia) is teaching guitar workshops there this summer with Remy Froissart!

D. Runyon & Pitching Novels

I've loved the work of Damon Runyon for years - maybe even before I saw Guys & Dolls (5 times) at summer camp. I cited his Broadway underworld characters as an influence on Swordspoint, which only made sense to a few (are you one of them?). Some years ago I pulled out my battered old copy (my dad's originally) of Runyon short stories for Delia, and she was so enchanted that she read me nearly all of them aloud. I know. You haven't lived til you've heard her Nicely-Nicely Jones. So much did she love that guy that she put him in her nice little kid novel, Changeling: the Producer of Broadway is, in fact, a (magical) Runyon character.

Now that Broadway's reviving Guys & Dolls, the New Yorker's published a terrific piece by Adam Gopnik on him, which neatly nails both Runyon's appeal and his technique - which has almost everything to do with language: "Like Wodehouse, whom he in some ways resembles, Runyon inherited a comedy of morals and turned it into a comedy of sounds, language playing for its own sake." The narrator of my coming-out-any-year-now story, "The Duke of Riverside," is my attempt to do a Riverside Runyon voice: "the unchanging, perpetually nameless and anxious-eager Narrator, with his warily formal diction and his cautious good manners.... The Narrator is, crucially, one of the lowest-status figures in Runyon’s bicameral world, where the petty hustlers and horseplayers who haunt Lindy’s by day are set against their sinister opposites, hit men and gangsters, who mostly hail from Brooklyn and Harlem and arrive at night." (and now that I've read this article, I'm not at all sure I succeeded, and it is taking all my strength - and Delia's iron advice - not to demand that Ellen Datlow give me the ms. back so I can rewrite it....).

Also: don't miss Delia's more than somewhat excellent post on pitching your novel to editors (or, I would add, not boring someone silly when they politely ask you what your book's about. Just sayin').