My Family

I don’t know what it is about Chicago, but the Windy City sure is kind to us Goldbergs. First, the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times gave my book DIAGNOSIS MURDER: THE PAST TENSE great reviews. Now TimeOut Chicago is raving about my brother Tod Goldberg’s short story collection SIMPLIFY:

[Tod] Goldberg’s work is an eclectic collection of realist and surrealist storytelling, from a brother’s difficult return from the first Gulf War to a kid who turns invisible after witnessing his father’s infidelity. The overheated suburbs of southern California and the crazed, sun-scorched roads through the outlying deserts are the perfect settings for Goldberg’s characters. In a story that exemplifies his skill for blending the unreal with the everyday, a dyslexic kid creates his own language as a way to deal with life’s stresses. As he witnesses a brutal act of violence against a fellow student and his careerist father becomes more and more aloof after a move to L.A., the kid fills binders and binders with his personal alphabet, a secret distress code. It’s a startling and shuddersome story, with the kind of atmospheric tension we’ve come to expect from the new wave of Japanese horror movies.

Ever wonder what taking a novel-writing seminar is like? My brother Tod, the literary novelist, reveals all.

Sometimes I’ll sing a song or two because, well, when you get to sit in front of
the class it’s kinda freeing to know that if you wanna belt out, say, Total
Eclipse of the Heart or Can’t Hardly Wait or even a little something from the
Neil Diamond song book, you totally can. And then we’ll get back to talking
about your story, which may be really good, or really bad, or really mediocre
and, at the very least, you’ll know my thoughts and might be humming a song,
too.

Before you write to Walter Scott of Parade Magazie to find out if someone is dead or not, use this handy checklist from my brother Tod.

a few ways to tell if the person you’re inquiring about is dead:

1. You are really, really old and unable to access the internet.

2. The person you are interested in starred in a "talkie."

3. Sometimes, you wet yourself a little and just say, "Ah, to hell with it."

4. There are nights when you honestly believe that signing a petition to get Diagnosis Murder back on TV might actually help.

5. Lately, you’ve felt very guilty for admiring the bronzed flesh of
Lindsay Lohan and wondering what it might be like to see her in a
Lucille Ball bio-pic where you get to play little Ricky.

6. The last show you remember watching was The Big Valley and after that went off the air you decided that from now on, you were just going to write The Big Valley fan fiction.

Want to know more? Check out "Letters to Parade: On The Nature of Dying."

My brotherTod reviews John Twelve Hawks’ THE TRAVELER , the marketing ploy masquerading as a novel. Rather than push the book on its own creative merits, the thrust of the advertising and publicity campaign is that the author is anonymous and lives "off the grid," as if that’s a reason to buy a book (or, for that matter, to publish one). 

According to the book jacket and press materials for The Traveler, the author "John Twelve Hawks lives off the Grid." What the bio fails to mention and what the publisher might have failed to note was that, "John Twelve Hawks doesn’t know how to write dialog." In addition, "John Twelve Hawks never was told that pages and pages of expositional dialog broken up with meaningless secondary action isn’t engaging."

I wasn’t planning on reading it anyway.

My brother Tod reviews the controversial book RAINBOW PARTY in this month’s issue of Las Vegas City Life. 

The problem, however, is that Rainbow Party isn’t actually scandalous or graphic…In another time, Rainbow Party might have been a "very special" episode of "The Facts Of Life," replete with a nice moralizing sermon by Mrs. Garrett. It’s harmless in a disappointing way — there’s no sense of the very real pressures young people face regarding sexuality — but it is the controversy generated by the parents that is truly troubling, especially when one considers the ultimate message of the book: Practice abstinence. Of course, those cloistered and closed-minded enough to demand the book be banned have already spoken to this.

You haven’t heard from me because I’m having lots of problems with Typepad, the service I use for this blog. This is the first time I’ve been able to access my blog and post a message since Friday.  I hope things return to normal on Monday.

Tech problems have prevented me from blogging and life has prevented me from doing much work on my second MONK book this weekend. Yesterday was my daughter’s 10th birthday and we had a family birthday party/barbecue with my Mom, my sisters, my brothers-in-law and my niece and nephew. And today, I’m off to the beach with the same merry bunch.

Happy Fourth of July to you and your family!

The best reason to read my brother Tod’s blog is his hilarious weekly dissection of Walter Scott’s Personality Parade column. I open the Parade magazine that comes bundled with my LA Times each Sunday trying to guess which stupid questions and inane answers are going to become the topic of Tod’s blog post. This week’s column was tough to guess, because it was a goldmine of inanity. You can see the questions that Tod tackled here. I knew he’d pick the Desperate Housewives question, but I was surprised he let this question-and-answer go:

I was surprised that Kenny Chesney was at the Academy of Country Music Awards without his new bride, Renee Zellweger. Where was she? Stella Wilson, Charlotte N.C.

The pair prefer to say out of each other’s spotlight, so Zellweger,36, was not in the audience last month in Las Vegas when Chesney, 37, was named Entertainer of the Year. (Our sources say she was at the hotel next door, but Kenny’s rep would only tell us "Renee was busy elsewhere"). The actress did attend a party afterward with her hubby.

Care to correct the oversight, Tod? 

If you thought my experience at the San Francisco Writers Conference was a freak occurence, you should read the encounters my brother Tod had at a  writers conference in Palm Springs…

"Oh, well, yes, I’m working on a novel," she said, "but I was hoping you
could tell me how to get an agent."

"Have you finished your book?" 

"No."

"How far along are you?"

She reached into her purse and pulled out a handful of single-spaced pages.
"I’ve done a detailed treatment of my novel," she said, "but I thought maybe I
could find an agent who would complete it for me."