{"id":7215,"date":"2018-04-19T07:53:43","date_gmt":"2018-04-19T11:53:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7215"},"modified":"2018-06-01T16:00:59","modified_gmt":"2018-06-01T20:00:59","slug":"walter-mosleys-advice-for-author-readings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7215","title":{"rendered":"Walter Mosley’s Advice for Author Readings"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"DevilWalter Mosley<\/a>\u2014one of the illuminati of crime fiction\u2014spoke yesterday in Princeton, providing good advice for authors invited to read from their work. He prefaced it by noting that, while he loves writing and cannot imagine doing anything else, it\u2019s also his business. It\u2019s how he earns a living. Participating in a lot of readings over the years, he\u2019s developed this nugget: \u201cthe longer you read, the fewer people buy the book.\u201d<\/p>\n

He once attended a reading for a book that adopted an esoteric analysis of the life of Tolstoy. \u201cSounds interesting,\u201d he thought. After the author went on to read from it for an hour, \u201cI was never going to buy that book.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then he proceeded to read about seven pages from the beginning of his own new book, published last February, Down the River Unto the Sea<\/em>, leaving us wanting more, enough to buy the book more. He told us in advance that his black ex-detective, a man named Joe King Oliver, becomes involved in the case of a black political activist sentenced to death for killing of a couple of on-duty policemen, with Oliver hired to help prove a wrongful conviction. It\u2019s evident that though the early pages are full of Mosley\u2019s sly wit, there is lots of pain to come.<\/p>\n

Mosley has written 55 or 56 books, even he isn\u2019t sure of the exact number, many of them his popular Los Angeles-based crime novels involving detective Easy Rawlins, and other kinds of books too\u2014literature, science fiction, plays, and advice for writers. But he says, \u201cEveryone wants me to write mysteries.\u201d Those people will be happy with this new work, which Richard Lipez<\/a> in The Washington Post<\/em> called \u201cas gorgeous a novel as anything he\u2019s ever written.\u201d<\/p>\n

He\u2019s received a wonderfully long list of awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Mystery Writers of America, and was brought to Princeton as part of a reading series organized by the Lewis Center on the Arts Creative Writing Program.<\/p>\n

Check out more of his wisdom in this recent interview<\/a>.
\n<\/a>\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Walter Mosley\u2014one of the illuminati of crime fiction\u2014spoke yesterday in Princeton, providing good advice for authors invited to read from their work. He prefaced it by noting that, while he loves writing and cannot imagine doing anything else, it\u2019s also … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Walter Mosley's Advice for Author Readings - the grand master knows of what he speaks","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[62,40,174,29],"tags":[412,1304,28],"class_list":["post-7215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-authors","category-fiction","category-first-draft-blog","category-writing","tag-mystery","tag-walter-mosley","tag-writers"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1Sn","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7215"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7215\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7282,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7215\/revisions\/7282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}