My Twitter Obsession

They warned me.

They warned me that Twitter would drain my blood like a vampire, sap my vital bodily fluids.

They were right, of course. My friends in marketing at my publishing house thought it might be a good idea for me to start Twittering, or Tweeting (whatever it’s called). My editor and my assistant were dubious — both knew how prone I am to getting caught up in things and spending way too much time on something that, let’s face it, only gets in the way of writing my next book. My editor does tend to treat writers like children who must be kept away from sharp objects lest they hurt themselves.

So I ignored Twitter, dismissing it as this weird thing that other people did, like clogging or snowshoeing or curling.

But I met a couple of much savvier guys at Ben Mezrich’s birthday party a few weeks ago who told me I had to, so I dipped in . . .

And got addicted.

My editor and my assistant both tried to stop me, but it was too late. As readers know, I’m a gadget guy, and I love new technology. Two weeks into this, I’ve already developed a following (everybody develops their own following; it’s not like I’ve gone all Hollywood on you), and my followers post all kinds of fascinating stuff — about books and bookselling, journalism, movies and TV shows. One of them even got me to start watching “American Idol” against my will! Honestly, no hype, I think we’re witnessing the birth of an entirely new type of communication — halfway in between private and public. It’s very strange.

In some ways, too, it’s like being back in high school. Like: I “followed” her, how come she’s not following me back? Some people seem to have nothing to do but Twitter — they don’t seem to have employment. People you’ve never heard of have twenty, thirty thousand followers. Some celebrities, like Ashton Kutcher, have huge followings; other, even bigger celebrities lock down their “updates” so that you can only follow them if you’re approved. (One movie star I’ve written a movie for, for instance, let me into his exclusive, private group of followers, fewer than I have; he seems to use it mostly to communicate with his girlfriend.)

Some Tweeters seem to accumulate followers and follow nobody, or only a chosen few — wannabe cult leaders, I guess. I have no patience for them. (One is a book person I know personally . . . sort of tacky, I think.) They're treating it like a one-way broadcast medium, which isn't the point.

At its best, Twitter is a multi-sided conversation. It's interactive. It's like a dinner party in some ways, where some people say nothing and just listen, others hold forth way too much, and you meet some great people and you learn interesting stuff. For some people, Twitter seems to be performance art — 140-character haikus — and some of them are quite clever. I do feel a pressure to be entertaining; if I’m not entertaining, people will Qwitter me. (Seriously, that’s what it’s called, and unlike Facebook, I get notified every time it happens.) The really entertaining, really involved writers on Twitter have amassed serious followings. Neil Gaiman has 36,361 followers as of this second, and only follows 179. (Wait, it just became 36,363.)

No doubt about it, there are also the TMI (“too much information”) Twitterers — who update you on their sinuses acting up or they’re standing at a urinal. Clogging your feed with useless trivia: Twitterhea.

It wouldn’t be exactly accurate to say I’m a reluctant Twitterer, but I’m certainly an anxious one. I love it – but it scares me, too, and I’m torn about its cost-benefit ratio. I ask myself, would Charles Dickens Twitter? You bet. He’d have a Facebook page and a TV series and a bigger branded presence than Jim Patterson. No question he’d be Twittering. Mark Twain, too.

Unlike e-mail, where you can take your time answering and filtering your replies, Twitter is instantaneous. You also get very public feedback. For example, I was Twittering at dinner last week, at a fundraiser, saying stuff like, "Sitting across from Tess Gerritsen" and "Michael Palmer just walked in." And one of my Followers cracked: @joefinder = name dropper.

Yesterday one of my Followers wrote:

"I wonder what a "real" author hopes to gain from engaging in the sick masses."

I told him I wasn't sure.

The novelist’s life is a great one, with two major exceptions. First, it’s very solitary; second, the feedback process is necessarily delayed, since by the time a book gets published the author is already working on the next book, or even the next book after that. I’ll get emails asking me about why characters in High Crimes did or said certain things, and I have to go back and look up the answer; I wrote that book ten years ago, and have written several hundred thousand words since.

Twitter addresses both of these shortcomings. I can walk in and out at will; I can check in on the people I follow, and they can check in on me. It’s the equivalent of passing notes in class, or making snarky comments to a friend in a movie theater – did you see that guy in the purple suit? What’s with her today?

It’s also a way for readers to connect with me in a way that provides immediate feedback. You’re reading one of my books, you want to know what a reference means; you can send me a direct message. (You could always send me an email, too, but sometimes it takes me a few days to respond. If I’m on Twitter, you’ll get a response a lot faster.) You can tell me that you like something, you can tell me that you don’t. On a day when I’m writing, it reminds me that I’m not just talking to the wall – I’m writing for readers, and the readers are with me.

But I can already see the dangers of it. It’s more fun to gossip on Twitter than it is to work. I already have half a dozen different ways I can avoid writing when I’m at my desk, and Twitter’s just one more; every link to a great article or piece of new information someone sends me is another justification for spending time on Twitter when I need to be writing.

Twitter creates a sense of intimacy that’s both seductive and dangerous. I’m not a celebrity, but I admit to tweeting about things like what my dog’s doing, or what I ate for breakfast; it amuses me, it seems to amuse the people who follow me, and it doesn’t do any harm … or does it? I’m not stalking any of the 300+ people I follow on Twitter, and I trust that none of my followers is stalking me … but if you wanted to stalk someone, wouldn’t Twitter be a great place to start?

So check it out — follow me on Twitter, where my handle is @joefinder. I promise I’ll follow you back.

But do it soon. Before they take the sharp object away from me.

Chocolate: No Excuses Necessary

February can be a grim month in New England. Temperatures are low, snow on the ground is filthy, and baseball Opening Day is still two months away.

The one ray of sunshine on the calendar is that holiday in the middle of the month – known as Valentines Day to some, but to us hardcore chocolate lovers, it’s Perfect Alibi Day.

“I’m not buying this for myself,” I can say. “It’s for my wife. No, my daughter. No, my wife and my daughter.” If an extra box of chocolate happens to make its way into my shopping bag, well, so be it.

Like coffee, chocolate is a time-honored literary obsession. Goethe loved his hot chocolate so much that he brought his own supply – complete with brewing pot – on a tour of Switzerland. (He didn’t trust the Swiss to provide him with proper chocolate!) Hemingway’s famous injury, in 1918 – the one that led to his writing A Farewell to Arms – happened when he was delivering chocolate (and cigarettes) to Italian soldiers in the trenches.

In fact, I don’t know why chocolate hasn’t gotten more attention in books written for adults. There’s Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate, of course, and Joanne Harris’s wonderful Chocolat – but the best books about chocolate are targeted at young adults and children. Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War (though, strictly speaking, that book might just as easily be The Wrapping Paper War or The Gourmet Popcorn War). Blood and Chocolate, Annette Curtis Klause’s vivid teenage werewolf novel. In J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels, if you’ve had contact with the soul-sucking Dementors, the best first aid is eating large quantities of chocolate.

And of course, the original and the best children’s novel inspired by chocolate is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, by Roald Dahl.

Dahl’s story about the origin of his classic children’s story is actually a great lesson about finding inspiration in anything that excites you. As a boy, Dahl attended a prestigious British public school with a sadistic headmaster. The one ray of light in the schoolboys’ life was monthly deliveries from the Cadbury chocolate factory, which wanted the boys to evaluate new products for them. It had never occurred to the young Dahl that someone might have the job of inventing chocolates; he fantasized about having this job himself, and coming up with his own inventions. Years later, this childhood fantasy became the basis for Willy Wonka’s amazing chocolate factory. (Factoid 1: Roald Dahl despised the original movie, which starred Gene Wilder; Factoid 2: Quaker Oats financed the original movie as one of the very first major tie-in campaigns, to help them roll out their proposed Wonka Bar … but they could never get the formula right, and the product was abandoned.)

I justify my own chocolate habit by calling it research. Did you know, for example, that while cacao is native to Central and South America, three-quarters of the world’s supply is now grown in Africa – where much of it, sadly, is harvested by child labor? Have you ever thought about the implications of African conflicts for the world’s chocolate supply? Can you imagine a situation in which someone might be willing to kill to keep the lines of distribution open?

Sure. I’d kill for chocolate. The stuff contains theobromine, which releases endorphins and serotonin, which cheers us up. It’s got phenylethylamine, too, the chemical secreted in the brain when we fall in love. Studies in serious medical journals like Nature and the Journal of the American Medical Association assert that dark chocolate has all sorts of health benefits: it contains antioxidants (polyphenols) and flavonoids, which reduce the risk of coronary artery blockages. It lowers blood pressure. And after all, milk chocolate was co-created by a German pharmacist (well, pharmacist’s assistant), Henri (ne Heinrich) Nestlé, who made his fortune from inventing the world’s first infant formula.

Okay, okay. This is all rationalization. Except for the mood part. That’s real.

A long time ago I discovered the chocolates of Robert Linxe at La Maison du Chocolat in Paris, and was so blown away I decided to bring a small box of the stuff (it ain’t cheap) to dinner at my French editor’s house. So I picked out several types of chocolates in the glass case and asked them to box them up.

Problem was, my French was lousy, particularly numbers. When I gave the clerk my order she lit up and called several of her colleagues over, and everything in the shop came to a halt. They invited me to have a cup of hot chocolate while they assembled my order. They gave me a complimentary assortment of their amazing chocolates and a big tasse of the best hot chocolate I’d ever had in my life — thick and velvety and rich and barely sweet.

I should have known why they were being so nice. I’d gotten the numbers wrong — somehow confused grams with kilograms or something — but when I saw the massive box I was too embarrassed to say anything. When I saw the bill, I was speechless. And when I brought it to my French editor’s house, he must have been a little embarrassed at my extravagance: he immediately trundled it away so that none of his other dinner guests could see it. My wife, when she finally got over the shock of how much I’d spent, began to joke that the next time I went to La Maison du Chocolat they’d probably have a bust of me, carved out of the finest dark chocolate.

Unfortunately, the hot chocolate at La Maison has gone downhill since then -- a casualty, I suspect, of too much expansion; they’ve now got boutiques in New York and London and Tokyo and all over Paris. When I was in Paris on tour this past fall I took some friends to their boutique in the Carrousel du Louvre and told them the hot chocolate there would change their lives. Feh. It was fine. Better than Swiss Miss. But nowhere near the way it used to be. Now my French gourmand friends tell me the best hot chocolate can be found at Angelia on the rue de Rivoli. I can’t vouch for that — never had it — but the best I’ve ever had since then, in fact, was in Harvard Square, Cambridge, at L.A. Burdick’s. (Any other tips are welcome!)

One last thing about chocolate. When was the last time you had a Hershey’s milk chocolate bar? I used to love them as a kid. But when I had one last Halloween I was amazed at how skimpy it was — paper-thin, way thinner than it once was, sealed in plastic instead of that great foil and paper sleeve. And it barely tastes of chocolate at all — though that may not have changed.

My tastes have changed. I’ve been spoiled by all the great chocolate you can get here — Scharffen Berger, Valrhona, Callebaut, Lindt . . . Even mass-market Dove, which you can get in any CVS, is infinitely better than Hershey’s milk chocolate. (And by the way, so is Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, but not the stuff made in the U.S. --which is manufactured by Hershey! -- only the bars made in the U.K.)

And speaking of U.K. chocolate: my favorite candy bar (as opposed to chocolate bar) is Kit Kat. But British Kit Kats are noticeably better than American. Maybe that’s because our Kit Kats are made by Hershey’s (sorry to trash Hershey’s again!), and theirs are made by Nestlé. Or maybe it’s simply that the Brits invented it (introduced in 1935 as “Rowntree’s Chocolate Crisp”) — and maybe they’re keeping their top-echelon manufacturing secrets for their own.

Which gives me a plot idea, of course. Plant Adam Cassidy, from Paranoia, in Nestlé headquarters in Vevey, Switzerland, see . . . Corporate espionage plus chocolate: — what’s not to love?

Writers: The Coffee Achievers

Santa didn’t bring me what I really wanted for Christmas, but I hardly expected him to. Don’t get me wrong -- I was good last year, and Santa was generous. But what I really wanted was a Clover® Brewing System, the kind they have at the Starbucks on Beacon Street, and in only a handful of other Starbucks around the country.

It was a lot to ask for, I knew, even before I found out that a Clover® machine costs $12,000. But I swear, if I found $12,000 on a sidewalk, I’d buy one.

If you don’t understand why, some part of your psyche will always be a mystery to me. I don’t get people who don’t like coffee, and I distrust writers who don’t drink it. How can anyone be a writer without coffee? Writers are the original Coffee Achievers. At the risk of dating myself, I still love this commercial:



Yes, that was David Bowie … and Cicely Tyson … and Kurt Vonnegut.

Coffee has been an essential tool of almost all the greatest modern writers, and certainly of the most prolific ones. Voltaire reportedly drank 50 cups a day (and I’ve seen estimates as high as 72 cups a day). Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote what amounted to a love letter about freshly roasted coffee. Arthur Conan Doyle and his fictional sleuth, Sherlock Holmes, loved coffee almost as much as they loved cocaine (Holmes: “A cup of coffee would clear my brain”). Anthony Trollope, admirably disciplined, rose every morning at exactly 5:00 and drank his coffee before writing for three hours, after which he went to work at the post office. Edgar Allan Poe drank coffee by the gallon (the tell-tale heart’s pounding: conscience or caffeine overdose?). Maigret’s creator, Georges Simenon, could write a detective novel in three days on the power of his bottomless coffee cup. Beethoven loved his coffee strong, and Johann Sebastian Bach dedicated a sonata (BMV 211) to the glories of coffee.

I would argue that coffee has been far more important to literature than alcohol. We think of Hemingway, for instance, as a hard drinker, but he was equally addicted to coffee, and wrote some of his best work with its help. If you ever visit Montreux, Switzerland, you can take a Hemingway walking tour that includes a visit to the railway café where he wrote A Farewell to Arms.

The master Coffee Achiever, though, is surely the great Honoré de Balzac. Balzac wrote 16 hours a day on specially-prepared Parisian coffee, and no writer was ever more obsessed with it. His essay “The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee” [link: http://www.newpartisan.com/home/balzac-the-pleasures-and-pains-of-coffee.html]
describes its power and gives advice for overcoming caffeine tolerance (ultimately, by dumping raw grounds into an empty stomach; don’t try this at home). Once coffee hits your system, Balzac wrote, “ideas quick-march into motion like the battalions of a great army.” He once claimed he drank 50,000 cups of coffee during his lifetime. Maybe that’s how he was able to turn out 100 novels by the time he died, at 51. (Or maybe that’s why he died at 51.)

Coffee has been the official American drink since 1773, when colonists revolted against King George III’s tea tax by dumping a load of British tea into Boston Harbor (to which King George III allegedly responded, “So they threw their tea in the harbor. Let them drink coffee.”) No wonder, then, that the Continental Congress declared coffee the official beverage of the Colonies.

And yes, there have always been exceptions. Henry James was, of course, a tea drinker. Henry David Thoreau railed against coffee as an expensive luxury. “[W]ater is the only drink for a wise man; wine is not so noble a liquor; and think of dashing the hopes of a morning with a cup of coffee.” I bet he didn’t get invited to many parties… and of course, that was before Starbucks took over Concord Center.

Coffee is part of my earliest memories. My parents ground their own beans, years before it became common practice; the sound of the coffee grinder used to wake me up on school mornings, and I’d come downstairs to that intoxicating smell. I didn’t start drinking it myself until college, but once I did, I quickly figured out the difference between the good stuff and the – uh – not.

When I was a student, for example, you couldn’t drink coffee in England. The first time I drank coffee in London, I spit it out. (Agatha Christie, a tea drinker, once remarked, “Coffee in England always tastes like a chemistry experiment.”) Now, though, you can get amazing coffee in England – at the Monmouth Coffee Company in Covent Garden and Flat White in Berwick Street, among other places. And there are Caffe Neros all over the place, almost as abundant as Starbucks. Lee Child, quintessential Englishman, loves coffee and drinks it black (like his hero, Jack Reacher). My British-born assistant, Claire Baldwin, drinks only coffee, not tea.

Coffee gets credit for modern civilization, in more ways than one. Both the American and the French Revolutions began in coffeehouses. My friend Malcolm Gladwell, in a piece in the New Yorker [link: http://gladwell.com/2001/2001_07_30_a_java.htm] some years ago, pointed out that coffee helped give rise to the Enlightenment: Voltaire, Robespierre, Napoleon, Victor Hugo and Rousseau gathered at coffeehouses in Paris. Coffee also fueled the American Industrial Revolution, by helping workers get up early, work long hours, and coordinate their shifts.

And what are novelists but shift workers at the fiction factory? I space my working day out in cups of coffee. It’s my reward for getting work done, and also my stimulation to do more work. I need that psychoactive alkaloid stimulant crossing my blood-brain barrier. In fact, I’m sitting here drinking a perfect espresso as I write this.

Every week I buy a couple of bags of fresh-roasted Peets coffee to make at home. At the office, though, I drink only espresso, using a Gaggia espresso maker and Starbucks pods (less mess than grinding, and fresher-tasting than the Illy pods). It’s excellent, though it doesn’t compare to the coffee produced by a machine my friend Giles McNamee recently turned me onto: the Jura Impressa Z6 [link: www.capresso.com/automatic-coffee-centers-z6.shtml].

The Z6 makes espresso even better than I’ve had in Italy … almost as good as the Clover. And at a mere $3,699, it’s a bargain in comparison. I haven’t yet sprung for it, and probably won’t – but couldn’t I call it a business expense?

The Best Pencil in the World

I’m often asked how I write — do I use a computer, when do I write, do I have an office, and so on. These are natural questions, actually, since they concern the mysterious alchemy of the creative process. And truth is, most writers I know ask each other the same sorts of questions.

Of course I wrote on a computer (a Mac, naturally — a G5 tower with an immense flat-screen monitor, and a Macbook Air at home). But it surprises a lot of people to hear that certain scenes (the more meditative ones) I write with a pencil. And I almost always edit pages, in hard copy, with a pencil.

So the right pencil is important to me. Years ago, at a stationery store in Harvard Square called Bob Slate’s, I discovered the best pencil ever. It was called the Blackwing 602, made by Eberhard Faber. It was perfectly designed, hexagonal so it wouldn’t roll off your desk, with lead that was creamy soft but not too soft. A great oblong eraser you could pull out to extend its use. Its embossed motto: “Half the pressure, twice the speed.” (Who wouldn’t want half the pressure and twice the speed?) In a world of yellow pencils it was silvery gray. Several times a year I’d stop into Bob Slate’s to buy a box.

Turned out there was a whole underground fraternity of Blackwing-obsessives. Stephen Sondheim told the New York Times he’d use nothing else: “They wear down quickly, so I feel like I’m getting a lot done.” Writers like Thomas Wolfe and Archibald MacLeish loved them. The late John Steinbeck, ever in search of the perfect pencil,thought the Blackwing “floated over the paper just wonderfully.”

Then one day I went into Slate’s and learned, to my horror, that the Blackwing 602 was no more. It had been discontinued. Frantic, I launched into action. I enlisted my assistant to call every stationery distributor, every mom-and-pop stationery store in the country, and buy up as many boxes of Blackwings as we could find. In time we’dd amassed a closet full of them.

When the terrible news spread throughout the Blackwing Underground, my fellow obsessives began buying them up too. Writer friends of mine who learned of my stockpile — Andre Gregory (of “My Dinner With Andre”) and Roger Rosenblatt — began calling me to ask if I could spare one . . . or a box. Soon, Blackwings began popping up on eBay for $20 each. In fact, I just checked eBay and found one for $38.99 — for a single pencil.

Still, I won’t sell mine, and I only give them away to my closest friends who will make good use of them. I figure that as long as I have them around, I’ll keep writing my novels with half the pressure and twice the speed.

The Perfect Signing Pen...

does not yet exist.

The classic, of course, is the Sharpie. They’re great for signing your name, but they’re too thick for writing anything more than a few words -- legibly, anyway. They also tend to bleed through the thinner paper that publishers have been using in recent years. Sharpie makes an Ultra Fine, but that’s way too thin and scratchy.

Even my favorite general-use writing pen (and yes, I’m a pen-obsessive),the Uni-Ball Vision Elite, isn’t right. Not bold enough.

At the beginning of this tour I found the perfect signing pen, given to me by someone at a Barnes & Noble – a model sold by OfficeMax and marketed under their house brand – but when I went to OfficeMax to buy more, I found that they’d stopped making them.

So the question is, how do I convince the Sharpie people (Sanford, owned by Newell Rubbermaid) to make the classic Sharpie in a somewhat thinner point? Call it the Sharpie Autograph. I’ll bet I could get it into the hands of every bestselling novelist in the country. Come on, folks!

Dateline: Miami, May 23 -- "24" Fans in High Places

After my signing at Books & Books in Miami, I talked to that great bookstore’s owner, Mitch Kaplan. His sister, as it turns out, is an executive at Fox involved with “24.”

Mitch began to reel off for me a list of famous writers and literary figures who are as obsessed with “24” as I am. I won’t list them here, since Mitch didn’t give me permission to do so, but they include a legendary former editor of The New Yorker and Knopf, a former editor of the New York Times Book Review, a very mandarin book reviewer. . .

So it’s not just me.