Bourbon Cowboy

The adventures of an urbane bar-hopping transplant to New York.

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Location: New York, New York, United States

I'm a storyteller in the New York area who is a regular on NPR's "This American Life" and at shows around the city. Moved to New York in 2006 and am working on selling a memoir of my years as a greeting card writer, and (as a personal, noncommercial obsession) a nonfiction book called "How to Love God Without Being a Jerk." My agent is Adam Chromy at Artists and Artisans. If you came here after hearing about my book on "This American Life" and Googling my name, the "How to Love God" book itself isn't in print yet, and may not even see print in its current form (I'm focusing on humorous memoir), but here's a sample I've posted in case you're curious anyway: Sample How To Love God Introduction, Pt. 1 of 3. Or just look through the archives for September 18, 2007.) The book you should be expecting is the greeting card book, about which more information is pending. Keep checking back!

Sunday, May 14, 2006

Why The Crossword Editing is Going So Slowly

I just wrote the following note on a SINGLE CLUE. I've got 36 more whole puzzles to go. Note, by the way, that the clue is a theme entry leading to the phrase SOUPY SALES, and my innovation was to add a question mark at the end of the constructor's original clue.

27D. Concern of Seinfeld’s “Nazi”? [NOTE: Technically, “Seinfeld” should be in quotes, since it refers to the TV show. But that would leave two quoted words right next to each other, so I went for readability over style consistency. Also, this would seem to be a perfect example of the lower-case use of “nazi,” but every source I can find capitalizes the character as “The Soup Nazi.” So if you’re going to cap it, I think you need to quote it. You could maybe rephrase it to keep the quotes apart: Concern of a “Nazi,” on “Seinfeld”? In any case, you need that terminal question mark to match it with other theme entries.]

As of this writing, with 119 puzzles finished, my list of fixes on the puzzles takes up 13,070 words, or 82 double-spaced pages. Maybe I'm doing this wrong.

LATER: It's been six hours now, and I've knocked off ten more puzzles. Thirty to go. And four more pages of corrections. In just ten puzzles, this guy has tried to assert that "Enos" was a character on "Sheriff Lobo," that an AMBER Alert is the same thing as an APB, that Camelot contained a character named Enid, that Bush headed the CIA under Nixon (it was Ford), he called the Mayo Clinic a "practice," and twice got a podium confused with a lectern. He also misspelled---in the grid, of course---the phrase "papier-mache" (he spelled it PAPER), and the card game Mille Bornes. (He used it to clue BOURNES.) On top of this, he gave the clue "Ender's commander" for GRAFF--a reference to Orson Scott Card's Ender series of sci-fi novels, for those of you outside the geek demographic. Oh! And let's not forget that one grid included the word SAMBO. (I changed it to SAMBA, so now we can sell the book in Atlanta and Chicago.) I take it back---I'm not the one doing anything wrong. No wonder I feel beleaguered.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Welcome to my life, Dave! (7 years of editing crossword puzzles...)

I'm glad to see you got the job. I hope you're enjoying NYC. Chris and I visited there a few years ago and loved it!

5/18/2006 10:15 PM  

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