Call me Eli

Elihu Yale: Fabulous hair.

I’m in New Haven this week, attending the Yale Writers Conference. The attendees are mainly fiction writers, with a medium number of us nonfiction types, and even fewer screenwriters. (The poets either weren’t invited or they boycotted the proceedings. You never know with poets.)

It’s been a fascinating few days, sharing notes and ideas with other writers. There are novelists working on murders and zombies and crooked corporate CEOs and dysfunctional families (sometimes all four), and there are memoir writers working on real versions of the same things, minus the zombies. Nobody but me is writing about babies, except as cute little fictional props squeezed in between scenes of mayhem.

I’m here because I’m working on book two, code named “Son (or Daughter) of Birth Day.” I would tell you what it’s about, but my instructor here at the conference, who is a well-known, literary-battle-hardened L.A. writer and editor, tells me that only someone who wants their book idea stolen tells people what it’s really about.

So I’ll tell you this: There are no zombies. There will be babies. And I hope to bring back Queen Victoria for an encore.

What more could you want?