Sunday I decided to hit the pool for a bit and do water aerobics since there was no way to do laps in the W pool. I carried my water buoys and my waterproof MP3 player with me from home, so I was all set. It was lovely to be outside and for the moment, not racing from event to event.

Then it was back to the Festival. I decided to spend some time at the actual fair where I caught up with Gayle Lynds at the Mystery Bookstore booth where I also met Stuart Woods. It's always nice to see a familiar face when traveling like this. Clair Lamb, who writes the Mystery Bookstore newsletter was there as well and we had a nice chat. Then it was off to meet one of our readers, Jean Utley, who manages two book clubs for the Book'em Mysteries bookstore. She then introduced me to Sally from ILoveAMystery.com.

At every booth there were signings and buyers. The traffic on Sunday had more kids and the Target stage was one happening place.

Every panel I had attended on Saturday had had few empty chairs. Thus I wanted to see what attendance would be like at the Sunday event where the lineup was two debut authors, who were war veterans writing about Iraq in a panel entitled In War Time: Personal Stories From Iraq. Again, another crowded room!

There I was pleased to meet Paul Rieckhoff, the author of Chasing Ghosts, as we had just finished building his website. After months of email and little conversation, it's nice to have the handshake that usually starts most other business relationships. John Crawford joined Paul on the panel, which was moderated by Doug Smith.

No matter how one feels about the war in Iraq there are soldiers who cannot be ignored. Paul talked of the "fog of war" where one could not tell friend from foe. He spoke of soldiers returning home, one-third of whom are suffering from stress disorders. John told stories of how the war is different for soldiers this time since technology allows them to be so much more connected to home. They race back from the battlefields to sign up for Internet time and to make cell calls back home. On one call his wife complained of traffic on the I-10 while he would be preoccupied with the brains from a fellow soldier that now were embedded in his shoe after a battle. It was a very "in your face" story that told the story of war.

Both Paul and John still looked like they were in another place when I looked in their eyes. They had seen things that we had not. They talked of death and what really happens in war. Paul is looking for a greater breadth of coverage from the media on the war. He wants credible coverage that honors the military obligation that people are making and honors the fallen. Their commentary was met with wild applause, which was nice to see.

They also spoke about the cost of liberty being eternal vigilance. The difference between Vietnam and Iraq is that this war can follow us to these shores. The wrap up line before I had to leave was something like --- Congress enacts foreign policy while soldiers execute foreign policy. Paul wants to see us separate the war from the warriors, which I applauded and so did the rest of the room.

No panel moved me that much all weekend. I walked out and called a friend to share it with him and realized I talked five minutes straight without giving him a moment to respond. He said, "You were in your New York mode after that panel." I wonder if others felt the same way.

For the last panel of the day it was Mystery: Page Turners with Harlan Coben, Lisa Scottoline and Stuart Woods, moderated by Miles Corwin. If the panel before was serious, this one was light and full of banter. Scottoline writes books about people who get in trouble and need to get out of it. Coben writes about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.

Woods had some good introspection on writing. He said that he has learned that he can write as well fast as he can slow. Coben said that some days he writes and it feels good. On others it will not feel as good and he will write through it. The interesting thing is that in the end he cannot tell what he wrote on the good days and what he wrote on the bad days. Scottoline said that she has a theory on writing. Apply butt to chair. When you think it's not coming, just don't get up. Also, allow yourself permission to write a crappy first draft and then fix it.

Coben feels we are in the golden age of crime fiction writing. He reads almost exclusively fiction. Woods does not read in the genre as he is afraid of plagiarizing. He does read a lot of history and biography. Scottoline gave a great idea on getting started writing. When she writes with kids she asks, "What super power would you like to have and what would you do with it?" They can start pretty quickly with a line like that!

To create page turners both Scottoline and Coben pay attention to prose asking, "why is this line here?" all day long. Lisa asks if each line drives plot or helps the story. Coben actually keeps a file he calls spare and tugs every unneeded line and puts it there. For a 400 page book this section can be 100-150 pages long. As Elmore Leonard says, "I try to cut out all the parts your normally would skip."

After this panel wrapped, I joined my friends Skye and Todd from ExpandedBooks.com for a late lunch and drinks and then went onto dinner with my friend, Mindy Schneider, who just finished writing a book that is in the process of being sold.

From there I headed for the airport and the redeye back to New Jersey. I wished I had my Light Wedge with me since I was wide awake most of the flight and would have loved to read!

Great trip and I WILL do it again. I have not stopped to count the number of authors I heard, or the number of panels that I attended, but I will say it was a deeply satisfying weekend. I take off my hat to the organizers, as well as the authors.

Saturday morning I walked over to the Festival and things were bustling. There was a line of cars waiting to park that streamed onto Hilgard and I saw why people had urged me to stay at the W and walk. There were crowds everywhere --- everything from organized patient queues to pick up tickets and lines to attend events.

I started out at a panel where Scott Turow, Amy Tan and Greg Iles pondered whether authors are born or bred. Amy told of loving words even as a young child. She read the dictionary, the thesaurus and a book a day. For years she was a workaholic-obsessed business writer before she became a fiction author. She shared a funny timeline of the kind of rejection letters she got along the way with the first being mimeographed.

Greg picked up next telling of growing up Natchez, Mississippi. His dad was a doctor who read and collected books. His mom was an English teacher. He had lots of talents growing up, and shared a line to ponder about this --- "Most natural athletes are the least motivated since they do not need to be motivated to succeed." He was a natural writer and thus was the same way. He would not rush to enter writing contests or pursue writing since it came naturally to him. His teachers would pull him aside and tell him --- you know you can write, don't you? But he wanted to play music, not write. Music was a challenge where writing came easy.

He started writing after he got married at 29 and spent 50 of 52 weeks on the road playing with a band and realized that was no way to be married for a very long time. He gave himself a year to write a novel. And during that time wrote a 260,000 word novel in much the same way that he had attacked his college term papers. The difference is that this one became a bestseller!

Scott Turow's dad was a doctor who wanted Scott to be a doctor. His mom always had wanted to be a novelist. His first book was about two boys who lived outside Chicago who drove down to New Orleans where they witnessed the murder of an African American prostitute. The interesting thing is that Turow had never been to New Orleans and thus just made all those parts up!

His teacher at Amherst told him at one point to write ones needs to "stuff yourself with novels,"which to me sounded like a pretty good line. He later was a writing fellow at Stamford where as he says, “Not everyone wrote like Hemingway, but they drank like Hemingway!” He went on to become a lawyer though he still wanted to write. Thus he would write on his train commute each morning. He joked that his wife had married a writer and ended up with a lawyer. Sounds like she, like us, is pretty happy he went back to writing.

The moderator of the panel, Barbara Isenberg, shared one more point on craft that I wanted to pass along. She said that to learn sentence structure, Joan Didion once typed Farewell to Arms. There I guess is no better example of craft vs art.

For the next panel I headed over to Royce Hall, which is one of the more gorgeous campus buildings that I have seen. The architecture alone was a sight to behold. During the prior evening’s events I had missed many of the details of the building as I was seated in the orchestra. This time I was in the balcony and could appreciate it more. Above the stage was a line that neither Hinton nor I could quite figure out --- "Education is learning to use the tools which race has found indispensable."

The theatre holds more than 1,800 (I looked this up when I got home) and from my view there were very few open seats, which amazed me. I have been to a lot of book events in my life, but few where the authors packed the room like rock stars.

The featured authors --- Mitch Albom interviewing Frank McCourt. I have seen both of these authors before, but never speaking together. McCourt talks like he is doing standup comedy. He can say a line like "Faulkner’s sentences go on and on and on" and leave the audience laughing. This was in reference to the years that he tried to write like both Hemingway and Faulkner, without much success. He also spoke of trying to write Angela's Ashes as a novel instead of as a memoir, and how that failed miserably.

I did not realize that in ’96 when Angela's Ashes was published, McCourt already was 66 years old. He had been teaching for years and really enjoyed it thus his memoir, Teacher Man. He felt his students needed to be entertained each day and recounted many stories of how he did this. He also joked at how most people who write about motivating students clearly have never been near a room of high school students! He also talked about something called "title fusion" where one mixes up titles. I am happy to know there is now a title to what I regularly do with book titles. I also do the same with author names thus I guess that is "author fusion."

Albom belongs to the band, The Rockbottom Remainders, which is comprised of authors including Amy Tan, Scott Turow, Greg Iles, Ridley Pearson and Dave Barry, among others. Albom talked about McCourt doing a gig with them where he was going to play harmonica. He said he knew Love Me Do by the Beatles. Sooo the band practices this so McCourt can play with them. Well, when they practice they realize that McCourt instead is playing I Should Have Known Better, not Love Me Do! Seeing them both on stage one can see the humor in this just by watching their faces as they recount it.

For the record…back to books….McCourt currently is at work on a novel about a boarding house in Brooklyn. Albom just turned in a still untitled novel that is scheduled to be published in September.

Next up I went to a panel that featured four of the five Young Adults nominees for the previous night’s Book Prize on a panel called Young Adult Fiction: Rites of Initiation. The panelist were John Green, Per Nilsson, Andreas Steinhofel and Markus Zusak, moderated by Sonya Bolle Interestingly Green was the only American thus noting the strong influence of international writers on the American market. Each shared wonderful stories about his writing and what he hoped to share with readers.

Susak talked about his bookshelves at home where his favorite books are housed on his top shelf. He moves titles in here as they become new favorites. What’s on his shelf? Slaughterhouse Five, The Half Brother, My Brother Jack and a book by Peter Hedges that I failed to note the title of. This prompted the moderator to ask the same question of the other authors.

Steinhofel noted Kon Tiki and David Copperfield. Nilsson picked The Master and the Margarita. Green said All the King’s Men, Huck Finn, which he reads over and over, J.D. Salinger, which he reads over and over and Zora Neale Huston.

Susak had a wonderful take on the obsession that many writers have with hitting the bestseller list. He instead focuses on writing a better book so the next time instead of stopping now to see obsess on where he is positioned now. He feels that writing a better story should be the focus, not prizes and list status. Good words.

The next panel was called The Insiders and featured literary agents, Larry Kirshbaum, Betsy Amster and Steve Wasserman, along with publicist Kim Dower, also known as Kim from L.A. and moderated by Bridget Kinsella. Lots of chit chat here about the realities of book publishing as well as the "Opal" and "Frey" situations. Good dishing. And comedy as well, as Wasserman managed to turn each question into some political attack on Washington government. It got to the point where there were three logical replies and then we went on a little off-road excursion with Steve.

Something to keep in mind here, folks. While I was at these panels there typically were 6 other events going on. During the Insiders panel as an example, there was Michael Connelly & Robert Crais in Conversation and Joan Didion in Conversation with David Ulin. Thus there were crowds moving around everywhere.

Next I was onto Creating New Worlds: Young Adult Fantasy Writing where Denise Hamilton moderated Cornelia Funke, Adam Gopnik and Margo Lanagan. My younger son is a HUGE Funke fan so I attended this one for him! He would have loved her story about how she writes by sharing her stories with her daughter each night to see if they hold her interest. She wants a story that sounds good since kids are intrigued by storytelling and if one tells a story well, one will enjoy reading it as well. She said there is a real hunger out there for good stories, which is why she feels thrillers do so very well.

Lanagan is from Australia and she told the story that inspired her story, The Lottery, which takes place in a tar pit. Relatives and friends watch as someone disappears into a tarpit after being charhed with a misdemeanor. It’s got sci-fi overtones to the fantasy.
Gopnik too has his son read his work. He has his son’s book group read his stories and then interviews them to see what works and what does not. His son came up with the title for his first book, The King in the Window. His daughter has given him the title of the second one, Steps Across the Water.

Funke spoke of having 40 books written in German that have not been translated yet. Startling to hear that an author of her caliber has that much material that could be shared. She also told us why she had set The Thief Lord in Venice. All too often she feels that fantasy takes place in worlds such as Hogwarts that children never will see. She loves getting letters from kids telling her that they have traveled to Venice and found the locations that she spoke about.

I had barely walked around the Fair where there are booths laid out throughout the campus. I took a turn at one point at the top of a hill and saw a whole other section that I had not passed earlier. S urprising since I already was wowed but what I had seen.

Taking a break I stopped by one of the stages where the Rockbottom Remainders were finishing up a set where Roger McGuinn from the Byrds was guesting along with Mitch Albom’s wife, Janine. The crowd was loving it.

I am a huge fan of the book, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and thus the next panel was one I wanted to see since Lisa See, the author, was on it. Joining her were Bruce Bauman, Susan Straight and Amy Wilentz for The Unknown Territory, moderated by Mr. Zachary Karabell, who wrote for us at Bookreporter.com many years ago. Small world from New York to L.A.!

See did not disappoint me. She spoke and gave so much backstory on Snow Flower. She spoke about being the second foreigner to go to where she had researched her book and learn more about nu shu, a secret written phonetic code among women that dates back 1,000 years in the southwestern Hunan province. She also talked about how given the high infant mortality rate the Chinese often named their children by number until they reach a certain age and then they give them a name. She also spoke about how she had at one point too many characters in her book. It was getting unwieldy. There were too many people, too many women and thus she needed something to put things more into check. So, she wrote an typhoid epidemic into the plotline in what Zachary called, “literary population control.”

Once again I went to hear one author on a panel and then learned so much from the others there. Wilentz feels that it helps to be from outside a place when you go to write a story since you see so many things that others do not. She likes being an outsider in the world that she is creating. Straight talked of fiction listening to her when she feels like no one else does after telling a funny story about she feels her children and her ex-husband never hear her.
Nice way to wrap up panels for the day. I caught up with Hinton again and he introduced me to Glenn Geffcken, who organizes the Festival. He told me that they were reporting 62,500 attendees. As a veteran of these events, I would have clocked attendance a lot higher --- even double that --- but he said that they have a formula they use each year and that they feel gives them a fair report. What struck me was how calm he was. The entire operation was running seamlessly and he had plenty of time to chat and answer my questions. Nice.

From there it was back to the hotel for 15 minutes and then a drive back to the campus to catch the pre-show reception for Rockbottom Remainders as well as the show. It was nice to talk to some of the authors who I had seen on the panels and meet some new people. For the show we had McCourt on harmonica, Roger McGuinn again on guitar and Craig Ferguson from the Late Late Show on drums and lots of laughes. Nice nice day.

For years I have been hearing that the L.A. Times Book Festival is the quintessential book festival event. Schedule conflicts always kept me from attending in the past, but this year I vowed I would get there. Thus in March I locked down a flight and a reservation at the W Hotel, which was easy walking distance from the UCLA campus where the event is held.

The Festival always takes place the last weekend in April, which typically follows the Mystery Writers of America Edgars Week in New York. This year was no exception and thus I found myself getting home from the Thursday night black tie Edgars Awards ceremony and racing to pack for L.A. as I had an early AM flight.

The plane on the flight out was something like a Greyhound bus with wings. Seriously, it was a 727, but as we were packed in like sardines on a plane with almost no legroom, it felt like a bus. I cannot remember the last flight I took that had a vacant seat. When I talked to the flight attendant about this she told me that these planes also fly to Europe, which made me remember to triple check the aircraft when I book a flight in the future.

Of course, the person in front of me pushed back their seat all the way thus shooting my plan to work on the way out. To open my laptop and see anything I would need to do some funky yoga position with my head and upper body.

Instead I turned on my ipod and picked up the copy of THE KING OF LIES by John Hart that Matt Baldacci from St. Martin's Press had handed me at the Edgars. Great book and somewhere over Pittsburgh I stopped noticing much around me as I turned the pages. As the book opens Jackson Workman Pickens, known as Work learns that his father's body has been found 18 months after he mysteriously disappeared the night his wife died. While he tries to figure out who may have killed him, he becomes the lead suspect. The story moves, but what drew me to love the book is the tone of the writing. Hart does a terrific job of writing emotion. When we touched down I still was engrossed.

Checked in at the W, which is the kind of hotel I love. Boutique-y with an eye on service. I also was test driving a new connection on my laptop with a Verizon Air Card. Instead of using the hotel wired or wireless connection I got online via Verizon. Worked like a dream and since I have a lot of travel scheduled these next months I heaved a sigh of relief. It runs like $60 per month, but when you factor in those annoying $10.95 per day fees at hotels, this is a right nice option!

First thing on my agenda --- was a stop at the Mystery Bookstore in Westwood, which was a few blocks from the hotel. There, in an annual event, authors gather to quaff some drinks and do some signings the night before the Festival. I met a very interesting man who has collected some 5,000 plus mystery and thriller titles. I plan to interview him for the site in the months to come.

From there it was onward to the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Ceremony at the Royce Hall on campus. I met up with Hinton Dillard who is organizing the Atlanta Book Festival, which should debut in 2008. We had met at the Quill Awards last October in New York. We drove over to campus and Hinton quickly learned that I have the worst navigating skills. Seriously. Turn me around twice and I am lost. Heading toward the dinner I saw something that was going to save me this Festival --- pennants.

Above the streets strung between trees and lightposts were color-coded pennants to follow to get from location to location. Thus red to blue to green meant Carol had a chance to get from point A to point B without circling back. I loved those pennants!

We started out at the pre-award dinner where we met two terrific women who were both avid readers. One was in a book club; the other was an aspiring author. Chatter about books, events and the festival turned strangers into new friends. While I had a press pass for the weekend’s events, Hinton needed to score the tickets that were given out in limited numbers for each of the panels. Our new pals had some extras for some of the more highly coveted events, which was great.

The awards ceremony was brisk, elegant and full of star power with National Endowment for the Arts Chair Dana Gioia serving as the master of ceremonies.

During the evening, Joan Didion was awarded the Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement. Born in Sacramento and a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, Didion has written much of her work about her life in California. THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING was one of my favorite books of 2005. I had seen Didion accept the National Book Award in New York last November and then speak the following evening at the Miami Book Fair. This time speaking in her native state she touched on her love of the Los Angeles Times and spoke of how she reads it each day no matter where she is in the world. I always view her as a New Yorker, so it was lovely to hear her make this reference to something that clearly mattered to her from another time in her life.

Here is a list of all the award winners and their presenters. By the end of the ceremony, jet lag had me heading back to my hotel post haste!

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Here was the lineup for the presentation of the Book Prizes and the winners.

Biography: Hilary Spurling, "Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse, the Conquest of Colour," 1909-1954 (Alfred A. Knopf); presented by Blanche Wiesen Cook

Current Interest: Anthony Shadid, "Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War" (Henry Holt); presented by Ronald Brownstein

Fiction: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, "Memories of My Melancholy Whores" [translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman] (Alfred A. Knopf); presented by Luis J. Rodriguez

Art Seidenbaum Award For First Fiction: Uzodinma Iweala, "Beasts of No Nation: A Novel" (HarperCollins); presented by David L. Ulin

History: Adam Hochschild, "Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves" (Houghton Mifflin); presented by Leo Braudy

Mystery/Thriller: Robert Littell, "Legends: A Novel of Dissimulation" (Overlook Press); presented by Mary Higgins Clark

Poetry: Jack Gilbert, "Refusing Heaven: Poems" (Alfred A. Knopf); presented by Dana Goodyear

Science and Technology: Diana Preston, "Before the Fallout: From Marie Curie to Hiroshima" (Walker & Company); presented by Robert Lee Hotz

Young Adult Fiction: Per Nilsson, "You & You & You" [translated from the Swedish by Tara Chace] (Front Street/Boyds Mills Press); presented by Adam Gopnik