WHEEE! Jacket copy, and a road trip!

Got the full final jacket copy for Rock & Roll Never Forgets in email this morning. Thusly:

One legendary band on a sold-out American tour. One sleazy biographer digging up old secrets and opening old wounds. One ageing guitarist, with a crippling illness and a twisted past. One woman who will do anything to keep her hold over him, and another who will do anything to protect him.

The last thing the members of Hall of Fame rock & roll band Blacklight need to hear is that ruthless tabloid biographer Perry Dillon is planning a tell-all history of their group. The issue hits hardest for English ex-pat guitarist JP Kinkaid; with his history of heroin addiction and deportation, his estranged wife, and his long-term relationship with a girl he met when she was a teenager, JP has the most to lose. Dealing with his multiple sclerosis doesn't make things any easier.

When he sits down with Dillon, JP's main concern is preserving both his own privacy and that of Bree Godwin, his fiercely protective longtime girlfriend. But it's obvious from the first question that Dillon is digging deep. And he's not planning to stop until he hits rock bottom.

Dillon's looking for trouble, the kind of trouble that garners publicity and sells books. What he finds is the kind of trouble someone will go to any length to cover up, and that includes murder.

Opening night at Madison Square Garden encores with a corpse in JP's dressing room, leaving Blacklight in the middle of a media frenzy--and Bree as Homicide Lieutenant Patrick Ormand's prime suspect.

Rock & Roll Never Forgets, the first JP Kinkaid mystery, offers an all-access backstage pass to how musicians work, live, and love.

Deborah Grabien is a cook, guitar player, cat rescuer, traveler, and all-around rocker chick. She also writes a little: she's the author of the Haunted Ballad series and five standalone novels. Additionally, numerous short pieces of both her fiction and commentary have appeared in anthologies and magazines. Deborah lives in San Francisco, heads back to London and Paris whenever she can, and honestly believes you're never too old to rock and roll.

Visit her Web site at www.deborahgrabien.com.

Advance Praise for Rock & Roll Never Forgets

"Deborah Grabien adds murder and mystery to the sex, drugs and rock and roll equation."--Simon Wood, author of We All Fall Down

"Rock & Roll Never Forgets provides ‘you had to be there’ insight into the hearts and minds of aging rockers with engaging storytelling and grungy charm. Here’s your all-access pass to a full-tilt, fun read—Rock on, Deborah Grabien!”--Kathi Kamen Goldmark, author of And My Shoes Keep Walking Back to You

Praise for Deborah Grabien’s Previous Novels

“The appealing characters and musical background keep the stories fresh and engaging.”—Denver Post on New-Slain Knight

“Her most chillingly effective performance to date….Grabien ratchets up the suspense steadily and implacably, and the resolution is deeply satisfying.”--Publishers Weekly (starred review) on Matty Groves



Not too shabby. And, I'm heading to LA next Thursday, as part of a panel of editors and writers on publishing (big and small press), at the Abbot-Kinney Library in Venice. I believe the event is open to the public, so come on by, have a listen, and take part in the Q&A, if you're so inclined.

Tenterhooks, thy name is Kinkaid

So, the first galleys for Rock & Roll Never Forgets are landing on reviewers' desks. I'll just be over in the corner, feasting on my own fingernails, or maybe hyperventilating.

Normally, I shrug off reviews. It doesn't hurt that I usually get very good ones; Publishers Weekly and Library Journal have starred my books in the past, newspapers like me, it's all good. The occasional bad one stings for a bit, but that doesn't last. I read the stinger, see what they have to say, and if it's valid, I'm glad for the input and I try to implement.

On the Kinkaid Chronicles, though, I'm a bit more - I don't know. Vulnerable? Edgy? Maybe I just care more?

Oy. Going to be a long couple of months. I expect to have no fingernails left come June.

When is a memoir not a memoir...?

...when it's fiction, yo.

You'd have thought James Frey cutting Oprah down to size (for about a jillionth of a nanosecond) would have been enough for the PTB of the publishing industry, but no, here they go again. Two more "memoirs" have revealed to be complete fabrications. Misha Defonseca (Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust years) turns out to come from a nice settled Belgian family, and - good heavens - didn't actually spend the Second World War roaming Europe as a small Jewish girl in the company of wolves. And Margaret B. Jones, who wrote Love and Consequences, a memoir of being a mixed-race teenager running drugs in South Central, turns out to actually be Margaret Seltzer, a nice white girl from Sherman Oaks.

Part of me wants to smack both these women with a big hairy cluestick: Jesus h. wept, what were you thinking, you had these stories in your head, why in hell didn't you just write them as fiction? That's what they are. But it seems that the sure way to get an idiot publisher to buy the pretty story in your head is to call it memoir. That somehow makes it Cult of Personality, which Americans are apparently complete suckers for.

So - who to smack?

Here's the thing. I'm a novelist. I write fiction. My PR stuff makes that very clear. It's especially true of the current series, my "midlife crisis reclaim some of my own history" books, the Kinkaids: they are simply not memoirs. Hell, they aren't even roman a clef category.

Fiction, people. Fiction, fiction, fiction.

Do they incorporate incidents from my own life? Of course they do. That's true of everything I've written. Is JP Kinkaid a real person? No. His voice was very much the voice of someone I knew and loved dearly, but they think differently, they react differently, they even look differently. When I close my eyes and think John Peter Kinkaid, the man I see in my mind's eye is not the man I knew.

Fiction. Say it as often as is needed: fiction.

If I were laying blame for the rash of fake memoirs out there, I'd be laying it first and foremost (and most heavily) on publishing. You guys like to say you're simply reacting to market demand. That's bollocks. You're creating the damned market, and you're the ones pushing the Cult of Personality crap. Spread your attention around a little bit, level your playing field, start worrying about (dare I say it?) good reads, instead of the author's personality status. You might be surprised. I sure as hell would be.

So, saying it loud and proud: don't expect to see me on Oprah, claiming the Kinkaids are fact. They're not.

They are, however, really, REALLY good fiction.