Wednesday, March 31, 2010

the end zone

The newest Body Farm novel has been a topic of conversation almost everywhere I've been over the past week. At last night's Einstein Simplified show, a guy named Moose told me that his father had been at the Oak Ridge book signing. Moose was amused that I had signed page 359 of his dad's copy of "The Bone Thief." One of the errors caught by my proofreading got mentioned by Jon Jefferson in a great interview with Chapter 16:
Chapter 16: Do you ever have trouble keeping the two separate when you're writing?

Jefferson: In this latest book, The Bone Thief, there was one place in the manuscript, when I was writing along, that I actually wrote Dr. Bass instead of Dr. Brockton. And it wasn't until before it went to press that anybody caught that. So mostly it's not hard to keep the fictional Dr. Brockton separate from the real Dr. Bass, but occasionally it gets a little blurry in the wee small hours when I have been writing a long time.
My friend Brian Egan and his wife Jen were visiting from the D.C. area yesterday. We met at Patrick Sullivan's before the improv show. Jen was excited to hear about the books and plans to give them as gifts to a family member. Somebody, maybe it was Brian, shouted out "body farm" as a suggestion for one of our improv games.

While chatting about the Body Farm with some folks on Monday, I was reminded of something I heard Dr. Bill Bass say on Thursday. I did a little impromptu emceeing at the Oak Ridge event, by helping with the Q&A session. I asked the assembled crowd to indicate if they wanted to be buried, cremated or skeletonized at the Farm. One man approached Dr. Bass later to say that his mother had donated her remains to the facility upon her death last year. Dr. Bass said that the man could call the anthropology department and make an appointment to visit his mother's bones, once they had been cleaned and stored in Neyland Stadium. It was another fascinating fact that was new to me.

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