institute for computational sustainability they are doing things like helping california rice farmers plan when they are going to plug the field to claim it's better with bird migrations because it helps them have a flooded field. we are coordinating complex systems in a way that we could before and so when we look at the future problems like climate change, we are going to need their help to let our souls and understand these complex interaction systems. >> caller: i was wanting to ask if he saw marks testimony on tv and how he would rate a his

inheritance to the golden rule especially for a generation yet to come. i agree with what he says about how we need to look at these issues clear into the future. >> host: thank you. >> guest: i did watch mark's testimony, and i am not a good friend of his that i spent time talking about these issues and i think that he is sincere in wanting to do the right thing. he had this idea that by connecting people and amplify showing more with it like they bring them together and we found out that that turned out not to be the case. andd i see the engineers of thee folks working very hard to solve

that problem. at the same time i see them trying to preserve their business model which of course every other company in america does. >> host: tim o'reilly, wtf what's the future and why it's up to us. live coverage of the 23rd "los angeles times" festival of books continues on the campus of the university of southern california. coming up next, live author discussion about biographies. we will hear from jonathan who's written a biography on mohammad ali, a new book out on presidents nixon and some other authors as well. this is why it's coverage on a booktv. welcome to the panel. as you well here we have got

some great writers and i have a couple of announcements they asked me to make when we start. one is be sure that your cell phone is turned off. weco don't want any calls coming in in the middle of the discussion. and also, there are no personal recordings so please honor that as part of the agreement that we have by getting to do this. go for me if you work. the other thing that's important to note is after the event we will be going over to the signing area and i would encourage you to come over and do that. if you have more detailed conversations you would like to have you are welcome to either walk over with us or just meet us over there and we will be there as long as he wants us to beat so we will see you at the d of this event.

in general i just want to say that we are going to try to keep this as informal as we can and encourage the panelists to interact with each other and briefly introduce folks to get a sense of it and add a couplee of questions and hopefully they will take over for me. i am a writer and historian from montana and i have a book here that they had which i thought was interesting so i will be over there also if you're interested. in particular, i just want to give you a quick overview of all of these books and i have them to showqu you. this is an amazing biography of richard nixon i call it a thriller. you know the ending but yet you have no idea what a page turner this is, so i highly recommend this book.

we have the biography of mohammed ali again an amazing and disturbing book almost like it is happening in real time. this is about four leading women you've ever seen written about together before. it's an interesting way of looking at the women that are revolutionaryy for their time ad if you are in need of inspiration these days, which i know i am, this may just be your book. and finally, we have asked him who's going to tell us about somebody that maybe we don't necessarily think of as being a great life. the author and sort of new food

expert i look forward to having a discussion about the difference betweensc writing abt somebody we think we know all about, like richard x. and into somebody that runs off and lives on an island and lives off of land, so we have a unique combination. i would like to start with john who wrote the richard nixon book and ask how he started and came to this subject something we think we all know about and it turns out that we only know a part of the story. there are certain rules for the biographers and one is if the publisher asks you to write a biography speed to i was asked to see if there was a story to tell and i decided i would make

the argument in the initial research that we live in a world of richard nixon left us both in the polarization that we had and atio home, north versus south, black versus white versus the good folks of the heartland. and in the international bordered he gave us the structure that we live in and have lived in and if you define it the way he did which was for 50 yearswar he's a caricature for most of us theut only president to re-signn we know him from watergate and vietnam and it's a sort of famous story showing up in the white house years to join the delegation to the funeral and he walked in and there was the warmer president gerald ford and jimmy carter and richard nixon and bob dole with his casino

here -- here know evil, see no evil. i think this really is a tragic story. he came up in the outback of southern california and his parents demonstrated one way or another that they didn't think much of him, but he had to step in that he came away with the experience be leaving as he told david frost iem and unworthy person and he went on televisioe telling people i'm such an unworthy individual nobody could ever possibly love me and that's he believed. he had a fought in the back of his head that he was a creature,

throughout his presidency he was constantly whispering in his own ear you are no good coming you can't succeed you have to play the game hard for. and the final reason was due to the ministries of the national archives all of a sudden there was a flood of new material and all of the teams released histories, grand jury testimony was released. i fee feel that they don't desee any accolades because i had this stuff to work with and all i have to do is get out of the way. >> i thin >> i think you have a similar kind of challenge.

hey was probably the most famos man of th his time and recognizd before the days of the internet or cable tv recognized instantly i can drop out of an airplane around the planet and walk up to any house and city and village in the world and they would love to see me i is how good he feltd this is the thing that ultimately destroyed and.

in the personality was so possible to take your eyes off of and entertaining but it wasn't until later i realized how interesting is life was and how relevant it is today and this is a story about race and religion and politics. i don't have to be what i you want me to be. he was very unpopular in america. try to imagine what mohammed ali wentnt through when he was stripped of his crown and denied the right to box in the country. he thought his career was over.

i was able to interview everybody close to him and i lost count after a while. they saw his glowing personality and great telegenic personality. whataw i came away with is a sty that surprised me over and over that he was so complicated and his wife was one of the great tragedies. i felt like an enormous responsibility when he's telling the story of someone that is so well known and famous but i also

felt like giving what is going on in the country today it is incredibly relevant and i think that he is a story that we will be telling for generations to come. i'm not sure that this will be the last biography that it will be the greatest. >> you have another challenge witwith women that we assume new wild. you were taking a different approach so i wonder if you can tell us how you came to dogh th. there were four women each of whom in similar ways changed the way that we thought about this. what really interested me is

there were so many parallels in their stories even though they didn't know each other and they were even in different generations for instance all work on credentials outsiders and went into the field and got their hands literally and fingers dirty against all odds they prevailed. all were green fingers before it hahad entered her eclectic at february. three out of four wrote the comic books that ignited the social movements and most interesting it was at a time when women had no voice. what is it about the voices and why do they speak so clearly to the times?

so my character is in the 1960s and as i started reading the work in the books about idealized by this character was the 1950s because each of the women had been pushing against the values of the 1950s. the cultures increasing disconnection from culture. the love affair with science-based technology. they have spoken up and said i don't think that this is the way forward.

the companies have a product and off we wilfive we will turn it o domestic use. the wathe waitress told us to kk down the city's to do a sort of top-down development project to put up the high rising powers and maybe empty clauses but to remove the urban grid they would be reengineered so that they could fashion faster and

sadistic and acrylic mindset is what is really driving the 50s and i don't think this is the way forward but there's another way forward. in 1961 a woman couldn't be on jury duty because she would be neglecting her duties. if she had property and married him if they wanted a credit card she had to have a male cosigner.

if she wanted to be a scientist, she could maybe teach but she was never sent out to the field. she could be a stewardess that if she had children or got married, she didn't leave her job. she could be a secretary. both jane goodall and jane jacobs wentac because they thout that is how they would separate themselves. maybe the most unbelievable, while in many states if they were matched clothing, she could be arrested. there was a story i read where a woman walked into the courthouse to pay her husband's parking ticket and was ordered out because she was wearing pants. i thought how is it that these outsiders were able to make inroads and change the way we think about the fields at a time when no one is listening to

women so that became the kind of connective tissue i was looking for as i wasas researching becae all along they kept having these repetitive patterns. like a lot of people i wasn't sure if i had read silent springs. when i read it i realized this is difficult stuff and she made it so eloquent that this bad news is being delivered in a way that you are able to get through it. then i realized it's because the same language rachel carson is using that describe describes tm and jane jacobs said it isn't just what the buildings look like, bu that there was a human ecology and if you knock down a whole swath inat the cities youe

destroyed the streetlights and if the was the connective tissue that put together the grid and then allowing kind of one neighborhood to flow into another of the cities were a fragile ecosystem in that you could not intervene from on high withoutt destroying their wife share. single celled organis organismf the pond water dries up, where is it if it is just a few expect that fast it doesn't exist except in the context of its environment, so all of these women were looking at the systems that support it the living world whether it was in

cities or the natural environment. i was seeing the same pattern is. i was following the line and i sort of feel that it's a biography of the paradigm change iwith an emphasis onin emphasisd ideology to hands-on go into the field and observe very closely to see what's there. >> i want to get at him in here. fat on in here. one of the things when i took my notes up on the four books i was talking about richard nixon being a thriller as i said, which you don't expect. mohammad ali as jonathan said it's a tragedy can get you see that tragedy unfolding in the most classical sense of the word. integration with these visionary women and so i guess that is the

question is how do you come to a topic about someone that you don't know that much about and your readers don't know that much about and how do you approach back differently as you start to write about it >> unlike the others we are talking about i think it is fair to say relatively unknown to mostre people into the presented some challenges and opportunities and perhaps the greatest was convincing a publisher to do something about a person that most people had neverr heard of and in fact i hd never heard of it until after she died in 2005 i came across her work and life by happenstance reading and obituary in a food magazine. the editor had been a great champion of the patient work and

hahave reviewed her best-known work was published in 1986. in that obituary, he described them as th of the greatest that whateverfr beaverton which sound over-the-top and implausible but highly intriguing and around the same time i found a copy of the book on my parents bookshelf that had been there most of my childhood and i've never seen it and they have hardlyor used it. there was one recipe that had a note in the margin. i opened the book and was completely taken away by the pros and the life that she liv

lived. it's too kind of masterly way travel so it couldn't resist to know more about her. as andrea was saying it was a remarkable period and in particular elizabeth david showed a part of that revolution and the project is understanding who she was and how she came to write this monumental book had a real impact and influence on food writers in the united states and the uk and she was seen as a kind of guru at the

tip of the peninsula in italy to visit her they saw her out. by the time she died in 2005, the bbc described her as an almost forgotten culinary star. so might open the book is to reintroduce her to a contemporary audience. for people to learn lessons, i am wondering what are the lessons that we learned from richard nixon's life? >> the west end she learned, going to the east room of the white house and standing there perspiring is the only time he wore glasses during his

presidency to read a quote from teddy roosevelt was the only time in his life that he actually reflected on the tragedy and what the lesson was. you never hate your enemies because it is only when you hate them they win because yo you destroy your assault and that is the lesson i think. i can't think of too many moments like it in american history. words for his wisdom. >> what was interesting is your book is a very political. i am old enough to remember the antiwar protest and whatnot that

he got involved with and the signs oft his conviction. i wonder how you managed to balance all of that to make him come alive as a totally three-dimensional person. >> one of the great things is that he's not reflected at all. he becomes thi the icon for the movement and all these people refer to his role and he was opposed to the movement and integrationl and said that it s a waste of time and peoplele but never give up any power and the only way was for people to do it on their own in their own organizations to break away from the united states and form their own countries. his father found in a new version is suggested you have to be independent but he was all

over the place and never had a strong center. he was perhaps most famous for saying he wouldn't fight in vietnam and years later he was askedt if he had any regrets in life and a he said i regret that stuff i said about vietnam and vietcong and for a minute i couldn't believe it because this was the thing that most of the feet of him from being an athlete and an important political figure. why would he say that he read granted it did becaus because te regretted it. he always wanted to be loved. you see from an early age there was a myth.

it was a city bus. doesn't it stop all the time and he said yes they were doing it for attention. we transferred and so i think what he was saying is he regrettedn, those remarks. he didn't regret the stand he took. he said he would die before he would go against his religious principles. he wouldn't do it. what he meant is he was upset that it had offended so many people. he felt bad that he had upset so many people. in the end he had a great desire to be loved and that trumped his desire to be respected and that is the key to understanding him i think. >> you get that from reading the

book. and also it's why he thought so often because he needed the money. >> but alsoe what are you going to do to put you in that kind of spotlight where you have billions of people watching you liveu on tv. .. a do you respect him anymore but i do a feel like i understood hm more and how we got got to where he was and i'm just wondering

riefly what that challenge was because you want people to care about the people you're writing about even if you don't necessarily want them to like him. spin there are some that go beyond the pale but even explaining it is important to try to get where the pathologists comes from the basically i thank the rule of a biographer is to approach a subject fairly and with not sympathy like you are in the tank for them but empathy for them as a human being. i was immediately struck when i started feeling friends and family members who were still alive about how protective they were of him of this awkward man. immediately a light old went off. there's something more here and again talking about all b those documents that were released and the love letters to his wife.

he was a starting lawyer in whittier california. he showed an entirely different side. it really was tragic that this insecure person who had the ability to move so far beyond was still brought down in the end. henry kissinger said he met the classic definition of a greek tragedy. not only did he have this tragic flaw but he saw it in himself and he inevitably brought down-- >> he couldn't stop it. >> i'm interested based on what you said earlierer about what is in the water that suddenly made these for women acceptable in the culture that they were being

listened to. it is an unusual time for women to be atng the forefront of intellectual thought. because they were outsiders the culture at that moment gave priority to fear he and technical expertise. none of them had been trained in d their fields. they were not part of the status quo and i was struck because none of the women i wrote about power.terested in they were extremely reticent and shy and quite mortified every time she was asked to speak in her agents said you have to go to more book events. she was so passionate about what she was doing that she wanted to get the word out. she waswa dying of cancer at the time she was writing and she didn't want anyone to know because she thought the chemical companies would use it against her. because they were outsiders and they didn't know any better they

were acute observers and j. jacobsen walks through every neighborhood in new york city trying to figure out what makes the site work--sidewalk work and why are some wonderful and summer and he and abandoned. jane goodall had been trained in pharmacology. lewis was a skirt chaser and you know i think he wanted to still have her around. she had no methodology so she started following them and watching and they would sit for hours and watch them. she started to see the theory at that time was that animals were like clocks. they were biological monolith and they operated by veryan fixd

rules and they didn't have emotions. as she watched and again for weeks and weeks in her incredibly arduous condition she started realizing they were friendships. she noticed she identified and had givenno names. they rushed up and hugged each other and she realized this is more than clockwork. there seem to be a whole constellation of emotions. she sought revenge, she saw anger and she saw tenderness and she thought some more better mothers. same with rachel carson. she at the time that she was working biology was about counting and categorizing things in theay way the zoology, they would kill wild animals and measured their bones encountered t. and that was the way they proceeded. carson was really ending natural world day after day watching and

seeing the world as a whole web. the fact that they didn't know better and they were grounded in the physical they weren't afraid of being intuitive and they weren't afraid of looking hard and you know this objective wasn't considered very professional. they weren't part of the status quo in anyin way and they were also not afraid to use personal and the goat. they were all incredibly beautiful writers so they would put in their stories the things that they had seen and done as part of their argument. they really were able to put a humano face on very big questis about where the country was going. that was perhaps because they were women but perhaps because they just have a different orientation. >> they receive the message differently maybe perhaps, i don't know. so adam again when we are

dealing with someone who runs often does her own thing in that time period how do you approach those kinds of questions from a biographer perspective? >> the an outsider defined who she was so unlike nixon not only did she shun the limelight to the extent that the she sabotaged her own career as a journalist in the 1950s she was appointed the first editor of the women's page at the observer one of the leading post-war papers in london. she also had just published a best-selling cut but in 1957 and in 1962 gave all of that up and rejected the trappings of consumer society and the barked on this 40e year trip to the

mediterranean. in may and she settled on a place that was so remote and lived without electricity or running water or a telephone. in a sense she was a very elusive figure and she looked at the genre of biography and autobiography very skeptically. she did write a memoir of her childhood that begins on page 300 and in the preface it says all autobiographies are discretion and lies. i shudder to imagine what she would think of my book. at the same time all of these are full contradictions and she left behind a a remarkable treasure trove of letters. she corresponded on a daily basis by writing letters. they had no other way to communicate and she saved all of those letters. she sought those letters from her friends clearly in an attempt to preserve them.

without thosele letters the project would have beenul doomed but it made her an inherently fascinating person and figuring that out was one of the threads that runs throughout the book. >> bringing that life forward is important. a thread that i'm very interested in pursuing with all off you here. the title of this is writing, great lives and as a writer myself i am very interested in the process what is involved and i know his writers you often hear the question do you write with the computer or by hand and that sort of thing but there is a real archiving to a biography and aso lot of work. i'm interested and if you want to pick up a little bit on what started that process. i'd like to move down and talk

about that a little bit. >> i will be completely upfront and say i never imagined i would write a biography and i had no idea but i would write this book or how i would rate this book when i embark on the research which i think in a way was a bit of a blessingi . i didn't comment it was some sort of preconceived idea of how i had to put this thing together over the course of 10 years collecting material in reading through the letters in the archives the process to use a word that doesn't perhaps illuminate much it was very organic and this is my first book. writing it came much more easily than i thought it would. i think when you are dealing with a lot of material you have to be selective.

you can't just dump everything into the book and think that people are going to appreciate that they could as they walked. that's a real art and you have to be your own editor anyway in terms of getting a sense of what matters. we know that if we tried towe capture all of that it would be pretty jury stuff. so i think that was one of the great challenges. you know i'm sure if i have the opportunity to write another book it would be--. >> you have a presidential library to work with. i was just camping outside of the nixon library and i was wondering what that process was like. these are notseer books that yon turn around in a year. >> first of all i'm grateful to

jonathan for writing about--and for you for writing about poor people. you despair sometimes when you think about what youou have to . in some ways you are a novelist because you have your plot but there's also way you can approach that. so there is within that structure some freedom of style that you get to deal with. basically it's grinding. when nixon was in law school they called him gus which stood for gloomy gus which is just his personality but they also call them iron sides because he did

not have a quick intellect. what he was was a great writer and he would go to the library and he would sit there and he would study and he would go to his part-time job and then he go back to his rented room in the woods. there's almost no part of this life that you can't spin on but there's a lot of craft as well. >> and timewise again just to give people a a sense of the tie commitment. >> my first three books have been six years from the time and ideas goes off and it hits the stores. >> it's quite extensive. before i asked jonathan i'm going toth alert you that in a w minutes i'm goinge, to ask for some questions from the audience if you have questions.

i always like to point out that if you have comments or you want to talk about a book we have plenty of time to do that afterwards. if you have a specific question for the panelists we would welcome those and we have, think we have some microphone somewhere which the gentleman in the back will help us with when the time comes. think if there's anything you'd like to ask any to people while we are here and if you have more of a comment we can bring those up when we go in the signing area. i just wanted to giveav you a heads-up on that. >> i think i spent a year with without thinking about writing just doing the initial researchf and becoming an expert on the subject of reading and figuring out where the archival material is. for the first time i was writing up about someone who was still alive and family members were still alive so i hate to be crude about it but doing the

older people as quickly as possible. especially when you are dealing with famous people who have been around someone very famous. you can't just call them up and say hey can i come over and spend a week to interview you. it takes two or three years just to win them over. his brother who is still alive the first time i called them i said that like to interview you and he said $1000. i started calling him and i cawould just ask, just one question. he would say $1000. it's still a thousand dollars. so was a long time before we became friends and before i was able to interview him at length. often you do these interviews before you prepare foran them. you say yes to the interview and you go. you are turned --a year or two

later you may relate to ask all the wrong questions and you hope you can get back in the door. ken burns isth working on documentary that goes back to some of the same people. for somebody who is a contemporary a lot of this interviewing which i love and then when you begin to feel you have a mastery of the subject then it's okayy to begin writin. i found and i'd love to hear what the other safe you start writing too soon you are wasting time he gives a year later you realize you are an amateur and you didn't really have command and the context. nick gregory said to me one of the firstdi people i interview when he passed away last year but especially u.s. a white guy he said you will have a real challenge. you think you understand what makes this kid think he's special and that's true for any

biography. it's especially to true as gregory pointed out someone like emmett till who was raised in a society where he was told that he certainly was not great and he was in fact inferior and not entitled to the same rights. what made this kid think he could challenge authority and stick it to the man. that's ahe serious marching ordr when someone saysts don't bother writing the book. i think that's probably something we all face. >> i remembered a comment that virginia woolf made once. she said writing a biography is donkey work because there's a huge amount of slogging just to get a lot of material assembled and you begin to see patterns.

i have to say doing a full life and really trying to get --to give it adequate development is enormous and admirable. because i was doing a group biography i was looking forward to the moment that illuminated the perks of their character in the genesis of their id. the common ground that they shared but i also there were four different laws that i had to research and as jonathan says you start to think okay what do i need to tell my audience about these women that makes it all makes sense? i would do a huge amount of research and write a a rough drt

of one woman and then move onton the second. then i would do a huge amount of research and then i have course ended up doing a huge amount of rewriting. you have to know it's so much more that you can include. there were places where i had gotten off on and jane goodall had a fascinating childhood and i spent a lot of time in her pearlized it's out of proportion i've have to cut out 20 pages which is i guess why it's so slow. you have to know so much more than you can include and you don't really know if you want to keep the story going so there's a dramatic art, to it. i think for me it was always looking for connect to tissue and looking for moments that illuminated each woman. >> one of the things you run into is especially the older

folks they don't remember the actual event that they remember memory of it and they remember that someone interviewed them and they are breeding back to what was written about them. you have to persevere. george shultz was secretary of state and he was richard nixon's economic adviser and secretary of labor. when i interviewed him he was doing the same thing. he lets the cabinet officials use camp david on the weekends block, blonde going probe stories i finally said okay but he tried to get you involved in watergate going to the irs and blackmailing people. he finally got frustrated and he said richard nixon was like that poem. what poem? the one we learned in first grade through there was a little girl who and when she was good she was very very good. when she was very --when she was

bad she was horrible. those are the moments you live for. [laughter] >> i want you to start thinking about your questions right now but i would like to ask others just for a snippet of one of those kinds of stories that you uncovered. >> there are so many and as you pointed out perhaps i embellish them to so much that they no longer resemble the original story through george foreman told me he was drugged. i said do you really believe that you are drugged and he said yeah. that manager was hired by all these camp. george said to me the otherge thing he said i found out afterwards i gave the referee $10,000 cash before that fight. it wasn't a fair fight and i found out later that i'll be

gave the raft 20,000. i called ali's manager and i said is it true that george gave the raft 10,000 and he gave the ref $20,000. he00 said that's ridiculous we only give them 5000. [laughter] >> adam? >> patience was very skilled at crafting a very loose interpretation of her own life. she embellished and emphasized in the autobiographical that she did in later life she drafted a bunch of letters to a writer and journalist who was thinking of doing a biography and included a

lot of personal details including a reference to someoe who had told her in the early days of the second world war that she had been a subject of interest to mi-6 the british intelligence agency. it seemed like one of those things that could not really be true because why would the british be interested in this woman? it was something that i thought was an interesting notion that probably had no basis in fact. as i started doing archival work and i requested information from the national archive in uk it turned out patients had gone to the london school of economics with the woman whose sister had been a soviet spy and this woman was being watched by an intelligence agency. it turned out patience is name

turned out in that file frequently and the details were at times hilarious and just really surprising. i also learned they probably had a separate file on patience but requested that they didn't have it. biographies are those threads that you never quite get to the end of. and that was certainly the case with this. >> one really quick one and that i'm going to ask questions. >> when alice waters, the there was a period in the early days when it was completely chaotic and there were a lot of drugs in the kitchen. a private aside when i was there interviewing her ias said oh wel what about the cocaine and i realized i mentioned those but i

heard more in the weeds stories about what was going on in the kitchen them then i needed to do. there was a lot of sex and a lot of drugs and a lot of dancing. there are a lot of stories that can't make it in but they are great stories. >> i saw a couple of hands over here. please keep the questions short so we can get to as many people who would like to ask questions and if we run out of time we will meet you over in the area. signing area. >> i have spent many years teaching high school student english and literature and writing. they can't grasp what it means to really edit or what it means to revise. there are comments here and

there. they are so in love with what they have written. i know a few writers and i say to them oh my gosh one paragraph and you go through 50 revisions. i would love to hear from each of you and i know every writer is a little bit different, what you do to revise and edit. thank you. >> thank you. a good question. anyone want to jump in? >> i'm in every writer. i write very much by my year and there is probably no paragraph that i haven't worked over 10 times. i like writing and i have a bad memory so the only way i remember is if i tell a story. i really work at the writing and in fact i remember a writer was interviewed and the interviewer said why did it take 11 years to

do your first and second novel and i said i seemed to have to write it in every possible variation. i'm a little that way. >> anybody else want to take that? >> my first book was 700 pages too long. [laughter] all of us have more left on the cutting room than we'd like. >> editing is. >> sometimes they don't want to hear that. a question over here. >> thando you. i amy on my second book but the first one was a math book. this one is about my peers and myself during world war ii. i always wanted to talk about

what the war did to us because there were a lot of heroes but it seems like the children and the kids so on and so forth have been left ahi mind and i would like someone i think it was adam who said we have to write without destroying anyone. i'm looking for help. i'm looking for a ghostwriter. >> so the question is --thank you very much. >> i think it's always challenging when you're close to the subject. for us have the luxury of participating.

but i think great power comes from that to a lemonade what it the experience might have been to you and your peers. writing is so personal. i wish i could give some good advice. maybe the fellow panelist would have some wisdom on that. i admire your pursuit. >> can i sneak in one more and then we will bring the subject up again onn the walk over to te signing area. [inaudible.

[inaudible] how do you do that? >> in some ways is just rolling the dice. sometimes, my first book is a very funny book in the last book was smoother and easier. it could be because i'm 20 years older and 20 years more experience. .. >> said kill your darlings. a lot of times i find things that are the most beautiful art always the most important . >> i think you're answering the question i was going to ask