Nor Did I Meet Wonkette, Dammit

When I learned that Nick Denton, the publisher of Gawker Media, was going to be throwing a partyy for San Francisco novelist Eric Martin to celebrate the publication of Winners, my first reaction was to get all excited that maybe I'd finally be able to meet the head Gawker herself, but it was not to be! On the other hand, I did run into Julian Rubinstein, which was fortuitous, as Fresh Eyes had just published the third in a series of great articles about Ballad of the Whiskey Robber and why it's--I'm paraphrasing here--a cult favorite instead of the wild bestseller it ought to be. Julian also introduced me to Barry Yourgrau, who's got something darkly unusual coming out next month called NastyBook.

Turns out that Winners is set in San Francisco during the peak New Economy years, and the reason the party was at Denton's place, Martin explained during his brief welcoming (and thanking) remarks, was that Denton's initial reaction to the early chapters was to wonder if a dotcom executive was supposed to be him. (Eric assured us it wasn't, and pointed out that the question is one fiction writers will often wind up facing, "like from your parents whenever a scene involves bad parenting," or from your exes whenever a love scene goes wrong.)