Rex Pickett's Blog

Over 20 years ago, dead broke, divorced, and living in rent-controlled Santa Monica, CA I started making pilgrimages to the Santa Ynez Valley, two hours north of Los Angeles. Initially, I drove up, always mid-week, to play golf. By myself. It was affordable, the courses were beautiful and uncrowded. Soon, I started staying overnight so I could get in more rounds of golf until I discovered it was wine country. I made friends, got to play all the courses up there, including the Alisal Ranch private course with the then head professional. The beauty of the property was sublime. It wasn’t until later, when finances allowed, that I got a chance to really enjoy the Alisal Ranch.

Going back to my origins visiting Santa Ynez, wine tasting was free back then, and I was just starting to learn about wine. For reasons that have to do with my palate I gravitated to Pinot Noir, and fell in love with the grape, a lifelong love that endures to this day. There was precious little Pinot Noir back then, mostly a few hundreds across just west of the 101 planted by the iconic Richard Sanford.

Writers are like thieves; we're always working. I started taking more and more sojourns up to the Santa Ynez Valley, but my focus was now more on wine tasting than on golf. I remember the first time I ventured up the sinuous Foxen Canyon Trail and stopped at some of my favorites: Foxen, Byron, others. I became more and more enamored of the beauty of the land, the wonderful wines, the inexpensive Windmill Inn (now the Sideways Inn), almost as if I had discovered an edenic paradise just north of me that brought me peace and happiness — two things I was in short supply of at the time. Two hours of driving out of congested L.A. and I found myself in a little bit of paradise that few knew about.

Soon I began to take friends up. Often we would stay at Alisal Ranch, when I wanted to impress them. They, too, fell in love with Santa Ynez Valley's beauty, its wines, Alisal Ranch’s charm and, yes, golf. Coming from the cement landscapes of Los Angeles, I can’t explain the splendor of the sylvan views Alisal Ranch filled my soul with in each stay. One does not expect luxury and dude ranch to amalgamate so spectacularly as it does in every aspect of the Alisal Ranch. Wine, cuisine, experience, Alisal Ranch is the pinnacle expression of Santa Ynez Valley’s central California western roots, sense of adventure, and exquisite taste.

Always looking to share my love for Santa Ynez with others, way back in '96, I took a road trip with my friend Roy Gittens. He's larger than life, boasts a hearty laugh and a true, insatiable, Falstaffian love of life. For three days and two nights we caroused, visited all the winery tasting rooms we could find, played golf at Alisal and La Purisima, ate ostrich burgers at Hitching Post II. No, we weren't chased down by a naked man. No, I didn't drink from the spit bucket at Frass Canyon in frustration. At one point, Roy said to me, "Rex, you should write a screenplay of our experiences." I did. I didn't like it. I didn't show it to anyone. Then, I was toying around with writing a novel, in first person from the point-of-view of one Miles Raymond (Paul Giamatti in the movie), and everything just clicked. I wrote it quickly. I was afraid to show it to anyone because it was so bawdy, so irreverently funny. When I wrote it, I dared to bare my soul and throw in everything and the kitchen sink. It felt personal, autobiographical, and I thought I would be vilified by my agent. But, my career was nowhere, and I had nothing to lose. So, I did. He, Jess Taylor of the Endeavor Agency, loved it. The submissions to Hollywood heavyweights began.

To be continued…

In the meantime visit https://www.alisalranch.com/experiences/sideways-anniversary/ to join me for the Official Sideways Anniversary Weekend at Alisal Ranch.

In 1999 I wrote a novel titled Sideways. It would take another five years before it became the hit, award-winning film of the same title. At the risk of immodesty that movie, and my book, have not faded with time. Almost every day I live its fan base's hosannas – in person at events; via social media; email missives; not to mention new openings of the play I successfully adapted it from. In fact, there are times when I think the Sideways fan base has grown since its release in 2004. Especially in the wine industry. I don't know if it's the three-dimensional believability of the characters, the bawdy and sardonic comedy – that we see so little today in movies – the picaresque romance of people going wine tasting in a sylvan, rural setting, or what, but there is no question the book/movie has endured with time.

What a lot of people don't know is that I've written three sequels – with more to come. Last March I issued my Sideways New Zealand. And in July, when Sideways Oregon is re-issued, it will constitute a legitimate tetralogy. I write in first person from the point-of-view of Miles Raymond (Paul Giamatti in the movie). Where I go, Miles go. In Book 3 he journeys to Chile. In Book 4 we find him holed up on the south of the South Island in New Zealand. Different than most mystery/detective/crime serieses Miles does show signs of ageing. It's not like Raymond Chandler's iconic Philip Marlowe who stayed more or less ageless for over two decades. But my Miles isn't solving crimes; he's living life and dealing with all the frailties and vulnerabilities and escapades that come with that adventure. He's my alter ego. He, fictionally, goes through everything I've gone through in life: failure; success (in Sideways Oregon); losing his small fortune and having to take jobs he doesn't want (Sideways Chile); wanting to disappear (from fame, from his past) in Sideways New Zealand. In every scene, in every line, is a drop of blood from my soul. I only write what I feel is true to my sensibility. I hold nothing back. I bare my soul for all to see.

Fans aware of the sequels often ask me if they can start with a certain book in the tetralogy and if it would be a stand-alone read, and I like to think they could, but I do strongly feel it helps to have a knowledge of Miles's origins in the original Sideways. From there, I suppose you could leap forward, then go back and fill in the gaps. But, whatever one's approach, the good news is, this coming July, 2024, the Sideways tetralogy will be in its full efflorescence from Blackstone Publishing.

Since moving to the city of Napa a little over a year ago I have been a frequent visitor at the Vintners Collective in downtown Napa. It's by far, to me, the finest tasting room in all the world because it does a number of things that most tasting rooms don't. First, it's one of the coolest buildings, a two-story stone masonry edifice standing sentinel at the corner of Main and Clinton. Second, it boasts a beautiful bar that can handle about a dozen oenophiles. It has upstairs private seating, but the bar is where the action is, and the conversation is convivial and always wine-knowledgeable. The Vintners Collective pours a curated list of about ten wineries. Their selections are focused on small producers and the finest winemakers in Napa/Sonoma. It is here where I discovered the Ancien Wines and its winemaker Ken Bernards.

Ken Bernards of Ancien Wines and me:

Ken, a big believer in site-driven wines, sources from as far south as the Santa Ynez Valley (the famous Fiddlestix vineyard) to the Shea Vineyard in Oregon, and everywhere in-between: Russian River, Napa, Carmel ... Yes, it's true I'm a Pinot Noir lover and have been ever since I wrote Sideways in the late nineties. That passion for the grape was annealed in the cauldron of my mild antipathy for the heavy, tannic Bordeaux varieties: Cabernet Sauvignon, Cab Franc, Petite Verdot, and, yes, Merlot. I love the range of expression in Pinot Noir from terroir to terroir and from winemaker to winemaker. True, since the movie came out nearly 20 years ago, a lot of mediocre, and even bad, PN has flooded the market, and a lot of people might wonder what my alter ego Miles Raymond must have been thinking when, played by Paul Giamatti, he waxed on about its "haunting" flavors. Mediocre, supermarket, Pinot Noir can turn you off from the grape. But when it's done right, it can reach empyreal heights.

Ken, in my humble opinion, is producing some of the finest Pinots in the world – and I'm going to except Burgundy from that statement because it's such a different terroir, and its wines are ludicrously out of the price range of even the most passionate Pinotphiles. From bottle to bottle, from vineyard to vineyard, Ken's wines are lush, geologically complex, and provide the full three-act palate experience that all the great wines—and plays, and books, and movies—should deliver, but which many don't. So many wines have a front attack and you maybe get a tease of excitement, but in the mid-palate they disintegrate, collapse, often turn harsh and bitter and show their real amateurishness.

I got a chance to meet Ken and talk about his winemaking techniques. He's a modest guy. Without getting too geeky, he uses basket presses which, he believes, more gently crushes the splendiferous fruit he sources. He does as little as possible in his facility so as not to introduce too much oxygen. Fermentations are long, and often involve native yeasts. The wines rest in oak—a nice combination of neutral and new—for a year-and-a-half and longer so that they can evolve, soften. Ken is a non-interventionist winemaker. Everything is gravity flow. He reminds me of an Italian winemaker I met in Chianti Classico who, when I asked him about his winemaking philosophy, looked at me and said, "I take what the vineyard gives me."

I love every single one of Ken's Pinots, but my current favorites are his Jouissance, sourced from a tiny vineyard in the Russian River and his Coombsville Mink Vineyard from, shockingly, a small parcel in Napa. As a writer, I'm a fan of lyrical rhapsodizing, but of late it's Ken's Ancien single vineyard Pinots I've been fond of extolling, the ones which have been inspiring poetry. In the case of Ken and his Ancien Wines I have to say he coaxes the most out of the tremendous grapes he's sourcing. His Pinots soar across the palate. At his new tasting room in Napa I got a chance to taste some of his older vintages from as far back as '07, '10, and '13, and I was stunned by how fresh and delicious they still tasted. None of them had collapsed. They all showed so beautifully. Ken's wines might be site-driven, but he chooses the sites, and in his barrel room, he works more like a true artist, never wanting to cut corners, always wanting to extract the finest expression of the vineyard lots he magically divinates to. From site selection to harvest to barrelling, he makes highly subjective decisions, akin to a writer, and lives with the results. In his case, it's all five-star reviews. We should all, artists and winemakers alike, be so lucky.

You too can experience Rex Pickett's Discovery and Love for Ancien Wines by visiting his Napa Tasting Room or the Vintners Collective in Napa.

Sideways came out nearly 20 years ago.  I haven't seen Paul Giamatti, my alter ego Miles Raymond – I write autobiographically in the first person from Miles's point of view in all my Sideways installments for those who haven't read me – since an awards show in '05.

A few weeks ago, a friend informed me that Paul was going to be taping a podcast ("Chinwag") he co-hosts live at a theater in downtown San Francisco and asked if I would like to come.  Sure.

About half the audience paid extra to receive a signed poster of the podcast after the episode concluded.  I deliberately hung back at the end of the line.  When I approached Paul he didn't recognize me at first.  I held up my phone and showed him the below photo of the two of us at the cast read-through of Sideways two weeks before beginning principal photography in Sept. of 2003.

Paul and me in the Santa Ynez Valley, fall of 2003:

Paul's expression immediately changed and a smile of recognition spread across his face.  "Rex Pickett?  How are you?"  He was stunned into near wordlessness, not a feature of the otherwise loquacious actor.  Paul has gone on to have a stellar career since Sideways was released Oct. 22, 2004 and changed a lot of people's lives, but I think even he would admit this one film had a seismic impact on his career, and is perhaps his legacy work.  Certainly, it's mine.

There are many stories about the fits and starts of Sideways and how it even came to be, but one day all the forces came into a felicitous confluence in the Santa Ynez Valley.  My character of Miles and Paul's thespian interpretation of him, orchestrated and conducted by writer/director Alexander Payne, collided in the cosmos and strew stars everywhere in a galaxy that still scintillates with them.  This is rare in cinema, rare in any art form.

Paul – warm, grateful, not hurrying me along – and I reminisced about this phenomenon of Sideways and how it lives on as an evergreen.  I didn't know how much time I would have with him, but he couldn't have been more gracious as my friends took photos.  It was an out-of-the-body experience for me.  I don't remember half what I said.  I know I didn't pitch him on a sequel or lobby him for anything.  I just wanted to thank him for the gift of his voice and his brilliant ventriloquizing – I don't know any other word for it – of my character Miles Raymond, written at a tough time in my life, written without pandering to artifice, formula or predictability.  I wrote it in the most self-effacing way I know how.  I bared my soul for all the world to see, but it was Paul Giamatti who had the job of bringing that nakedly personal character of mine to life on the big screen.  

It was a short, but heartfelt reunion.  We both implicitly know what we did for each other and there was a tacit mutual respect omnipresent in our tête-à-tête after so many years.  We hugged and said goodbye. 

Paul Giamatti and me at the Marines' Memorial Theatre in San Francisco, Jan. 27, 2024.

Who knows?  Maybe we'll meet up again one day in New Zealand.

I haven’t had a pet since I was a kid, and that was some decades ago. Kate, the archivist who processed my papers, knowing I lived a monastic life, and that I suffered from the typical mental issues that afflict a professional writer, thought it would be a good idea if I had a cat. One day she introduced me to a three-month-old tabby from a rescue shelter. He was cute, and affectionate, but he had some issues with his back legs. Kate, who has had cats all her life, said she would oversee his well-being. I agreed to foster him.

I named him Max. He was short of stature, and would never, we soon learned, grow to a normal height and weight, but for me he would always be “maximum.” Within a few days, he started showing alarming physiological problems. His back legs would inexplicably give out on him and he could only move by crawling with his forepaws. We knew Max couldn’t jump up onto a couch, or a table, but we didn’t know he had a problem where his hind legs collapsed on him.

After a few days, Max would return to semi-normal. But then it would happen again. It could start for the strangest reasons: a jackhammer tearing up the street outside; his nails getting caught in a blanket. Watching him crawl with his forepaws to his litter box and hoist himself in and relieve himself didn’t disgust me at all; it was like a scene out of Chariots of Fire. I felt so sorry for him. These episodes were heartbreaking, heroic.

I have a friend who is a veterinarian. I sent her videos. She thought it might be neurological. Which means it might be best to put him down. But how could I do that to “Little Max,” as I called him, when he was lying on my chest and purring away as if nothing was amiss. Kate wasn’t convinced it was neurological. She summoned the rescue group who worked closely with a local veterinarian. After numerous X-rays and blood panels they determined Max had a rare metabolic bone disorder where he couldn’t synthesize Vitamin D, which is essential for the absorption of calcium, and that his bones had not developed normally. The several weeks he spent alone in a ravine before he was rescued possibly contributed to his rare disorder.

Max was prescribed an oral supplement. Every third time he would vomit it back up. Dismay filled my days with Max. When his back legs gave out I felt more helpless than him. When he returned to “normal” I would be suffused with elation. He slept in his little bed in the room next to me. Every night I used to wake around four in the morning. I would carry Max like a baby into bed with me and engage in a meditation session with him: he purring on my chest; me cogitating on an upcoming trip to New Zealand to research and eventually write the next installment in the Sideways series, the novel I wrote that became the Oscar-winning Alexander Payne movie. Once I fell asleep with Max next to me. I heard him retching. Why was he vomiting? I theorized it was because when I fell asleep he sensed he had no way to get down off the bed.

One day, using his forepaws, Little Max mounted a pillow I had set out for him and clambered up onto the couch where I wrote. I almost wept. We had many moments of little triumphs and setbacks, producing an emotional rollercoaster the likes of which I’d never experienced, with an animal or a human (!).

When Covid was winding down and New Zealand was opening its borders I readied for my trip. Kate, who always administered Max’s oral supplement, was set to take him. The dilemma for her is that she has three cats, but there was no way she was going to give Max up. He was ours now.

On the ride up to LAX from San Diego I already missed Max. I spent six months in New Zealand. My new novel was set to feature Miles (my alter-ego; Paul Giamatti in the movie) and Jack (Thomas Haden-Church in the movie) on a book tour from hell. In a camper van. I took that trip for research. In winter. It was barbarous. Diagnosed with panic anxiety in the nineties, several times I had to check into ERs believing I was suffering a heart attack. Those who know me and know my work know I write from a deeply autobiographical place. I strip-mine my soul, I feast on my personal life, there is nothing I won’t exploit, no matter how self-effacing, how self-deprecating, how humiliating.

Risking the maudlin, I decided to make Max a character in Sideways New Zealand: The Road Back. He would become Miles’s (my) emotional support animal, even though I don’t like that term because it implies the animal is an adjunct to the human, when in fact, in my case, he is his own special needs case. We both need each other to assuage the fears and debilitating anxieties that we both daily confront. In missing Max more than I can convey in mere words, I was able to keep him alive in my imagination in the writing of the book.

Though he of course doesn’t speak he has his own narrative arc, his own beginning, middle, and end. If I had not been given the gift of this special needs cat I would never had had the idea to make him a character in a novel. Through his relationship to me, where a current of feeling streamed daily between us, I found one of the most affecting characters in my novel. In risking the maudlin I found something deeper. I found a subterranean level of true feeling. I found love. In a cat.

I’m sad to report Max is no longer with me. I’m happy to report he is with Kate and her three other cats. He hasn’t had a relapse of collapsing back legs in well over a year. He doesn’t vomit up his medicine anymore; in fact, he looks forward to it. He gets along with the other cats fine. He’s well taken care of. I miss him terribly. He’s immortalized in my novel. As much as Miles (me) and Jack (my friend Roy) gave me my iconic characters, Max gave me a character who lent a whole new dimension to the novel. Max didn’t write the novel, but he was its indisputable muse. Sideways New Zealand is dedicated to him.

My mental health issues are in abeyance. I’m able to fly without fear. I haven’t been hospitalized for a panic attack in a number of years. I’ve stayed sober. I like to believe Max wordlessly taught me that no matter how bleak things get, use whatever you have and crawl your way to the next station in life like Max if you have to. Stop complaining. Life is short. Live every moment to the fullest, even if you’re paralyzed with anxiety, bedridden with depression, or, God forbid, are afflicted with writer's

block.

Kate sends me videos of Max. He’s never given up. He’s figured out ways to get up and down cat trees, onto the backrests of couches where he loves to watch the birds. His favorite movie is Kedi. His favorite treat is salmon. I would love to get another rescue cat, but I feel like I would be cheating on Max, content and healthy as he now is. But, in my novel, he will forever reside in my heart. Without him, I don’t think I would have had a novel. He brought a whole new dimension to it. I anthropomorphized him and transfigured him to the human.

Postscript: Kate brought Max for a visit. I hadn’t seen him in person for over a year. She let him out of his travel enclosure on the couch. He stepped out gingerly, eyed me circumspectly, sniffed the air all around, turned away, then turned back to me. I exchanged glances with Kate, and shrugged. She put a forefinger to her lips cautioning me to wait. A moment later, a still wary Max ventured on tiptoes to my side. He continued to sniff the air. Then, as if a flare had gone off in his head, he climbed onto my lap, crawled up onto my chest, laid his head down on my shoulder, and started purring. Was he whispering to me the idea for my next novel? I whispered back: “I love you little Max Man. I love you.”

Sideways New Zealand is now available for Pre-Order at rexpickettbooks.com. I will sign and inscribe each novel. See Max with Miles and Jack on the cover below. Shipping late January 2024. Don't order from Amazon: they are evil.

In Pinot We Trust,

Twelve years ago I premiered/workshopped my Sideways play (a theatrical adaptation of my novel written by me) at the tiny 50-seat Ruskin Group Theatre in Santa Monica, CA. Scheduled to run 15 performances, it ran nearly 100. A certified, Equity-waiver hit, it bolted straight to the La Jolla Playhouse, a 400-seat theater, with Des McAnuff (Jersey Boys) directing. It ran over 50 performances and broke all records for a non-musical at that theater. Due to a dispute with the director, the rights to my play were held up for three, long years. When they finally reverted back to me it was staged in London at the St. James Theatre. The first two productions were wildly successful, the London one not so. I never felt, in all of the productions that the director got my text right. There was something missing, but since I hadn't seen the ne plus ultra version of my play, being a neophyte to theater I didn't know what it was. Until now.

In Feb. of 2023 I received an email from my licensor that the artistic director, Alvis Hermanis, of the New Riga Theatre in Riga, Latvia was interested in staging my play. He wanted to read it. My play was sent to him. Two months elapsed before the New Riga Theatre wrote to say that Alvis Hermanis, was interested in licensing Sideways and inquiring about the terms. My permission had to be obtained, and I granted it immediately. Not knowing Latvian, what did I care? I would get a royalty and that was that. My play had already been on a successful national tour of Spain for two years. A silly version, compressed to a 90-min. one-act, but still ... two years.

Alvis wrote me an email thanking me for granting him the rights to stage my play at the smaller (250 seats) of New Riga's two theaters. He admitted to me that originally he only knew the movie, that he didn't know the movie was based on a novel, and that a play version written by me had emerged out of the book and had been staged successfully in the States. We scheduled a Zoom. Alvis Hermanis, 58, is a tall, serious man with a shaved head. He admitted to me that he had already written the adaptation, drawing mostly on my play, but also on my novel with bits pulled here and there from the movie. He asked me to trust him because in Latvia some things don't translate: names, jokes, etc. He assured me, though, his adaptation was very faithful to my source material. I did some research on Alvis. I learned that he had begun as an actor, then been a production designer, but for the past 26 years had been the artistic director of the state-supported New Riga Theatre. He had staged many plays, two of them having played in repertory for over a decade. He had also directed five operas at La Scala and four at the Berlin Oper Haus.

Our Zoom and subsequent email resulted in a lively exchange that would end up in the playbill for the play. Whatever reservations I had about Alvis's adaptation of my play were assuaged by the fact I don't speak Latvian and probably wouldn't see the play and, as with Spain, it wouldn't matter. Nevertheless, I followed the play's progress on their website. I saw pictures of cast members and was pleasantly surprised. When I was vouchsafed an English transcript of Alvis's adaptation I devoured it eagerly. The translation was butchered by Google Translate and it was, to put it mildly, risible to read the English version. However, I was able to see the structure of the play, the design. And, as Alvis promised, he had remained, for the most part, faithful to my original play text.

Sideways, as written, is a difficult play to stage. After reading the workshop version, Des McAnuff said to me: "You've done something almost unprecedented. You've written a play that has 23 scene and setting changes and your main character is at the top and bottom of every scene. How did you do it?" I told him to come up to Ruskin and see for himself. He roared up in his Porsche Panamera and took in the workshop, Equity-waiver version in Ruskin's 50-seat house. The director of the Ruskin Group Theatre version was a 31-year-old woman who had only directed one play before. In order to keep the play moving she employed commedia dell'arte transitions. Some were clever. Some were silly. Some were practical. It was 20 minutes of another play that I hadn't written. But it kept the play moving because plays, I learned, can never stop for more than a few seconds. At the $20 million Potiker Theatre at the La Jolla Playhouse where McAnuff staged it, he had an almost unlimited budget and all the sophisticated technology in the world not afforded Amelia. Working with a Tony Award-winning production designer they were able to change the set from a tasting room to a hotel room to a car to a beach in a matter of seconds. In McAnuff's words: "It's the hardest nonmusical I've ever directed." It put a burden on the actors. Still, the audiences roared with laughter eight performances a week, was extended twice, and to this day is one of the most successful nonmusicals in La Jolla Playhouse's history. McAnuff went for big moments, big laughs, and delivered. But it missed the deeper core of emotionalism, if I was to quibble.

Three years later, London was different. The 300-seat St. James Theatre has a thrust stage and minimal tech. In order to execute those scene and setting changes they employed two medieval-looking wooden revolves that had to be turned by the actors. The actors were terrific, but the play, in my mind, was a disaster. I was beginning to give up hope that my play could ever be staged in such a way that it showcased all its gifts.

I planned to visit Spain to research the next installment in the Sideways series. I figured if I'm going to go to Spain, why not attend the premiere of Sideways in Riga, which Alvis had humorously retitled Pelicans and Grapes? I made plans to fly to Riga, over Scandinavia, over the Baltic Sea, to a country abutting Russia. Never in a million years did I think I would visit a Baltic country. But the momentum of the play's opening drew me.

I stayed at the Grand Poet Hotel. I learned that actor John Malkovich stayed there when he was directing a play. It's an extraordinary hotel, with all the amenities and then some. Riga, though getting chilly in October, is a lovely city. It's modern, but it has old world charm. Restaurants are fantastic. But on to the play.

Alvis, a classy guy, took me around Riga the day of the first, and only, prevue. We talked theater. I started to get the sense that Latvians took their theater seriously. Very seriously. I was nervous at the prevue. It was sold out. In fact, all the six stagings of my play in Oct. were sold out in a 250-seat theater. And though I don't speak Latvian, I had read the translation twice and I knew where the laughs would come, I knew what the scenes were about. Alvis warned me: "Latvians don't laugh big like Americans, but they're laughing inside." Was he setting me up for failure? When I asked him if he was nervous, he said, "I've directed five operas at La Scala. That's pressure." He also explained to me that he was broadening his aesthetic. He had staged Tracy Letts's black comedy Linda Vista and was having a big success with it. Pelicans and Grapes would be in Latvian, but it would be set in the setting of my novel, the Santa Ynez Valley. The names of places and wines would be right out of my original play/novel.

Before the play started, I noticed the stage was perhaps 35' - 40' wide. Centering it was a table above waist high that was at least 20'-25; feet in length and about 5' feet in depth. In front of this baronial table were placed normal-sized chairs. On the backstage side of the table were chairs that were stools that were taller. The table was empty. My play begins with Miles sleeping off a hangover. The actor playing him (Jānis Skutelis) was lying on the table, curled up. He ignores two phone calls, one from a creditor, the second from his landlord hounding him for the rent. The third call is from his publishing agent. He wakes abruptly and answers the call with alacrity. There's hope. What I realized in that moment was Alvis had decided the table could be a bed. In other versions of my play he's lying in a real bed, a bed that would have to come off the stage for Scene 2 when Miles and Jack hit the road. In addition, as it would progress, every scene begins with a voice over the audio system setting the scene. We hear the sound of keys typing out the words on a keyboard, as if Miles were writing this novel he's about to live. The transitions were that simple, that effortless.

When Jack (Ivars Krasts) makes his entrance, Miles has clambered off the table and the two of them are talking excitedly about their upcoming trip. A bottle of champagne is produced from a duffel bag. The lights dim and when they come up again Miles and Jack are sitting next to each other in the low-elevation downstage chairs. Miles is holding one hand out in front of him pantomiming holding a steering wheel. At La Jolla Playhouse, Des McAnuff wanted a car onstage. He likes tech; he likes props; he likes big things. He ended up, at great expense, having this gigantic black golf cart custom-built. It looked ghastly. Its moniker was "Darth Vader's Golf Cart." No one would dare say that to McAnuff for fear of getting their head bit off. Yes, the golf cart could come and go from the stage quickly, but critics were quick to jump on its garish, overblown presence. Alvis probably didn't have the budget for any simulacrum of a car, let alone one that moved on stage, but I don't think he wanted one anyway.

And so the play unfolded. The lights would briefly dim between scenes and very little would be done by the cast of seven to reset the stage. Chairs would be moved, bottles and wineglasses repositioned, but that was it. One of the problems with previous productions was the setting out and removing of wineglasses and bottles because the play has a lot of wine in it. Alvis ingeniously solved this problem by letting the bottles and wineglasses accumulate on the long table. As the play continues, as the characters imbibe more and more wine, it added an almost subconsciously visual metaphor to the play. As things grow messier, as romances are kindled, lies are disinterred, the accumulation of wine bottles and wineglasses is a brilliant visual testament to what is happening in the narrative: principals are getting drunk; lives are getting messier; the party is reaching new heights, and lows, of emotional extremis. And Alvis conveyed this with the accumulation of bottles and wineglasses. Simple, elegant.

The table, the lone piece of set design, at play's end:

All the directors I've worked with are, to one degree or another, crafts people. They're not really artists in the true sense of the word. They all know how to stage a play and get it up on its feet. In fact, after Opening Night at La Jolla Playhouse a slightly tipsy Des McAnuff hooked an arm around my neck and slurred: "You've got talent, but I've got skill. You've got talent, but I've got skill." I think what he meant was: he could never have written the play I had written, but without him it could never be staged. The difference between a master theatre craftsman like McAnuff and a theatrical artist like Alvis Hermanis is one has to bombard the stage with everything from rear-screen projections to scrims to elaborate lighting cues to miniature cars to put on a show. The other (Alvis) possesses the confidence to realize that the scene and setting changes were going to be difficult, were going to tax the actors, so he designed a minimalist set with the least number of props and put all his attention on the actors and the text. He didn't try to tart it up with commedia dell'arte interludes or throw ham-fisted theatrical wizardly and gimcrackery at the audience to disguise the fact that he had no other solutions to deal with so many scenes and setting changes. No theater director I've worked with has such a great eye for composition, almost like a cinematographer, as Alvis Hermanis. Instead of having his actors running frantically about, he gains maximum emotional and comedic effect by the way he positions them.

There are three big emotional moments in the play. One is when Maya learns that Miles's friend Jack, who is having a torrid affair with Maya's best friend Terra, is getting married in a few days. Alvis positions her up on the table, on her feet, as if heightening her physically on the stage, he's heightening, or underscoring, her harangue against Miles. When Terra accosts Jack she also climbs up onto the table to hurl insults at him. Brilliant compositional symmetry. But, it doesn't end there. When Miles learns from his publishing agent his novel has been rejected and his agent is "retiring the manuscript," a downcast Miles, in utter frustration, picks up a spit bucket in a famous scene from the movie, climbs up onto the table and drinks lustily from it. Those are the only three moments in the play where someone is standing on that table. And they register emotionally in the manner in which they were written.

Maya outraged at the confession Miles's friend Jack is getting married:

Terra's harangue at Jack when she confronts him about his upcoming nuptials:

Miles drinking from the spit bucket:

Miles and Maya have a give-and-take love story. It's infused with seductive talk about wine, Miles's inability to make a move because he fears being compromised when Maya learns Jack is getting married, and so on. The way Alvis positions them on the stage is, in a word, genius. In all the versions of my play where Miles and Maya perform their wine duologue—first Miles, then Maya— they are seated next to each other, shoulder to shoulder. But Alvis spreads them apart on the stage. Maya's wine soliloquy happens to the farthest edge of stage right. All the attention is on her monologue. Miles, being on stage left, is diminished by her words, rendered almost nondescript. He feels close to her, but far away, too. This compositional choice not only showcases Maya (a luminous Jana Čivžele) and her lovely speech, but it highlights the emotional distance between the two characters. Most directors "block" scenes, then bring the props to the actors. Alvis positions actors to heighten whatever is going on in the scene.

The ending of Alvis's adaptation of my play eschews the wedding. When I read the transcript of his adaptation I thought this was a mistake because there are two affecting scenes at the wedding. What Alvis chose to do instead was incorporate Maya's appearance at the wedding (not in the movie) and mash that together with Miles's phone call to her apologizing for all that went wrong on the ill-fated week in the Santa Ynez Valley. Instead of his apology dying on her answering machine, Maya emerges wraithlike from out of the shadows and immediately calls Miles back. They are now at opposite ends of the long table. They are as far apart as two people can get on the stage, which is where they are at emotionally, and as a couple, in the story. It ends on a note of hope, of promise, but with that distance still to be bridged!

Maya and Miles at play's end. Look how far apart Hermanis positions them. This is inspired, brilliant:

The famous wine duologue. Instead of putting Miles and Maya shoulder to shoulder, Hermanis moves them apart. It highlights each of their soliloquies to wine. Your attention is focused on the actor speaking, not the actor reacting.

Alvis also utilized music in a very specific way. McAnuff commissioned someone to do a score, and I don't remember it, it did nothing for me. Alvis would often play piano in a minor key, one note dripping after another note, never even a chord, to accentuate the melancholy of the moment. It was haunting. But he also used source music from famous songs to liven things up when he needed to liven things up. Unlike McAnuff who needed a hot tub to rise up out of the floor, Alvis simply had the four leads climb down off the table and pantomime being in a hot tub. And it worked. And it worked better. It was hilarious when Jack pretended to turn on the Jacuzzi jets and they all started jiggling histrionically. Alvis does more with the audience's imagination, trusts in their willingness to suspend disbelief, than any other director I've ever collaborated with. Two chairs can be a bed. Why not?

In the half dozen versions of my play I've seen I've always had some problems with the cast. I don't want to single otu productions or individual actors because it would be in poor form, but I've often not believed the friendship between Miles and Jack, or the chemistry of the unrequited love story between Maya and Miles. Alvis, working with a repertory theater of nearly 30 revolving cast members, assembled an incredible cast. I've never seen so much affection between Miles and Jack. I don't know if it's a Latvian thing or what, but they're very physical with each other. Jack is often played for broad laughs in other productions, but actor Ivars imbues him with a great sense of tenderness at times. Janis plays the tortured intellectual Miles with self-effacing and self-loathing humor. They are the odd couple, the Vladimir and Estragon of wine.

Miles and Jack in one of many moments where they are physical with each other:

In Sideways the movie, Jack is played as a cad. Payne saw them as more "pathetic" than I did. The play rectifies this. McAnuff again: "I loved the movie, but your play is richer and more emotionally complex. And funnier."

Here's Jack's tenderness toward Terra (Sandra Oh in the movie). I never saw this before in any play version. The chemistry was always exclusively sexual. Here it's a genuine, if fraught, falling in love:

Inga Tropa playing the paramour of Jack didn't hold back on her desires; she owned her sexiness. All the actors, in fact, let themselves go to the text I wrote. Again, I don't understand Latvian, but I knew my play. I was warned that Opening Night would not get as many laughs as the Prevue night. Wrong. There was twice the laughter. Tickets for upcoming shows were snatched up within minutes of posting.

Had I not gone to Riga I never would have seen this sublime version of my play. Had I not gone to Riga I never would have believed this version could exist. At a nearly three-hour running time I thought the play was doomed. Not only was it not doomed, but the audience sat rapt. Alvis Hermanis raised my play to high art. The other versions were all entertaining, on one level of success or another, but my play in Riga, Latvia was alchemized into something greater, something, dare I say, more profound. Plays are malleable, of course. The director and the budget determine its outcome. But I witnessed surprisingly consistent methodologies to staging my play across the board until I got to Riga. There I saw my text transformed into something approaching, even exceeding, high art. Alvis played it for comedy, but he really adapted/directed a play that's a tragi-comedy. And that's the novel I wrote, that's the play I wrote.

Me in the center next to Alvis Hermanis and ringed on both sides by the stellar cast:

Who would have thought I would have found redemption in Riga, Latvia? Who would have thought Latvians would get my play better than Americans? When the movie came out all the credit went to the writer/director and the actors. With the play I've reclaimed ownership of my characters, my story. But it took a decade to see it in all its glorious efflorescence.

This weekend I fly to Riga, Latvia to attend the premiere of my Sideways play at the New Riga Theatre. A 250-seat theater sold out 11 performances in 48 hrs. Then, it's on to Spain to catch up with the cast of my play there. A totally different production. I'll stay on in Spain to begin my research for the next installment in the Sideways series. Yep, more books are coming, more Miles chasing wine and the perils of fame and panic attacks. Speaking of which, I just finished replying to the copy-edit of Sideways New Zealand and my publisher Blackstone Publishing will be releasing it Jan. 24, 2024 (go to rexpickettbooks.com to pre-order; don't order from Amazon; you won't get it autographed and I'll still be a starving artist!)/.

I'm going to be blogging my Latvia / Spain trip regularly. Replete with photos. Tons of photos. People ask, "Where's Latvia?" And I tell them: "It's east of the Baltic Sea, on a latitude with Sweden, and shares a border with Russia. My play there has been translated and adapted from my play and novel by the artistic director of the New Riga Theatre, Alvis Hermanis, an award-winning theater director who has called my play "rebellious" and in the production notes compares me to Chekhov. His words, not mine. I'm flattered, but I'm obviously not Chekhov, but if he insists, go ahead.

I look forward to sharing intimate details of my travels with all of you Sideways fans. You're going to get an inside to my writing process. I'm thinking of starting the novel here in the town of Napa at my favorite watering hole, Vintner's Collective. They're a tasting room featuring a small, brilliantly curated selection of Napa/Sonoma vintners. It's in an old stone building built in the late 1800's. If you come to Napa, definitely pay them a visit. My favorite place in the world to go wine tasting.

While I'm away, only signed copies of my novel will be available on my website. Inscriptions will be available until Thursday, October 5th.

My Am I Going Down app informs me I have a 1 in 5,971,481 chance of going down, or a 99.99999% chance of making it to Europe.

The above photo is of the Vintners Collective in downtown Napa. Formerly a brewery, then a Chinese laundry, this historic building is now one of the finest tasting rooms I've ever come upon. They source a limited selection from mostly Sonoma and Napa Valley wineries, and I've had some eye-poppingly, sublime wines here, most notably a variety of Ancien single vineyard Pinot Noirs.

This is the first in a series of blogs of my travels. I'm in Napa now, but not Napa Valley, the town of Napa. I recently returned from New Zealand where I ideated and subsequently wrote Sideways New Zealand. That book will be issued by my publisher Blackstone Publishing this coming January, 2024. In October I jet to Riga, Latvia for the opening of my play at the New Riga Theatre. Then, from there I fly to Alicante, Spain to see the Spanish version of my play which has been on a national tour of that country for the last two years.

I love writing the character of Miles (played by Paul Giamatti in Sideways), who is my alter ego. Where I go, he goes because I write him in the first person. And where I go I have to find a story. I found one in New Zealand: a book tour in a camper van with Miles and his best friend Jack. Let's just say, it does not get off to a propitious start. But, like all my work, I like to believe it goes where you least expect it. I write from the inside out, I told an interviewer recently, I don't write from the outside in. I put myself into the world and I see what I'm thinking and feeling and then fictionalize from there.

Speaking of Sideways, I'm beyond thrilled that we managed to locate a 35mm print of the film and that the historic 90-year-old Sebastiani Theatre on the Sonoma Plaza has a working 35mm projector and we'll be screening a film I haven't seen in over a decade. In fact, it may be the last time you'll get to see the film in a theater with an audience, ever. And that is not hyperbole.

Sideways has now taken me all over the world, and that journey continues. In mid-August Broadway Records will release the Cast Recording of Sideways The Musical. And one day it will see the footlights on a stage somewhere, I'm positive.

Stay tuned for more diaristic musings on my adventures. And watch for Sideways New Zealand!

- Rex

For years I wrote at a desk until one day I decided a laptop, while sitting on a couch, was easier, more expedient, and less formal.  For those years I wrote at a desk I had two images hung on the wall directly above my monitor.  The image on the top is a photo I took of a Rodin-like sculpture bench on the bluff in Del Mar.  To me it symbolizes the imagination, and the imagination is the ideation phase of the writing process.  The horizon is endless when you begin, and you are all alone on that bench.  (Sadly, the bench is gone thanks to some stupid decision by the City of Del Mar to get rid of it for fear of a lawsuit if a citizen were to plunge into the ocean due to a bluff collapse.)  

The two images above my writing desk for many years.  

The second image is a reproduction of a famous painting by Gustave Caillebotte titled The Floor Strippers (aka The Parquet Planers and The Floor Scrapers).  It depicts three shirtless men, on their hands and knees, their faces pressed to the floor, almost anonymous, scraping the varnish off a floor, a brutally hard job.  To me, this symbolizes the work.  Writing is hard work.  I may only write 2–3 hours a day, but I’m writing in my head from the moment I wake up, and I continue writing after my actual writing session is over; the novel, or screenplay, or play, never leaving my imagination for very long.

Sideways NZ:  The Road Back (tentative title) began with a proposition by a Kiwi over email.  Would I be interested in bringing my iconic characters Miles (my alter-ego) and Jack to New Zealand?  Sure.  Let’s do a deal.  NZ’s borders were closed for months due to strict Covid protocols, but the dialogue between Youssef Mourra and myself never abated.  From early on I started – think of Image #1 – to ideate the novel.  Or, more accurately, attempt to outline it, build its world, knowing full well that it would only be an adumbration until I had a chance to be in NZ.  Because I was living in Del Mar, CA (just up the road from San Diego) I naturally assumed Miles would be departing, like me, from LAX en route to Auckland.  But something changed when I got to New Zealand.

After a sounding-board conversation with my writer friend Marco in the early weeks of my stay, I decided to begin with Miles in NZ, at the bottom of the South Island, in Central Otago, famous for Pinot Noir.  I wanted him at the end of the world, physically and metaphorically.  My friend Kate, the archivist of my Rex Pickett Papers, had the brainstorm Miles’s impending NZ book tour should be in a camper van and not a Stagecoach bus and five-star hotels.  Everyone I told Kate’s idea to immediately broke into laughter.  Done, and done.  I was still in the bench-on-the-bluff phase, still ideating, still dreaming.  Then something epiphanic came to me:  Miles receives some shocking – not tragic, but shocking – news that compels him to return to California.  I will never begin a work without an ending, even if I change it.  I had my ending.  Miles, who has over-stayed his visa, has to return to California and risk not being able to return to NZ and his winemaker soul-mate and love.

 At some point you have to leave and begin realizing the dream.

I knew the opening, but it was that big middle I fretted over.  I had to take that camper van trip in order to write about it.  As he always has, and continues to do, Youssef (Youie) made it happen.  One day at Prophet’s Rock Winery guest house, Paul Wright of Three Miners Winery showed up with a camper van courtesy of the generous folks at Pacific Horizon Motorhomes.  It was a beauty, but it terrified me.  It was winter – it still is – and I was about to embark on a monthlong camper van journey, moving from the south of the South Island of New Zealand to the north of the North Island stopping at an eclectic mix of book signings and book clubs, and wineries, along the way.  Here’s an instance where the photo and the painting literally and figuratively intersected.  The fictional book tour trip was not a vacation, was not dreaming as much as it was trying to disinter the novel I needed to write.

I’ve met many aspiring writers who never get past the dreaming/ideation stage.  When it comes to the work they either procrastinate, don’t have time, or flat out can’t make it happen.  I’ve also met writers – some quite successful! – who work their asses off but who never stopped to dream.  They write from their heads, not from their hearts, not from their souls.  I know one in particular who made over a million writing but never had anything go into production.  Her agent negotiated a big deal with a famous movie star (at the time) for a script of hers and then lucrative writing jobs followed one after another.  But nothing ever got made.  Until, finally, ten years later, one did get made.  And came and went ignominiously.  But, she worked her tail off.  She figured out what they wanted and gave it to them in formulaic fashion and on her eleventh screenplay she landed a big fish.  I know another “writer” who is a famous showrunner now who would be the first to admit he’s not much of a writer.  They gamed the system, schmoozed and worked their butts off, but they’re only remembered by their CPA’s.  But, mostly, I meet dreamers, aspiring writers who won’t get down on their hands and knees and scrape the varnish off that parquet floor until they see the beauty of the wood underneath.

As a writer who has had experienced a few enduring successes, and many forgettable failures, I give equal weight to the dreaming and to the work.  At some point the dreaming gets realized in the work as words on the page, and then it’s still mostly work.  But you never stop dreaming.  You keep thinking it could be better, it could be this or that, but the work eventually concretizes the dream.  And then one day there’s a novel, or a …

The writing of Sideways NZ: The Road Back has commenced.  The dreaming and the work have felicitously merged.  A month ago I was on a real journey because I write from the real, I write from experience, I write from what I know, characters I can see and hear in my head.  I do not fictionalize out of thin air like some writers, and some do it well indeed.  I have to have been in a place before I can write about it.  I’ll invent as I go, but it always begins with the real.  And the real always begins with the imagining.  It always begins with sitting on that bench on the bluff and staring out at the infinitude of that ocean, that ocean of your imagination.

I realize my last blog dealt with Day One of my camper van journey in NZ.  I was going to go backward from July 12th and work forward, but after the events of Saturday I’ve decided to leap ahead to the end, then fill in the middle here and there.

This photo does not do justice to the perilousness of Cape Palliser Road.  There were several of these closures, but they let the vehicles go anyway.

From the south of the South Island of Aotearoa New Zealand I lumbered my way north in a 5-ton camper van.  The roads in NZ are well-maintained but they are mostly one-lane with no shoulders.  It is a rural country of verdant ranchland and farmland, and you wind through it on sinuous, unlit – and uncrowded! – roads.  I’m here in the winter.  I don’t know what it’s like in the summer, but I imagine more tourists, more cars.  And I now understand why camper vans and their ilk are such an institution here.  It’s stunningly beautiful almost everywhere you go; free camping is everywhere and unbelievably safe.

I made it to Picton, the tiny port town where you catch the Interislander Cook Strait Ferry.  Once aboard, for a bit extra you can sit in the Plus Lounge and languish in the views.  The day I crossed the skies were saturnine, there was intermittent rain and the seas were white-capped, pitching the gigantic ferry boat to and fro (thank God I brought some Dramamine!).  If I had been two days later to the ferry it would have been shut down due to rough seas.  In America we think of NZ as a land of plenty and with a high-level of progressivism – and all that’s true – but it’s also an island nation close to the Antarctic and can be assailed by inclement weather.  Growing up in San Diego, I miss the drama of the weather, the four seasons, because in San Diego there are no seasons:  summer looks the same as winter, only warmer.

As my research trip came to a close I kept pushing myself harder and harder to uncover material for my novel Sideways NZ: The Road Back.  And there were epiphanies galore, which I’ll go into in future blogs.  I was living the novel as I was ideating it in my head.  Miles and Jack, the now iconic characters from the original Sideways, in a camper van on a book tour in NZ in the winter.  Everyone I disclosed the premise to began laughing, so of course naturally I had to get a camper van and experience the journey in order to write it.

As I approached the ending of the novel (in my head) I wanted a desolate beach where my alter-ego Miles would go off the grid.  From the time I arrived in NZ on May 12th I’ve asked a lot of questions to the Kiwis.  They are a remarkably solicitous people and they always try their best to help.  But, I wasn’t finding that beach until my driver to Hawke’s Bay for an event mentioned two.  From Martinborough – a great wine region for Pinot Noir! – I went to Google Maps.  It was a choice between Castlepoint and Ngawa.  Initially I was going to drive to Castlepoint, but a chance encounter with a terrific young winemaker convinced me to head south to Ngawa.

The beach at Ngawa.  The end of the world.

I left last Sat.  The forecast was not favorable.  A month of being on the road had rendered me brain-fogged.  Four gallons into refueling my camper van I noticed I was putting in unleaded instead of diesel!  I immediately stopped pumping and topped it off with diesel.  In the gas station market they looked concerned.  A mechanic poured in some additive and told me to keep topping it off.  I wondered out loud what would happen and he said diesel engines just won’t start on unleaded and the tank would have to be drained.  Great!  But, with a 4-1 ratio of diesel to unleaded he urged me on.

South out of Martinborough you’re in sheep and cattle country.  Gently sloping meadows with lush verdant flora bound you on both sides as far as the eye can travel.  The wind was blowing at least 20 mph, and in a camper van with a high center of gravity you feel it buffeting you, you slow down, you grip the steering wheel, you drive as much as you can down the middle of the one-land road because there are no shoulders.

When I reached Cape Palliser Road the ocean opened up to me.  Cape Palliser Road is a narrow, serpentine road that hugs the southern coastline of the North Island.  It is not for the faint of heart.  It is not for those with dodgy eyesight.  Throw in a 5-ton camper van, now 30 mph winds, gusting as if blown from gigantic wind machines, driving all alone, you’re hanging on for dear life.  Undeterred, desperate to find that last location, I drove on.  I encountered few cars.  The YouTube videos I previewed showed surfers at famous NZ surf breaks like Ning Nong (love that name) parked at the ocean’s edge sipping beers and firing up bbq’s after a long day out in the water.  But not the day I was driving.  There was almost no one on this narrow thread of a road that makes the Big Sur Drive – which I’ve taken many times – seem like a cruise down the I-5 on a quiet Sunday.  I started coming across warning signs:  “Washout” was one of my favorites, because that’s how I’ve often felt in my life, until I realized the sign wasn’t joking.  Sections of the narrow road had calved off onto the beach, and yet the NZ version of Caltrans wasn’t closing the road.  “Drive With Caution” meant steer your 5-ton camper van away from the crumbling asphalt, with no room on your left and hope the weight of your vehicle does’’t trigger another road collapse.  Should I turn around?

I had fully intended on this last day, all alone now, of this novel research road trip to park on the beach and sleep in the camper van.  But as I battled barbarous winds, intermittent rains, slippery roads, washouts, and partial road closures I changed my plans and decided to return to Martinborough and get a hotel.  But, still hellbent on exploring an extreme region of NZ, and essentially location-scouting for my novel, I wasn’t going to turn around until paralyzing fear struck me down.

As I said, I grew up in southern California.  I’ve driven over a million miles in my life.  I consider myself an expert driver.  But not until last Sat. (Aug. 6th) did I experience the most perilous drive of my life.  As I negotiated the narrow Cape Palliser Road, and forded the even narrower bridges, as my anxiety grew with every caution sign, as the wind rocked my camper van, once so hard it knocked a piece of luggage from the above the cockpit to the floor, rattling my nerves, I started to grow genuinely terrified.  A few minutes later a cabinet door would come unlatched and a grocery bag with bottled drinks crashed to the floor, hissing foam from the bottles.  I was in the middle of it now!

The beginning of perilous Cape Palliser Road.  The only sunshine I glimpsed in three hours of the most harrowing drive of my life.

But, paradoxically, as I continued on – looking back I think I must have gone slightly mad and didn’t know it, didn’t have anyone riding shotgun as a sounding board to temper my intrepidness – the beauty of Aotearoa NZ was heart-stopping.  I grew up on the ocean, spent my youth surfing in it, but this was a wild and savage ocean like I had never seen before.  Maybe it seemed even more savage because I was now in the middle of nowhere, on the most dangerous road I’ve driven in my life, in barbarous weather conditions, in a camper van with a high center of gravity taking every blast of the now monsoon-strong winds with great resistance as I clung to the steering wheel and, dear life.  Now and then I stopped to get pictures.  At one overlook the wind was so fierce it blew the heavy driver’s side door shut.  For a terrifying, panicked moment I thought it would lock me out and I’d have to find a stone and smash my way in through a window.  Fortunately, it didn’t.  Another time – and I don’t if it was my now perfervidly apocalyptic imagination or what! – the camper van didn’t turn over on the first turn of the key and I worried about that unleaded fuel no longer igniting that diesel engine.  But, still, even with those caveats, I soldiered on.

And then the epiphany came to me:  Miles and Jack have split up for reasons I won’t spoil and Miles, in a funk, has driven his camper van, sans publicist, sans driver, to the wildest coastline he’s ever been to, on a day when even Kiwis are indoors, rife with all his panic anxiety afflictions, realizing he’s come to the end of the world, the end of his fictional book tour.  I’ve never seen, or experienced, such a confluence of beauty and peril in all my life.  NZ in the winter?  Hell yes I wanted to scream.I came upon a sharp bend in the narrow road where NZ’s Caltrans had poured a gravelly mixture over the road.  It looked like I was now heading off road because I couldn’t see what was around the bend.  In a rare sane moment, I decided to turn around and head back to Martinborough and the warmth and safety of a hotel.  The drive back was even more anxiety-producing because now I knew the narrow thread of a crumbling road I had to re-negotiate.  When I got to the hotel I was so wired I told the receptionist my story.  She calmly informed me that Cape Palliser Road goes out all the time.  “What do they do if you’re stranded between road closures?” I inquired, bug-eyed at the thought.  “We rescue you by boat,” she replied.  And that’s how novels are written!