Delfino has never done a traditional sitcom before, and she's surprisingly good. "Sometimes you just look at her, and it's like visiting a museum," says Weiner, providing a clue as to how she got so rich and famous as an author, after leaving The Inquirer in 2001, following a six-year stint as a feature writer.
Weiner, pronounced WI-ner ("Anthony Weiner has ruined a perfectly good name for a lot of people," she says), is much greener than Delfino. Yet here she is, executive producer of her own show, surrounded by scads of cast, crew, and cowriters, with a TV veteran partner, Kirk Rudell, co-executive producer on Will & Grace, to keep things running smoothly.
It's very different from sitting all alone in a garret in Queen Village, where she has lived for years, making a book, and she's glad.
"I love being around people, having other people to talk to," she said in a phone interview from her L.A. office. "It's very lonely writing novels."
Weiner is a gregarious scribe. Many authors dread book-tour publicity. She says she likes it, and a new tour is in the offing. Then Came You, about a wealthy woman, her stepdaughter, an egg donor, and a surrogate mother, is 70th on the Amazon fiction list, and it won't be published for three weeks. She'll talk about the book in an appearance at the Free Library of Philadelphia, 1901 Vine St., on July 13.
Weiner gave out whoopie pies on a mini-tour in May in New York and at the Gershman Y in Philadelphia to mark the paperback release of her seventh novel, Fly Away Home.
Why whoopie pies? "Because they're delicious!" she writes in an e-mail. "And I did cupcakes last year."
She's big on computer interaction. Time readers voted her the world's 14th best Twitterer.
