Pretty witty--and gay: in between seasons of Frasier and Out of Practice, Joe Keenan found time to write My Lucky Star, his third hilarious novel.

One person who would never have a problem writing the "What I Did on My Summer Vacation" essay is Joe Keenan, who spent several years crafting his wildly funny and farcical new novel, My Lucky Star (Little, Brown and Co., $24.95), during the downtime between writing and producing the megahit sitcom Frasier and his acclaimed new comedy, CBS's Out of Practice. My Lucky Star is Keenan's third novel--following My Blue Heaven and Putting on the Ritz--to center on the harebrained schemes of gay-boys-about-town Philip Cavanaugh and Gilbert Selwyn; this time around, they run amok in Los Angeles and cross paths with a closeted movie star, his eccentric family, and a troublemaking Hollywood madam. As in Keenan's previous P.G. Wodehouse-inspired books, it's up to Philip's writing partner, Claire Simmons, to save the day when all seems lost.

Over cream puffs at a bakery in Hollywood, the transplanted New Yorker--who still doesn't drive after more than a decade in Los Angeles--talked about finding time to be literary while working as a TV mogul, a balancing act for which he credits success to his partner of 24 years, Gerry Bernardi, who Keenan says "manages our lives well enough so that I don't have to do anything but write."

I understand that the writing of this book has been something of an ongoing process.

After I'd been working on Frasier for a couple of years, I had really been pining to write another book. The problem is that novels do take a while to figure out, and I spent the first two years that I was working on it just trying to work out the plot, because my plots tend to get pretty Byzantine. And you have to work things out before you start; you can't just jump in.

So you were working on this book offend on while you were doing Frasier?

The writing schedule for a TV show is that you begin right after Memorial Day weekend and you have about 10 weeks before the cast assembles for the season. In those 10 weeks you want to find at least half of the 24 stories you're going to have to tell that year, and then you're in production three weeks on, one week off, until about the middle or the end of March. So really, April and May is the only downtime, and even that downtime can be kind of fraught with busywork for the next season. You're still editing the last episodes; you're still looking around for restaffing if someone has left the show; you're interviewing; you're reading scripts; you're doing a lot. Not a lot of vacation time.

I'm sure you get this a lot, but I always see Gilbert and Philip as two gay Bertie Woosters, with a great female Jeeves to save them.

There is something like that. Sometimes I think of them--to be incredibly highfalutin--to be ego, superego, and id. Philip the ego, Claire the superego, and Gilbert the untrammeled id.

As someone who works in the industry, are you ever concerned that in doing a showbiz novel you have to avoid getting too close to certain people or certain truths?

Well, it's a novel, so your characters are invented anyway. Clearly, you want the book to feel credible, to feel like real life and real show business, but I'm not really copying well-known characters or trying to in any way; I'm dealing with archetypes. The archetype of a diva and the much-rumored archetype of the closeted megastar. I mean, who knows if such a creature really exists? You take all the gossip floating around and say, What if you base a character on all this frantic supposition? That would be a very fun character to write, because it's a guy with a great big problem: His ego and his need for mass adulation are constantly at war with his libido.

It would appear that CBS is fairly supportive of your new show, Out of Practice, in that it's still on the air when so many shows get the trapdoor if they don't immediately start delivering ratings right out of the gate.

It has gotten to be a very impatient medium, run more by bean counters than by visionaries.

How has this experience been, tackling e new show after being involved with a long-running one?

It's been delightful. It's a wonderful cast of incredibly gifted comic actors, a very happy family. And we have a very good staff of writers too, which you need because there's more work to be done on an hourly basis than a couple of people could pull off. All you can do is your best work and hope that all your failures are noble ones. [Laughs]

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