Writer's Report 2.0

By DORIE TURNER, Associated Press

ATLANTA – Pulitzer Prize winning author Alice Walker is placing her literary archive at Emory University’s library.

The author of the 1983 Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Color Purple,” “By the Light of My Father’s Smile” and other works visits Emory every couple of years for readings and meetings with faculty members. That relationship was key in her decision to place her archive at the institution, university officials said Tuesday.

“I can imagine in years to come that my papers and memorabilia, my journals and letters, will find themselves always in the company of people who care about many of the things I do: culture, community, spirituality, scholarship and the blessings of ancestors who want each of us to find joy and happiness in this life, by doing the very best we can to be worthy of it,” Walker said in a statement. (more…)

British sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke turns 90 on Dec. 16.

Clarke penned the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was adapted into Stanley Kubrick’s big-screen sci-fi favorite.

Clarke is also the last surviving member of the “Big Three” of science fiction authors (the other two members of the geeky coterie were Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein).

The command center of the Apollo 13 craft was named “2001″ after the movie, Clarke also had an asteroid AND a new species of dinosaur Serendipaceratops arthurcclarkei named after him.

Clarke’s three laws (to writing speculative science fiction):

1. “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”
2. “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”
3. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

You can find a comprehensive collection of Athur C. Clarke’s works at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database

Kurt Vonnegut died this past April, at the age of 84. He was a prolific novelist known for works blending satire, dark humor, and science fiction, such as Slaughterhouse-Five. He was also a graphic artist and produced silk-screen prints of his works.

Vonnegut gave the following interview to J. Rentilly for US Airways magazine just before his death. It is thought to be the best Vonnegut interview ever given.

[Edited for content]

Tell me the reasons you’ve been attracted to a life of creation, whether as a writer or an artist.

I’ve been drawing all my life, just as a hobby, without really having shows or anything. It’s just an agreeable thing to do, and I recommend it to everybody. I always say to people, practice an art, no matter how well or badly [you do it], because then you have the experience of becoming, and it makes your soul grow. That includes singing, dancing, writing, drawing, playing a musical instrument. One thing I hate about school committees today is that they cut arts programs out of the curriculum because they say the arts aren’t a way to make a living. Well, there are lots of things worth doing that are no way to make a living. [Laughs.] They are agreeable ways to make a more agreeable life.

In the process of your becoming, you’ve given the world much warmth and humor. That matters, doesn’t it?

I asked my son Mark what he thought life was all about, and he said, “We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.” I think that says it best. You can do that as a comedian, a writer, a painter, a musician. He’s a pediatrician. There are all kinds of ways we can help each other get through today. There are some things that help. Musicians really do it for me. I wish I were one, because they help a lot. They help us get through a couple hours.

“A lack of seriousness,” you wrote, “has led to all sorts of wonderful insights.”

Yes. The world is too serious. To get mad at a work of art — because maybe somebody, somewhere is blowing his stack over what I’ve done — is like getting mad at a hot fudge sundae.

Nearly forty years after Slaughterhouse-Five, people still love reading your books. Why do you think your books have such enduring appeal? (more…)

This is an article from the December issue of Randy Ingermanson’s (creator of the Snowflake Method) Advanced Fiction Writing newsletter

[BTW: Check out the Advanced Fiction Writing Blog . It is updated frequently and filled with great information and answers to reader's questions.]

If you want to drive from Los Angeles to New York, you
need a roadmap. That isn’t necessarily an actual piece
of paper with roads drawn on it. It might be just a
series of steps to follow, like these:

• Get on I10 and drive east from LA
• Switch to I15 and drive to Salt Lake City
• Take I80 east to Chicago
• etc. (It gets complicated after that)

Now, each of those steps may take a short time or a
long time to execute. You’ll be on I10 for maybe an
hour. I15 will take you a full day. I80 might take a
couple of days. Along the way, there’ll be smaller
tasks you have to execute, such as stopping for gas,
food, motels, etc.

The important thing here is that the main steps are in
order. You’ll go nuts trying to get onto I80 straight
from I10, because they don’t connect. Try any trick you
want. You can even (groan) ask directions. It won’t
help. If you want to get from I10 to I80, you need to
take that pesky intermediate step of I15. You can’t
skip steps.

Of course, there are other ways to get there. You could
take I70 through Denver and Kansas City and Columbus
and on east. Or you could take the southern route on
I40. What won’t work so well is taking I5 up to
Seattle. That’s a little pointless, even if you drive
it really fast, because Seattle is further from New
York than LA is.

The roadmap to getting published isn’t quite like
driving across the country. It’s a lot fuzzier… (more…)

By PETER SVENSSON – Associated Press

For a decade now, publishers have been hoping to wean readers off books and move them to electronic versions, which are much cheaper to produce and distribute.

It just hasn’t happened, even with the support of an electronics giant like Sony, which put out a dedicated e-book reader last year. Amazon.com Inc. recently followed up with its own reader.

But if you look away from the mainstream publishing industry, e-books are already a success in a few niches, where they are giving rise to new ways of doing business. The standout example is role-playing games, but buyers of college textbooks and even romance novels are warming to e-books.

Witness Gareth-Michael Skarka, a representative of one of our newest professions: the e-book publisher. “E-book publishers” that reformat printed books into electronic formats have been around for a while, but Skarka commissions, edits and sells books that overwhelmingly never see print, and would never have existed if it weren’t for electronic publishing.

“Most of our customers are fairly comfortable with the electronic format,” said Skarka. He pulls in around $50,000 a year in sales, enough to make a living of it in Lawrence, Kan., where he is based.

The 156 e-books in Portable Document Format, or PDF, sold by Skarka’s Adamant Entertainment aren’t exactly highbrow literature. With titles like “Slavers of Mars,” and “One Million Magic Items,” they’re aimed at people who play role-playing games — the most famous of which would be “Dungeons & Dragons.” Skarka’s prices are mostly less than $10, but the e-books aren’t hugely cheaper than printed books, because most of the PDFs are short.

Role-players buy lots of books, which contain rules for their games or expand on the imaginary worlds in which they are set. It’s fiction, but it’s more like reference material than the kind of long narratives you’d find in novels. Industry insiders see that as a big reason PDFs work for role-players.

“In general, it’s not the 300-page prose novels that people want to read on the screen,” said Steve Wieck, who co-founded one of the most successful publishers of role-playing games, Atlanta-based White Wolf Inc., in the early 90’s.

Wieck started noticing that a lot of White Wolf’s releases would be scanned by fans and pirated online. Following a “can’t beat ‘em — join ‘em” strategy, he and his brother started DriveThruRPG.com in 2004 to sell PDFs, gathering books from many publishers, including Adamant Entertainment.

Wieck and Skarka estimate that e-book sales make up 10 percent of the $25 million in annual RPG sales. DriveThruRPG alone does $2 million in business annually. By comparison, the Association of American publishers put 2006 e-book sales at $54 million, 0.02 percent of total book sales of $24.2 billion.. (more…)

By MARIA SANMINIATELLI, Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK – Christopher Hitchens believes it is time to rid people of several notions.

Mark Twain did not believe in God, Americans are not uncritically devout and an atheist can be elected president of the United States.

In fact, the extent of religion’s hold on people, the British-born author, journalist and provocateur says, has been vastly exaggerated. Despite polls that suggest differently, people are not as religious as many think, he says.

“I knew that the zeitgeist of religion was changing, that the parties of God would … (anger people) in their various forms: Republican or Shiite,” Hitchens says. “But I had, I think, underestimated how much of this there was.”

He was referring, in part, to the comments he received following the April release of his best seller, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, in which he lambasts religion as illogical and dangerous, and blames believers for centuries of war, persecutions and other ills.

A new anthology published earlier this month, The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever, continues to press the case.

Witty and feisty, the Oxford-educated Hitchens is known for his contentious stances that make him difficult to typecast. A former Trotskyist who published regularly in British and American left-wing publications, he has bitterly criticized Mother Teresa — he testified against her before Vatican officials when then-Pope John Paul II prepared to beatify the nun — former President Clinton and former national security adviser and secretary of state Henry Kissinger. (more…)

3 movie deals prove author Lehane’s luck

By Jocelyn Noveck, Associated Press

Bookstores are lined with the works of novelists who’ve never seen their creations make it to the silver screen — or who’ve been burned when they do.

So count Dennis Lehane among the doubly fortunate few.

First Clint Eastwood made a film classic out of the respected crime writer’s Mystic River, with that scorching, Oscar-winning performance by Sean Penn. Then Ben Affleck made his highly acclaimed directorial debut last month with Gone Baby Gone. Within days came word that Martin Scorsese would direct the author’s Shutter Island next year, with Leonardo DiCaprio in final talks to star.

With that last bit of fortuitous news, Lehane pronounces himself almost embarrassed.

“It’s egregious,” he muses. “I didn’t tell people. My fiancee said, ‘Why don’t you call people?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, let’s just pile it on!’ ”

So what’s Lehane’s explanation?

His talent is not, he insists, originality of plot, saying they “could be found on an episode of ‘CSI’ or ‘Law & Order.’ ” He’s merely happy to take credit for doing what he does very well, which is to write meaty, morally ambiguous, thought-provoking crime novels centered in the seamiest parts of Boston. (more…)