Writer's Report 2.0

When you read how much John is enjoying himself, it makes you want it all the more…

Associated Press

John Grisham has no desire to ever run for office again.

Though his name pops up every now and then on ballots in Virginia and Mississippi, the mega-selling author, former lawyer and politician emphatically vetoes the idea of a return to public service.

“I wouldn’t take a seat in the U.S. Senate if it was given to me and guaranteed for 20 years with no opposition,” says Grisham, who served as a Democratic representative in the Mississippi state House of Representatives from 1983 to 1990.

Getting fired up, he declares, “Look, I’ve got the easiest life in the world. I don’t want to go to Washington and sit through subcommittee hearings on Medicare. How much fun is that? No.”

Besides, he’s having too much fun writing books. Grisham, who turns 54 on Sunday and has started an official Facebook page to reach out to fans, had an especially good time working on his new legal thriller, The Associate.

Grisham’s 22nd book tells the plight of a bright young attorney who is in over his head at an amoral, high-powered corporate law firm. Shades of “The Firm” , the 1991 best seller-turned-blockbuster movie that established him as the Stephen King of his genre. This time, the drama begins when the handsome lawyer-hero, Kyle, gets blackmailed into spying on his employer after some shady agents discover an ugly secret from his past.

“It really reminded me of `The Firm.’ … It’s an escape. It’s popular fiction,” Grisham says.

With “The Associate,” Grisham tries to recreate the suspense of older hits such as “The Firm,” “The Pelican Brief” and “The Client,” without wrapping his plot around a weighty issue or social injustice. After writing books that veered into sports and coming of age, and a nonfiction account of a rape-murder, he returned to the familiar genre. The demands of fans for vintage Grisham began nagging at him.
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In an interview article in USA WEEKEND to be released March 6th, Stephen King was asked if his mainstream success over the past 35 years paved the way for the successful careers of Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling and Breaking Dawn (The Twilight Saga)author Stephenie Meyer. He dishes out some hefty criticism about the most bankable author since J.K. Rowling, and offers his opinions on a couple of other well known writer’s.

USA WEEKEND
By Brian Truitt

(King) said he doesn’t know how much of an influence he had on Meyer, but he does know that Rowling read his stuff when she was younger. “I think that has some kind of formative influence the same way reading Richard Matheson had an influence on me,” King explains.

“People always say to me, ‘Well, what about H.P. Lovecraft?’ And the thing was, you read Lovecraft when you were a kid but I never felt that he was speaking my language. It was chillier than my heart was, and when Matheson started to write about ordinary people and stuff, that was something that I wanted to do. I said, ‘This is the way to do it. He’s showing the way.’ I think that I serve that purpose for some writers, and that’s a good thing. Both Rowling and Meyer, they’re speaking directly to young people. … The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.”

But then King recalls that when his mom was alive, she read all the Erle Stanley Gardner books, the Perry Mason mysteries, obsessively when he was growing up. “He was a terrible writer, too, but he was very successful,” King says. “Somebody who’s a terrific writer who’s been very, very successful is Jodi Picoult. You’ve got Dean Koontz, who can write like hell. And then sometimes he’s just awful. It varies. James Patterson is a terrible writer but he’s very very successful. People are attracted by the stories, by the pace and in the case of Stephenie Meyer, it’s very clear that she’s writing to a whole generation of girls and opening up kind of a safe joining of love and sex in those books. It’s exciting and it’s thrilling and it’s not particularly threatening because they’re not overtly sexual. A lot of the physical side of it is conveyed in things like the vampire will touch her forearm or run a hand over skin, and she just flushes all hot and cold. And for girls, that’s shorthand for all the feelings that they’re not ready to deal with yet.”

I must give Meg Gardiner author of The Dirty Secrets Club (Jo Beckett)
and the blog Lying for a Living, props for leading me to an excellent article on what it took author Jeff Vandermeer to complete the first draft of his book. A must read for novice writer’s who think revising merely means running your manuscript through Spell Check.

Link: High-level Notes After Completing First Draft

W

(Reuters) – U.S. author John Updike, a leading writer of his generation who chronicled the drama of American suburban life with searing wit, died on Tuesday, his publisher said.

“It is with great sadness that I report that John Updike died this morning at the age of 76, after a battle with lung cancer. He was one of our greatest writers, and he will be sorely missed,” said Nicholas Latimer of Alfred A. Knopf.

Updike was best-known internationally for his series of four novels and a novella about the life of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom through the latter decades of the 20th century and for the novel The Witches of Eastwick.

Twice a winner of the prestigious Pulitzer Prize, Updike was also a poet and short-story writer and essayist.

He lived in Beverly Farms, Mass.

(Reporting by Michelle Nichols, Editing by Frances Kerry)

This is an interview John Updike did with Donald Murray – a locally reknown professor of journalism at the University of New Hampshire. Donald passed away in 2006.

 *** The New York Times has a very good and extensive write up on Mr. Updike.

Thriller novelist Jack Higgins (born Harry Patterson), has authored more than 60 novels in a writing career spanning 50 years – and he is still counting his blessings.

Eight years ago, Higgins, 79, was diagnosed with essential tremor syndrome, a progressive neurological disease. It made him shake so much that two years ago he found he could not even pick up a pen and was going to give up writing.

Then while visiting a friend, he suffered a seizure, fell and hit his head. He ended up in the hospital as a result — and overnight his tremors disappeared, which allowed him to write again.

“In a way it is a bit like Lazarus. It has been a blessing late in life — this unprecedented cure. People have got in touch with me who have got this crippling thing to say what can they do. I can’t tell them what to do. I was just lucky,” he said.

Higgins 1975 breakthrough novel The Eagle Has Landed was made into a blockbuster movie establishing him as an international best-selling author.

Higgins did a stint as a soldier in the British army and then a teacher before becoming a full-time writer. Besides using the Higgins pseudonym, he also wrote novels under the names James Graham, Martin Fallon and Hugh Marlowe.

His latest novel, A Darker Place, released this month, is his 16th featuring Irish hero Sean Dillon.

In a recent interview Higgins spoke about his career:

Q: Did you think “The Eagle Has Landed” would be your turning point?
A: “At the time I was writing for Collins Publishers and it was a good thing when they took me up. But when I wrote “Eagle” the director who handled me rang me up and said what is this book? He said it sounded like a bird book. I gave him the pitch … the book was about German paratroopers dropping in to grab Winston Churchill.

He said that was the worst idea he had ever heard in his life and my readers would hate me as I was not giving them any heroes. Anyway the book was published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston who realized they had something special on their hands and it came out in America to be a sensation.”

Q: How did that changes things for you?
A: “It was rather Harry Potter-ish. Obviously no one will get to that level that (J.K. Rowling) did. But suddenly you were known to everybody and everyone wanted to know you and copy you.”

Q: Why have you used so many pen names?
A: “I used all the other names as I was writing books more as a hobby when I was an academic than for the money. I discovered I could write three books in a year but needed a different name on each otherwise the publishers would not use that many in a year.”

Q: How did you settle on Jack Higgins?
A: “My mother was a Higgins from Northern Ireland. I was born in England, she left my father when I was a few months old, a marriage breakdown, and she decided to get out and took me back to Belfast to her extended family, the Higgins family. Jack Higgins was a great uncle of mine. When I was a child if I was ever at his house he opened a little drawer under the stairs as he put his coat on and there would be three or four handguns and he’d put on in his pocket. He was a militant Orangeman.”

Q: What is your proudest achievement?
A: “People are always going on about the OBE’s and honors that Britain hands out but I’ve never had anything like that…there is a famous program in England called Desert Island Discs and people always said it was only a few thousand people who have been asked to do that program and I have been blessed by appearing on it twice.”

In honor of the Edgar Allan Poe’s 200th birthday on Jan. 19, the Mystery Writers of America have compiled a volume of his works — from the best-loved to the more obscure — along with short essays by award-winning authors who cite him as their inspiration.

In the Shadow of the Master (William Morrow, 416 pages, $24.95), edited by Michael Connelly: The beating of the telltale heart still echoes beneath the floorboards. The cask of amontillado still eludes the wretched Fortunato. The raven still croaks, “Nevermore.”

No matter how many times you read them, Edgar Allan Poe’s classic tales never seem to lose their macabre magic.

In the Shadow of the Master was edited by Michael Connelly and includes vignettes by mystery authors from Sue Grafton to Stephen King.

Their essays provide a range of insightful observations. Some authors reminisce about their favorite Poe tales, while others recall their first exposure to his stories. Still others have come back to Poe’s works after many years and describe how their reactions have evolved as they’ve grown older.

Most of the guest essays sparkle. Each is about two to five pages, a quick read, and each resonates with an unmistakable passion for Poe.
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SAN FRANCISCO DE PAULA, Cuba (Reuters) – Cuba on Monday made the first of thousands of digitized documents, photographs and books that belonged to writer Ernest Hemingway available to scholars after the items languished for decades in the basement of his home outside of Havana.

Most of the papers have never been published and will give new insight into the 21 years Hemingway spent at Finca Vigia in San Francisco de Paula where he wrote some of his greatest works, said Ada Rosa Alfonso Rosales, director of Museo Ernest Hemingway.

Scholars “will be able to study important documents that shed light on the Cuban period of Hemingway, which was very important and not well known by his biographers,” she said.

The material includes more than 2,000 documents ranging from manuscripts of some of his works to letters to store receipts, 3,500 photographs and 9,000 books, some 2,000 of which Hemingway was known to have read because he made notes in the margins, she said.

The documents included coded accounts by Hemingway of his exploits searching for German submarines off Cuba’s coast during World War Two and letters about his love affair with Italian Countess Adriana Ivancich, believed to be the model for the heroine in his 1950 novel “Across the River and Into the Trees,” Alfonso said.

So far, about half of the 2,000 documents have been preserved and digitized and are now available for perusal by scholars who make formal application to see them.

For now, they will have to go to Finca Vigia, or Lookout Farm, to see the archive, but later this month the documents will also be available at the Hemingway Collection in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, Alfonso said.

The archive is not available on the Internet, but likely will be someday, she said.

The project is part of a joint effort by the Cuban National Cultural Heritage Council and the U.S. Social Science Research Councilworking together under a 2002 agreement to preserve the archives that were stored in Hemingway’s basement.

Decades exposed to humidity, insects and heat took a toll on many of the documents, which Cuban conservationists have painstakingly restored, then scanned into computers.

Hemingway moved to Finca Vigia in 1939, the year before For Whom the Bell Tolls was published, and wrote The Old Man and the Sea, A Moveable Feast and Islands in the Stream while there, Alfonso said.

He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.

In July 1960, he returned to the United States and a year later, on July 3, 1961 at the age of 61, he committed suicide in Idaho.

Poor Don, he didn’t quite make it to 2009.

From the New York Times

By Jennifer Lee

Donald E. Westlake, a prolific, award-winning mystery novelist who pounded out more than 100 books and 5 screenplays on manual typewriters during a career of nearly 50 years, died on Wednesday night. He was 75.

Mr. Westlake collapsed as he was headed to New Year’s Eve dinner while on vacation in Mexico, said his wife, Abigail Westlake.

The cause was a heart attack, she said.

Mr. Westlake, considered one of the most successful and versatile mystery writers in the United States, received an Academy Award nomination for a screenplay, three Edgar Awards and the title of Grand Master from the Mystery Writers of America in 1993.

Since his first novel, The Mercenaries, was published by Random House in 1960, Mr. Westlake had written under his own name and several pseudonyms, including Richard Stark, Tucker Coe, Samuel Holt and Edwin West. Despite the diversity of pen names, most of his books shared one feature: They were set in New York City, where he was born.

Mr. Westlake used different names in part to combat skepticism over his rapid rate of writing books, sometimes as many as four a year, his friends said.

“In the beginning, people didn’t want to publish more than one book a year by the same author,” said Susan Richman, his publicist at Grand Central Publishing.

Later in his career, Mr. Westlake limited himself to two pen names, each generally focusing on one primary character: He used his own name to write about an unintentionally comical criminal named John Dortmunder, and as Richard Stark wrote a series about an anti-hero and criminal named Parker.
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Being a fan of Kerouac, I was surprised when I read about this.

Associated Press
BY BRUCE DeSILVA

“The Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks” (Grove Press, 214 pages, $24), by William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac: More than 60 years ago, when Jack Kerouac was 23 and William S. Burroughs was 30, they were arrested in New York City for helping a friend cover up a murder. Although neither had written anything worth mentioning yet, they fancied themselves writers. So, after they beat the rap, they collaborated on a novel based on the case.

Kerouac, for one, thought the book was darned good. America’s publishers unanimously disagreed. And so the manuscript was tucked away, unloved and forgotten, until, at long last, Grove Press published it this month.
It was not worth the wait.

The real crime, which caused a sensation in 1944 New York, gave Kerouac and Burroughs a lot with which to work, but they failed to do much with it. The story is plodding, the characters uninteresting and the writing listless, with few hints at the innovative styles that would later make these writers icons of the beat generation. Perhaps the book will be of interest to literary scholars, but Grove could have posted it on an obscure internet site and spared the rest of us.

The real killer was Lucien Carr, a youth from a well-to-do family. The victim was David Kammerer, who had become infatuated with Carr years earlier in St. Louis while serving as his Boy Scout leader. Kammerer apparently came to New York to pursue Carr, their dance ending when the youth stabbed the older man in the chest with a scout knife, put stones in his pockets and shoved him into the Hudson River.

Carr promptly confessed to Burroughs and Kerouac, who did not call the police. In fact, the latter helped dispose of the murder weapon. Carr was later found guilty of second degree murder, but he was given only a two-year sentence after his lawyer argued that he had committed the crime to defend his honor from a homosexual predator. Carr served his time and went on to have a distinguished career as an editor. He died in 2005.

The crime, with its bohemian characters and hints of pedopilia, was a lot more interesting in the newspapers of the day than it is in the novel.

Kerouac and Burroughs changed the names of all the characters, including themselves. Inexplicably, they also changed the murder weapon, turning the delicious detail of the scout knife into a hatchet. As “Mike Ryko” and “Will Dennison,” the authors take turns narrating the story in a hard-boiled style, trying to write like Mickey Spillane and making a mess of it.

The characters are aimless, intellectual wannabes who spend most of the book engaging in vacuous conversations while wandering from one seedy apartment and bar to another in pursuit of sex, drugs and whiskey.

It is impossible to work up much concern for what will happen to any of them.

Associated Press
By CHRIS TALBOTT

“One Night Stands and Lost Weekends” (HarperCollins, 384 pages, $14.95), by Lawrence Block: Beware the book whose author admits in the introduction he’s afraid to read the stories that follow:

“I’m scared I’ll decide not to publish them after all, and it’s too late for that. So an uncharacteristic attack of honesty compels me to advise you that I am in the curious position of introducing you to a couple of dozen short stories which I myself haven’t read in forty years.”

That’s from one of three introductions Block writes in “One Night Stands and Lost Weekends,” a fun if warmed over collection of the author’s early work, which had already been published in separate collectors’ volumes at the turn of the century.

The stories are just what the title suggests. Quickies sold to pulps and their descendants in the late 1950s and early 1960s in the first part of the book and easily digestible hard-boiled novellas in the second. They’re all easily forgettable — Block, in fact, forgot about a few — but curiously compelling.

Though they mirrored the dreck of the day — full of rapists, murders with semi-plausible twists and an unending line of bombshell blondes pulling a double-cross — Block shows the early promise that would lead him to Grand Master status with the Mystery Writers of America and four Edgar and Shamus awards.
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