Writer's Report 2.0

Associated Press

Stephen King is a video star.

The animated video adaptation of the horror master’s short story “N.” has been viewed more than a 1 million times on the Internet and on mobile phones since its release in July, according to publisher Simon & Schuster. King has well demonstrated his digital appeal before; his e-novella “Riding the Bullet” was a sensation in the early years of the Internet.

“Stephen King has once again lured his readers to try a new way to enjoy a story,” Susan Moldow, executive vice president and publisher of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, said Thursday in a statement.

The print version of King’s short story, in which a psychiatrist fatally absorbs the madness of one of his patients, is included in the collection “Just After Sunset,” released this week.

You can find all 25 Episodes of “N.” at: www.Nishere.com

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From The Associated Press
By Cain Burdeau

Anne Rice has a new book — a memoir in fact — that’s climbing best-seller lists. Everything is normal, then.

Normal if it were 1994 — the height of Rice’s megaselling fame as a queen of Southern Gothic pulp.

For those who haven’t been paying attention lately to vampire lit, America’s most famous chronicler of bloodsuckers doesn’t live in New Orleans anymore — and hasn’t since before Hurricane Katrina hit — and she’s riding new waves of enthusiasm: the memoir and Christian lit.

Her memoir, “Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession,” is the latest piece of evidence that Rice is reinventing herself in an attempt to build a reputation as a serious Christian writer.

In the memoir, the 67-year-old writer doesn’t disavow the two decades she spent churning out books on vampires, demons and witches — with a batch of S&M erotica thrown in — following the breakout success of her first novel in 1976, “Interview With the Vampire.”

But she’s clearly moved on.

In a telephone interview from her mountain home in Rancho Mirage, Calif., Rice laid out her goal:
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This is a shocker!

From TV Guide:

Michael Crichton, whose contributions to pop culture ranged from the human drama of ER and Disclosure to the sci-fi adventures Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain, has died after what his family called “a private battle with cancer.” He was 66.

“While the world knew him as a great storyteller that challenged our preconceived notions about the world around us … family and friends knew Michael Crichton as a devoted husband, loving father and generous friend who inspired each of us to strive to see the wonders of our world through new eyes,” his family said in a statement. “He did this with a wry sense of humor that those who were privileged to know him personally will never forget.”

Crichton died Tuesday, the family said.

His page-turner novels — and later the plethora of TV shows and films based on his work — balanced hard science with rip-roaring adventure and small-scale emotion. They sold more than 150 million copies worldwide.
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From The Associated Press

TULSA, Okla. – A library book checked out from a Tulsa high school in 1947 has been returned — with a $250 check to cover overdue fees.

Holland Hall School librarian Betty Niver says the book “New Word Analysis: Or School Etymology of English Derivative Words” was mailed to the school by Martha McCabe Jarrett.

Jarrett, of Venice, Fla., was Martha McCabe, a sophomore, when she signed out the book 61 years ago at what was then Holland Hall School for Girls. She recently found it while cleaning out her other home in Rome, Ohio.

“It was just there, with the things I enjoy and my kids don’t,” she said Friday.

In a note sent with the book, she included the check to pay any fines. But she wasn’t sure how she wound up with the book. “I don’t know if it was something the library was getting rid of, or my Latin teacher had given me, or if I just kept it,” she said.

“I sent it back just because I value the education I got at that school,” she said.

School officials said they were not sure what they will do with the $250 because there is no specific overdue book fund. It might be put toward student scholarships.

The book has closed on the great and inimitable Studs Terkel.

The ageless master of listening and speaking, a broadcaster, activist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose best-selling oral histories celebrated the common people he liked to call the “non-celebrated,” died Friday.

New York Times
By William Grimes

Studs Terkel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose searching interviews with ordinary Americans helped establish oral history as a serious genre, and who for decades was the voluble host of a popular radio show in Chicago, died Friday at his home there. He was 96.

His death was confirmed by Lois Baum, a friend and longtime colleague at the radio station WFMT.

In his oral histories, which he called guerrilla journalism, Mr. Terkel relied on his enthusiastic but gentle interviewing style to elicit, in rich detail, the experiences and thoughts of his fellow citizens. Over the decades, he developed a continuous narrative of great historic moments sounded by an American chorus in the native vernacular.

“Division Street: America” (1966), his first best seller and the first in a triptych of tape- recorded works, explored the urban conflicts of the 1960s. Its success led to “Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression” (1970) and “Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do” (1974).

Mr. Terkel’s book “ ‘The Good War’: An Oral History of World War II” won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.
In “Talking to Myself: A Memoir of My Times” (1977), Mr. Terkel turned the microphone on himself to produce an engaging memoir. In “Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession” (1992) and “Coming of Age: The Story of Our Century by Those Who’ve Lived It” (1995), he reached for his ever-present tape recorder for interviews on race relations in the United States and the experience of growing old.

Although detractors derided him as a sentimental populist whose views were simplistic and occasionally maudlin, Mr. Terkel was widely credited with transforming oral history into a popular literary form. In 1985 a reviewer for The Financial Times of London characterized his books as “completely free of sociological claptrap, armchair revisionism and academic moralizing.”

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I hate this kid…nooo I don’t. I’m just jealous that he was a best selling author at the age of 19, and got a three-book deal that was since converted to a four-book deal.

Christopher Paolini’s million-selling “Inheritance” fantasy series, was originally planned to be a trilogy, but has been extended to now include four books in the series.

The first two books, Eragon and Eldesthave sold more than 12 million copies worldwide. The third book, Brisingr, was released last fall.

Paolini said, “I plotted out the `Inheritance’ series as a trilogy… when I was 15. At that time, I never imagined I’d write all three books, much less that they would be published,”

“When I finally delved into Book Three, it soon became obvious that the remainder of the story was far too big to fit in one volume. … In order to be true to my characters and to address all of the plot points and unanswered questions Eragon and Eldest raised, I needed to split the end of the series into two books.”

You can find more info at Paolini’s Web Site

A couple of my favorite new media novelists are offering their newest books for FREE as an eBook download. However, they’re only available for a very limited time.

Go here to get Doug Clegg’s Afterlife

And you can also get Reincarnationist by M.J. Rose

Enjoy!

(New York Times)
By Marilyn Stasio

Tony Hillerman, whose lyrical, authentic and compelling mystery novels set among the Navajos of the Southwest blazed innovative trails in the American detective story, died Sunday at Presbyterian Hospital in Albuquerque, The Associated Press reported.

He was 83 and lived in Albuquerque. The cause was pulmonary failure, according to the AP report.

Hillerman’s evocative novels, which describe people struggling to maintain ancient traditions in the modern world, touched millions of readers, who made them best sellers. But although the themes of his books were not overtly political, he wrote with a purpose, he often said, and that purpose was to instill in his readers a respect for Indian culture. The plots of his stories, while steeped in contemporary crime and its consequences, were invariably instructive about ancient tribal beliefs and customs, from purification rituals for a soldier returned from a foreign war to incest taboos for a proper clan marriage.

“It’s always troubled me that the American people are so ignorant of these rich Indian cultures,” Hillerman once told Publishers Weekly. “I think it’s important to show that aspects of ancient Indian ways are still very much alive and are highly germane even to our ways.”

Hillerman was not the first mystery writer to set a story on Indian land or to introduce a full-blooded Native American detective to crime literature. In 1946 the grand prize in the first short-story competition of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine went to Manly Wade Wellman for the first of two stories he wrote with an Indian protagonist.

But beginning with “The Blessing Way” in 1970 the 18 novels Hillerman set on Southwest Indian reservations featuring Lieut. Joe Leaphorn and Sergeant Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police, brought a new dimension to the character of the traditional genre hero.

In addition to his complex heroes, Hillerman also wrote compassionately and with intimate knowledge of a great range of clansmen from the Navajo, Hopi and Zuni tribes, people with whom he felt a deep affinity because he grew up among those very much like them. “When I met the Navajo I now so often write about, I recognized kindred spirits,” he wrote in an autobiographical essay in 1986. “Country boys. Folks among whom I felt at ease.”
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As the art and business of writing makes the transformation into new media formats, the shifting sands of change continue to show the relentless decline of print media.

After nearly 30 years, the Writer’s Digest Book Club has stopped accepting members and will close down on October 31st, 2008. Here’s what they said on book club site:

It is with regret and sadness that we announce the closing of Writer’s Digest Book Club effective 10/31/08. Since its launch in 1979, Writer’s Digest Book Club has been a program of F+W Publications, Inc. which publishes quality instruction and inspiration for writers through the Writer’s Digest brand. In spite of the closing, we remain committed to the writing community, as we have for more than 80 years, and we’ll continue to produce the best content for our books, magazines, and online venues.

Our decision to close this Club did not come easily. Through member correspondence and feedback, we know Writer’s Digest Book Club has been a reliable source of information and inspiration for thousands of writers for almost 30 years. Book buyers today have many choices in where they purchase books and how they acquire writing related content. As a result, declining membership along with rising costs have negatively impacted the Club’s business model.

This isn’t the end however. Writer’s Digest will continue to make writing related books available through a new website storefront to be launched November 1st at http://www.fwbookstore.com/category/writers-digest

Additionally, there will still be the Writer’s Digest Magazine and their Writer’s Online Workshops and the Writer’s Market resource.

This is a story from our friends across the pond in the UK. It is inspiring at a couple of levels. First, it is the story of Lorna Page, who had her first novel published. She is 93-years-old. More importantly is what she did with the money she received from the sale of her books. She bought a five-bedroom home to keep her friends from ending up in nursing homes.

Read the BBC News article here and watch the video at that link. It’s a great story.