Writer's Report 2.0

50 years ago this coming fall, John Steinbeck embarked on a road trip with his French poodle Charley, on a tour to “find America” in 1960.

Steinbeck traveled the U.S. in a specially built pickup truck with a camper attachment in the bed of the truck. He dubbed it “Rocinante” – after the hapless Don Quixote’s horse (written by Cervantes).

I recently visited our library and found they had an original 1962 issue of Travels with Charley: In Search of America. It showed every one of it 48 years of being on the shelf.

I first read Travels with Charley some twenty years ago. After re-reading it I felt like I saw it with new eyes from a whole new perspective and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Although I can’t take 3 months off to travel the route Steinbeck did, I am planning a long weekend trip to follow the same route Steinbeck did, at least through the New England portion of the trip.

I don’t think I’ll go all the way down to Long Island and start from Sag Harbor, taking the ferry back. I think I’ll just go down to Groton, CT, and start from there. I’ll follow his route through Massachusetts, up into Maine and to Deere Isle of course. Then I’ll go up to the northern most part of Maine, over to NH and through VT. If I have the time (and the inclination) I might head over to Niagara, New York.

In beginning my research to try and replicate Steinbeck’s route as closely as possible, I found an original vintage 1960 Shell Station Northeastern United States Road Map, at an antique store. It only cost $7.50 and I should get it in the mail in a week or so.

I think starting out on September 23rd, as he did, would be a colorful time of year to travel this route in this region of the country.

Harlan Ellison in a serious yet hysterical bit on paying writers for the work they do. For anyone familiar with Harlan, his language can be pretty rough – this is no exception:

Stephen King was the first prominent, best-selling author to exclusively publish a novella in the e-book format. He believed it would be a growing industry, but not that it would ever replace real books. He met with limited success.

Now King is back with his e-book only novella “UR”. Its release coincided with the launch of Amazon’s upgraded Kindle 2 reader.

In 2000, in the early years of e-books, King’s novella Riding the Bullet was downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, the load overwhelming all online sites offering it. Although it seemed a little dated then, I still liked it.

He followed that with the story The Plant. King offered the book in unencrypted installments. He requested that people use the honor system and pay one-dollar for each installment. He warned that he’d drop the project if the percentage of paying readers fell below 75 percent.

The percentage of paying customers dropped and true to his word, the project stopped after six installments – the story incomplete.

King said there would be more, but that other projects needed to be finished first. To date there has been no further mention of the story. Too bad, I was into the story when it stopped. Yes, I paid, but only for the first three installments. I thought it was an inefficient, pain-in-the-ass way to pay for a story.

Currently, “UR” is ranked No. 11 on Amazon’s list of Kindle best-sellers and is available as a download for $2.99. It’s about a college English instructor whose pink Kindle allows him to access new books by famous dead authors as well as newspapers that tell of a future event that he is compelled to try to forestall. Some readers have likened the book to an infomercial for the pricey e-book reader.

The Kindle 2 is a slimmed-down model of the original with upgraded components and storage capacity. It went on sale Feb. 9 for $359.

The device downloads books, newspaper stories and blog posts over a wireless network.

At a time when the book industry is going through tough times, it was reported this e-book was released to “create some excitement” in electronic publishing. Although the Kindle and competing devices account for no more than 1 percent of overall book sales, I can tell you the younger generations are going to continue to adapt to this format over traditional book over time.

King sees the Kindle as a delivery system that matters less than the story it delivers. Last year, King wrote in his blog, on the Entertainment Weekly site, the Kindle will not replace books, that there’s a “…a permanence to books that underlines the importance of the ideas and the stories we find inside them…”

But they can, he wrote, enrich a reader’s life.

“For a while I was very aware that I was looking at a screen and bopping a button instead of turning pages. Then the story simply swallowed me, as the good ones always do,” King wrote. “It became about the message instead of the medium, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be.”

Danielle Steel, the best-selling author, has decided to convert 71 of her novels into e-books to be downloaded digitally.

The e-books were released on Feb 24th. The titles include her latest book One Day at a Time and other popular works such as The Promise and Leap of Faith.

The cost for the digital version of the books can vary, but are still cheaper than buying a new hardcover print of any best-seller. They typical cost of a best-seller in e-book form retails for about $9.99.

Publishing houses like HarperCollins, Random House and Simon & Schuster say that sales of e-books for any device – including laptop downloads – constitute less than one per cent of total book sales.

That may be so, but the reason authors like John Grisham and Tom Clancy have also taken their books digital is because there are signs of building momentum. Publishers report that sales of e-books have tripled or quadrupled in the last year.

Although regular books aren’t going anywhere any time soon, things are changing.

Markus Dohle, chief executive of Random House, the world’s largest publisher of consumer books, said, “E-books will become the go-to-first format for an ever-expanding group of readers who are newly discovering how much they enjoy reading books on a screen.”

This one’s for all you die-hard Mystery fans:

Agatha Christie’s Georgian villa where the writer spent her summers and entertained guests with readings from her thrillers will open to the public for the first time on Saturday, February 28th, after a $7.8 million restoration.

Visitors can see the bedroom where Christie slept, the dining room where she entertained, and the drawing room where she thrilled friends with readings from her latest whodunit.

It took two years to restore the 18th-century home, called Greenway, and the rooms are much as they were when Christie lived there in the 1950’s, complete with books, boxes of chocolates and bouquets of flowers. Even the scratches on the bedroom door made by the family dog remain.

Christie bought Greenway in 1938. It is located near Glampton in Devon, England, about 200 miles southwest of London. She spent her summers there until 1959.

Dame Agatha Christie, and her husband Max Mallowan, in 1946.

Born in Devon in 1890, Christie had deep roots there. It is a region of beaches, dramatic river valleys, hills and wild moorland. Fifteen of her books have Devon settings, including And Then There Were None, and Ordeal by Innocence. Christie died in 1976, at the age of 85.

Christie’s grandson, Mathew Prichard, said he hoped the renovation would let visitors “feel some of the magic and sense of place that I felt when my family and I spent so much time there in the 1950s and ’60s.”

Visitors can see Christie’s bedroom, with its view of grounds sloping down to the River Dart, the formal dining room and a manuscript room full of Christie first editions.

During World War II, the house was used by the U.S. Navy during preparations for D-Day. The home’s restorers have retained a vivid frieze of wartime scenes painted on the library walls by Lt. Marshall Lee, a U.S. Coast Guard war artist. Christie had kept them as a memento of their stay.

Although Christie never wrote any of her novels in Greenway, the drawing room is where friends and family would gather to hear Christie read from her latest manuscript and then try to guess whodunit. It is said that her archaeologist husband, Max Mallowan, would wake from a doze to announce the name of the murderer.

Christie’s heirs donated Greenway to the National Trust nine years ago, but until now only its lush gardens have been open to the public.

Greenway is the mystery-lovers’ Mecca. The National Trust said that once the house has been open for a while, they may even consider holding murder-mystery tours and Christie-themed events.

For die-hard fans, one floor of the main house has been turned into a five-bedroom vacation apartment, available for $3,600 a week in high season. The trust also hopes to offer overnight guests a meal in the dining room where Christie once dined.

Robyn Brown, who manages Greenway on behalf of the National Trust said, “It’s my dream, that on the last night of their stay, we will ring a gong in the hall and they will come down for drinks in the library and then have dinner in the dining room.”

For fans of Christie, what could be better?

Coraline may be 3rd in the box office, but it’s Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book that caught my interest.

I recently read an article about The Graveyard Book receiving the Newbery Medal for children’s literature. Having grown up reading stories about ghosts and ghouls, I just had to check it out. However, it would only add to my ever growing stack of books to read – so I decided to get the audio book version and listen to it during my commutes to and from work.

The audio version of The Graveyard Book is wonderfully narrated by the very capable Neil Gaiman himself.

It is the story of Nobody Owens – Bod for short – who is orphaned when his family is killed by an assassin. He escapes to an old graveyard where he is protected and raised by its ghostly inhabitants.

This is pure story at its best. It is thrilling, clever, sinister and yet tender. The story’s language and humor can seem sophisticated, and is reminiscent of storytellers from long-ago, weaving a tale of haunting enchantment.

Bod reminds me of a young version of Dean Koontz’s, Odd Thomas. Although classified a YA novel, I enjoyed it immensely. Once I was so engrossed listening to the story that I missed making a scheduled stop at a local market to pick up dinner for the family. I only realized it when I was most of the way home. So I had to turn around and go back…which enabled me to listen to more of the story…

Whether you read or listen to it, I highly recommend The Graveyard Book.

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.
(more…)

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.”

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.

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.