Archive for the ‘writing’ Category
Wednesday, October 28th, 2009
I remember feeling intensely sad the first time I heard the story about Elena Desserich - the five-year-old girl diagnosed with brain cancer who hid hundreds of little notes around the house for her parents, Brooke and Keith, to discover after she had died.
This sad story and the notes have been turned into a book called Notes Left Behind and the Today Show focused on the Desserichs this morning. Notes Left Behind was originally self-published but has since been picked up by the publisher, William Morrow.
Here is an excerpt from the book…(I can’t read it - I have two young daughters.)
By the way, all proceeds from this book go towards the family’s cancer foundation.
Posted in author, books, children's book, family, news, writing | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
Sarah Palin is all the rage again with the publication of Going Rogue coming up soon. I won’t be reading this particular memoir but many people will - it is already a bestseller on Amazon.com on pre-orders alone. But did you know that Palin is already a published author…sort of?
Yes…. Palin wrote the foreword for Wild Wonderful Alaska Seafood by Steve Lee and Sue Ashworth, and published by the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute. I think I’d actually prefer to read Wild Wonderful Alaska Seafood than Going Rogue. I am quite sure the seafood in Alaska is really wild and wonderful.
The website of the Alaska Seaford Marketing Institute offers a host of fun facts, including that the average salmon boat is 37 ft. long and giant vegetables are common in Alaska due to the extremely long days in summer. Alaska has grown a record cabbage weighing in at 94 pounds.
I’d pay good money to see a 94-pound cabbage. How did I get from Sarah Palin to giant cabbages?
Posted in author, books, food, news, odd, politics, writing | No Comments »
Monday, October 26th, 2009
Bookslut has an interview with Ron Charles from the Washington Post. Ron is Deputy Editor of the Post’s Book World and you’ll also find him on Twitter, but his daughter doesn’t like the idea of her father tweeting. (We follow Ron on Twitter.)
My wife finds it really distracting! My daughter has refused to become a follower of mine; she thinks it’s completely ridiculous that I do this. It came out of that NBCC meeting. I had no idea [before that] what it was at all. I’d just gotten on Facebook to follow my daughter. Twitter sounded absurd, you know, “I had pork and beans tonight,” who cares about this? But [at the NBCC meeting I learned] that professionally you can direct people back to your own site or your reviews, so I decided I’d give it a try.
Posted in books, interview, writing | No Comments »
Friday, October 16th, 2009
A very sad story from the UK, author Graham Taylor, who writes as GP Taylor and is best known for Shadowmancer, has put this writing career on hold to look after his 11-year-old daughter who has an incurable disease.
Posted in author, family, news, writing | No Comments »
Thursday, October 15th, 2009
It’s been a while since we posted a good Hunter S. Thompson rant and I just found this one yesterday. In it Hunter is displeased about the progress being made on the film adaptation of his Rum Diary and is writing to an executive at the studio who has the rights.
HOLLY SORENSON / Shooting Gallery / Hollywood / Jan 22 ‘01
Dear Holly,
Okay, you lazy bitch, I’m getting tired of this waterhead fuckaround that you’re doing with The Rum Diary.
We are not even spinning our wheels aggressively. It’s like the whole Project got turned over to Zombies who live in cardboard boxes under the Hollywood Freeway… I seem to be the only person who’s doing anything about getting this movie Made. I have rounded up Depp, Benicio Del Toro, Brad Pitt, Nick Nolte & a fine screenwriter from England, named Michael Thomas, who is a very smart boy & has so far been a pleasure to talk to & conspire with…
So there’s yr. fucking Script & all you have to do now is act like a Professional & Pay him. What the hell do you think Making a Movie is all about? Nobody needs to hear any more of that Gibberish about yr. New Mercedes & yr. Ski Trips & how Hopelessly Broke the Shooting Gallery is…. If you’re that fucking Poor you should get out of the Movie Business. It is no place for Amateurs & Dilletants who don’t want to do anything but “take lunch” & Waste serious people’s Time.
Fuck this. We have a good writer, we have the main parts casted & we have a very marketable movie that will not even be hard to make….
And all you are is a goddamn Bystander, making stupid suggestions & jabbering now & then like some half-bright Kid with No Money & No Energy & no focus except on yr. own tits…. I’m sick of hearing about Cuba & Japs & yr. Yo-yo partners who want to change the story because the violence makes them Queasy.
Shit on them. I’d much rather deal with a Live asshole than a Dead worm with No Light in his Eyes…. If you people don’t want to Do Anything with this movie, just cough up the Option & I’ll talk to someone else. The only thing You’re going to get by quitting and curling up in a Fetal position is relentless Grief and Embarrassment. And the one thing you won’t have is Fun…
Okay, That’s my Outburst for today. Let’s hope that it gets Somebody off the dime. And if you don’t Do Something QUICK you’re going to Destroy a very good idea. I’m in the mood to chop yr. fucking hands off.
R.S.V.P
(Signed)
HUNTER
Apparently the movie is still “in production” …. Thanks to Letters of Note for finding this classic piece of Hunter ephemera.
Posted in author, writing | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, October 13th, 2009
Neil Gaiman, with the help of more than Twitter users, plans on releasing an audio book based on Tweets.
Gaiman started his latest project yesterday by tweeting the first line. Once approximately 1,000 tweets are logged, a script will be compiled from the edited contributions and then an audiobook will be recorded. The final product will be available for download for free from the BBC Audiobooks America Blog as well as at iTunes and audiobook retailers.
Gaiman’s opening tweet can be seen at http://twitter.com/BBCAA and anyone wishing to tweet a contribution can do so with “#bbcawdio.”
Posted in author, blog, web, writing | No Comments »
Friday, October 2nd, 2009
Chinua Achebe, the iconic African writer who gave us Things Fall Apart, writes very slowly and he’s very happy to write very slowly. This month sees the publication of The Education of a British-Protected Child - a collection of essays linking his literary career. It’s been 20 years since his last book.
Posted in author, books, interview, writing | 3 Comments »
Monday, September 28th, 2009
William Safire, a speechwriter for Richard Nixon and columnist for the NY Times, died yesterday. He was 79 and had been suffering from cancer.
Mr. Safire also wrote four novels, including Full Disclosure (Doubleday, 1977), a bestseller about succession issues after a president is blinded in an assassination attempt, and non-fiction that included The New Language of Politics (Random House, 1968), and Before the Fall (Doubleday, 1975), a memoir of his White House years.
Posted in author, books, news, politics, writing | No Comments »
Friday, September 25th, 2009
Thriller author Philip Kerr, whose Berlin Noir books were featured on our list of the top 10 trilogies, is interviewed in the Independent where he compares himself to Jack Torrance from The Shining. Lovely!
Posted in author, books, interview, writing | No Comments »
Thursday, September 24th, 2009
It’s National Punctuation Day apparently - best day of the year for Lynne Truss and her cohorts. Two weeks ago, I wrote some copy for an email newsletter promoting some books and misplaced an apostrophe. It was a silly mistake and my own fault for not checking the text sufficiently before we pressed ‘Send’.
Within minutes, our customer support people were getting calls from distressed AbeBooks customers. Emails started flooding in. One person compared my mistake to the end of civilization. After a few hours of calls and emails, I started to feel like a punch-bag and was cursing my own incompetence. If there is one thing that book people hate, it is a misplaced apostrophe. Frankly, I totally agree with them - misplaced apostrophes are everywhere, wine bottle labels, menus, signs above shops, newspaper ads etc etc.
It wasn’t my greatest day at AbeBooks.
Posted in AbeBooks, reading, writing | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009
The National Book Awards quest to find their finest ever winner has reached the shortlist stage after 140 writers selected six books that “represent the best of the National Book Awards for Fiction.” It’s an interesting list and shows the power of collected stories.
The Stories of John Cheever
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
The Collected Stories of William Faulkner
The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor
Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
That’s six heavyweight writers on the shortlist. Who’d question the result if any of them won?
Anyone can now vote for the overall winner (click here to vote) plus there is a contest to win two tickets to the 60th National Book Awards on November 18, 2009 with hotel accommodation.
Posted in author, awards, books, celebration, lists, literature, news, writing | No Comments »
Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009
Stephenie Meyer has some new competition.
While vampire books have been the lifeblood of the publishing industry during the recession, their hot status is being challenged by the latest publishing trend - fallen angel books.
Striking while the iron is hot, first-time author Becca Fitzpatrick’s Hush-Hush, an angel-themed tale of forbidden love has had its release date bumped up to next month from next spring. Going Bovine, Libba Bray’s book featuring a punk angel was released this month as was The Unfinished Angel by Sharon Creech. And in time for the holiday shopping season, Fallen, the first in a planned four-book series by Lauren Kate, will come out in December.
“There’s still steam in vampires,” says Trevor Dayton, vice-president of Kids and Entertainment at Indigo Books. “But angels offer a more interesting palate, from the fallen all the way through guardian angels. They can be quirky and more human in their feelings.”
Who will win the battle of fangs vs. wings? I guess we’ll have to wait and see what the sales figures say…
Posted in books, publishers, writing | No Comments »
Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009
Ex French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing with Princess Diana
At 83, romance is heating up for former French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. Giscard is keeping his retirement lively by writing a steamy, romantic novel.
The Princess and the President is the tale of the secret love affair of President Jacques-Henri Lambertye and Princess Patricia of Cardiff. The Princess is miserable because of her husband’s adulterous affairs and when she meets the French president at the closing dinner of a G7 summit, sparks ignite.
While marketed as a novel, a work of fiction, Giscard has obviously modeled his characters on himself and the late Diana, Princess of Wales. For example, Princess Patricia has the same passion for working with children with AIDS and campaigning against anti-personnel mines as Diana did. The heroine also reveals that just before her wedding to the Prince, she learned of a mistress with whom her future husband was determined to keep a relationship with. (Oh and don’t forget that the character is the Princess of Cardiff…Cardiff is in Wales, is it not?)
Critics are saying that Giscard is simply cashing in on the massive attention Diana’s life and loves still attract and that he’s opening himself up to ridicule by even hinting of an affair between himself and the Princess.
La Princesse et le Président will hit bookstores in Paris on October 1. Somehow I don’t think Charles and Camilla will be requesting a signed copy.
Read extracts from the book in The Independent.
Posted in UK, books, history, news, politics, romance, writing | No Comments »
Monday, September 21st, 2009
William Dalrymple asks where all the great travel writers have gone. Isn’t the issue really that everyone has been everywhere? Now, we’re stuck with books about crossing the Artic on a pogo stick or bouncing across America on a spacehopper.
(What about Jan Morris? She’s still around.)
Posted in author, books, travel, writing | 2 Comments »
Thursday, September 17th, 2009
Life Magazine remembers its 1952 issue that included Hemingway’s novella, The Old Man and the Sea.
In 1952, LIFE sent legendary photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt to Cuba to shoot author Ernest Hemingway. The magazine needed photos to run alongside a new novella that would run in LIFE before it was published in book format. That book was “The Old Man and the Sea,” and the issue of LIFE where it was first printed went on to sell 5.3 million copies in two days. For years afterward, Eisenstaedt would refer to the experience of shooting “Papa” Hemingway as his most difficult assignment ever. Recently, LIFE discovered these photos, all but two of which have never been seen: LIFE’s editors opted to print illustrations based on the pictures rather than the pictures themselves.
Imagine a magazine selling 5.3 million copies in two days in today’s economic climate? AbeBooks has 14 copies of that issue of Life for sale, ranging from $20 for a beat-up copy to $200 for a decent one.
Posted in author, books, collecting, writing | No Comments »