M. R. Bailey

In 1991, Gretel Ehrlich was struck by lightning while walking her dogs on her Wyoming ranch.

Before electricity carved its blue path toward me, before the negative charge shot down from cloud to ground, before “streamers” jumped the positive charge back up from ground to cloud, before air expanded and contracted producing loud pressure pulses I could not hear because I was already dead, I had been walking.

A Match to the Heart, page 5

She regains consciousness and with her dogs manages to get to the house.   She is in shock, singed, disoriented, lame, plagued by furiously burning pains, her throat is paralyzed, and her nervous system is seared, broken and fragmented. Somehow she dials 911. So begins her journey from blinding light through years of shadows.

Hospitalized and severely debilitated, she begins a battle that will take more than two years for her to regain her health and a sense of confidence and autonomy. As compelling as being struck by lightning may be, it is Ehrlich’s narrative of her return to life that is extraordinary.

As in her other work, Ehrlich explores existence from all angles and perspectives.  Even she, the victim, is not spared the Nature writer’s intense probing, research and exploration in search of understanding.  She studies thunder, lightning, and storms and discovers comfort in their fierce science. She seeks out other victims of lightning strikes and finds many others who have experienced the indescribable pains that are invisible to medical specialists, impossible-to-explain personal transformations, and isolation due to society’s ignorance.

As she did in THE SOLACE OF OPEN SPACES (1985), and ISLANDS, THE UNIVERSE, HOME (1991), Ehrlich generously shares her unblinking observations along her uneven path to understanding with us.

I heard her read from MATCH and speak at the Los Angeles Public Library in December 1994.  Her humility, commitment to nature, and passion for expressing the often inexpressible were moving.

A MATCH TO THE HEART, One Woman’s Story of Being Struck by Lightning. Pantheon, New York, 1994.

In a vote of confidence for the growing digi-lit market, E-Reads, a leading independent in the e-book and print on demand space, has uploaded more than 200 titles to Apple iPad, Kobo, Diesel and Google editions. E-Reads is converting its ten-year, 1000+ title inventory to the specifications of these and other retailers, as well as older customers.

Little, Brown and Company updated its logo for its adult and children’s divisions. The renovation involved abandoning the image of Boston’s Bulfinch Monument and replacing it with a combination of an “L” and “B” suggestive of keys from a vintage typewriter.  Little, Brown publishers Michael Pietsch and Megan Tinsley sought an identity that would be shared by both the adult and children’s divisions as they have done previously, and would also function more effectively across multiple media, in advertising, and online.

The revamped logo was designed by Lance Hidy, co-founder and art director at David R. Godine, former art director at the Harvard Business Review and consultant to Adobe Systems and Eastman Kodak.  Many will recognize his work in the timeless Ansel Adams “Yosemite and the Range of Light” hardcover.

The design, which features the Silica typeface, emphasizes Little, Brown’s focus upon writers and writing over time.  Few people use typewriters any longer, yet the typewriter key design is instantly recognizable, echoes our enduring experience with books, and recognizes our relationship with the keyboard to translate ideas and stories into text on the page or screen.

The LB typewriter keys reflect self knowledge that should build confidence in readers.  Writers will appreciate its identification with the craft of writing and editing books. Does this brand identity authentically express Little, Brown and Company’s vision, goals, values, voice and personality?  Does it reinforce loyalty to the house that Evelyn Waugh, P.G. Wodehouse, A.J. Cronin, C.S. Forester, J.D. Salinger, Lillian Hellman, William Manchester, Nelson Mandela, and Peter Hamill helped build?  This writer and reader believes it will. Time and Little Brown’s author and title selections will decide.

Winner: General Fiction

2010 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Winner
Congratulations to Patricia McArdle, winner of the 2010 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award in General Fiction for her novel, Farishta. Read an extended excerpt, and check out the experts’ reviews.

Winner: Young Adult Fiction

2010 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Winner

Congratulations to Amy Ackley, winner of the 2010 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award in Young Adult Fiction for her novel, Sign Language. Read an extended excerpt, and check out the experts’ reviews.

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2009 ABNA Winner: Bill Warrington’s Last Chance by Jack King

2008 ABNA Winner: Fresh Kills by Bill Loehfelm

In a recent e-mail to customers, Jesse Douma of the The Writers Store in Los Angeles writes that his father, Dan Douma, co-founder of the The Writers’ Computer Store, has died.  This is a loss to the writers’ community everywhere.

In 1982, Dan co-founded The Writers’ Computer Store with Gabriele Meiringer as a resource for writers on Santa Monica Boulevard in West L.A. It became a thriving hub for writers and filmmakers, provided world-wide mail-order services, training and support, a writer-oriented newsletter and special events geared towards creative writers, principally Hollywood screenwriters, but novelists as well. The rest is history. With success they moved the store to Westwood Boulevard and changed the name to The Writers Store. Jesse will soon move The Writers Store again to a new location in Burbank.

Working Writers’ Heroes

By 1982, Dan and Gabriele had witnessed the rapid adoption of the Atari 2600, Commodore 64, IBM 5100, Apple I, Apple II, IBM 5120, TRS-80, the IBM PC, Kaypro II, DEC Rainbow, and saw the personal computer’s potential for transforming the writer’s process. At that time, veteran and aspiring writers throughout Southern California were still using Smith-Coronas and Selectric II’s late into the long writer’s night. The clacking of long-throw keys, the impact of metal type hammering away at paper, and return bells filling the air on summer nights – Muzak of the creative life – were about to be replaced with muted keyboard clicks and the whir of hard-drives.

Just as Dan and Gabriele were getting the shelves stocked in their new Writer’s Computer Store, the era of personal computers dawned for real. Apple, already light years ahead, was soon to introduce the Macintosh. Others followed. The staff and consultants at The Writers Store were always up to speed on the facts, features, and benefits of every hardware and software configuration.

The staff at the Writers Store have long been valued colleagues. When I lived in Los Angeles, I stopped by the store occasionally to see what new books and software were available. Dan, Gabriele, and Jesse have always been helpful. No return to L.A. is complete without checking in.

Notices

Variety 7 June 2010

Los Angeles Times 10 June 2010

Literary Entrepreneurs

Self-publishing is leveling what has been a uneven field of competition for authors, for readers, and for book sellers.  Writers still write books on spec, but now they can manage rights, take responsibility for when and how their work is published, participate more fully as equal partners in their work’s publication, connect more directly with readers, and be better literary citizens.

Book Publishing is Becoming Self-publishing

The Internet has made every individual a potential publisher. And technology is making every idea, story, and work of art marketable. Even the business side of the transaction is returning to a one-to-one exchange.

JA Konrath has six books in print and thirteen e-books available from Amazon. He has projected that he will earn up to $100,000 this year on sales of his e-books alone. Each sale is initiated by an interested reader who decides to download one of his novels to their Kindle, iPad, PC, Mac, iPhone, iTouch, Droid, or any other of an expanding universe of personal e-reading options. Amazon’s online Kindle Store (or Apple’s iBook and others) completes the transaction within seconds. No shipping. No waiting. From JA Konrath directly to Ima Reader wherever she is on the planet.

After iPad

There are thirty-nine e-readers on the market. Considering the quantum leap forward in quality of the user experience, it is tempting to rephrase that device snapshot to something more like: the Apple iPad and thirty-eight others.

The iPad provides an excellent, even transformational e-reading experience. It feels good cradled in your hands, on your lap or propped up against your thighs for those middle of the night reads. It has a high resolution color screen that is easy on eyes, especially aging eyes. It responds instantly, enthusiastically to any impulse. Turning the page is almost as satisfying as leafing pages in that 600-page Dickens anthology you’ve had since Lit 101. And you can look up words in the dictionary without getting up to go find it. Plug in some ear buds and you can even listen to the voice of your choice read your book to you.

The iPad will dash the ambitions of many early e-readers and the field will inevitably narrow to a select few devices. Sony and other quality device manufacturers will accept iPad’s challenge and up their game. All for the better. Whatever makes the author’s work available in a high integrity transaction, on an enjoyable-to-use device, and to more people is good.

Opportunity is Calling

When in your lifetime did obstacles to getting your work published actually diminish in number? If you have a good book, some appealing cover art, a compelling description and the ambition to grow your audience, now would be a good time to get out there and share your work.

Related:

The Rise of Self Publishing (NYT  26 April 2010)

Which e-readers will the iPad crush? (CNET, 1 April 2010)

Ken Auletta offers a short course on the agency business model and the ever-evolving history of publishing.  This article also includes a situational analysis about the stakes for authors, publishers, bookstores, and device makers in the current competition between the printed page and the panel of pixels known as the e-Reader (Kindle, iPad, Nook and others coming online). The writer, journalist and media critic at The New Yorker has been a keen observer of media trends.  His Three Blind Mice: How the TV Networks Lost Their Way put the failing big three television network model in stark context for us in 1991. Now, he has once again captured a dynamic period in media history on the page.

His recent article, Publish or Perish Can the iPad topple the Kindle, and save the book business? (The New Yorker, 30 April 2010), is similarly timely and incisive. A ‘must read’ for authors, agents, publishers and readers.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/04/26/100426fa_fact_auletta

Bruce C. McKenna Goes to War

Recently, Bruce C. McKenna, co-executive producer and lead writer on the HBO television mini-series, “The Pacific,” paused for an interview about his latest project. He provided valuable insights into the challenges of adapting history to television, the importance of persistence in getting any project to the screen, and the role of the writer in the process from research and design of story architecture to defending the vision during production and presenting the final product to audiences. Look here for a link soon.

On the same day, Bruce presented the fourth episode of “The Pacific” in the Powell Family Cinema in the Center for Film Studies at Wesleyan University. His answers to questions display the historian’s deep knowledge of his material, the screenwriter’s respect for storycraft, and openness to sharing his seven year experience. Here are his remarks.

Except your own.

Writing to the market always falls short of the mark. Besides being a soul-numbing experience (because you end up essentially writing someone else’s inspiration), it cannot be researched sufficiently, drafted, rewritten, edited, rewritten again, shopped, edited, and published in time to capitalize on the market trend.  So, you have invested valuable time, energy, and effort in a project to which you are less than 100% committed, and about which you are less than passionate.

Start with what you want to read. Do what you think is right. Draft your concept.  Outline it, write a few chapters and share it with someone whose skill, perspective, judgment, interests, and discernment you respect.  Odds are that those pages will jump to life in the reader’s mind because you care, because you’re invested in something you want to say, in a tale you want to tell.

Trying to forecast the market, or read editors’ or agents’ minds wastes your time.  It also paralyzes your writer’s instrument.  The skills that you develop as a writer are important, high performance, precision tools.  Don’t use your scalpel as a screwdriver.  Don’t use your best sagacious voice to make someone else’s hero sound interesting. Respect yourself, your ideas, and your time.  Follow your muse, your heart, and craft the stories you think matter, the ideas, subjects, and characters that wake you at 3:00 am.

The writing in this novella is lean and economical. It tells a tale that sets the hook and guides the reader through several surprises to the final reveal.  For me, this book belongs on the same shelf with “The Ledge“ (1959) by Lawrence Sargent Hall, THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA (1952) by Ernest Hemingway  and “To Build A Fire“ (1908) by Jack London.

As a teenager, Les Galloway (1912-1990) shipped out to New Zealand as a seaman and a few years later, dropped out of college to enlist in the Bolivian army. Most of his life he was a commercial fisherman out of San Francisco. His stories were published in Esquire and Prairie Schooner.