Month: May 2012

Sneak Peek: Jew in Jail by Gary Goldstein

Today we have a sneak peek from Gary Goldstein’s book, Jew in Jail:

JEW IN JAIL is the true story of the nearly six years that I spent incarcerated in various correctional facilities throughout the state of New York. It deals with my attempts at recovery from past addictions to alcohol, drugs and gambling, as well as my efforts to turn my life around in hopes of becoming a solid citizen and successful member of society upon my release. In addition, my book also provides insight into how I, as a minority in prison, was forced to fend for myself against all of the mistreatment at the hands of the powers that be from the Department Of Correctional Services in this “world within the real world,” as well as the daily grind of doing time with hardened criminals, many of whom I felt no close connection to, all the while continuing to fight for the true justice I strongly felt I wasn’t afforded during my lower court proceedings. 

Jew in Jail is available in print and for Kindle on Amazon.com. Continue reading “Sneak Peek: Jew in Jail by Gary Goldstein”

Is it long enough? (Said the vicar to the nun) Part 2 by Chris James

Author Chris James
Author Chris James

Last week author Chris James talked about achieving the proper length and momentum when writing a novel. If you missed Part One of his post, you can read it here. Now, the conclusion of “Is It Long Enough?”: 

Story acceleration

The next problem after the dead zone is story acceleration: instead of trudging endlessly to the Pole, you decide to bring the Pole to you (we’re talking about our imaginations here, after all). You tell yourself a character or plot sequence is too weak, so you cut it out: you want to get on and write the most exciting bits as soon as you can, instead of taking the reader on an intriguing journey that builds gradually to a satisfying climax (said the vicar to the nun).

The answer here is to put yourself in the position of, say, a stand-up comic: he writes a gag and it’s funny – but only once. He rehearses it, then tells the joke maybe hundreds or thousands of times in his career. For him, the joke has become a meaningless sequence of words, devoid of any humour whatsoever. But he keeps using it because he can remember the impact it had when he first thought it up, and every time he tells it, his audience laughs. It’s the same for your novel. Before you publish, if you’re anything like me you’ll read it over 200 times. The words will lose almost all meaning, and it will be the easiest thing in the world to doubt that your writing is any good at all. Here you need to be like the comic: remember what made you write that scene in the first place, and then imagine the impact it will have on someone who reads it for the first time. Trust your original instinct. Continue reading “Is it long enough? (Said the vicar to the nun) Part 2 by Chris James”

The Fountainhead of Creativity

While it is always wrong to make absolute declarations and sweeping generalizations, it is undeniable that there are three types of people in the world:

1. Those who are good at math, and

B. Those of us who aren’t.

The easy conclusion is that people who are good at math are organized, logical thinkers. This may be true—the old left-brain/right-brain thing. I can never remember which is which. That may mean I am the third of the two types. However, I think there is a reason the people who are not good at math tend to be the more creative types—artists, writers, thespians, short-order cooks.

The very simple and obvious explanation is that we had to think up reasons we did not have our math assignments ready to turn in. This forced us to turn on our creative juices to move beyond the old trope of “the dog ate it” to the more entertaining (if no more credible) mitigation of epic singularities such as alien abductions, evil twins, foul play, espionage, talking rabbits who are late for parties, and inter-dimensional portals opened by the magnificent correctness of a formula you calculated (which sadly resulted in its theft by miscreants from another galaxy). Continue reading “The Fountainhead of Creativity”

What I did today

Sometimes, work is plain fun.

The Perth foothills

Exhausting, demanding … but you get a blast. That’s what happened to me today. I was facilitator at a workshop organized by the KSP Foundation at their Writers’ Centre in the hills, at the edge of the Perth metropolitan area. Because this blog is read by an international audience, it’s necessary to describe some stuff in more detail than I otherwise would. So let me describe how the Perth foothills – visible for quite a few miles away, and which surround the coastal plain where the city stands – rise from the plateau, and seem green-grey and hazy from a distance. Continue reading “What I did today”