This book is a fast-paced read. I recommend Hamilton’s memoir to those reviewers who seem to not like memoirs that are too revealing about the author

We discovered how Karr could break rules—going off-story and on tangents but that she did it so well, as one reviewer put it, “her narrative meanders through tangents that sometimes more entertaining than the point she’s getting to.” We also admired Karr’s “time management.” Again, borrowing from another reviewer: “schoolyard rape gets little more than a footnote. Karr faces it down as she does cancer, madness, alcoholism and a vicious dog—with humor and a scrappy genius for survival.”

Then be prepared for editors with notions, who often know less than you, write less than you, but who are totally necessary and worthy of being listened to. You want to learn to dialogue, to discourse with your writing, so you will have to answer what seem like silly questions about your meaning and intent. And over explain things.

Blood Shadow Entered in NPR three-minute fiction contest. Rules included the word count had to be 600 words or less and about a president. I’m a pitbull on the pantleg of popportunity. George holds off to the perimeter, sharpening his diction. “It’s a remarkable piece of equipment,” Karl says brightly. His eyes glance off Colin […]

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole My rating: 5 of 5 stars The reader either gets this author or is bored to a DNF (did not finish). I re-read this book every few years. What I love is the character Reilly, the way Toole captures the culture and times of the 1960s like […]

Solar Light, Lunar Light: Perspectives in Human Consciousness by Howard Teich My rating: 5 of 5 stars Howard Teich’s groundbreaking new book, SOLAR LIGHT, LUNAR LIGHT, Perspectives in Human Consciousness, courageously challenges the cherished assumption that masculine and feminine traits represent opposing forces. In fact, Dr. Teich shows how that entrenched belief has led to […]

The Gammage Cup by Carol Kendall My rating: 5 of 5 stars I read this book at about age 11 or 12 and it helped shape my understanding and attraction to society’s outcasts. Perhaps it urged me always to think outside the box and to live most of my life in unconventional, but personally shaped, […]

Today, I’m overwhelmed by the process and choices of ebook publishing. As book designer Joel Friedlander describes it, the process looks like an “out-of-control spaghetti party.” Doubt creeps in when I look at the number of romance, mystery, thriller, and erotic books on the do-it-yourself site.

My baby is none of the above. It’s literary mainstream. It doesn’t have too many adjectives and adverbs. The F word appears in it exactly 0 times. Hey, I better stop trying NOT to sell my book here. It’s titillating in other ways—ways that complex thinkers, literati, and others in the formerly rarefied air of publishing can appreciate. It’s lonely at the top.

OK, I’m coming back down now.

Developing the “narrative,” staying “on message”—these are oft-used phrases in politics and in writing. Just as writers are advised to know their reader, politicians only stay in office if they speak to their constituents’ interests.

Listening to Terry Gross last night interviewing J.R. Moehringer who is the author of the memoir Tender Bar, I was captured by his phrase—keeping “the dogs of Narcissism” at bay when writing his own memoir. He was explaining that when he ghost wrote the memoir for Andre Agassi he didn’t have that concern. He had […]

You don’t get to the guts of your story or memoir and the reason you think it’s so important to write and share with others by a linear approach to surface events or a timeline. You get to it by (cliche alert:) spilling your guts. You get to your memoir or story through an entry point, by deep resonant honesty that let’s you into your story as a trusted, detached, at times un-sentimental (not disinterested or dis-associated, but detached) observer.

• Does the observer (writer) really alter the outcome? Or does the outcome retroactively alter the observer (writer)?• In the Self-fulfilling-Prophecy dynamic what comes first? The Self or the Prophecy. Or is there a third option, as in Buddhist thought: dependent co-arising (or co-dependent arising)? • As in life, a developed Sense of Time is all-important to writing memoir. Once you tap the archetypal current (time eternal) of your story, you know how/when to dilate or contract Time.