Kesey & Me

With the fiftieth anniversary of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest almost upon us, I’d like to share a personal reminiscence about one of my all-time favorite authors, the great Ken Kesey.

I’m sure I’m not the first person to observe that the reading experience is not only a subjective one, but is highly situational.  By that I mean that reading The Catcher in the Rye at age fifteen is a fundamentally different experience than reading it at age forty.  Because while books do not age, their readers, and the world their readers inhabit, surely do.  And when the right book and the right reader meet at the right time under the right circumstances, magic happens. Continue reading →

So You Want to be a Writer?

Two recent events got me to thinking, yet again, about this whole novel-writing business, and about how fortunate those of us who do it for a living truly are.

First, I was asked to author an essay for publication in a popular legal magazine.  The essay deals generally with the business of penning a legal thriller, but specifically with the odds of any one lawyer – or any one person, for that matter – making it into print with his or her maiden effort at book-length fiction.  The assignment required a modicum of research into the (opaque, and often contradictory) mathematics of book publishing, the results of which were, in a word, sobering.

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Breaking Into the Business

wishful thinking

Today’s publishing landscape is both convoluted and shifting.  The advent of the e-book and the corresponding explosion of self-publishing have in one sense democratized a process formerly reserved for the few.  These developments have, at the same time, both flooded and muddied a literary pool in which the traditional filters have been breached.

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Hitting the Restart Button

In case we haven’t met, my name is Charles Joseph Greaves, and I’m a novelist.

Such was not always the case.  If you’d asked me in junior high, I’d have told you that my goal in life was to play guard for the Knicks.  By high school, I’d lowered my sights to brain surgery.  This I’d actually pursued, until I encountered a pre-med college course called Inorganic Chemistry.  By the time I’d hit graduate school, it was law, not medicine, that glowed like a new dawn on my life’s horizon.

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Welcome to Prose & Cons: A Blog

Welcome to my periodic musings, on topics ranging from the writing process to books and authors I admire to whatever else might spark my interest and imagination.  I hope that through these posts you’ll get to know me, and that from your comments, I’ll get to know you.  I’ve begun, by way of introduction, by recounting my unlikely journey from L.A. trial lawyer to published novelist. 

If anything tickles your fancy, feel free to share it.  You have my permission.