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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