Monday, May 25, 2009

Changes in the Publishing Industry

I cannot idly sit by and not comment on what's happening in our industry.

Nathan Bransford, a literary agent whose blog I follow, complains about distress in the publishing industry. Publishers are shutting whole divisions down, bookstore chains are shedding employees like everyone else. With the market tanking, the same forces are affecting publishing as all other sectors of the economy.

Every time I google the subject, I see new companies wanting to publish your stuff as an E-book. I see newer and better Kindles coming on the market. A kindle is a hand-held devise that can store literally hundreds of thousands of book. By some year in the not too distant future, one kindle will hold everything that has ever been written in any language.

A kindle is an improvised electronic device [IED] which is killing hundreds of writers' hopes every day. It's a boon for consumers but an absolute disaster for writers because it moves their break-even point further down the road and maybe out of reach. It means that writers have to sell even more books befor they can make any money. It also means that the writer has to have even more cost-effective ways of getting the attention of readers. It's part of the increasing disrespect for creativity and increasing narcissism among readers.

What is means is the creative industry is going through through transition just like others. How are we to navigate through it?

What do you think? Do you have a favorite book or first sentence? Tell me. Post a comment. I'd like to know. And follow me on Twitter.com

Writing is for me an entrepreneurial activity. For my ideas on entrepreneurship, go to www.hatman2.blogspot.com and for entrepreneurial real estate go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog and for my ideas on writing and publishing, go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com.

Sunday, May 24, 2009

First Sentence: Richard Wright's Black Boy

One of the really rich autobiographies available to us is the one by Richard Wright, Black Boy (American Hunger) A Record of Childhood and Youth, originally published in 1945 by Harper and Row. The copy I have, reissued in 1989, starts this way:

One winter morning in the long-ago four-year-old days of my life, I found myself standing before a fireplace, warming my hands over a mound of glowing coals, listening to the wind whistle past the house outside.
Who wouldn't want to read about a black boy who was standing in the warmth out of the cold wind. The hands again, a symbol of the way we touch other people and things. Warming his hands against the cold wind.

Yet the winds of change were blowing even in 1945. Truman had recently, or would soon, send segregation in the armed forces. Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, dealt a blow to the "separate but equal" rationale. The Montgomery Bus Boycott would come soon as would the voting rights act and other national legislation.

It's hard to look back at that world through the lens of the Obama victory. But we lived in a time then when a president could never be elected if he was black. I kid growing up in this world will never know that one. Wright's autobiography is one that should be read by anyone who cares about America.

What do you think? Do you have a favorite book or first sentence? Tell me. Post a comment. I'd like to know. And follow me on Twitter.com

Writing is for me an entrepreneurial activity. For my ideas on entrepreneurship, go to www.hatman2.blogspot.com and for entrepreneurial real estate go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog and for my ideas on writing and publishing, go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com.

Saturday, May 23, 2009

First Sentence: David Simon's Homicide a Year on the Killing Streets

David Fine's terrific book, Homicide a Year on the Killing Streets (New York: Ivy Books, 1991) starts out like this:

TUESDAY, JANUARY 19.

Pulling one hand from the warmth of a pocket, Jay Landsman squats down to grab the dead man's chin, pushing the head to one side until the wound becomes visible as a small, ovate hole, oozing red and white.
Red and white are American colors. The detailed description of the bullet hole. The idea of the hand going from the warmth into the cold to touch somebody. Then some gallows humor to relieve the horror inherent in the work homicide detectives have to do.

The cover says this book is "engrossing." Engrossing it is. I couldn't put it down. I was also a fan of the TV series made from this book. But as a piece of creative non-fiction it's a masterpiece. So much exposition yet the horrendous details of homicide investigation and the awful toll it takes on the people who do it just gripped me and couldn't let me go. It flips back and fourth between third and second person and is in the present tense, all things I normally don't like, but here it works.

I recommend this soon to be classic true crime book.

What do you think? Do you have a favorite book or first sentence? Tell me. Post a comment. I'd like to know. And follow me on Twitter.com

Writing is for me an entrepreneurial activity. For my ideas on entrepreneurship, go to www.hatman2.blogspot.com and for entrepreneurial real estate go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog and for my ideas on writing and publishing, go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com.

Friday, May 22, 2009

First Sentences: Umberto Eco,'s The Name of the Rose

I read The Name of the Rose (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1980) on a trip to Europe. I started it on the plane, then continued reading it during the jet lagged period awake during the middle of the night. I like to read things related to where I travel. With the exception of Richard Russo which I'll read anytime. He needs to write a new one for me to read.

Here's how it starts:

On August 16, 1968, I was handed a book written by a certain Abbe Vallet, The Manuscrit de Dom Adson de Melk, traduit en francais d'apres l'edition de Dom J. Mabillon (Aux Presses de L'Abbaye de la Source, Paris, 1842
Very formal.

Eco obviously wants to set a quasi-official tone, as if this were some kind of report. Not my strategy, but, hey the book was a best seller in every language it was translated into, and mine isn't even close. I've tried to read others of his, particularly Foucault's Pendulum, but to no avail.

This one served up a delicious mixture of Sherlockian whodunit, European history, Catholic doctrine, and heretical literature. I was engrossed from start to finish which means there's a lot of ways to write great stuff. So much exposition so adroitly handled. An amazing achievement.

This novel did for me what novels were originally supposed to do: inform, teach, and move. I was different after having read it than I was before. All this, and a spectacularly fine ride. My wife didn't really dig it though, which means not every book is for everybody, no matter how well crafted.

What do you think? Do you have a favorite book or first sentence? Tell me. Post a comment. I'd like to know. And follow me on Twitter.com

Writing is for me an entrepreneurial activity. For my ideas on entrepreneurship, go to www.hatman2.blogspot.com and for entrepreneurial real estate go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog and for my ideas on writing and publishing, go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com.

Thursday, May 21, 2009

First Sentences: William Gibson's Neuromancer

William Gibson in his 1984 novel Neuromancer, gave us "cyberspace" and "the matrix." And he made all sorts of other fiction possible. It threw me for a loop the first time I read it. Sentences like this, from p. 5:

He'd operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into a consensual hallucination that was the matrix.
Egad. I mean--"disembodied consciousness?" Consciousness doesn't have a body, so how can it be disembodied?

And "custom cyberspace deck"?--what was that?

And "consensual hallucination"? Come on.

I was wondering what kind of hallucination he was on. I was also realizing that this book was either genius or trash.

Sometimes you have to do when reading what William Saffire once said you have to do when you use language. It's taking an elephant for a walk. You just have to go where it wants. Then afterwards you can decide whether it was worth the trip. Or, if you find out the trip's not worth it when you're half way through, drop the leash and go on to something else.

Well, here is his first sentence:
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
So what is that? I wasn't drawn in by this sentence, but I was curious about what that might be about that I kept reading.

What do you think? Do you have a favorite book or first sentence? Tell me. Post a comment. I'd like to know. And follow me on Twitter.com

Writing is for me an entrepreneurial activity. For my ideas on entrepreneurship, go to www.hatman2.blogspot.com and for entrepreneurial real estate go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog and for my ideas on writing and publishing, go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com.

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

First Sentences: Helene Stapinsky's Five-Finger Discount

Helene Stapinski has written a terrific piece of creative non-fiction: Five-Finger Discount; a Crooked Family History (New York, Random House, 2001). It's the story of a crooked family, as she says in the subtitle.

Here's the way she starts it out:

The night my grandfather tried to kill us, I was five years old, the age I stopped believing in Santa Clause, started kindergarten, and made real rather than imaginary friends.
How about that? Who wouldn't want to go on. It's amazingly engrossing. Though crime and corruption are baked into this family, in some ways it's as American as apple pie.

What do you think? Do you have a favorite book or first sentence? Tell me. Post a comment. I'd like to know. And follow me on Twitter.com

Writing is for me an entrepreneurial activity. For my ideas on entrepreneurship, go to www.hatman2.blogspot.com and for entrepreneurial real estate go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog and for my ideas on writing and publishing, go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com.

Monday, May 18, 2009

First Sentences: Dalton Conley', Honkey

Dalton Conley's Honky (New York: Random House, 2000) is an amazing book, the memoir of a white man who grew up in the projects where just about everyone he knew was black or Hispanic, the Huxtables upside down.

He starts:

I am not your typical middle-class white male.
Introduction through understatement.

This is creative non-fiction, but you still have to have a good first sentence causes you to ask why isn't he typical. The cover of the book of course tells you all about it. Read it anyway.

What do you think? Do you have a favorite book or first sentence? Tell me. Post a comment. I'd like to know. And follow me on Twitter.com

Writing is for me an entrepreneurial activity. For my ideas on entrepreneurship, go to www.hatman2.blogspot.com and for entrepreneurial real estate go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog and for my ideas on writing and publishing, go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com.

Sunday, May 17, 2009

First Sentence: Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

This is a really profound and wonderful book. The overleaf says he was born in the mountains of North Carolina. It has the feel of that. Cold Mountain was published by Random House in 1997. A movie with a lot of famous actors and actresses was made of it. I didn't see it.

Here's the first sentence:

At the first gesture of morning, flies began stirring.
"At the first gesture", the morning personified, beckoning you into the dawn of a new day and into the novel.

"Flies stirring," your interest stirring. The story stirring you. Nine simple little words, and you're in.

He could have written, "At morning's first gesture, the flies began stirring. That's actually 8 words, but it wouldn't have had the punch as the way he said it, did. It would have sounded too much like "Through rockets'red glare."

If you haven't read this strange and beautiful novel, you're missing something.

What do you think? Do you have a favorite book or first sentence? Tell me. Post a comment. I'd like to know. And follow me on Twitter.com

Writing is for me an entrepreneurial activity. For my ideas on entrepreneurship, go to www.hatman2.blogspot.com and for entrepreneurial real estate go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog and for my ideas on writing and publishing, go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com.

Saturday, May 16, 2009

First Sentences: Alex D. Pate, West of Rehoboth

Here's what I said on April 21, 2009 about this engaging novel. I'll just repeat it here:

Alexs D. Pate [Yes that's how his first name is spelled.] begins his wonderful novel, West of Rehoboth (New York: William Morrow, 2001] "The soft summer held them all." Just six little words encapsulates the entire novel. It does what all sentences are supposed to do: lead you to the next one.

But what is "them?" Dreams? People? Cups of coffee? We are intrigued. At least I was when I read it. You should read it too.
But I'm going to go further and quote the first two sentences:
The soft summer held them all. They gently sat upon the shimmering flecks of sun hidden in the cut grass.
The shimmering flecks of sun hid in the grass. They were in there, you just couldn't see them. Why did the flecks have to hide? What did they have to fear? It was a soft summer sun, but they had to hide. Hmm, threatening and comforting at the same time. Kind of gives you hint of things to come.

He goes further: "They came together like this every Fourth of July." A symbol of American independence and a celebration of our success as a nation. "It was a time when Lemon Hill Park was at its height of sweetness." Something foreboding in the air.

I'll stop. Read this most excellent book.

What do you think? Do you have a favorite book or first sentence? Tell me. Post a comment. I'd like to know. And follow me on Twitter.com

Writing is for me an entrepreneurial activity. For my ideas on entrepreneurship, go to www.hatman2.blogspot.com and for entrepreneurial real estate go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog and for my ideas on writing and publishing, go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com.

Friday, May 15, 2009

First Sentence: Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train

One of the things that fun for me is to revisit all this stuff I haven't read before. I got that rush again when I pulled down Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train New York: Norton and Company, 1950). She got some attention when The Talented Mr. Ripley was made into a good movie with a lot of famous actors in it. A friend of mine once compared my writing to hers, which made me warm all over.

Here's her first sentence: "The train tore along with an angry, irregular rhythm."

"Tore along"; "Angry"; "irregular rhythm." Kind of like bad music. What a tone it sets up. A devil's bargain on an angry irregular train. Hmm.

When you read that, you say, "Ooh, I want to read that."

I must confess I was curious about the book after I'd read the three Ripley novels and a couple others of her and heard about the movie Alfred Hitchcock made from this one, and I wanted to see what the book was like. I think if it had been a bad intro, I would have put it down, but I didn't

It's a good first sentence. Had I come upon it cold, who knows. But, once you have an audience you can get away with just about anything. But getting that audience...

What do you think? Do you have a favorite book or first sentence? Tell me. Post a comment. I'd like to know. And follow me on Twitter.com

Writing is for me an entrepreneurial activity. For my ideas on entrepreneurship, go to www.hatman2.blogspot.com and for entrepreneurial real estate go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog and for my ideas on writing and publishing, go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com.

Thursday, May 14, 2009

First Sentences: Carson McCullers, A Clock Without Hands

Wow!! When I pulled this off my book shelf (Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin,1989) 1 to share it with you, I experienced a heavy endorphin rush. I loved this book.

Sometimes when you read a really good novel, that works for you on so many levels, it can't be expressed what you experience.

Here's the first sentence:

Death is always the same, buut each man dies in his own way.
Here's a 2nd-person POV sentence starting off an omniscient-POV story. That's a great technique and it causes the reader to ask a "Why are you telling me this?" kind of question which moves you right into the next sentence.

I recommend this and any of her other 10 books. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter won Alan Arkin an academy award and is one of my favorite movies.

When I get done with first sentences, I'm going to do titles I think.

What do you think? Do you have a favorite book or first sentence? Tell me. Post a comment. I'd like to know. And follow me on Twitter.com

Writing is for me an entrepreneurial activity. For my ideas on entrepreneurship, go to www.hatman2.blogspot.com and for entrepreneurial real estate go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog and for my ideas on writing and publishing, go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com.

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

First Sentences: Wyman Richardson, The House on Nauset Marsh

Wynan Richardson's The House on Nauset Marsh (Woodstock, VT: The Countryman Press, 1997) is one of my favorite books on Cape Cod. It's creative non-fiction, but it could be a novel. The writing is extremely fine and the narrator is a really interesting character, and others are as well.

But, so what. Whether it's fiction, creative non-fiction, or a textbook on how to remove a bullet from you skull, you need a good first sentence.

I can't resist quoting the whole 1st paragraph:

You can go to Eastham, on outer Cape Cod, and live in the little old Farm House at the drop of a hat. The pump, the kerosene lamps, and the open fire are always ready without fear of frost or storm. You can drive up the lane, stop the car by the kitchen door, and unload your gear. You can look out the south windows over the nearby grassy hills, over the bright blue water of Nauset Marsh to the darker blue glimpses of the sea beyond the dunes, and draw a deep breath
There you have it, a magical place where you an go back to over and over and it never changes.

Eastham, founded in the early 17th century, was one of the first towns on Cape Cod. It's population grew so fast there was some interest in moving the capitol of the state from Plymouth to Eastham.

But what subtext: "You can go" empowers you; "little old Farm House" means a place where you loved as a kid. "Drive up," "Unload your gear," "Look out," "over the bright blue water," "without fear", "draw a deep breath"; it's so enabling and just makes you yearn to escape the confinements and go into you mind into such a place. And the details, "the pump, the kerosene lamps, and the open fire" just want you go come along. You can go into the book and get lost in it, which I recommend you do.

This Cape Cod no longer exists, of course. Eisenhower's interstates delivered the first bow. It was going away just as Richardson wrote the first edition of this fine book.

I think I'll drop my hat and go read it.

What do you think? Do you have a favorite book or first sentence? Tell me. Post a comment. I'd like to know. And follow me on Twitter.com

Writing is for me an entrepreneurial activity. For my ideas on entrepreneurship, go to www.hatman2.blogspot.com and for entrepreneurial real estate go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog and for my ideas on writing and publishing, go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com.

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

First Sentences: Dylan Thomas, Adventures in the Skin Trade

I have never read through this strange and wonderful novel [New York: New American Library of World Classics, 1960]. It's in the vein of John Steinbeck's Cannery Row and Edgar Lee Masters's, Spoon River Anthology. In that group, but not of that group.

My problem, I can't get past the beauty of the words and phrases. I get about halfway through the page and I'm lost somewhere out in the stratosphere. He was such a gifted writer and what worlds he drafted with his pen. "Do not go quietly into the night." Or something close. What power in the language. How can just 26 letters produce what it produces.

Anyway, here's the opening sentence:

That early morning, in January 1933, only one person was awake in the street, and he was the quietest.
I'm not even going to try to parse this one. Dylan Thomas stands far above the crowd, probably the greatest writer the English language ever produced.

Dylan Thomas is, well, Dylan Thomas.

What do you think? Do you have a favorite book or first sentence? Tell me. Post a comment. I'd like to know. And follow me on Twitter.com

Writing is for me an entrepreneurial activity. For my ideas on entrepreneurship, go to www.hatman2.blogspot.com and for entrepreneurial real estate go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog and for my ideas on writing and publishing, go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com.

Monday, May 11, 2009

First Sentences: Cormac McCarthy's The Road

Cormac McCarthy again in The Road [New York: Random House, 2006]. I like his stuff, though I think this one and All the Pretty Horses are the best of the 5 or so I've read.

Here is the first sentence:

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him.
Here we go again. Those haunting, quasi-poetic lines, drawn into his complex, mysterious post-Apocalyptic world. Why was he always sleeping in the woods in the cold. Who is the boy and why are they together? We don't know at this point, but we're in.

I loved this novel. It's a terrible world he's writing about. Cold. Hostile. Threatening. Starvation everywhere. Death and destruction all over the place. Just the man and his son, the man dying we find out. Trying to survive and get somewhere. I couldn't put it down, but others react differently.

Still, I'd like just a hint of why the world is like it is. Was it a global ecological catastrophe? Nuclear attack? Why are there virtually no people around. A few, but most seemed to have picked up and left for somewhere else.

I could make a poem out of this:

He'd reach out to touch the child.
Nights dark beyond darkness.
Days more gray each one, like the
Onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.

His words not mine.

What do you think? Do you have a favorite book or first sentence? Tell me. Post a comment. I'd like to know. And follow me on Twitter.com

Writing is for me an entrepreneurial activity. For my ideas on entrepreneurship, go to www.hatman2.blogspot.com and for entrepreneurial real estate go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog and for my ideas on writing and publishing, go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com.

Sunday, May 10, 2009

First Sentences: Frederick Forsyth, The Odessa File

Frederick Forsyth, another one of my favorite authors. I've read The Odessa File (New York: Bantam Books 1992) twice if not more. I know how it turns out and I reread it again because getting there is so amazing.

So here it is:

There was a thin robin's-egg-blue dawn coming up over Tel Aviv when he intelligence analyst finished typing his report.
What does this tell us? It's a clear day. The intelligence analyst has been working all night, so something must be up, unless he always works nights in which case it's just another day in his life. We are told it's a beautiful day dawning, suggesting good things maybe on the way, but the use of the adjective "robin's-egg-blue" attributes a kind of fragility to the coming dawn as if something bad could well happen.

Well, kind of a limited start. But the first sentence has to do less work this time around because, if for no other reason, Mr. Forsyth is well know from his books, including Day of the Jackal, from which a brilliant movie was made, and which, by the way he had a lot of trouble getting published which tells you what the hell publishers know--Nothing. And if the reader doesn't know about the author already, the Author's note and the Foreward do a lot of the work for it.

What do you think? Do you have a favorite book or first sentence? Tell me. Post a comment. I'd like to know. And follow me on Twitter.com

Writing is for me an entrepreneurial activity. For my ideas on entrepreneurship, go to www.hatman2.blogspot.com and for entrepreneurial real estate go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog and for my ideas on writing and publishing, go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com.

Saturday, May 9, 2009

First Sentences: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

I've written elsewhere about Ralph Ellison's Wonderful Book, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1995).

Here's the first sentence: I am an invisible man.Just four words and you're in. Invisible man, what could he be talking about? What do you mean, invisible.

What do you think? Tell me. Post a comment. I'd like to know. And follow me on Twitter.com

Writing is for me an entrepreneurial activity. For my ideas on entrepreneurship, go to www.hatman2.blogspot.com and for entrepreneurial real estate go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog and for my ideas on writing and publishing, go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com.

Friday, May 8, 2009

First Sentences: Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses

Okay, now for another one of my favorite authors: Cormac McCarthy. I've read a fair number of his books. All the Pretty Horses (New York: Random House, 1992). How I can like Richard Russo and this guy, I have no idea. They're as far apart in style as you can be and still be on the same planet. This book is the first volume of a trilogy, the second two I read but was not that thrilled about so didn't keep.

Here goes:

The candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass twisted and righted with he entered the hall and again when he shut the door.
This first sentence announces that you're in for a world which is grayer than most. Where images change and transform themselves before your eyes in ways over which you have no control. Where words run together and you're not sure what is really happening so you have to take it as it comes.

This guy takes a little getting used to. First of all, don't count on quotation marks or clear speaker attribution. Don't count on a lot of commas and semicolons. Faulkner used them all up, I think. Just spare, staunt prose, and haunting narrative and compelling characters. Just thinking about this makes me want to read him again.

Take this sentence from later on page 1.
It was dark outside and no wind. In the distance a calf bawled. He stood with his hat in his hand. You never combed your hair that way in your life, he said.
How could you not love that writing, even if you're a Virginia Woolf devotee?

I would like some quotation marks, though. I also don't like writers who don't identify who they're characterizing before they refer to them as "he". Tony Morrison does that too, and it used to drive me nuts.

Somebody once complained about a famous writer because he used bad grammar. The writer said something like, "They give Pulitzers for writing not for grammar."

What do you think? Tell me. Post a comment. I'd like to know. And follow me on Twitter.com

Writing is for me an entrepreneurial activity. For my ideas on entrepreneurship, go to www.hatman2.blogspot.com and for entrepreneurial real estate go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog and for my ideas on writing and publishing, go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com.

Thursday, May 7, 2009

First Sentences: Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion

From Ken Kesey's expansive novel:

Along the western slopes of the Oregon Coastal Range. . . come look: the hysterical crashing of tributaries as they merge into the Wakonda Auga River ...
There, in this little sentence, Ken Kesey has captured the entire world of the Pacific Northwest. It's somewhere under the words, I don't know. The book lives somewhere between prose and poetry. "The hysterical crashing of tributaries"--wow. Who can write like that? How can you not read on?

What do you think? Tell me. Post a comment. I'd like to know. And follow me on Twitter.com

Writing is for me an entrepreneurial activity. For my ideas on entrepreneurship, go to www.hatman2.blogspot.com and for entrepreneurial real estate go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog and for my ideas on writing and publishing, go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com.

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Great Introduction: Ken Kesey

Ken Kesey dedicates his wonderful novel Sometimes a Great Notion (Penguin edition, 1977) to his parents this way.

To my mother and father--
Who told me songs were for the birds,
Then taught me all the tunes I know
And a good deal of the words.
I rediscovered this poem reproduced just before the first page while flipping through to the first sentence. I read the book a number of years ago, but don't remember this quote. Either I flipped by it or I forgot it. I am a different person now than I was then and it has stuck. I like the idea of teaching your children things that will help them soar when they grow up.

We should never give away books we have read. We should let them lie fallow on our bookshelves and then come back to them. They're exactly the same, if a little yellow, but we're different, so we have a different relationship to them and they will make a different sense to us.

What do you think? Tell me. Post a comment. I'd like to know. And follow me on Twitter.com

Writing is for me an entrepreneurial activity. For my ideas on entrepreneurship, go to www.hatman2.blogspot.com and for entrepreneurial real estate go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog and for my ideas on writing and publishing, go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com.

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

First Sentence: Camus, The Stranger

Another all-time favorite book of mine, Albert Camus's The Stranger [New York: Random House, 1946]:

Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure.
Okay, so technically it's two sentences, go ahead and shoot me. Maybe the translater did it.

Of course, if he'd written it this way--"Mother died today or maybe yesterday; I can't be sure."--it would have been one sentence. But that would be Tim Bosworth writing, not Camus. And who am I to change what Camus wrote? And who's counting anyway.

Back to Camus, a very powerful sentence that just sketches out the narrator's complete lack of concern with anybody, even himself. Why doesn't he know when his mother died? Why didn't he find out? Why wasn't it important to him?And this way he has of intellectualizing everything, what's that about? Amazing.

These are books that demand we keep on our shelves and go back and reread them. We're different each time, nevertheless they change us over and over.

What do you think? Tell me. Post a comment. I'd like to know. And follow me on Twitter.com

Writing is for me an entrepreneurial activity. For my ideas on entrepreneurship, go to www.hatman2.blogspot.com and for entrepreneurial real estate go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog and for my ideas on writing and publishing, go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com.

Monday, May 4, 2009

First Sentence: Sapphire, Push

Here's the opening from this intendedly unpleasant novel, Push [New York: Random House, 1997] by a one-named author, Sapphire, a writer and teacher in New York City:

I was left back when I was twelve because I had a baby for my fahver.
So here we go, troubled waters ahead. The story is in the 1st person and the narrator, whom we soon find out is named Claireece Precious Jones, doesn't have great grammar.

But she's insightful in spite of the awful cards dealt to her. And how she could survive with a sense of self through the awful situations she winds up in is a testimony to the endurance of the human spirit.

That first sentence draws us in, though. What are the circumstances? Why did this girl get in this situation? We want to know these things. But should it have read, "I was lef' back..."? Maybe. It seems almost out of character that she would use the standard English word when she talks in dialect a lot. Just picking nits.

This novel has a soul and in engaging the reader helps him or her reclaim theirs.

What do you think? Tell me. Post a comment. I'd like to know. And follow me on Twitter.com

Writing is for me an entrepreneurial activity. For my ideas on entrepreneurship, go to www.hatman2.blogspot.com and for entrepreneurial real estate go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog and for my ideas on writing and publishing, go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com.

Sunday, May 3, 2009

First Sentences: Joseph Conrad, Victory

Here's the way Joseph Conrad starts one of my favorite novels of all time, Victory. I have the Penguin Books edition published in 1989. The novel was written in 1915. World War I had just broken out.

The story begins on p. 57:

"There is, as every schoolboy knows in this scientific age, a very close chemical relation between coal and diamonds."
Huh? What's this got to do with anything?

The note on p. 388 says,
Coal and diamonds are allotropic forms of carbon. Conrad uses this display of some degree of scientific knowledge as part of his characterization of the narrator (see notes 14 and 17)
Remember that the narrator, even if never named, is a character in the story through whose experience all the story gets filtered.

Well, in 1915, people were accustomed to this kind of stuff. All that scientific stuff in the first paragraph worked then. And you could get the point that
And I suppose those two considerations, the practical and the mystical, prevented Heyst -- Axel Heyst -- from going away." [p. 57]
I've reread this book at least four times and I can't ever get my mind around it. It's intrinsic inscrutability leads to my endless fascination with it.

This first sentence wouldn't work today. Conrad probably would never get published today. But we know about him already as one of the great writers in the English language and are going to go ahead regardless of the first sentence. And when we're done, we'll look back and say, "Of course, what a brilliant first sentence."

And English was his second language. He was actually Polish. Not bad huh? Try becoming one of the great writers in the Polish language.

What do you think? Tell me. Post a comment. I'd like to know. And follow me on Twitter.com

Writing is for me an entrepreneurial activity. For my ideas on entrepreneurship, go to www.hatman2.blogspot.com and for entrepreneurial real estate go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog and for my ideas on writing and publishing, go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com.

Saturday, May 2, 2009

First Sentences: Johnny Glynn's Seven Days of Peter Crumb

This is about seven days in the life in a psychotic schizophrenic.

That sounds redundant, but one of the two words by itself wasn't strong enough to do it for me. Crumb's last days--maybe--are chronicled in Johnny Glynn's Seven Days of Peter Crumb (New York, Harper, 2007), as I said yesterday, an evil, disturbing, violent, psychotic novel. But a really good one.

Glynn starts this way:

Write it down, he said--every dirty word, he said--the truth of it--the awful truth of it.
Well this tells you you're in for it. The only questions are who the narrator is and who the "he" is.

Well, in the third paragraph we find out who the "he" is. The rest of it you have to slog through the whole novel. But what grips us about this is that Solzhenitsyn quote that started it out. This guy is in every one of us. We spend the novel denying it and accepting it at different levels. We're moved by it and are different at the end, which is the goal of great fiction.

I wouldn't put up up there with The Great Gatsby, but it's worth a read. If you have a strong stomach.

What do you think? Tell me. Post a comment. I'd like to know. And follow me on Twitter.com

Writing is for me an entrepreneurial activity. For my ideas on entrepreneurship, go to www.hatman2.blogspot.com and for entrepreneurial real estate go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog and for my ideas on writing and publishing, go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com.

Synopsis:

Ian Kearney, the director of the Kearney Music School, an elite musical training school in Philadelphia, dies after a fall from a balcony during a recital. World-famous cellist, Henry Harrier, recently forced from the faculty, returns to investigate Ian's death when his prized former student is arrested. Henry shows through his brilliant and single-minded pursuit of the truth that, as usual, they have it all wrong. This Sherlock Holmes-type mystery leads the reader through the world of classical music and lays bare the conflicts which dominate the lives of talented adolescents when placed under the pressure of studying for a demanding, stressful, and often elusive career as a classical music performer. Henry Harrier is part John Le Carre's George Smiley, part Arthur Conan Doyle's Holmes, and part Orlando Cole the beloved teacher, renowned chamber musician, and until his own retirement, the premier cellist of the Curtis Institute.

Author Profile:

Tim was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, on January 30, 1946. In 1951 he moved with his family to Schenectady, New York, where he lived through high school. He attended Baldwin-Wallace College, Berea, Ohio, from 1964 to 1968. He graduated in 1968 with a B.A. in history and philosophy. He received his Ph. D. in history in U.S. history in 1980 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison after spending 2.5 years in the U. S. Army. Most of his army service was completed in Wuerzburg, Germany, from 1969-1971. In 1972 he returned to Madison to complete his doctoral study. His dissertation, Those Who Moved; Internal Migrants in American 1607-1840, combined the statistical analysis of genealogical and biographical data with the study of traditional literary diaries, letters, and journals.

Tim was a market and survey research consultant from 1983 to 2000 and a smoking cessation researcher from 2000 to 2003. His consulting practice focused primarily on conducting community health needs assessment. He authored hundreds of market research reports and published a number of his assessments in Community Health Needs Assessment published by McGraw Hill in 1996 and in a revised volume published in 1999. In 2000 he joined the staff of the Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention of the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he conducted smoking cessation research. He published several articles in peer-reviewed journals and spoke at national smoking cessation conferences.

In 2003 he moved to Philadelphia and earned his real estate license. He now practices real estate, works on publishing his novels, and studies and teaches entrepreneurship.Tim has written a dozen novel-length stories, a volume of short stories, and about a 3-foot stack of pages poetry. He is currently working on earning his 4th million in real estate sales, publishing his novels, and working on an entrepreneurish handbook as a support for his students.

Tim is a trained violist and an experienced string quartet player. He is an avid listener to classical music and regularly attends classical music concerts. He has two grown children by his first wife and a stepdaughter with his second wife. He likes to cook, read, write, entertain, develop relationships, and help other people. Formerly Tim used to travel frequently. He doesn't so much anymore. Now he regards the combination of real estate practice, writing and publishing, and the teaching and studying of entrepreneurship as enough of a trip.