Scott Berkun's Blog, page 20

Help me launch the new book Wednesday

If any of my work has helped you in the past, here’s an easy way to return the favor. My 6th book, The Ghost of My Father, launches on Wednesday. Every single mention or purchase of the book on the day helps tremendously in helping this new book find its way in the world.

50% of profits of this first edition are going to Big Brothers Big Sisters, so you’ll be helping a great charity too.

How to help on Wednesday 10/22:

Set a schedule reminder for one or more of the following (iCal appt):

Buy the book on launch day :) Kindle through this link is best for me (here’s paperback)
Post on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn with the link
Email your friends and family about the book
Post an Amazon.com review when you finish reading (and Facebook / Tweet about it)
Spread word of the sample chapter
Multiple mentions throughout the day can help

Sample Facebook / Twitter text you can use:

Best single link: http://bit.ly/ghost-pb
Excerpt link: http://bit.ly/ghost-excerpt
Book cover link: http://bit.ly/ghost-cover-small

The hashtag is #ghostmf. Feel free to reuse, borrow, snip and edit these:

Twitter: “New book by @berkun, The Ghost of My Father, fantastic story of understanding the past, on sale today: http://bit.ly/ghostofmyfather #ghostmf”

Twitter: “New book by @berkun, The Ghost of My Father, read the powerful chapter excerpt and buy today:  http://bit.ly/ghost-excerpt #ghostmf”

Facebook: “One of my favorite authors has a new book out today. If you have issues with your parents you’re still trying to work through, get this book. His story will help you understand yours: http://bit.ly/ghostofmyfather – 50% of profits donated to Big Brothers Big Sisters”

Want a Reminder?

If you’re following me in any medium you’ll be reminded on Wednesday :) There’s a special Facebook Event page, but my twitter, Facebook fan page and mailing list will all be updated in the morning, and likely throughout the day with news.

If you leave a comment on this post I’ll make sure you get an email too.

Early reviewers wanted for my next book

My 6th and most personal book, The Ghost of My Father, launches next week. If you’re willing to write a review on amazon.com, you can read it before everyone else does – as in starting right now. Get a taste by reading the free chapter excerpt.

Contact me here if you’re interested. Thanks.

The best memoirs I’ve read: a list

As I work on a new book I make a list of books I need to read. For The Ghost of My Father I realized that since I’ve never written a memoir before I needed to study the classics and inform myself of what they can do. Reading books in the genre you’re writing is the only way to understand how to solve certain problems and to learn what the strengths and weaknesses of the form are. The more I read for a book project, the more confident I become about what I’m doing.

As The Ghost of My Father launches this Wednesday (get the exclusive excerpt here – PDF), it’s a good time to review the best, or most important, memoirs that I came across. I’m sure I forgot some, so expect updates to this post.

Down and Out In London and Paris, George Orwell. Technically this is a work of fiction, but it was clearly based on Orwell’s real experiences. His style was very influential for future journalists who chose to write in a first person style. Orwell’s ability to describe situations and environments is first rate, and he excels at concision. One of my favorite books, NewJack: Guarding Sing Sing By Conover, is in the same lineage. These books heavily influenced The Year Without Pants and the new book too.
The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion. For my purposes I needed to study the telling of tragic personal stories and this book has become the canonical reference. Didion’s husband and best friend died suddenly and the book documents the year that follows. Didion is cerebral, the camera angle of her narrative is strictly in her head, or over her shoulders, providing a more intellectual narrative than many memoirs do. It is a solid book, but I was underwhelmed by it for reasons I can’t explain. It felt repetitive to me, which to be fair is perhaps an accurate reflection of what she experienced (that’s the challenge with memoir – the most honest telling of real life stories often don’t fit into convenient narrative arcs or patterns).
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard. If you’re not captivated in the first few pages, give up, not just on this book but on reading in general. I’ve read this book several times and each time I’m surprised by how truly breathtaking her prose is, and I’m not a prose junky. I will never be the kind of writer she is is. She’s like Updike at his best, able to wind paragraphs of description and perspective around a single moment or image and leave you wanting more and more. The book demonstrates how a memoir can take one simple trip, act, decision, or idea, and develop it into an entire world.
Get In The Van, Henry Rollins. The raw, honest stories of life in a rising, but fledgling punk band in the 1980s is something to behold. There is no pretense here, in the writing or in the life he led. The simplicity of his approach, both in the structure of the book (it’s a journal) and the entries (a record of places they performed, and encounters on the road) reveals how little artifice a memoir needs to function. Many of Rollin’s books are disappointing, especially his poetry, but this book shines and stands up as a testament to how simple a good book can be.
Nothing to Declare, Mary Morris. I read this book 15 years ago ago, long before I decided to be a writer. I’d never read a book that was simply a person telling a story about what was happening to them, and for that to be interesting. I’ve read several of her books and enjoyed them all. This in part gave me the confidence to become a writer. The idea that a good book wasn’t about extreme situations or great drama. It was about being honest, being thoughtful, and applying the craft of storytelling. Bukowski and Henry Miller were also huge influences for me in the idea that simply being brave enough to be honest is exceedingly rare and can make for powerful writing all on its own.
This Boy’s Life, Tobias Wolfe. I read many of the classics memoirs and this was one of the few I enjoyed reading. It tells the story of Wolfe’s difficult childhood. The themes echoed the stories I wanted to tell in The Ghost of My Father, and Wolfe tells his story with a lack of pretense and judgement. I knew I wanted to be closer to Didion in perspective, with commentary on what happened in my life, both what I thought about it then and what I think about it now. But Wolfe avoids this. He writes as if it were a screenplay, making few overt judgements about anything, leaving it to the reader to decide for themselves what was good, bad, right or wrong. I also tried the classic Stop Time, by Frank Conroy, which I abandoned after 20 pages for sheer lack of interest – it didn’t cohere for me at all.
Born Standing Up, Steve Martin. Famous people writing about their lives is often dreadfully predictable, but Martin is a fantastic writer. This book focuses on his early years performing for empty theaters, and how he found his way, through work and experimentation, to excellence. Its charm is how foolish he reveals himself to be, a naive kid working oh so hard to figure out show business. “Precision creates movement” is one of my favorite quotes.
Chronicles, Bob Dylan. This is an odd choice in a way, as he gets away with things here purely because of his fame. He jumps through time, abandons stories, repeats stories and generally seems to be teasing and playing with us readers. But there is a charm here. An unwillingness to follow convention and to play with the lines of storytelling and narrative. If you know his career it’s no surprise his book takes this approach, but it’s a worthy counterpoint to more literal memoirs that follow strict boundaries of form.
Broken Music, Sting. Like me Sting had a difficult relationship with his father, and the album The Soul Cages, is essentially dedicated to him (most notably, the wonderful sad Why Should I Cry For You). I put it on my list for that reason and wasn’t disappointed. Sting is smart and well read (he was an English teacher while playing in bands at night), and the book is empty of most the arrogance he’s earned a reputation for. It focuses on the early years of his professional career, before the Police, and the many mistakes and chance occurrences that led to his rise to fame.
The Night Country, Loren Eisley. Like Nothing to Declare, I read this long before I became a writer. Eisley has always been a big influence, particularly his ability to blend personal stories with professional observations, a theme that runs through all of my books. The Night Country in particular expresses a love of the mystery of life and how important mystery, and the curiosity to explore it in all it’s forms, is at the heart of an interesting life. If you have any interest in science and literature Eisley is a rewarding read.

I need to go back through my library to see which ones I’ve missed, and I’ll be back with updates. Stay tuned. Also look forward to posts next week for reviews of the books I read on how to write a memoir, and more.

The 5 Worst Fathers Of All Time

In working on my upcoming book The Ghost of My Father (releases on 10/22), I’ve read many books about fathers. There is a long history of bad ones and it puts most of our modern complains about parents into sharp relief. My book is strictly about my own experience with a distant father, and the hard work of sorting out the consequences now as an adult. But for all of my complaints about my father this list expresses the wide spectrum of how bad some fathers have been.

Emperor Constantine.  Reigned over the Roman empire around 300 A.D. He led the way for the endorsement of Christianity, as a supporter of the Edict of Milan. Where he got into trouble, as many Roman emperors did, was how he handled his family. He had his son, and likely heir, Crispus murdered. And of course, he also had Crispus’ mother Fausta murdered just two years later. The history of Rome and many empires is filled with fratricide, filicide (killing your child), patricide and more.
Peter The Great. Curiously similar to Constatine, Peter had his son Alexei executed. To be fair Alexei grew up with an allegance to his mother, who despised Peter. Alexei put himself into exile, which generally pissed Peter off and he returned only with assurances that he wouldn’t be tortured or killed. Those assurances were ignored and Alexei was tortured to death.
Bible grab bag: Lot, Jephthah, Noah. There is plenty of bad fathering described in the bible (including perhaps by God himself), and although I believe the bible is best understood as fiction the importance of the book earns these fathers an entry. Between Lot’s incest with his daughters (and allowance of their raping), Jephthah killing his daughter, Caleb trading his daughter to whomever could conquer a city (it turned out to be Caleb’s brother), Noah cursing his grandson Canaan to a lifetime of slavery for his father seeing Noah naked, and on it goes.
Ivan the Terrible. He makes Constantine and Peter look meak, as rather than have officials take care of the deed, he committed filicide by hand, brutally striking his son’s head with a staff. The reason for this fight? Ivan physically attacked his daughter-in-law for wearing immodest clothing, and Ivan’s son tried to protect her. This scene is captured in a famous painting.
Marvin Gay Sr.  Marvin Gay Jr. always had a difficult relationship with his father, and he was thrown out of the house on several occasions. Alberta Gay, Marvin Jr’s mother, said, “My husband never wanted Marvin, and he never liked him. He used to say that he didn’t think he was really his child. I told him that was nonsense. He knew Marvin was his. But for some reason he didn’t love Marvin and, what worse, he didn’t want me to love Marvin either. Marvin wasn’t very old before he understood that.”>As he rose in fame and wealth Marvin Jr. added an ‘e’ to his last name to distance himself from his father. They were estranged for many years, but eventually Gaye tried to reconcile with his father, presenting gifts. In one last argument things got out of hand and Marvin Sr. shot Marvin Jr. twice, killing him.

These are extreme cases and it’s a relief in some ways to realize that as bad as your parents might have been, they weren’t anywhere near as bad as these ones were to their children, as you’re still alive to read this (and I’m still alive to write it).

References:

I started with other people’s lists but did my own research to confirm/deny facts and pick the 5 worst examples.

The 20 worst fathers in history – SF Weekly
Top ten worst fictional fathers – Time.com
Ten worst fatherhood role models – Menshealth
The worst father ever imagined - Patheos.com

Exclusive: Read the first chapter of my next book

For the last 18 months I’ve been working on a very different kind of book, a memoir about a personal crisis in my family. The book is called The Ghost of My Father and I’m proud to tell you the book is finished and will launch to the world on Wed Oct 22nd, 2014 – if you’re on Facebook, please follow the launch here.

As primarily a business author I’ve spent much of my career advising other people to take creative risks, but rarely did myself. How creative is a writer who only writes in the same genre? If nothing else, I hope you’ll be interested in my book as an expression of me practicing what I preach and taking a big risk myself.

50% of all profits from this first edition of the new book will be donated, divided between Big Brothers Big Sisters and Big Brothers Big Sisters of Puget Sound - reading this excerpt, and the book, will explain why I’ve chosen to help this particular charity.

Click on the cover below to download this exclusive book excerpt (or go to: http://bit.ly/ghost-excerpt).

I’m on tour in the Southeast this month

I’ve been to 43 of the 50 states in the U.S. This month I’m hoping to get that number up to 46 with a road trip through the southeast.

I’m speaking at An Event Apart Orlando on Wed October 29th and then spending 8 days driving through Alabama, Tennessee, and Louisiana (tentative route here).

On Nov 4th I’ll be in Collierville, TN to speak at FedEx, but the rest of my dates are TBD.

If you live somewhere on my route and can help organize a place for me to give a lecture or a happy hour when I’m in your neighborhood, get in touch.

Finalist in the Amtrak Writers in Residency Program

I learned today I’m a finalist in Amtrak’s Writer’s in Residency program. Of over 16,000 applicants 124 semi-finalists were selected and the 24 finalists were announced this morning.

The Amtrak website is getting hammered so I reposted the list of finalists here. Congratulations to everyone.

MEET THE 24 WRITERS SELECTED FOR THE AMTRAK RESIDENCY PROGRAM

Amtrak is excited to announce the selection of 24 members of the literary community as the first group of writers to participate in the #AmtrakResidency program. Over the next year, they will work on writing projects of their choice in the unique workspace of a long-distance train. The 24 residents offer a diverse representation of the writing community and hail from across the country. Meet our residents below:

Ksenia Anske

Ksenia Anske is a Seattle based fantasy writer, entrepreneur and social media marketer. She was born in Russia and came to the U.S. in 1998, never imagining a career in writing. In 2009, she was named one of the 100 Top Women in Seattle Tech and has published several short stories and novels, including Rosehead and the Siren Suicides Trilogy.

Scott Berkun

Scott Berkun is an author and speaker whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist, among others. He has taught at the University of Washington and was a co-host of CNBC’s The Business of Innovation show. His latest book, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com & The Future of Work released in Sept 2013 and was named an Amazon.com best book of the year. He writes regularly on his popular blog and tweets at @berkun.

Jennifer Boylan

Jennifer Boylan is an author and the inaugural Anna Quindlen Writer in Residence at Barnard College of Columbia University. She also serves as the national co-chair of the Board of Directors of GLAAD, the media advocacy group for LGBT people worldwide. She is a Contributing Opinion Writer for The New York Times, and also serves on the Board of Trustees of the Kinsey Institute for Research on Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. Her 2003 memoir, She’s Not There: a Life in Two Genders was the first bestselling work by a transgender American.

Craig Calcaterra

Craig Calcaterra writes for the HardballTalk baseball blog at NBC Sports.com. From March 2007 until December 2009, he wrote ShysterBall, a baseball blog. Craig also spent eleven years as a business litigation and constitutional law attorney.

Jen CarlsonJen Carlson is the Deputy Editor of Gothamist, a website she has been a part of since 2004. Her writing has also appeared on Jezebel, Deadspin, and back when she attended way too many concerts, she had her own music column in The Villager. She can also make anything out of one head of cauliflower… including pizza.

Farai Chideya

Farai Chideya is an award-winning author, journalist, and Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University’s journalism institute. She has written four nonfictions books: Innovating Women: The Changing Face of Technology; Trust: Reaching the 100 Million Missing Voters; The Color of Our Future; and Don’t Believe the Hype: Fighting Cultural Misinformation About African Americans, plus a novel, Kiss the Sky. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from Harvard College and currently resides in New York City.

Anna Davies

Anna Davies is a writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, New York, Glamour, Cosmo, Women’s Health, Men’s Health, salon.com, refinery29.com and others. She’s ghostwritten ten bestselling young adult novels for Alloy Entertainment and has written three young adult novels under her own name—Wrecked (Simon & Schuster), Identity Theft, and Followers. (Scholastic) Anna has spent the last year backpacking around the world, and is thrilled to be settling back in Brooklyn in October—and can’t wait for her #amtrakresidency adventure.

Korey Garibaldi

Korey Garibaldi is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Chicago. His dissertation research focuses on how racial, gender, and sexual formations were challenged, solidified, and reconfigured by material commodities, especially literary texts, over the course of the 20th century. Korey has lectured in the “America in World Civilization” sequence in the University of Chicago’s Core undergraduate curriculum. Other teaching interests include post-Emancipation African-American history, and the histories of gender and sexuality in America and Europe.

Katie Heaney

Katie Heaney is the published author of Never Have I Ever and the upcoming novel Dear Emma. She is an editor at Buzzfeed and has written for New York Magazine and Pacific Standard, among other places. She is a graduate of Illinois Wesleyan University and the University of Minnesota.

Karen Karbo

Karen Karbo is the author of fourteen award-winning novels, memoirs and works of non-fiction including the best-selling “Kick Ass Women” series. Her 2004 memoir, The Stuff of Life, was a New York Times Notable Book, a Books for a Better Life Award finalist, and winner of the Oregon Book Award for Creative Non-fiction. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, Karen’s three adults novels have also been named New York Times Notable Books. Her short stories, essays, articles and reviews have appeared in Elle, Vogue, O, Esquire, Outside, The New York Times, salon.com and other magazines.

Marianne Kirby

Marianne Kirby is a writer and maker currently living in Orlando, Florida. She is the coauthor of the body politics book “Lessons From the Fatosphere” and can be regularly found at xoJane.com, the latest project by Jane Pratt.

Erika Krouse

Erika Krouse is a novelist and short story writer based in Boulder, Colorado. She has been published in The New Yorker and The Atlantic, and she is the 2014 recipient of the Lighthouse Writers Workshop Beacon Award for teaching excellence. Her latest novel, Contenders, will be available in 2015.

Lindsay Moran

Lindsay Moran is a former clandestine officer for the Central Intelligence Agency. She is a freelance writer whose articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and USA Today. In 2005 she published her memoir Blowing My Cover, My Life As A Spy, in which she wrote about her experiences as a case officer from 1998 to 2003. After graduating from Harvard, she won a Fulbright scholarship and then became an English teacher in Bulgaria.

Lisa Schwarzbaum

Lisa Schwarzbaum is an American film critic. She was a long-time film critic for Entertainment Weekly, appeared as a co-host with Roger Ebert on At the Movies, and writes regularly about movies, culture, books, TV, and theater. She has written for The New York Times Magazine, The New York Daily News, Time, The Boston Globe, More, and Vogue.

Tynan

Tynan is the co-founder of SETT, a blogging platform that launched in 2011. He was named the King of The Tech Geeks by Gawker in September 2013 and one of the Top 25 Best Bloggers by Time Magazine in August of 2013. His book, Superhuman by Habit, was published in September 2014. He prides himself in exploring the world and connecting with awesome people.

Jeffrey Stanley

Jeffrey Stanley’s screenplay Little Rock, a bio-pic about artist Copy Berg, the first officer to sue the US military for anti-gay discrimination, is currently in pre-production with Pink Slip Pictures. He is the author of the stage play Tesla’s Letters and the writer-performer of his recurring supernatural solo show Boneyards. Stanley has written articles for the Washington Post, New York Times, and New York Press. He teaches screenwriting and theater courses at New York University Tisch School of the Arts and at Drexel University Westphal College of Media Arts & Design. He lives in Philadelphia.

Deanne Stillman

Deanne Stillman is the acclaimed author of Desert Reckoning (2013 Spur Award winner, based on a Rolling Stone piece). She also wrote Mustang and Twentynine Palms (both LA Times “best books of the year”). Currently, she is writing Blood Brothers for Simon and Schuster and the “Letter from the West” column for the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her work has appeared in Slate, therumpus, and the NY Times.

Darin StraussDarin Strauss is a writer whose work has earned a number of awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His most recent book, Half a Life, won the 2011 NBCC Award for memoir/autobiography. His ALA Alex Award-winning, best-selling 2000 first novel Chang and Eng was a runner-up for the Barnes & Noble Discover Award, the Literary Lions Award, a Borders Award winner, and a nominee for the PEN Hemingway award. He currently resides in Brooklyn, New York, and is Clinical Professor of fiction at New York University.

Chris TaylorChris Taylor is a journalist originally hailing from the U.K., where he got his start on a variety of national newspapers in London and Glasgow. He has since served as San Francisco Bureau Chief for TIME magazine, West Coast editor for Fortune Small Business, West Coast editor for Fast Company, and is now deputy editor at Mashable. Chris is a graduate of the Columbia University School of Journalism and Merton College, Oxford.

Stephen ToulouseStephen “Stepto” Toulouse hails from the tech industry where he has over 20 years of experience with Microsoft, Xbox, and HBO. Currently he is the Director of Community Engagement for Black Tusk Studios working on the game Gears of War. He is the published author of the book A Microsoft Life as well as being known for his performances as a technology and Geek culture comedian. He’s published several short stories and a spoken word comedy album. He is a pet lover and you can find his writing at Stepto.com.

Glen Weldon

Glen Weldon is a writer, book critic and movie reviewer. He contributes to NPR’s blog, Monkey See and is a regular panelist on NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour. He is the author of Superman: The Unauthorized Biography, a cultural history of the iconic character. His next book, on the intersection of Batman and nerd culture, will be published in 2015.

Marco Werman

Marco Werman is the host of PRI’s The World. He is an Emmy award winner for his short documentary “Libya: Out of the Shadow” on the PBS program Frontline/World. Werman is also the co-creator of the PBS series “Sound Tracks: Music Without Borders.”

Saul Williams

Saul Williams is an award-winning poet, musician, actor, and performer. He recently starred in the Broadway musical, Holler if Ya Hear Me. and is currently working on an untitled book of poetry on America, commissioned by Gallery Books, and his forthcoming album Martyr Loser King. He is a graduate of Morehouse College and New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Bill Willingham

Writer and illustrator Bill Willingham began his career in the early 1980s and is still producing stories for comic and prose readers today. He’s the writer of several comic books, including the long running Fables series, and the author of the novels Peter & Max, Down the Mysterly River and Lady of the Lake (forthcoming).

An offline design magazine: Offscreen

The new issue of Offscreen magazine is here. As the name suggests, it’s print only, and it’s one of the best magazines I’ve seen about design and designers in some time. I’m biased as the closing essay in issue #9 is something I wrote about Embracing the Off Switch (aka Not Drowning in Data).

If you’re into design and getting away from machines every now and then, pick up the current issue at OffscreenMag.

New design of scottberkun.com is live

I’m happy to say the new design of this site is live. Thanks to Ryan Sommers for the design and development work.

If you find any issues or bugs, please leave a comment. Just make sure to mention what browser / platform you’re using.

Cheers.

New site design launches Monday

Ryan Sommers at Sevenbold and I have  been working on a redesign of scottberkun.com for the last few weeks. We’ll be launching the new design Monday morning. Things should go smoothly, but this is a warning just in case. Here’s a preview of what’s coming.