Warren Adler's Blog, page 5
March 21, 2018
Emily Jordan
Talk is not cheap, in word or in deed.
In 1998, I wrote my first unpublished magnum opus. It took me seven years to write and was about a high school Latin teacher who went insane and became a murderess. I was teaching high school Latin at the time. I loved this novel as fiercely as one would a problem child; every rejection was a sign of my own fatal flaw that I had somehow imparted and now the child would never succeed in life, make money or marry. Eventually, my agent and I decided to commit it to the cold pastures of my hard drive and we parted ways.
Next, I went to a prestigious grad school to get an MFA where I wrote a mediocre novel about an infomercial star who goes on a joyride. Meanwhile, mostly everyone in my grad school was a heterosexual white male who told me and the few other females that our writing was either too domestic/boring or too vaginal/scary. Needless to say, the famous author who headed the program did not help me get a new agent. I then abandoned fiction for non-fiction, imagining it somehow less emo. My book Did Jew Know?— a cultural history of Judaism that came out in 2013— still sells well at Hanukkah.
I was writing for Salon and working on a follow-up book about Shabbat when my dear friend Damon Suede, a best-selling author of gay romance, called me to suggest I write a romance novel. This set me on the trajectory on which I now find myself: writing YA contemporary romance. I recently finished writing Just the Sky—a contemporary YA about a prep-school princess who gets an internship at a youth detention center in the Bronx where she meets a troubled girl framed for arson. I happen to be on the board of an organization that teaches mindfulness practices to incarcerated and vulnerable youth in NYC and thus have spent a lot of time at youth detention centers around town. Still, I began to wonder if this story was mine to tell, especially issues pertaining to social justice. As I consider this question and have sensitivity readers give my manuscript a deep, critical read, I’m researching material for another YA set partially in the Victorian era.
Talk is not cheap, neither in cost or value. It can be empty. It can wound. It can even appropriate. And novels are built of talk, by talk, with talk. Yet, it has always been my fervid desire to talk less, to listen and say more.
http://www.emilyjordanbooks.com
https://www.salon.com/writer/emily-jordan
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March 14, 2018
High Noon in Hollywood
A clever look into the machinations of Hollywood from the bestselling author of the blockbuster hit The War of the Roses. When Hollywood producer Zane Galvin’s failed movie leaves him with a $5 million debt and thirty days to pay it off, he goes to unpredictable extremes to raise the money. Joining in on his scheme are Zane’s girlfriend, his gardener, the film’s writer, and the director. The plan quickly turns into a wicked game of switching sides, blackmail, betrayal, and greed. Will anyone come out a winner?
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Naima Coster
I have always thought of writing as a process of transition. Books, obviously, chronicle changes in characters, but they also transform readers and writers. My insights as a writer are keener at the end of every one of my own drafts; words shift during the creative process, too, becoming alchemical in the hands of a writer. My first novel, Halsey Street, is about loss, renewal, and change in a rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn.
I have been deeply formed by transitions in my own life. I grew up in Brooklyn and, at twelve, I matriculated at a private school, where I met other New Yorkers whose families and stories differed greatly from my own. I adjusted to a new school and culture by writing fiction, inadvertently chronicling the reorientations occurring within me–new speech patterns, tastes, and an emerging view of myself as a young adult. I spent summers in the Dominican Republic, where I was especially aware of myself as a person born out of a momentous transition: my family’s emigration from that island to New York City.
In my fiction, I seek to make meaning out of transitional moments. Whether I am exploring the awkward in-betweenness of adolescence, the split consciousness of life as an immigrant, or the changing face of a neighborhood, I am interested in how we engineer change or grapple with it, in our communities and our inner lives.
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March 9, 2018
What if The Roses Had Taken Advantage of Quickie Divorces Online?
The recent launch of It’s Over Easy sent a steady stream of emails my way with the following question: What does the author of The War of the Roses have to say about quickie divorces online?
It’s Over Easy, launched by celebrity divorce attorney Laura Wasser, is the most recent online platform created to help divorcing couples navigate divorce in what promises to be a more cost-effective and amicable way. WeVorce is another online divorce platform that precedes it.
When I wrote The War of the Roses more than forty years ago, I was consciously concerned with the themes that continue to weave through my novels to this day: the eternal mystery and randomness of love, the corruptive power of acquisitive greed, the perverse underbelly of assertive ambition, the contemporary redefining of gender roles and the challenges of an overwrought technological tsunami building in the distance and the effect it would have on “everything.”
Paramount among these themes in my work, however, has always been the mystery of attraction between humans defined as “love,” the kind that brought together sweethearts like Barbara and Jonathan Rose who consented to the marriage pledge to love and honor each other for a lifetime….”till death do us part.” No emotion is more powerful and all-encompassing.
Countless couples throughout the world have “solemnly sworn” to do just that, only to discover that what they pledged as “eternal” had a shorter shelf life than they imagined. Any divorce lawyer can tell you that there are numerous reasons why marriages fail, but my plot line for the breakup of the Roses embodied all of the themes outlined above, which came together in one big explosion resulting in the bizarre death of this once loving couple. They were, in effect, killed by their own possessions. Death by house. Both Roses were blinded by their own ambition. While the children were not an issue of contention in my novel, they are by default and the impact on their lives, despite all rationalizations, is mostly negative.
Of course, not all divorces end in extreme tragedy. The unshackling of marriage vows via quickie divorces online theoretically no longer requires any more angst than simply the small inconvenience of returning merchandise from an online retailer and it seems quickie divorce operations are beginning to proliferate. The seriousness and sanctity of marriage now has a speedy exit door through websites that offer a kind of no-hassle escape for those married folks who seek a swifter and cheaper answer to uncoupling.
In most of my many novels, relationships are explored and dissected as my characters maneuver their ways through the tangled thickets of life. Love in marriage is like the course of a sailboat, subject to the power, direction, vagaries, and strength of the winds. It blows strongly at the beginning, changes direction often. Inevitably it must navigate through stormy life-threatening seas. At times the winds cease and the boat becomes dead in the water. Hopefully, the wind returns and the journey begins anew. No novel or short story of mine has ever ended with the timeworn ending phrase of the stories of my childhood “and they lived happily ever after.”
Will such quickie online divorce sites hobble the possibilities of the kind of war that is narrated in my novel? Statistics appear to prove that perhaps as much as fifty percent of couples, especially in developed countries, are opting to untie the marriage knot and the quickie online divorce offers an easy exit with a minimum of hassle and expense. It’s impossible to sit in judgment of those who find themselves in such a situation. It all depends on the depth of animosity between the divorcing couples who have opted for the quickie divorce for reasons of speed and economy. Couples divorcing with children custody and future support issues might find themselves on a slippery slope. As Tolstoy put it, not all families are alike, and it will take time to evaluate whether the quickie divorce concept has legs or is just a hasty ploy to divorce.
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March 7, 2018
Adriana Locke
Words have always captivated me. Whether it was writing stories about bakers and butterflies or reading tales set in far off lands, I’ve been drawn to words in one form or another as long as I can remember.
Life gets busier as one gets older and I became a mother early in my twenties. Motherhood soon took over every part of my life. I found myself forgetting who I was in the process of helping shape these four beautiful little souls I brought into the world.
One snowy, February evening in Indiana, I read an article about how to find yourself again. It said to remember what you loved as a child, before life got complicated, and there you might find your passion. I began writing that night. Every twist and turn in my story fed my spirit, each page bringing me back to who I am at the core—a lover of words.
Writing isn’t just an expressive form of art or a career or a hobby. It’s much, much deeper. It’s therapy, an escape, a tool for developing thoughts and ideas that sort of flutter around my brain. To put it simply, for me, writing is a journey of self-discovery.
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March 2, 2018
“Crime and Punishment” from Jackson Hole: Uneasy Eden
Now on Audible!
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February 28, 2018
Colin Falconer
People often ask: how much does a writer put of themselves in a story?
Perhaps it depends on what story means to you. For me, stories are a very personal thing. The first ones I ever heard were about my own family. I couldn’t have been more than four years old.
My mother, you see, was quite the storyteller. She must have been, because all these years later, I still remember the smallest details of many of her tales.
She used to tell me about her life growing up in the poorer parts of East London. She didn’t have the easiest life; she was one of nine children and her father, who I never met, was a violent alcoholic.
So although my own family are Cockneys, not Irish, much of the research for Kitty O’Kane was very familiar to me. I already knew, for instance, that the women who lived in the slums scrubbed their doorsteps every day; my mother had long ago explained to me that just because you lived in a tenement was no reason to let your standards slip.
After all, what would the neighbours say?
And it was no coincidence that Kitty’s father was a bully and a drunk. I couldn’t have imagined him any other way, even if he only played a cameo in the book.
My mother remembered to her dying day the beatings he gave her and her siblings. In later years, she often wondered aloud why my grandmother never left him.
She seemed to forget that my gran lived in a very different time, and in a very different society. There was also a psychology to it; Gran didn’t think she deserved any better.
Kitty’s story completes the circle; it is about a woman who takes back her own life, and discovers her own sense of being worth something in a forbidding world.
Which means that although there is a lot of my mother and my grandmother in Kitty O’Kane, my own daughters are in her, too. Kitty O’Kane’s journey takes three hundred and fifty pages; in real life it took four generations.
For all the similarities, it is still fiction. My grandmother was never a maid on the Titanic, she never witnessed the Russian Revolution first hand, as Kitty did, or the Siege of Dublin. But she did see the worst of East London and she did get through the Blitz.
Her daughter, eyewitness to it all, finally recounted the stories to a wide-eyed three-year-old boy; they were tales of tough times and hard people and about finding a way to survive long enough to find love at the end of it. When he grew up, the little boy took these bits of soft fact and molded them to something solid in his imagination.
So to answer the question: how much of the writer ended up in the story?
I suppose you would have to say; in the end, quite a bit.
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February 21, 2018
Annie Hartnett
I didn’t start writing—really writing—until my final year in college, when I was in a creative writing class that I’d just taken for kicks. The professor assigned The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories (edited by Ben Marcus) and I was just bowled over by it. I thought, if I could write stories like this—stories that are weird, off-kilter, somewhat unbelievable, yet also extraordinarily emotionally true—I’d never want to do anything else. That class woke me up, and since then, writing takes up as much of my life as possible. I’ve had day jobs, of course, and now I teach and freelance edit, but I’m usually able to give several hours of the day to writing. It’s best if I can spend my whole day in dreamland, but often that’s not possible. But even when I’m doing other things, I spend 80% of my waking life thinking about writing, telling myself stories, chuckling over the possibilities. My husband is also deeply involved in his work, so it works out really well for us, but lord help us if we ever have kids. I will definitely forget a baby on the subway somewhere, while I’m dreaming up the arguments my fictional characters could have. I’ll have to put a return-to-sender address on his diaper.
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February 20, 2018
The Watergate by Joseph Rodota: A Book Review from Warren Adler
To many, mentioning the word “Watergate” recalls a four-decade-old historical event that caused the downfall of the 37th American President, Richard Nixon. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of books have been written cataloging, commenting and analyzing this astounding hiccup in American national life.
To others, especially those in the Washington area, it is an apartment, hotel and office complex on the shores of the Potomac River of unusual design a stone’s throw from the Kennedy Center, minutes from the White House and State Department which has been and continues to be the residence of some of the most powerful and celebrated figures in American political life.
To Joseph Rodota, who has penned the book The Watergate with the apt subtitle “Inside America’s Most Infamous Address,” it is a quintessential rendition of how a complicated, creative and convoluted international real estate deal on a Washington mudflat became a permanent monument to American political chicanery.
Based on painstaking and remarkable research, Rodota, a political careerist turned author who worked in the Reagan White House and a top aide to former California Governor Pete Wilson delves deeply and eloquently into the exciting and wild shenanigans that involved a powerful Italian Development company with ties to the Vatican, an uncompromising and brilliant Italian architect, a covey of Washington developers and assisting architects and an assortment of political operatives, international bankers and colorful real estate tycoons in a birthing drama that makes Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal look like child’s play.
In the interest of full and honest disclosure, I must confess that Rodota’s fascinating rendition vividly recalls my own small part in this imbroglio which I hope will not distract from my sincere and enthusiastic commendation for his work.
I named this once muddy swamp Watergate. No irony intended but somewhat apt in today’s corrosive environment.
Actually, it was suggested from the name of a restaurant that occupied an adjacent property at one time and seemed wonderfully appropriate. Apparently, the powers that be agreed.
That was part of my job in my salad days as the founder and chief operational officer of Warren Adler, Ltd., an advertising and PR agency that I ran in the nation’s capital that, in addition to political accounts for both parties, specialized in creating branding advertising and community imagery for scores of housing communities throughout the Washington metro area.
My firm would name a community, prepare material to embellish that name and promote and advertise that community to the public. My tenure in this role did not last beyond the first Watergate building, constructed by my clients, but I did know and work with many of the players involved in the initial sales effort.
Because of its strategic location and its spectacular curving architectural white facade created by an Italian architect, which prompted a wag’s tongue-in-cheek description of it as “Spaghetti on the Potomac,” I was well aware in advance of construction that this one-of-a-kind complex because of its location and high profile would house some of Washington’s most significant movers, shakers, hanger-oners and hustlers.
Among them to name a few were Anna Chennault, Bob and Elizabeth Dole who lived next door to Monica Lewinsky and her mother, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a gaggle of famous Senators, Congressman, government officials, international diplomats, assorted lobbyists, influence peddlers, and the various socialites and friends of Presidents who bought into the Watergate complex to be part of the influential social hustle both on and especially behind the scenes of the Washington merry go round.
Of course, no one could have predicted how the break-in attempt at the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate would enshrine this development as ground zero of one of the most cataclysmic events that has ever “shivered the timbers” of our ship of state.
Many people involved in that turbulent era may no longer be alive, but the event still lingers in the public consciousness although most people haven’t a clue as to what really happened or why except that it made lasting legends out of all the principal players and lingers in memory as a rallying cry for freedom of the press and a cautionary tale for corrupt politicians collectively identified under the umbrella of a single name: “Watergate.”
What Joseph Rodota has done is give life to this inanimate configuration of apartments, offices and a hotel complex as if he was probing the inner life of a living colorful and controversial celebrity which has morphed into an enduring historical symbol of bizarre events.
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February 14, 2018
Kate Quinn
I can’t remember a time I wasn’t writing. I wrote my first short story at seven (front and back of a blank piece of typing paper, straggling pencil block print) and my first book at ten (121 typed and double-spaced pages of pure awful!) I wrote as a high schooler, as a college student balancing a full class-load and several work-study jobs, as a graduate with a 60-hour work week in a cubicle I hated. I always wanted to be a published author, and I count myself very lucky that the stars aligned and it happened for me, but even if I wasn’t, I’d still be writing books and putting them under the bed. The procession of characters through the mind, the rabbit-hole of historical researching, and the delight of putting words down on paper is a happy drug for me, the best and most absorbing hobby in the world. One of the few hobbies, in fact, that can be done by anyone–no special equipment required, just a story to tell and a means to set it down!
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