Warren Adler's Blog, page 62

Madame du Jour (Lady of the Day) by Solange Anduze James

People's Choice Award Finalist Story in the 6th Annual Warren Adler Short Story Contest .

      After the passing of Camilla, it was as if everything living had ceased to fly over the village of Grande Fleuve.

      Once an important trading town buoyed by the reign of King Sugar, many moons of silt and remembrance had rendered its once thriving channels unnavigable, causing nature and its people to turn their back on the rest of the country; they became the  people of a dreamtime, with sandbanks and wiry mangrove closing the door to the world outside them.

      The town had been founded and designed by Mr. Oxley Keats, the unclaimed bastard child of the once flourishing Keats sugar plantation. In the hope that God would absolve him of his illegitimacy, he had originally designed the village to look like a giant crucifix from above, with King's Lane forming the main business base and Queen's Trace completing the apex.

      It was here that Camilla, a woman who since Roman times had brought grief to men, lived.  The Gods had been reckless, blessing her generously with beauty and cursing her with courage. As tall as a young redwood tree, her brown baked skin concealed a secret consortium of untold histories. With a spirit as wild as Virgil's Volscians, she would often retire to her room, a bottle of Puncheon rum in her grasp, coming out only to summon her resident male companion when it was time for him to take her to the bar.  Most of these outings would almost always end up with a fight, with some man who could not afford her attention daring to remind her as to her profession. The police however, always treated her with deference and respect as it was common knowledge that her connections rivaled the Lord's, and that one of her important suitors would always come hastily to pay her bail.

      By the time she was thirty, Camilla was one of the most sought after courtesans in Grande Fleuve.  As imperious as the flaming Ibis, she had once interrupted a conference held by the mayor to take him to task for not paying for services rendered.  Standing in the middle of the room in a demure white cotton dress that barely repressed her coveted goods she addressed him:

      "Aloysius, it's been one week since you came by and were happily entertained and I know you remembered that you promised to pay me the next day.  I sent Clyde to collect the      payment – the nerve of you to threaten to have him arrested!" she said, her eyes greeting each councilor with a gaze of silent knowing. She continued:

      "I would rather not come down here and broadcast my business as such, but I can't get in the habit of letting people think that they can get away without paying for my services."

       "Ahem– Miss Camilla" the mayor stammered as he loosed his tie that appeared in sudden danger of asphyxiating him. 

"I'm kind of in the middle of some very important meetings here.  If you don't mind, why don't you wait in the next room for me and we can discuss your issue further" he said, trying his best to cultivate some semblance of decency

      "Well Aloysius, I don't mean to be rude, but in case you haven't noticed your fancy tone don't faze me one bit. I'm going to wait right here till you pay me in cash-thank-you-very-much" as she placed her beaded clutch on the mahogany desk and proceeded to apply a fresh coat of conflagrant colored lipstick.

      The councilors, sitting at the end of the desk looked around in feigned prostration, for they all knew that it was only but for the Grace of God that their places had not been reversed. Smug with the satisfaction that they could go home and sermonize about the Mayor's immoral conduct, they hid their secret shame in disapproving whispers, satisfied that no one had the proof needed to point a deserving finger at them as well.

      The flustered mayor tried to persuade Camilla to leave quietly, but she refused to budge until she collected her fee in full, leaving a confounded mayor who paid for services in triplicate, an attempt to silence the scandalous public encounter that would ensue in her wake.

      Her outlaw spirit seemed to arouse a bestial desire in men to tame her, all with the hope that one day they could possess her, making her their sole lady of call, a woman of the day.

      None felt this desire more than Gilroy Stanton.  A London trained accountant of the staid planter class, he was a diminutive man, bred solely for a life spent hunched in duty behind a desk.  He wore horn rimmed frames, never removing them except when he bought a new pair of the same style. The thick glass magnified his myopic eyes, giving him the guise of a small puffer trapped in twin bowls.  Content to share her with other men rather than marry the subdued specters of his class, he would often proposition Camilla, receiving until her death, the same response: 

      "The day we sign those marriage papers Mr. Stanton, you will try to make me a proper lady, and from that minute, all our passion will quickly wilt away."

      They were an unlikely match yet through his guidance and her shrewd business acumen, by her mid thirties she had become a Caribbean Queen Amytis, lording over several properties, including a brothel which she had replicated after the tower of Babel, complete with a terrace of lush hanging gardens. Trading in the commodity of flesh, she quickly surpassed the class of her suitors, buying herself a huge estate replete with several maids, gardeners and a household manager.

      She would keep a main companion for several years at a time, dismissing them when she tired of them. Gilroy Stanton, a habitué who would eventually become a life long suitor, would visit every Saturday night, at exactly five minutes to eight, dressed as if he were roaming Trafalgar Square, his somber wools woefully out of place in the stifling Caribbean heat.  The house staff would time them uneasily, using the length of his visit to estimate the treatment that would be meted for the upcoming week:

      "Ah, methinks Mistress is not in a giving mood      tonight – look Mr. Stanton leaving and it's only eight thirty!"  Or:  "Oh ho, Mistress giving lots of loving tonight!  It's midnight and Mr. Stanton ain't leave yet!"

      In spite of her weekly evening activities, Camilla diligently attended church every Sunday, belaboring the congregation with her presence, taking pleasure in the clucking of tongues and the shuffles of the self righteous, as she brazenly walked down the center nave and took her place in the front pew, drawing her black mantilla over her face in feigned humility. 

      In Grand Fleuve, life continued in this way, deviating little from the synonymous existence, decades aging them less languidly than the rest of the world. 

      The year was 1980, and Gilroy decided to throw a party in celebration of Camilla's impending seventieth birthday. Many of those who whispered piously secretly hoped that they would get an invitation, as parties on her estate were known to be grandiose affairs, the last of them having naked knife jugglers and flying acrobats as the intermission entertainment.

       They did not disappoint, and the event was a flamboyant soirée, the pinnacle of ostentation for the descendent of slaves. There was a beauty pageant, with each of the ladies representing her from a time past, all vying to be deigned the "Nouvelle Camilla" in honor of her unharnessed spirit that had not waned in over half a century.   

      That night in her usual manner, Camilla retired to her room; but tonight would be different – as death stole her quickly away, never awakening from her half drunken sleep.

      Gilroy, destroyed by grief, shut himself in Camilla's room, spending several days wailing like a wounded stray until Hensley, the estate manager, instructed the yard hands to break the door down.     

      "Mr. Stanton Sir, I don't mean to be too much out of place, but the body is going to bloat!" Hensley continued: "Through all the years you have come like a husband to Camilla.  The time to cry can come after"

      This aroused Gilroy somewhat from his melancholy mood, as he realized that in addition to her household staff, he was the only person who had been privy to her affairs and therefore was the only person who could make arrangements for her burial.

      When Gilroy arrived at the funeral home he was met by its director, Cuthbert Myers, who led him to the cold storage area to see the body. Shocked to see Camilla lying on a cold slab with her legs as open shears, his anger returned and he objected loudly to the careless manner in which the corpse was being treated. 

Cuthbert however, morbidly exclaimed:

      "Here, all the dead is the same Mr. Stanton – whether prince or pauper, all the dead is the same piece o' meat.  Well, Well.  All them high and mighty man used to lust after her, yet here she is, with only you to take care of her."

      Continuing as though it was a detail as trivial as the flower request he continued:

      "I was wondering, I can't seem to close her eyes, and well, I've tried to sew her lids shut several times but, as you can see, it's not working — I was hoping you could let me know what I should do about it"

       Gilroy retorted:

      "It's as if she looked death in the face when he came take her – Let her go to the great beyond looking at the Lord in defiance!"

                                 ***

      The morning of the wake, both the curious and genuinely bereaved began arriving around ten am. Heavy morning downpours and Gulf of Paria high tides had raised the level of floodwaters so that by the time the funeral was set to begin, many mourners, including the only priest who would agree to perform the ceremony, had no choice but to arrive by canoe, punting their boats through the Caiman infested water with uprooted bamboo stakes.

      Performing the ceremony under the tent that just a few days prior was filled with merriment and pageantry, the priest quickly said the blessings and instructed the gravediggers to nail the coffin shut and lower it into the hole. However, the dirt had become saturated, pregnant on the ceaseless flow of floodwaters, and the collapsing grave pushed the coffin out of the hole with much noise and force, making it appear as if were being pulled by invisible hands.

      Those who braved the rains to attend the interment began to murmur, praying softly at first, then raising their voices in boisterous supplication, as the coffin continued to squelch and refuse to submerge.

      One of the gravediggers decided to stand on the coffin, hoping that the additional weight would push the box to the bottom of the grave, but instead, with one giant flatulence, the coffin flipped to a vertical position, plunging him to a murky death. In his stead, Camilla emerged, hurtling from her gilded resting place, face down and half naked in front of the now frenzied mourners.

      The small crowd scattered in fear, appearing as a nest of exposed insects. They would trample each other into the mud, killing a pregnant mourner in the process, escaping what they believed, was the just wrath of God.

Israel: The Role Model in the Neighborhood

If Egypt and, indeed, the whole Arab world need a role model for how to conduct their governments in the ways of democracy, they should look no further than to one of their closest neighbors.

Israel.

Sounds crazy. It's not.

To do this young Arabs must rewire the tangles put in their minds by decades of hateful rhetoric and bloody confrontations that have led them into a kind of intellectual and political oblivion and crippled their capacity to make rational decisions on behalf of themselves. It is time they started to learn from their neighbor and stopped demonizing it. It has brought them nothing but death and despair.

Israel is a true democracy, albeit messy, unruly, argumentative and fractious but somehow miraculously workable. Every point of view has its passionate representation including religious orthodoxy and its Arab citizens. They have an excellent military under civilian oversight.

Indeed, there are religious parties in Israel with similarly rigid ideas as some Muslim sects.  They debate their secular opponents. They are loud, raucous and insistent that they represent the true path to salvation and can, through religious doctrine, lead the country into the future. The Israelis have made them inclusive and they have influence but not enough to compromise the bedrock idea of a secular state with a Jewish identity.

Israel's secular parties, which dominate the political culture, represent every spectrum of political life, left, right and center. They are perpetually ranged against each other like contentious gladiators. They draw blood, but it's more like Hollywood blood, hardly the real thing. Nevertheless, with all this Tower of Babel cacophony they manage to move the country's agenda in the path of freedom and prosperity.

However far apart they are on the issues they do not kill each other and somehow they advance what they deem the common good. The case of the Rabin assassination was an aberration and filled almost all Israelis with disgust and anger.

Considering how Israel has been treated by their neighbors since their founding, and the blood they have shed maintaining their sovereignty, one can understand why they have often been reluctantly forced into making draconian decisions to ensure their survival.

Despite this, they have managed to function and grow and have built the most viable, prosperous and creative democratic state in their geographical neighborhood while their cousins, the Arabs, are lost in dysfunction, corruption, fantasies and antagonisms that have kept their people in a state of  stasis for centuries.

Many of these Arab countries are swimming in oil and wealth, but other than a handful of autocrats and exploiters most citizens of these states share none of its largesse. They have allowed themselves, quite literarily, to be oppressed, manipulated, abused and largely impoverished by a small group of greedy and corrupt overseers.

In the case of the Iranians who are not Arabs, a dictatorial extremist Muslim theocracy rules by oppression of its people and poses a frightening danger to the entire world. One hopes that their young people begin to awake with the same zeal, commitment and courage as the Egyptian youth.

The educated cadre of young people who sparked the Egyptian protests were fed up with the lack of opportunity offered them. They are sick to death of the doors to employment and prosperity being slammed in their faces.  They have good reason to protest.

It is about time they started to wake up. Now that they have made their voices heard, they must be alert and vigilant so that their hopes and dreams are not crushed by ambitious theocrats or a repressive military dictatorship.

They represent the best and the brightest of their country, young people who have demonstrated that they believe in freedom, civil liberties, honest government free from corruption, a fair justice system, free speech, free elections, and  all the other benefits of a free and open society. It won't be easy to undo the damage caused by years of oppression and brainwashing.

The Israelis are far from perfect. They have been made tough by adversity, suspicion, persecution, bigotry and a ceaseless drumbeat of hateful propaganda by their Arab neighbors. They yearn for peace and security and have managed to rise above their anxieties to exploit the possibilities that exist under a really free and democratic government.

Arab youths have good reasons to break the chains of oppression and it is time now to find the best path for what comes next. It is really not as far-fetched as it sounds to look to Israel for inspiration and practical knowledge on the real benefits of living in a free and open society, however messy and contentious.  Perhaps the Egyptians can build upon their cold peace with Israel and persuade their people that greater cooperation will be advantageous to both countries.

Instead of wanting to destroy the Jewish state, those Arab countries still in a state of war with Israel, can save themselves from drowning by seeking a helping hand from those who have been falsely accused of being their enemies.

All that is required is the courage to change as the young citizens of Egypt have just demonstrated.

The Enigma of Matchmaking Between Author and Reader

Now that the skeptics in the publishing industry, the media, assorted prognosticators and self-proclaimed experts have finally realized that they had it all wrong about e-books, it is time to move to the next big idea affecting readers and authors.

Matching up the serious reader with his or her natural author mate?

How does one find their reading material of choice when the filters, meaning the old army of "experts" who once dominated the book pickers round table have been lost in the fog of the Internet. Let us confine this discussion to the realm of fiction, which, for obvious reasons is my abiding concern.

It used to be that readers of fiction were given their marching orders by a circumscribed population of reviewers and recommenders that used the bullhorn of the old media to make their choices known to avid readers. They presided over special book review editions in daily newspapers and weekly magazines, and a scattering of radio and television shows.

Generally these outlets provided the content that left considerable space and time to advertisements of books offered by publishers usually with a plethora of affectionate blurbs by other authors, mostly friends of the published writer or in the stable of the publisher. These factors helped push many authors to best seller lists maintained by these outlets as an inducement to publishers, advertisers and bookstores to stock and readers to buy.

Bookstores were further induced when publishers bought position displays and shelf advantages to enhance their branded authors.

Whatever may be said about the process, this was the marketing religion of the publishing industry, abetted by the bookstores who stocked by consignment books that were judged by their exposure, paid and unpaid, to these inducements. Note that I have deliberately shied away from the word-of-mouth factor about which no one has ever unraveled the mysterious power of this phenomenal process.

Alas, the tried and true method of this marketing architecture will soon be in ruins, blasted away by the e-book and Internet juggernaut.

Here's why.

Those traditional filters and inducements are on their deathbed. Book review sections are disappearing. Print newspapers are shrinking rapidly and morphing in different forms to the web. While they will feature book reviews, they will have less impact because they are competing for attention in a giant pool of information and a plethora of distractions.

The big book stores will implode because they will no longer need big space to sell the diminishing number of print books. Amateur book reviewers are multiplying like rabbits on the web, each with a small pocket following. Everything now is fractured, splintered, diverse and diffuse. The filters are giant strainers spewing out material in unmanageable waves of opinions, taste levels and personal agendas. The so-called once authoritative voices are being drowned out by a chorus of self-appointed "experts."

Authors and publishers who once relied on traditional methods of marketing will have to rethink their strategies to rise above the chatter and individualize their authorial products. Those who have reached some level of popularity under the old system will be ahead of the game but not for long as more and more competition enters the fray.

The line between what the academy and their camp followers deems literary and the crass products of commercialism will become fuzzy and force an expansion into more and more little niches. Book festivals, writing contests, literary magazine on the net will proliferate with reviews and opinions by ever more self-appointed "filters" with limited followings.

In the near future no books will go out of print. Last year half a million books were published in America, split fifty-fifty between self-published and traditional published books. Within a few short years the number of self-published books will reach into the millions, far outpacing the traditional publishers offerings.

Thus, the next big challenge will be how a publisher or an author will be able to reach his or her reader. How will he or she get known? Get bought? Get read?

There are now hundreds, perhaps thousands of entrepreneurs on the web, offering the magic elixir for authors to get known, bought and read.  What they exploit are the hopes and dreams of authors seeking fame and fortune. Just drop some money into their coffers and they pander to the gullible, although they do provide psychic joy to the authors willing to pony up for their mini-second of recognition.

There will, of course, still be readers out there hungering for material to reach their minds and hearts. There is nothing like a novel to enrich one's understanding of the human condition as spawned in the mind of a writer creating a parallel world in his imagination. A serious novel or play is a magic bullet into the mind. But then I am hopelessly prejudiced.

Everyone is reaching out to find a new paradigm. Tiny bookstores are sprouting in places like San Francisco where writers read their material before small groups of dedicated readers. Perhaps that will be the wave of the future. How it will play out is anybody's guess.

Having digitized all my previously traditionally published books eleven years ago and evangelizing and predicting the rise of digital reading long before Kindle, Nook and the Sony reader does not make me a great futurist. It was a no brainer.

It was also a game changer for the serious author and a sock in the kisser for the traditional publisher.

And so the next big thing for both a reader finding his or her author of choice and an author reaching his or her natural audience is hacking out a path through the cacophony of a modern Tower of Babel. I haven't figured that one out, but I sure as hell am trying.

Been There. Saw That.

When you have lived a long time through what is termed historical moments, you begin to see patterns at work that repeat themselves ad nauseam. Been there.  Saw that.

The scenario is normally played outdoors in a symbolic square or sacred area in some foreign country. It follows the same narrative line. Angry people, mostly young, erupt in a hysterical display of passionate frustration that often leads to violence.

We know in our gut that they do indeed represent the disenfranchised, the impoverished and the ignored. The villain, the target of their rage, is usually an entrenched leader or group that has been in power for decades.

Suddenly the media, and now the blogosphere in search of eyeballs and readers, come to life in a burst of sanctimonious chest beating, and in the safety of distance joining the fray and through ringing prose, ally themselves with the passionate protesters. Loaded words like dignity, justice, equality, fairness, decency and freedom punctuate the heated rants.

Politicians, ever on alert for voter support and pandering to prevailing opinion, join the fray seeking recognition of their self-righteous stand on sweeping away those thuggish dictators and oppressors that they had supported for years. After all, who is not on the side of freedom, dignity, equality and human rights, especially if someone puts a camera or microphone in one's face?

Never mind that it has been the official policy of the United States to support and do business with these oppressors for decades before these various eruptions. One need not be a student of history to recall some examples of our relations with Germany under Hitler, the Philippines under Marcos, China, Iran under the Shah, Iraq under Saddam, and every single oppressive Arab nation from the Saudis on down, all of whom have been currently under various forms of dictatorship for years.

You could go around the continents in ten seconds and put the magnifying glass on Africa, South America and Asia and points north and south to truly understand the state of the world in which we live.  Indeed, the earth is stained with the blood of the self-righteous, the good, the bad and the ugly.

Inevitably the tyrant will depart. His ill-gotten loot, systematically obtained through corruption and guile, will have already found its way into coffers usually in western banks. Someone or a group of someones will take his place and, at first, pay lip service to the idea of democracy. The exiled tyrant will live on his mountain of stolen gold, bitter and eventually forgotten.

Unless the path has been strewn with the rose petals of institutional democratic architecture it is in danger of getting little traction and the result will be yet another form of oppression. With luck, it is possible and there are some, not many, examples of eventual reform and a transition to a real democratic government. Will the original protesters be satisfied? As they say, hope spring eternal.

Nor is this little essay designed to cast aspersions on the political leadership of this country or the media and the vast army of bloviators and camp followers that pander to the winds of change based on the images we see on video and the quickly shifting sands of public opinion.

Like any running back dodging potential tacklers, our leadership, often blundering and heavy handed, has managed to keep our team in play for more than 200 odd years scoring a number of policy touchdowns. More often than not, we have won the day, the proof being our survival as a united nation, imperfect in so many ways, but still strong, still viable, still proud, still hopeful.

How we will survive the years ahead is anybody's guess. Religious fanaticism and nuclear proliferation is a very unhealthy brew. Few if any of us has the magic formula to keep us safe and free. Indeed, we feel for those who live in the dark world of oppression and poverty.

Our earthly ballroom is filled with predators. If we appear to be dancing with the devil at times, we sense that we will always be looking out for better less clumsy and more agile partners. But the objective, as always, is to keep on dancing, no matter what.

How I Got the Idea: The War of the Roses

It's been thirty years since the novel The War of the Roses was published and twenty-one years since the movie version with Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner was released.

In that time this cautionary tale about the perils of divorce and the destructive power of materialism which burst upon the public consciousness, has not only become part of the world-wide zeitgeist, but it has morphed into the nomenclature of divorce, both as a legal description and a symbolic description of a marriage breakup's ultimate consequences.

Ironically, the peak statistic for divorces in the United States was the same year that the book was published, 1981. In that year the divorce rate in the United States had soared to 5.6 divorces per 1000 marriages. In 2005 the rate was 3.6 and continues to drop, a situation that is mirrored throughout the world. Astonishingly, The War of the Roses, continues to garner traction in terms of name recognition in every corner of the globe.

It would, of course, be false modesty to suggest that this cautionary tale about divorce contributed to the impetus for this declining divorce rate. But one most note the impact of the publication of this novel which germinated a movie, a play and a sequel novel is still bouncing higher and higher in the public consciousness. Perhaps it is part of something bigger, but facts are facts, the divorce rate, for whatever reason, is in decline.

I am astonished at the staying power of the idea embedded in this book which takes a dark view on divorce and what the process itself does to people. Wherever I have traveled in the world, people who identify me as the author of the novel are convinced that it is autobiographical. Even when I explain that I have been married only once to the same girl I fell in love with a half century ago, they will insist that this cannot be true.

I have received countless comments, letters and e-mails from people who have read the book or seen the movie. Many have expressed their thanks to me for changing their lives in some way, which is the most gratifying comment to be received by an author. Some have confessed that they had abandoned any idea of fighting over property in the course of their divorces. Best of all, some have told me that it caused their reconciliation.

The idea for The War of the Roses came to me at a dinner party in Washington in 1979. One of our female friends was dating a lawyer, who was her guest at the party. At some point, he looked at his watch and announced that he had to get home or his wife would lock him out of the house. When asked why, he said he was in the process of getting a divorce and was living under the same roof and sharing facilities and that part of the agreement was a strict set of rules on coming and goings and the division of living quarters.

It is always difficult to describe to people, how a story idea enters a novelist's consciousness. By the time I began to write The War of the Roses I had already published nine novels and my antenna must have been circulating feverishly searching for a new idea. The dilemma expressed by this dinner guest might be called the "eureka" moment.

The story quickly formed in my mind and, with the exception of a brief conversation with a Judge who was an expert in domestic law, I did no other legal research on the subject of divorce. Oddly, many people have become convinced, including that dinner guest that somehow I had burrowed into the legal files of their various divorce actions and I cannot tell you how many times over the years people have accused me of "stealing their divorces." I tried countering this accusation by explaining that a novel's story grows out of a novelist's imagination and the amalgamation of his or her observations and experiences, but to little avail.

For some reason movie interest was immediate and the book was quickly optioned to Richard Zanuck and David Brown, two wonderful producers for whom I wrote the first script. For unknown reasons, which is the only way I can describe the Hollywood process, they could not put the movie together and the book and script were re-optioned by yet another creative producer James L. Brooks who had read the script first, then the novel and in the end produced the movie.

It is interesting to point out that all of the people who were involved in the purchase of the novel for a movie had contentious divorces, surely a motivating factor in their moving the novel to the screen. The two most obvious principals involved in the movie, this author, and as far as I know, Danny Devito have long time stable marriages.

.

Having optioned or sold 12 of my thirty-five books to the movies, including my recent novel Funny Boys, I haven't a clue to why my novels and short stories attract so much Hollywood interest. I don't write with the movies in mind, but people tell me there is something compellingly visual in my work, which may or may not be true.

Actually, I was quite happy with the result, which I attribute to the shepherding of this movie through the process by James Brooks and the creative ability of the director Danny Devito. Who can argue with the fact that they helped create an enormously compelling and enduring film, which pretty much followed the story arc of the novel.

As an aside, I was not happy with the adaptation of another book of mine, Random Hearts, which became a movie with Harrison Ford and Kristin Scott Thomas, a view expressed in a New York Times piece I wrote after seeing that film.

But The War of the Roses adaptation to a movie was, to my mind, an excellent rendition. It preserved the ideas and the fidelity of the characters. It successfully translated what I had to say in the book about how greed, materialism and selfishness can whittle away at a character's integrity, destroy common sense and encourage turbulent emotions that lead to violence. It illustrated the devastating effect such marital conflict could have on children who become innocent victims of the process.

In a later novel The Children of the Roses I carried the story forward to the next generation and showed how this early trauma had impacted on the lives of the Roses' children. There had been some talk about it becoming a television series, and I do hold out hope that it will one day be up on the silver screen. In that arena one never knows.

It is very hard to predict the life of a book. Some great books die a quick death. Some live on for reasons that baffle logic. In my case I acquired through reversion all the rights to my books and made a big bet on electronic publishing, which is emerging as a winning strategy after years of struggle.

But so far none of my other novels have as yet attained the world wide staying power of The War of the Roses, which continues as a movie to circle the world repeatedly and offer the millions who are aware of the story a sense that the breakup of a marriage has very destructive unintended consequences and should only be considered as last resort.

It is particularly gratifying for a novelist if his or her story has contributed to the betterment of his or her fellow mortals. I think The War of the Roses provides that kind of example.

The Dangers of Historical Ignorance

The aftermath of the attempted assassination of Congressman Gabrielle Giffords and the senseless killings of bystanders has exposed those who create the media conversation in America as appallingly ignorant of American history.

What is most egregious is that some of our major and normally respected media outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post and numerous talk show hosts have showcased their ignorance by attempting to pin the blame on political hate speech much of it emanating from the conservative end of the political spectrum.

Such nonsense is demeaning to American values. Worse, it is an indictment of our educational system that has spawned generations of Americans who know the minutia about the lives of Hollywood celebrities and entertainers and almost nothing about the lives of those who have been the major players in American history and the events that created the American experience.

Let us not delude ourselves. Our history is steeped in blood. We have fought brutal wars on American soil from the moment of our founding. There have always been bloody confrontations. American history records numerous wars against Indians, Mexicans, French, British, Canadians and on and on. I dare not cite the wars fought outside our boundaries up until the present moment.

As for assassination attempts on American political leaders, they are too numerous to mention within the confines of this short essay. Most one-off assassinations of political figures in this country have been the work of deluded and unbalanced misfits acting alone.

The facts are that most of the people who have succeeded or attempted to assassinate our political leaders, Presidents, for example, were people whose motives were based on personal unbalanced, inexplicable and uncontrollable rage that often had little do with hate speech and more to do with madness, vengeance and twisted and imagined disagreements on issues that had little to do with what is now called toxic political partisan discourse.

An unbalanced mind will often use public issues to motivate an act of personal violence against someone perceived to represent such an issue. It is a risk a public political personality takes and it cannot be avoided.

Indeed, there has always been what has been described as toxic political discourse and often outrageous militant and threatening political speech in America. Such are the perils of free speech.

There have been four successful assassination attempts on our Presidents and numerous attempted assassinations. I offer this list from Wikipedia, assuming its accuracy, although some of it is both shocking and surprising. One ventures to guess that if the files of the Secret Service were ever made public, Americans would be appalled at the number of threats made against our major political figures from every conceivable source.

1) Presidents assassinated

Abraham Lincoln
James A. Garfield
William McKinley
John F. Kennedy

2) Attempted assassinations

Andrew Jackson
Abraham Lincoln
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Harry S. Truman
John F. Kennedy
Richard Nixon
Gerald Ford

First assassination attempt

Second assassination attempt
Ronald Reagan
George H. W. Bush
Bill Clinton
George W. Bush
Barack Obama

3) Presidential deaths rumored to be assassinations

Zachary Taylor 
Warren G. Harding  

Then there is the case of Robert Kennedy who was assassinated by a young man of Arab extraction who disagreed with American policy on Israel. Martin Luther King's assassin was reputed to be a white supremacist. Then there was Malcolm X who was assassinated by three members of a rival Muslim group.

It is too easy to try to ascribe purely political or religious motives to these acts unless it is clearly acknowledged as such, like the case of the officer who perpetrated the killings in Fort Hood.  Then there are our homegrown monsters like Timothy McVeigh, angry men who act out their rage by mass killing. Or the Unabomber, a loner with a firm belief in his own meandering ideas of how the world should be run.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to killings out of rage and blind hatred. Most of these perpetrators are angry people, many of them mentally unstable who, for one reason or another, believe that this rage can be satisfied only by making a bloody statement involving killing a well known figure or a group of innocent bystanders.

We humans are a sorry lot. It is somewhat of a miracle that most of us here in America can go about our lives in peace and security avoiding the horrors and dangers that lurk within the human psyche. Compared to most countries of the world, we appear to do a lot better job of keeping the peace within our borders than others around the world.

It is indeed a complicated and often brutal world. Nevertheless our history has the power to teach us the truth about ourselves and perhaps in some mysterious way cause us to self-correct our behavior. But if, as most media contributors have revealed, we are uneducated about our history, we will never learn a thing and sink deeper and deeper into ignorance.

The Dedicated Reader is Alive and Well

It should now be obvious to anyone who reads books on a regular basis that digitized versions of books will dominate the marketplace for dedicated readers far sooner than anyone had predicted.

Having made the entry into digital publishing of my own works of fiction ten years ago, I have never lost faith in the idea that content was king no matter how it was delivered. Admittedly, the early days were a rocky road indeed. Many visionaries who believed in this technology in those early days have fallen by the wayside.

Thankfully, for those authors of fiction like myself, our day has finally arrived. Digital publishing on e-reading devices and print-on-demand technology will finally give the author his or her freedom from the traditional publishing industry's monopoly on content and distribution.

The introduction of the iPad and other tablets with their vast array of offerings of TV shows, movies and games, as well as books, will, in my opinion, not be the first choice of the dedicated reader, although the Apps offered make dedicated reading fare from Amazon, the Sony reader, Nook and Kobo available on such devices. Still, I believe that the truly committed reader will opt for the dedicated reading device itself while using the tablets for other entertainment forms.

There are, nevertheless, challenges ahead for both the author and the reader, especially in the realm of fiction. The well regulated and tight-fisted control of the traditional publisher as the gatekeeper of books and talent served the public well for centuries. They kept their inventories in check through out-of-print methodology which cleared unsold books from their warehouses and limited their sales efforts strictly to those books that were instantly promotable and could be marketed swiftly and be off the shelves of bookstores to make way for other books coming off their presses.

Books that didn't move quickly were withdrawn and eventually declared out-of-print based strictly on their sales potential, handicapped by a deliberately held back lack of advertising and promotion. Authors who were caught in the cut, saw their careers aborted and their hopes and dreams demolished while their work moldered on book shelves awaiting withdrawal from libraries or left to rot on home bookshelves and eventually discarded.

Many frustrated authors took to publishing their books via what was dubbed vanity publishing, once a by-word for schlock based on ego mania. The process was generally considered, perhaps unfairly, as a kind of last resort for the frustrated and self-delusional. This by no means discounts what might have been fine material published by talented authors through this process.

That day is over. Self-publishing has become respectable and allows an author to take control of his or her own destiny, especially those authors who have once published through the traditional system.  A self-published author can easily join his traditionally published fellow authors on every digital venue. The stigma of an author going that route is quickly disappearing.

Granted that many self-published books are, arguably, hardly worth one's reading time, there are, nevertheless, many of considerable worth, written by talented authors who have, for one reason or another, been shut out of the shrinking traditional publishing offerings.

The dedicated reader will have to choose carefully. Indeed, the e-readers like Kindle, Nook, iPad and Kobo and others still to come allow potential readers to browse, read excerpts or chapters before making their purchasing decisions. Beware of reviews which represent clashing opinions by readers who can preserve their anonymity and often are suspect as plants. Dedicated readers hungry for new material should carefully assess the various works presented and make up their own minds.

In general, book reviews and special sections in the print press featuring celebrated critics are shrinking rapidly, unable to be supported by advertising. Reviewing sites are springing up on the Internet but the fractured nature of cyberspace inhibits mass influence. Author and title identification will have an increasingly tough time rising above the competitive chatter.

With fewer and fewer books going out of print and self-publishing authors accelerating to the point that they have actually surpassed in volume books by traditional publishers, both the dedicated reader  and author will be challenged to wade through the huge offerings in an effort to find  the perfect fit between reader and author.

This new paradigm could lead to a reader's finding a favorite author and buying into a body of work instead of merely reading a single offering. The way in which the cyber bookstores present an author's work and the lower price points could change the single book purchase and entice the reader to buy multi volumes of an author's output.

Such an outcome is pure speculation at this point. The crystal ball gets pretty clouded when it comes to technology, although it is a no-brainer that in an astonishing short time most books will available to the dedicated reader in cyberspace and the big brick and mortar bookstores will eventually implode.

Authors, like myself, who take control of their own marketing in cyberspace will be challenged to find ways to attract a reader's attention in a world in which millions of books will be easily available.

Other like-minded authors will certainly be devising strategies to solve this dilemma. The harvesting of dedicated fiction readers that are on the same wavelength as the author, who are attracted to his or her stories and who gain pleasure and insight from his or her works will require an understanding of the marketing challenges posed by the ever-changing technological environment and the creation of a message that resonates with those who could be enticed to enter the parallel world of the imagination created by the writer.

That and an abundant serving of luck might keep the fiction writer's authorial name alive in a spinning merry-go-round of fame and fortune where most participants are more likely to fall off than stay on.

Why I Released Five Novels Exclusively and Simultaneously on Kindle and Amazon

One of the joys and curses of being an obsessive and compulsive writer of long form works of the imagination, meaning the novel, is the inability to cut off the flow. In other words the greedy muse must be served.

Most of my work is stand alone non-genre stories although I have among my published books written a six book mystery series about a female detective in Washington D.C. My stories are character and theme driven and deal with human conflict in mostly contemporary settings in some ways similar to The War of the Roses, and Random Hearts, which have been made into movies, and The Sunset Gang which became a trilogy on PBS.

Some are cast as thrillers or novels of suspense, intrigue and romance or whatever classification comes to mind. None are traditional genres.   A primary element in my work is the mysterious nature of love and attraction. Every story stands by itself. They are all different.

For the past five decades I have been writing stories, long and short, pretty much every day of my life. Considering the pace of about three to five pages a day every day the result is a considerable build-up of manuscripts that could not possibly be marketed in the accepted way under traditional publishing marketing.

The publishing business as it has been constituted for years is locked into marketing one book at a time, which has worked for them and for some authors, but not all. What the new e-book reading devices have done is changed that paradigm.

As an author of my output I am offering a body of work. Why not five novels out of my inventory to be introduced by the largest bookseller in the world? Amazon offered me the opportunity to assist in the global promotion of these five books in exchange for exclusivity. And I took it, gleefully, happily. The new titles now join the 27 non-exclusive books on Kindle and all other venues where electronic books and print on demand trade fiction copies are sold.

Additionally, Kindle and Amazon apps on iPad, Blackberry, iPhone  and whatever mobile device that allows the software increases the availability to any reader who taps into their vast inventory of books. Kindle and Amazon's reach is ubiquitous.

My goals are clear. I want to keep my authorial name alive in my lifetime and beyond. I want readers to be introduced to my entire body of work, not one book.  E-books will never go out of print and the competition will be fierce in the future with millions of books available in cyberspace.

The time is fast arriving when all writers, especially novelists, will have to take charge of their own destiny as the marketing of books morphs to the Internet. The old paradigms of publishing and big box book stores as their major outlet are shrinking precipitously. Book display space, even in major outlets like Walmart, will no longer equate with a profitable cost per square foot. Less space, less physical books to display, less foot traffic, less opportunity for print book sales.

For the author that means less advances, less print run, less promotion by traditional publishers. Everyone connected to traditional publishing will have to rethink their day job and that includes, agents, publicity people, backpack and bookcase manufacturers, libraries, and on and on.

To get one's authorial identity above the chatter on the net will take resourcefulness, creativity, cunning and above all luck. The filters for getting known and read are gone. Everybody is a reviewer. Everybody has an opinion.

Fiction book pickers like Oprah will lose their influence as others compete and proliferate.  Self-promoting talking heads on TV will have their moment but competition will make their manufactured large ghost written book products ebb with their ratings.

The paper book will survive but will be reduced in scope and marketed in new and innovative ways, but never in the mass numbers as before.

When the first stirring of the e-book possibilities began more than a decade ago, it struck me that here was an opportunity to liberate an author from total dependence on the traditional publishers and take one's future destiny as a novelist into my own hands. I quickly got my novel rights reversed, set up my own publishing umbrella and digitized all of my books.

The early days of the e-book invention were a disaster and finding a commercial outlet for my digitized books was nearly impossible.  Many an entrepreneur bit the dust. In those early years I was an evangelist for the process and was usually met with ridicule and disdain.  Barnes & Noble entered the field and after years of financial failure abandoned it only to return to the fray to play catch-up.

Then came the SONY Reader in 2007. To celebrate this entry into the field, SONY asked me to speak for it at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show. Still skeptics abounded.

It wasn't until the Kindle was introduced that I felt certain that the future had arrived. Un-tethered to a computer, the Kindle seemed to me the most compelling hardware to connect the reader to book content ever devised.

I bought one of the first and saw for myself that while the printed books had served its purpose for centuries, the Kindle offered the dedicated reader a new way to read content that in no way impinged on the one-on-one communication system that connects reader to author. Other devices will follow and compete, but at this moment in time Amazon's Kindle is the leading product of choice for the dedicated reader.

Hence my decision.

Official Amazon Press Release: Bestselling Author Warren Adler Releases Five New E-Books Exclusively in the Kindle Store

New Kindle Exclusive:  Bestselling Author Warren Adler Releases Five New E-Books Exclusively in the Kindle Store

New books by the author of "The War of the Roses" and "Random Hearts" available for Kindle and Kindle app customers in less than 60 seconds

SEATTLE, Dec. 13, 2010 – Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) today announced that bestselling author Warren Adler has made five e-books, none of which have been previously published in any format, available in the Kindle Store (www.amazon.com/kindlestore). These books, all of which draw from Adler's skill as a novelist and his keen insight into the nature of intimate human relationships, will also be available in print editions through CreateSpace. All five books in the series – "The David Embrace," "Flanagan's Dolls," "The Womanizer," "www.amazon.com/pr

Official Amazon Press Release: Bestselling Author Warren Adler Releases Five New E-Books Exclusively in the Kindle Store

New Kindle Exclusive:  Bestselling Author Warren Adler Releases Five New E-Books Exclusively in the Kindle Store

New books by the author of "The War of the Roses" and "Random Hearts" available for Kindle and Kindle app customers in less than 60 seconds

SEATTLE, Dec. 13, 2010 – Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) today announced that bestselling author Warren Adler has made five e-books, none of which have been previously published in any format, available in the Kindle Store (www.amazon.com/kindlestore). These books, all of which draw from Adler's skill as a novelist and his keen insight into the nature of intimate human relationships, will also be available in print editions through CreateSpace. All five books in the series – "The David Embrace," "Flanagan's Dolls," "The Womanizer," "Residue" and "Empty Treasures"—are available for sale today for $7.95 with the e-books exclusive to the Kindle Store for two years.

"Warren Adler has long been involved in digital publishing ventures, and we're thrilled he's decided to publish his new series in e-book form exclusively in the Kindle Store," said Russ Grandinetti, Vice President, Kindle Content. "We think Adler fans and readers who are just discovering his work will enjoy this new series."

Adler is also making available an anthology of "Warren Adler Short Story Contest Winners," featuring the winning pieces from the Warren Adler Short Story Contest, a contest Adler conceived to promote and revive the medium of the short story as a popular mode of literary expression. The anthology is available for $4.95, and is also exclusive to the Kindle store for two years.

"This exclusive deal reflects the rapidly changing need for mainstream novelists to find innovative ways to market their books," said Adler. "There is no question that Kindle and Amazon have pointed the way for an author to find new marketing and publicity techniques to gain the attention of its vast reader audience. As a leader in marketing e-books, Kindle offers tremendous opportunities that were never thought possible just a few years ago."

Adler is a bestselling author of more than 30 books. His books "The War of the Roses" and "Random Hearts" were both made into major motion pictures. Three short stories from his acclaimed collection "The Sunset Gang" have been adapted as a trilogy and shown on Public Television stations. His work has been translated into 25 languages.

Like all Kindle books, these books are Buy Once, Read Everywhere–Kindle customers can purchase these books and read them on the $139 third-generation Kindle device with new high-contrast Pearl e-Ink, on iPads, iPod touches, iPhones, Macs, PCs, BlackBerrys and Android-based devices.  Amazon's Whispersync technology syncs your place across devices, so you can pick up where you left off. With Kindle Worry-Free Archive, books you purchase from the Kindle Store are automatically backed up online in your Kindle library on Amazon, where they can be re-downloaded wirelessly for free, anytime.

About Amazon.com

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle, opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth's Biggest Selection. Amazon.com, Inc. seeks to be Earth's most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices. Amazon.com and other sellers offer millions of unique new, refurbished and used items in categories such as Books; Movies, Music & Games; Digital Downloads; Electronics & Computers; Home & Garden; Toys, Kids & Baby; Grocery; Apparel, Shoes & Jewelry; Health & Beauty; Sports & Outdoors; and Tools, Auto & Industrial. Amazon Web Services provides Amazon's developer customers with access to in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon's own back-end technology platform, which developers can use to enable virtually any type of business. Kindle and Kindle DX are the revolutionary portable readers that wirelessly download books, magazines, newspapers, blogs and personal documents to a crisp, high-resolution electronic ink display that looks and reads like real paper. Kindle and Kindle DX utilize the same 3G wireless technology as advanced cell phones, so users never need to hunt for a Wi-Fi hotspot. Kindle is the #1 bestselling product across the millions of items sold on Amazon.

About CreateSpace

CreateSpace is a leader in manufacture on-demand services for independent content creators, publishers, film studios and music labels. CreateSpace provides inventory-free, physical distribution of Books, CDs and DVDs on Demand, music downloads via Amazon MP3 and video downloads via Amazon Video On Demand. CreateSpace is a brand of On-Demand Publishing LLC, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN).

Amazon and its affiliates operate websites, including www.amazon.com, www.amazon.co.uk, www.amazon.de, www.amazon.co.jp, www.amazon.fr, www.amazon.ca,  www.amazon.cn, and www.amazon.it.  As used herein, "Amazon.com," "we," "our" and similar terms include Amazon.com, Inc., and its subsidiaries, unless the context indicates otherwise.

Forward-Looking Statements

This announcement contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Actual results may differ significantly from management's expectations. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that include, among others, risks related to competition, management of growth, new products, services and technologies, potential fluctuations in operating results, international expansion, outcomes of legal proceedings and claims, fulfillment center optimization, seasonality, commercial agreements, acquisitions and strategic transactions, foreign exchange rates, system interruption, inventory, government regulation and taxation, payments and fraud. More information about factors that potentially could affect Amazon.com's financial results is included in Amazon.com's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and subsequent filings.

Amazon.com, Inc.

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