Warren Adler's Blog, page 66

"The Thing with Feathers" by Evan Guilford-Blake

The doves stare through the bars of their cage, the opened slats of the blinds, the tight mesh of the window screens, into the dismal, sunless morning. They are mystified, it seems; the world is as much a mystery to them as they are to Mary. She watches them while she waits for the water to boil; she can smell the newly ground coffee.

She wakes Tennyson with a kiss and a glass of orange juice. He is the only little child she has ever known — heard of — who likes to sleep in but, this morning, ...

"Low Tide Turning" by John Blair

Just east of New Orleans, outside of the town of Slidell, something in the rear axle of the car gave way with a bang. The wrecker, when it showed up, was an old Ford with rust stains streaking down the fenders like stripes. A black-painted legend on the door read Dan Hebert Towing. Dan Herbert himself was thirty-ish, sun-dark, wearing Rayban sunglasses and a Peterbilt cap. "You called for a tow?" he asked them.

The garage that Dan Hebert towed the car to was just a large tin shed, open on one ...

"Scrambled Lives" by Doris Chauvancy

I never wanted to have kids. I had mom and dad. And that was enough for me.

Ever since I can remember, they've behaved like children, bratty, infantile and unrestrained. Amid all the melodrama, someone had to be the adult in the family. And on my sixth birthday, it was decided it would be me.

That year, dad showed up late for my party, smelling of cigarettes and cheap perfume. The kind his secretary wore to the company Christmas dinner a few days earlier, when she sat next to her boss looking m...

"Old Friends" by Ruvym Gilman

"So what do you think?" she asks, sitting across from me wide-eyed and terrified.

"What do I think?" I repeat. I'm totally unprepared for this.

—

I haven't seen her in at least a year, and other than the occasional online exchange, we haven't had any real contact since that random beach outing last summer when she called to see if I had any interest in an F-train journey to Brighton Beach.

"Brighton Beach?" I asked at the time, flippant in my tone, "why would I want to go there?" Now that I...

"The Week My Sister Died" by Kari Wicker

I am my mother's daughter. Our faces align themselves in the mirror of her bathroom. Our eyes large and blue-green. Hers are mostly green and mine are mostly blue. Our hands are making the same movements, applying dark mascara to the length of our eyelashes, our birthmarks brightening with concentration. Her lips are moving, and I am mesmerized. I'm not really listening. I'm following the sound of her voice and wondering if this is what I sound like to her. Our hair is brown; our skin is...

The Terrorists Speak

As a former newspaper editor and reporter I am always intrigued at the decisions made by editors and reporters in the placement and writing of stories.

In a recent issue of the New York Times a chilling story appeared buried on page 15 that, in my opinion, deserved far more prominence than it received. I suppose I should have registered my complaint with the official Times ombudsman, but then if it was heeded at all it would have been relegated to the limbo of a journalistic slush pile.

The...

New York is Indeed a Helluva Town

In reading Richard Goldstein's wonderful new book "Helluva Town" about New York City during the years of World War II, I was struck by the strange irony that despite the devastating horror of that bloodbath, the Big Apple had its worst incident by enemy combatants more than sixty years later.

Compared to the barbaric violence of the twin towers tragedy, life in New York City was practically a cakewalk during World War II and Goldstein, with journalistic panache describes the events of that...

Tom Hanks, Fine Actor, Historical Illiterate

The actor Tom Hanks has been going around the country flacking his mini-series about the Pacific War and telling all that the war with Japan was from the American perspective all about racism and terror.

I can only conclude by his ridiculous assumptions that he is, like many Hollywood personalities, historically illiterate. His very clear and largely unchallenged assertion that we fought the war in the Pacific because we were motivated by racial hatred of these folks in the land of the rising ...

Warren Adler Profile

When moviegoers watched Oliver and Barbara Rose’s marriage descend into a maelstrom of malice, spite, divorce papers and dog paté in the 1989 film, The War of the Roses, they were seeing the twisted but funny work of Wyoming author Warren Adler.

“It is strictly a crap shoot and a minor miracle to see one’s book made into a major film.”

MORE ABOUT WARREN ADLER

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Steal This Book. Or at Least Download It Free.

TALK to Warren Adler, and watch some favorite clichés crumble.

Remember “The War of the Roses,” the novel – and later, the movie – about a brutal divorce? Mr. Adler wrote the book and the screenplay, even though he has been married (happily, he says) to the same woman for 54 years. So much for “don’t write what you don’t know.”

How about “don’t fix what ain’t broke”? Mr. Adler has published 27 novels. But did he follow the tried-and-true conventional print route for “Death of a Washington Madame,” his 28th? No. He’s self-publishing that one electronically, and e-mailing it free, a chapter at a time, to anyone who asks. Fogies (like this reporter) who still want the feel of pages “can always print the chapter out,” he said. “The main thing is, give readers a new book for free, and they might go back and buy some of the former books.”

The way Mr. Adler, 77 (there goes “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks”), sees it, portable electronic readers will soon do to paper books what the Walkman and iPod did to boomboxes.

“Print publishing has had a great 500-year run, but the print book is morphing into the screen book,” he said during a recent lunch at Pigalle, a French restaurant in Manhattan’s theater district.

But what does that mean for those many, many people who believe there is a novel inside them, clamoring to be let out? Making a living as a writer has never been easy – even Mr. Adler was a self-described “failed writer” until, at 45, he finally caught a publisher’s attention. So will all this technological upheaval make it easier or harder to get read?

Both, Mr. Adler insists. The Internet, with its limitless capacity for blogs and whole books that can be electronically whisked from place to place, means people can pretty well publish what they want. On the downside, the competition for readers, already intense, will become maddeningly so. But writers need not make it past the gatekeepers at publishing houses to be published. Vanity publishing – a term Mr. Adler hates – has come into the electronic age.

Nothing can guarantee a sale, but, Mr. Adler said, for as little as $295 – plus a fee for each book sold – self-publishing services will register a copyright and put a book into an electronic format that can be sold as an e-book or printed out. Up the price to $1,000 or so, and the services will send out news releases, contact reviewers and offer the book to stores and online vendors like Amazon.com.

“The big publishing houses just don’t get it,” Mr. Adler said. Apparently, Mr. Adler does: next month, he will begin selling all his past novels on flash memory cards, readable on e-book players.

It took Mr. Adler a long, long time before his “obsession with the need to tell stories” gave him the luxury of choosing formats. He started writing when he was 16, waking at 4 a.m. and writing until 7. He made his living first as a journalist, then as an ad man – but those three hours were always sacrosanct. He married at 22 and still, at 4 a.m., to the typewriter he went.

There was no money in it at first – but Mr. Adler was no stranger to making do with little. As a child growing up in Brooklyn, he lived with his parents, his two brothers and assorted relatives in his grandparents’ house. At one point, 11 people shared a bathroom, “but it seemed a glorious childhood,” he said.

He was a so-so student – “I read voraciously but I hated studying” – but still made it through New York University, majoring in English. He took a job as a copy boy at The Daily News, “because it was the closest I could get to the printed word.” One day, on a Long Island beach, he struck up a conversation with Sonia Kline. They married in May 1951 and have three sons.

After a stint in the Army and a briefer stint in public relations, Mr. Adler started his own ad agency. By then, he had written three novels. Publishers were monumentally uninterested – until 1973, when he struck a deal with Whitman Publishing: he publicized John David Garcia’s “The Moral Society” free, and Whitman published “Options,” Mr. Adler’s third book.

“Options” bombed – but he was finally a published author. That made it easier to get G. P. Putnam’s Sons to publish “Banquet Before Dawn” in 1974. The advance was just $4,000, “but it felt like I’d won the lottery,” Mr. Adler said. “It was the defining moment of my life.”

Putnam published six more of his novels. Then it was bought by Universal Pictures, and “they dumped me,” Mr. Adler said. Warner Books picked him up and published “War of the Roses.”

Warren Adler.