Kenneth Atchity's Blog, page 155

In The Rooms Book Club Recommends William G. Borchert's How I Became My Father ... A Drunk!

How I Became My Father…a Drunk

[image error] By William G. Borchert
William G. Borchert’s inspiring and courageous memoir probing the intimate details of a family devastated by the disease of alcoholism, and blessed by recovery. Borchert wrote the screenplay of My Name Is Bill W, the most-watched television movie ever made. “I am a fan of neither pain nor discomfort which is what this effort of disgorging the past entailed,” Borchert reports. “But some very good friends finally convinced me over a period of time that sharing my own experiences in addition to the generous input from those in my family closest to me could offer hope to other alcoholics and show families devastated by the disease that there is a way out. In an age when there are still more than 44,000,000 alcoholics affecting at least eight others around them, over 200,000,000 people are looking for help. That is a plague. My personal experience with this disease proves there is help available as well as a pathway to a new life beyond their wildest dreams.” The author of eight books and producer of other successful films, Borchert not only wrote the Bill W story about the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous, starring James Woods, James Garner and JoBeth Williams but also the highly acclaimed movie, When Love Is Not Enough, about the founding of Al-Anon, starring Winona Ryder and Barry Pepper. The author and screenwriter said his new book was by its very nature even more difficult to write.

MEG Production Set to Begin August 29, 2016!

Fan Bingbing  Courtesy of Warner Bros.; Courtesy of Apelles Publishing Chinese actress Fan Bingbing, who appeared in X-Men: Days of Future Past, joins Jason Statham in Meg, the creature feature being made by Warner Bros. and Chinese company Gravity Pictures.

At the same time, Warner Bros. has set a March 2, 2018, release date for the pic, which will be directed Jon Turteltaub, best known as helmer of the National Treasure movies. Gravity will distribute the film in China, while Warners will release it throughout the rest of the world.

Dean Georgaris wrote the latest script for the project, which has been swimming upstream for 20 years in order to adapt the book by Steve Alten. It centers on a Carcharodon Megalodon, the 70-foot, 40-ton prehistoric kin to the great white shark.

The studio put forth the plot of Meg as such:

An international underwater observation program, led by Chinese scientists, is under attack by an unknown danger, and its deep-sea submersible lies disabled and trapped at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. With time running out, former Naval Captain and expert deep sea diver Jonas Taylor (Statham) is recruited by Dr. Zhang Suyin, lead oceanographer of the program, for what is likely a suicide mission. 
Years before, Taylor had encountered this same terrifying threat, which forced him to abort his mission and abandon half his crew, resulting in disgrace and a dishonorable discharge. Now, Taylor must confront his fears and risk his own life to save everyone trapped below … bringing him face to face once more with the apex predator of all time.

Fan’s next English-language movie is Skiptrace, the Renny Harlin-directed action movie starring Jackie Chan and Johnny Knoxville.

Story Merchant Books Prepares to Launch MaryAnn and Joseph Anselmo's Through Fire and Rain!

Story Merchant Books is proud to be publishing MaryAnn and Joseph Anselmo with Lisa Cerasoli’s Through Fire and Rain. Look for it in the next week—an inspiring true story of a couple who survived and triumphed over four huge life-changing catastrophes with their love and spirit intact and thriving.



IN 2012, MARYANN ANSELMO WAS at the height of her career, headlining at Chico’s House of Jazz—the premiere venue in New York for jazz singers. It was a sold-out show. The love of her life and husband, Joe, was by her side when she brought the house down. Her dreams were becoming a reality. Two days later she lost everything including the will to live when son Dustin died unexpectedly.
“I’ve never though of myself as a strong person…. After all, I’m just a jazz singer.”MARYANN
A month later, MaryAnn and her father, Artie, suffered a devastating car accident. Dad was going to be okay, but she shattered dozens of bones, and had a string of strokes that resulted in a coma. This ultimately left her without the use of her left vocal cord.
“My girl had a string of strokes. She was in a coma for weeks. I believed in God, I trusted Him, but we had just recovered from the Crash of 2008 when Dustin died, and now this. It’s too much. She doesn’t deserve this. No one does.”JOE
With Joe’s love and constant support, MaryAnn worked hard to recover, even starting from scratch with her old vocal coach. She was determined to sing again. Then in mid-November of 2013, she was given eighteen months to live, diagnosed with a high-grade glioblastoma—a later stage brain tumor.
“Everything happened so fast—the diagnosis, the surgery. chemo and radiation. Joe kept saying, ‘It’s going to be fine, Mare, it’s going to be fine.’ And I believed him. Even when we had to stop the chemo because it was killing me, I knew I’d be okay.”MARYANN
Joe did not know it was going to be okay, but he needed MaryAnn to feel secure, to feel loved, to have faith. Joe, for the second time in less than two years, left a job he had built from the ground up since the Crash, and made finding a way to save his wife his life’s mission. He called all over the world—no doctor too far, no medical procedure out of reach.  What Joe discovered was a new type of procedure called genomic sequencing. It fell under the category of Precision Medicine, and it was going to change their lives; he felt it.
Through Fire and Rain is a story of deep loss and salvation found through love, prayer, and faith in the future of medicine. They had made it through the fire. They had survived so much. This was just a little rain … Joe Anselmo believed that, and his wife, MaryAnn was convinced of one thing: Joe’s love for her was without boundaries. She had seen this kind of love before in her parents. Her dreams of becoming a world-renowned jazz singer was still “in the works.” For decades it had been, but she had found something perfect in this imperfect world—the love of a great man—and this is what would save her life.
MaryAnn Anselmo recently spoke at The 2016 National Brain Tumor Society’s Annual Conference in Washington, D.C.
***
“…In 2013, I was diagnosed with something I couldn’t even pronounce—a high grade glioblastoma multiforme. The prognosis was 18 to 24 months. Like I said, I don’t believe in self pity, but i do believe in miracles…. For I am still here.
I went through surgery and radiation like most cancer patients, but it nearly killed me. I had no other options until my tissue was genetically sequenced and a mutation found in melanoma patients was discovered in my brain. Joe researched and I got into a clinical trial for this mutation, and 2 ½ years later I am thrilled to say that I am tumor free!Your body and brain can take a lot. Fight through this and you can fight through anything. Don’t ever give up! For there is hope.With the grace of God and the power of science you will get through this. The future is here!”
***

Joe and MaryAnn don’t believe in coincidences; they believe in the power of God and precision medicine. That is why they’re sharing their story with the world. They believe this happened to MaryAnn so that they can create awareness, bring hope, change they way the word “cancer” is perceived, and open up minds to new possibilities.

Shortly after Dustin’s untimely death in 2012, Joe and MaryAnn created The Bungalow Foundation (www.bungalow.org). 

They created this to initially help people with depression through music and art, but then expanded it to become a public charity that funds bio-medical Precision Medicine Initiatives by way of grants to post-doctoral and clinical research fellows working with academic, medical or research institutions. This is their mission.

Through Fire and Rain, their memoir of impossible loss and deep faith is a story for all people from every walk of life. Just like cancer, their story does not discriminate. Unlike cancer, they will never be defeated. Their purpose is to share their story with the world in the hopes that more people see the possibilities in precision medicine: Believe that the future is now!

Marketing Ideas That Can Help Authors Increase Sales: Prepare Your Book Marketing Assets

Write a killer elevator pitch. Write a concise, snappy elevator pitch that shows what the book is about, what kind of world readers will be immersed in, why readers should care, and what accolades the book and author have received. A strong elevator pitch will make your book more enticing to readers deciding whether or not to purchase.

Poll your audience to test marketing copy. Use polling software like PickFu to test variations of description or marketing copy and see which variation your audience likes better. Always test and optimize to discover what copy will resonate best with readers.

 A/B test marketing copy. Unlike polling, A/B tests give you quantitative data (i.e., the number of clicks). Use your email service provider to run A/B test emails and see which copy has the highest click-through rate, or use ad platforms like Facebook to A/B test your copy.

Get blurbs from reputable authors in your genre. Blurbs can effectively catch readers’ attention, especially if they’re familiar with the quoting author or publication, and can help entice them to make that final purchasing decision. Our tests showed that book descriptions including blurbs got an average of 22.6% higher click-through rates than those without blurbs.

Create images for teasers and quotes. You can easily turn your quotes into vibrant images using free apps like Canva. Publish these teasers to your website and social media accounts in the weeks and months prior to a book’s release.

Read more at BookBub

Recovery Campus Summer 2016 Issue Features A Deadly Combination by Bill Borchert

A Deadly Combination by Bill Borchert

The Dublin Conference Special: The Power Of Storytelling with Dr. Ken Atchity

Techniques For Becoming A Best Selling Author

The Dublin Conference Special: The Power Of Storytelling with Dr. Ken Atchity
On this episode, Ken Atchity talks about the how story-telling is changing the world and the path to follow if you want to turn your book into a movie.
 
Dr. Ken Atchity (Yale Ph.D.), movie producer, author of over 20 nonfiction books and novels is our special guest. He has spent his lifetime helping writers get started with and improve their careers and has worked in nearly every part of the entertainment and publishing industries. He’s produced nearly 30 films in the past 25 years for major studios, television broadcasters, and independent distribution.

Ken Atchity will be also having a work-shop at this year's Dublin Writers Conference about the power of story-telling.


The Dublin Writers' Conference Specials is brought to you by With Andrea Billig after our interview booksgosocial.com and Laurence O'Bryan. The show is hosted by A.G.Billig, author, radio host and PR expert.



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Read more at The Seductive Writers' Diary

Dublin Writers' Conference

Dublin, The City Of Writers, In The Company Of Writers

Guest Post: The Open Secret – Art Johnson

  The Open Secret by Art Johnson, author of Deadly Impressions , and The Devil’s Violin

I am an American by birth. In 2002 my wife and I moved to Nice, France where she had spent her childhood. I have remained in the region ever since. The term ex-patriot is not comfortable. I prefer to think of myself as a transplant.

I was part of the vast music scene based in Los Angeles from 1968 through the early 80’s; recording on jazz and pop albums, as well as T.V. and film music for various companies like A&M Records, Twentieth-Century Fox, Warner Bros, and Universal.

The pressure of real-time-perfection in the recording studios, aware of executives gathered around debating the relevancy of every note you played, would occasionally tempt one to break away from studio politics. A phone call from the management of a top recording artist, heading out for the road, would be just the ticket. Touring the globe was a fantastic experience, but it is not the romantic picture that most of the public conjures up. You are constantly on the move with just two or three days in each city, never having the time to adjust: packing/unpacking, airports, noisy hotel rooms, late meals, useless sound-checks, even more useless rehearsals, and the ever-changing itinerary surprises. Unlike the pressure in the studios, the perfection demanded in live performance offered the musician the opportunity to react with a thing called an audience: playing in real-time for people who paid to get in the door, always offers an honest appraisal of the performance moment.

Aside from wine, women and song, the greatest pastime for touring musicians in the days before IPads and the internet, was reading. Most touring musicians were very well read individuals. With hundreds of hours of flight time and anonymous hotel rooms, reading became a psychological necessity. Dashing through LAX, one early morning, late for a flight, I ran into a fellow road-warrior who, of course, was also a few minutes behind schedule. As he ran past, he tossed me a book, “This is perfect for you,” he shouted, fading into a crowded corridor. The book was William Butler Yeats’s, Mythology’s, and it was perfect for me. This seminal gathering of Irish folk tales and Yeats’s veiled, dream-like memories of the poet’s time spent in mystical contemplation and magical ritual with groups who studied Transcendental Magic, in the late 19th century, sparked my interest.

For the next few years, throughout the 80’s, I read and wrote poetry, essays and kept intricate journals for hours each day as I gathered a small, but powerful library of rare treatises on Hermetic subjects: tomes that Yeats and his circle drew inspiration from.
In 1988, a book of forty poems was published in Los Angeles, by Silent House Publications, a small, intimate publishing house which is no longer with us. As I was delivering coordinated lectures and readings, the slender volume sold surprisingly well. After the excitement faded, I continued to write and study, but a life in music was taking most of my time as a performer, lecturer and educator.

Nearly twenty-five years later, I was transformed into a fiction author of detective/mystery-suspense novels. I’m not exactly sure how this happened, but I soon realized how much those years tucked away in a garden apartment, with a library and candles, contributed to the task of constructing a novel.

All poets earn by their hard work, acute powers of observation. The constant sifting through images, gathered into the mental-emotional state, brings about the distillation and re-defining of experience, which can be compared to the complexities of an alchemical formula—the tearing down and re-combining of elements.

A few years ago my wife and I were visiting relatives in Italy. One night, just before going to sleep, a half-dozen names came to my mind, with brief descriptions of each character. I turned out the light, confident I would recall these characters in the morning. Two minutes later I was sitting up in bed taking notes: as a poet, you learn to never trust your memory to recall an image received from those supposedly, unknown sources.

The following morning, I sat for breakfast, with just a cup of coffee, a pencil and my notebook. Six roughly outlined chapters for, what would eventually become, The Devil’s Violin, were written then. Because I wasn’t eating, the Italian grandmother asked my wife why I didn’t like her cooking. She told her I loved her cooking, but right now I was beginning a new book. Everyone at the table smiled, except for grandmamma: she kept trying to shove an overflowing plate in front of me every time I set the pencil down to take a sip of coffee!


A life spent creating, has taught me that all imaginative endeavors, no matter what the genre—music, literature or the visual arts, derive their inspiration from the same source. This vision; the will-power and desire of an individual, relies on the ritual of transformation, guided by faith and belief in the self. Art and Magic are nothing more, or less, than making the invisible—visible.
Transition is an open secret.

Deadly Impressions , and The Devil’s Violin by Art Johnson are available here.

 Reposted from BooksGoSocial 

Filmmaker David Lynch Picked to Receive Yoga-Inspired Namaste Award

More than 200 yogis are expected at the posh Malibu fundraiser.
Glenn Hunt/Getty Images

There's an award ceremony for pretty much every walk of life in Los Angeles — even yogis.

Filmmaker David Lynch will receive the Namaste Award at Yoga Gives Back's 5th annual gala fundraiser, titled "Thank You Mother India," scheduled for Sept. 25 in Malibu. According to the organization, the bronze trophy simply "recognizes those who serve others." Lynch will be only the second recipient of the prize, following in the footsteps of previous honoree Malika Chopra, daughter of Deepak Chopra.

Lynch, best known for Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway and Blue Velvet, is being lauded for his "noble and humanitarian efforts" through his David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace, which makes transcendental meditation accessible to children and adults all over the world. (Lynch has been practicing TM since 1973 and has been a vocal advocate of the practice in the decades since.)

YGB Founder Kayoko Mitsumatsu said in a statement: “While it’s common for many to perceive yoga as a physical exercise, the ultimate goal of the practice of yoga is to unite with the Divine Self—and meditation plays an important role in achieving this. ‘Namaste,’ which means ‘the divinity in me salutes the divinity in you’ in Sanskrit, symbolizes Yoga Gives Back’s mission, which is to help others, and is the inspiration for the Namaste Award.”

More than 200 guests from the local yoga community are expected to attend the event at the Pacific Coast Highway estate of philanthropist Amarjit Marwah. Oh, and the invites promise "a generous gift bag" to go with the $200 tickets.

 Read more at the Hollywood Reporter

Celebrating Disappointment by Kenneth John Atchity

Are you disappointed? We all get disappointed by life from time to time and, in these “interesting” times, no doubt more often than usual.

Maybe because I savored my Roman Catholic upbringing, I was drawn to a profession in which rejection became not a daily occurrence, but an hourly one—until the email era, in which rejections come in once every few minutes! As an intellectual property manager, I try to tell my rejected clients that every no is a step further to the one yes we’re looking for. I remind them of a story I was once told:

There’s a big blackboard in the sky. On it are all the NOS you or your dream project will ever get. And there too is the final YES.

The only problem is that you can’t see the blackboard.

Since this is the case, what does the dreamer do? Only three things:

Never give up. You never know, but the YES may be lurking behind the NO that makes you want to throw in the towel. There’s only one way to find out: Persist. As long as you live and breathe. My definition of a happy death is dying in the middle of your dream.

Get through the NOS as fast as you can.

Don’t think negatively about them. Do you really wish your dream was accepted by the WRONG person? That’s what a NO is, a wrong person for your dream. Nothing would be worse, believe me, than having your dream partnered with someone you talked into it when they didn’t see it in the first place.

Celebrate each NO as a step forward toward making your dream come true. No successful dreamer has succeeded without dealing with rejection over and over. Edison….

Disappointment and celebration. To live a happy life, you can’t have one without the other. Think of them as life’s teeter-totter, disappointment on one seat, celebration on the other.

Imagine that you’re on that teeter-totter (because you are) but don’t understand how it works. Every time disappointment has the upper position, you sit there like a lump on a log and bemoan your fate.

That will literally get you nowhere, allowing disappointment to maintain the upper hand. I went to an ashram outside of Delhi some years ago, to check out for myself whether a certain guru was all my current girlfriend believed he was cracked up to be.

I have to admit I was nodding during most of the program, but during the question and answer period I came awake as I heard a distraught westerner lament that she tried so hard to lead the path of perfection and serenity but, because she was only mortal, kept falling. “What shall I do?”

He looked at her with that infinite ennui that teachers who have heard it all a thousand times experience, and said:

“Pick yourself up and keep going.”

“Master, I try to do that,” she lamented. “But I am weak, and I only fall again. How many times can I pick myself up?”

“Sister,” the wise man replied, “how many times can you fall?”

That’s when I decided he was indeed a wise man.

You’re sitting there on the ground, disappointment in the air, wondering your glass of life is half-empty. Finally you get tired of the half-empty glass. Or you figure it out—or you remember--and you use your legs as pistons and celebrate your ability to return to the top of the teeter-totter where your glass of life appears to be more than half full!

That’s celebration in action, countering disappointment. That’s optimism, the only logical program to adopt for life. It’s logical because it either proves to be justified—by success; or you’ll actually never know because you remain optimistic to the end. That’s why, in The Godfather, we all loved the Don Corleone’s last words as he fell to his knees with a massive stroke in the tomato garden: “La vita é cosí bella…Life is so beautiful”—optimistic to the un-bitter end.

Don’t think I’m not as bad as the woman at the ashram in terms of sitting at the bottom of the teeter-totter wondering what happened to put disappointment in the cat bird seat. I am as good at lamenting as the next guy, maybe even better! One day I was complaining to my best friend (you need to be careful who you complain to, by the way) about a clump of setbacks that happened one after another, yet another reflection of the turmoil of our times. I recited them to my friend and explained why I questioned whether life was still worth living.

He said, “So some deals fell through, and so it’s hard to earn a living.

“But you don’t have mongoloid children, but two kids who are earning a living and leading an okay life. You go back and forth to New York whenever you want to. You have a beautiful Japanese wife who cooks, takes care of the house, works hard, has her own non-profit, loves you. Loves you. Your brother is not in jail, but is a millionaire who leaves you alone. Your sisters aren’t drug addicts, but doing okay. You aren’t pushing a walker, you ARE playing tennis 3 times a week. You’ve been involved in a whole bunch of books that have your name in them. You’ve been involved in a bunch of movies. You have a bunch of projects that are still viable. You have friends who haven’t killed you yet. You’re not driving a junk heap but a luxury sedan with air conditioning. You have a view out three sides of your apartment in L.A. You have a cat who loves you. You meet Hollywood people and literary people all the time. You’ve developed your companies in a whole new direction and had the best year in six years last year. You have several major feature films nearing production. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOUR ATTITUDE?”

One thing about attitude: you’re entirely in charge of it. Celebrate that. Celebrate that the problems you have are the ones you asked for. The cost of admission to the stage of your life.

Reposted from Tome Tender