Kenneth Atchity's Blog, page 48
March 21, 2022
Robert L. Rivenbark, Jr. Reviews Vincent Atchity's Romeo's Beat
Available on Amazon
How delightful to discover in the #MeToo age, when trust between men and women—and romantic love itself—has reached its nadir in our dysfunctional culture, that it’s still possible for an American novelist to write a literary love story that celebrates the eternal bond between man and woman. That’s precisely what Vincent Atchity has achieved with Romeo’s Beat. His novel has a deceptively simple premise—until you let it enfold and lift you into regions rarely explored in contemporary fiction. The points of comparison I can think of in terms of Atchity’s style are Ernest Hemingway (particularly in A Farewell to Arms) and Anaïs Nin (particularly in her Ladders to Fire). But Atchity has his own distinct voice, well-suited to his subject matter, giving his book a rhythm and cadence that make it a prose poem of unsurpassed beauty.
I had the honor of hearing Atchity do a live reading from his novel. During the Q&A afterward, he mentioned that given his responsibilities running a psychological clinic and raising three children with his wife, he had only been able to devote sixteen minutes day to his novel, beginning in 2007. Thankfully, he persisted, and the result is exquisite.
Set in the early 1980s, an era when great rock anthems resounded from FM stations, Romeo’s Beat follows the journeys of Juliet, a beautiful young Kansas botanist possessed of a mystical bond with nature; and Colin, a young singer/lyricist/guitarist who’s postponed recording his first record album in L.A., despite a lucrative recording contract, in a quest to find something enduring in his own music.
Juliet meets Colin while she’s on a solo pilgrimage to Salamanca, Spain, the city of her philosophical hero, Miguel de Unamuno. In her strolls through Salamanca’s cobblestone streets, she returns often to the Calle de Bordodores to see Pablo Serrano’s monumental statue of Unamuno. Yards away is one of her favorite shrines to Mary. Juliet considers her own personal religions to lie “suspended in a continuum between Unamuno and the Virgin Mary.” Unamuno scribed these words: “My religion is to seek for truth in life and life in truth.” Juliet believes this, too. “Even knowing that I shall not find them while I live,” she sadly concludes.
She’s at a crossroads. Having won a scholarship to begin her doctoral studies in botany in a month, she’s also engaged to Brad, a pleasant enough young man who brings solid financial prospects, given his upscale family roots. But Brad operates on a plain of consciousness that can’t begin to approach Juliet’s capacity to blend romantic and sexual passion with mystical intimations that take her into realms of awareness lightyears beyond Brad’s conventionality. She tells herself that she loves Brad, but that affirmation has started to ring hollow. Then she meets Colin in Salamanca, during his stopover on a peripatetic journey through Europe in search of his musical voice. The thunderbolt strikes them both. Juliet is powerfully drawn to this stranger in a way wholly unacceptable to her trajectory in life, so soon to be devoted to study, teaching, and a conventional marriage.
Colin, for his part, is strongly attracted to Juliet as well, but he’s obsessed with his own search, expressed in this reflection while he samples garlic-fried Champiñones mushrooms in a Salamanca tavern: “Colin had learned to cook from his father, and had a deep appreciation for dishes that brought together fundamental elements. The smell of olive oil and garlic had won him over before he’d even realized its source. It had grabbed something inside him that was older than he was, something that was inside everyone, and that would outlast any individual. For lyrics to last, Colin thought, they had to incorporate something as fundamental as olive oil and garlic.”
What follows is an elegantly articulated dance of love that focuses on the internal journeys of the two lovers, as they gradually come to accept that their meeting is going to disrupt their lives and change them both profoundly. The pace of this change unfolds slowly—perhaps too slowly for modern readers (though the novel is a quick read at 144 pages). But despite this minor pacing issue, Atchity does a magnificent job of dramatizing how, as their relationship becomes more intimate, Juliet’s and Colin’s hearts and souls are embroidered together, giving special significance to the Calle de Bordodores (which means “embroiderers”) that Juliet visits so often. From their love grows intimacy, the birth of a daughter, and a tragedy that raises the tale to classical stature.
It’s remarkable how Atchity occupies the minds, hearts, and souls of Juliet and Colin, particularly since we live in an age where writing from the point of view of the “other”—men writing from a feminine point of view, or women writing from a male point of view—is a taboo that often reduces our literature in a way that great writers of previous ages didn’t have to contend with (imagine Shakespeare hesitating to write Romeo and Juliet because he wasn’t a woman). Atchity’s insights are those of a mature artist who’s achieved a measure of wisdom about the eternal truths of life and love. At the end of the novel, I found myself hungering for more of this gifted writer’s work. Highly recommended reading.
March 18, 2022
My Obit: Daddy Holding Me by Kenneth Atchity
My Obit: Daddy Holding Me a page-turner filled with poignant family experiences, explosive sibling rivalry, literary adventures, ethnic cooking, wide-ranging storytelling, the workings of the brain itself--and what can be learned about life from playing tennis for decades.
"I’ve lived a lifetime of literary adventures by refusing to be relegated to a niche. In My Obit: Daddy Holding Me, my storytelling passion and family and professional anecdotes provide humor and insight into my hugely self-determined life."
~ Ken Atchity
Advanced Praise for My Obit: Daddy Holding Me:
“Powerful. Honest. Heartwarming. A courageous examination of the secret nooks in the soul that expose to the self who we truly are… and why. Atchity’s memoir is riveting, reflective, and revealing. A MUST read!” – Tracy Price-Thompson, bestselling novelist
“My Obit: Daddy Holding Me by Kenneth Atchity is a compelling autobiography worthy of the analogy of Sisyphus discovering the burdens and pleasures of each push of the rock up the hill of his extraordinary life.” – Norman Stephens, producer, former head of Warner Brothers television.
March 16, 2022
Author Spotlight: April Christofferson
The difference this Illinois native is talking about includes many of the most complex and conflicted issues of her adopted home in the American West, including wildlife and public lands management, tribal rights, and development. Most recently her passion as a writer has turned to the issue of more than 6,000 missing and endangered indigenous women in the country, many of them in the West.
This year, the reissue of the first two books of her Judge Annie Peacock Series, Alpha Female and Trapped, by Burns & Lea Books—along
with its shopping of them by publisher/agent Story Merchant for a television miniseries based on the characters’ adventures in Yellowstone National Park and beyond—speak to the enduring interest of her literary creations, characterized by deep-dive storytelling that started more than a quarter-century ago.
Growing up in Chicago, Christofferson came to love the West during summers visiting Yellowstone and her grandfather’s ranch in Wyoming, where both parents had been raised, and later her paternal grandparents’ homes in Salt Lake City and Richmond, Utah. But the road she traveled to become a successful writer is a long and winding story in itself.
In many ways, it starts with Christofferson’s maternal grandfather, Floyd “Doc” Carroll, a rodeo champion and Wyoming state veterinarian who was inducted into the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum’s Hall of Great Westerners in 1998. He was a stunt double for the famous movie cowboy. “My grandpa was such an influence,” says Christofferson. “I knew from when I was a little girl that I was going to live out West and be a vet.”
After receiving her undergraduate degree in biology from the U, Christofferson began a veterinary medicine program at the University of Illinois in Champaign. But after her first year, she realized she truly wanted to be back West.
“Throughout college, I worked at an animal hospital, but I was always upset—they would try not to tell me if someone was bringing in an animal to be euthanized, because I’d do anything I could to persuade them not to” if treatment were at all possible, she recounts in the alumni story by Marcia C. Dibble. “I realized I wasn’t really emotionally cut out to be a vet.”
At a book signing in Montana.Christofferson and her husband, Steve Leach–also a Utah graduate, BS’76, communication–quickly relocated to Coeur d’Alene, where April focused her love of animals on rescuing those in need. She began a series of odd jobs waitressing, loading UPS trucks, and working as a pharmaceutical rep, while determining what else she could channel her passion into next.
A friend began nudging her toward romance writing, telling her anecdotes about others who had made the transition from completely unrelated careers.
“I thought, I don’t have a creative bone in my body, but I had just turned 40, so I sat down and wrote a scene about it—and I just got hooked that day.”
It wasn’t a straight line between getting “hooked” on writing and publishing her first novel. Inspired by her oldest sister, Christofferson attended law school at nearby Gonzaga University in Spokane, where she graduated with a JD in 1983, followed by a stint as counsel at the Seattle-based entertainment company Miramar. But she continued to write, and for her first book, After the Dance, set in the entertainment industry with which she was then intimately familiar, the underlying issue was that of a family dealing with the death of a son from AIDS.
After the novel’s release by a small publisher in 1994, Christofferson swiftly got an agent and quit Miramar to write full time. Her second book, Edgewater, introduced more thriller elements into what was essentially a romantic narrative, with a plot involving a heavily armed northern Idaho militia. After the release of her second book, she promptly signed a book deal with national publisher Forge Books.
But the impulse for biology was always in Christofferson’s peripheral vision. Just as she was finishing Edgewater, she was contacted about a short-term gig helping a biotechnology company with its contracts and other business agreements. “I had really just started writing full time, but I thought, biotech would be such a great area to get experience in; it could provide such interesting background.” Working in that environment did indeed provide new fodder and depth for her next three novels, The Protocol, Clinical Trial, and Patent to Kill, all medical thrillers favorably compared by reviewers to the work of Michael Crichton and Robin Cook.
She centered the plots of the second and third of these thrillers around the abuse of indigenous peoples by unscrupulous westerners, a theme first introduced into her work in Edgewater. Then for her next book, she focused the action around another issue she had come to see as an inexcusable abuse of power: the slaughter of bison that wander outside the boundaries of Yellowstone.
Following the publication of Buffalo Medicine, she started getting gratifying feedback that helped her see that her work was making that difference she had always hoped it would. She got an email one day from a woman “telling me she’d made a donation to the Buffalo Field Campaign,” a nonprofit organization that works to protect the Yellowstone herds. “Most people didn’t know buffalo were being slaughtered, didn’t know about the issue with brucellosis,” a disease that can cause spontaneous abortions in bison and cattle, she explains.
Alpha Female, the first in the series now being shopped for television, revolves around poaching (in this case, of wolves) and addresses the threat to national parks from drilling. In addition to using her writing as a vehicle for educating readers, Christofferson currently devotes time to Footloose Montana, a grassroots nonprofit she helped found, which is dedicated to protecting all wildlife, including predator species. She presently serves on the advisory board.
The tiny out-building in Bozeman, MT where April Christofferson does her writing,Now a resident of Bozeman, Montana, where her son and one of her two granddaughters live, Christofferson has a full life. It includes regular visits to the Blackfeet Reservation, where her daughter and other granddaughter live, writing daily in a small but cozy outbuilding, hanging out with her kids/grand daughters and husband, and, of course, entertaining a herd of furry friends, currently featuring five cats and four dogs, including an “all heart” black lab. Always, there are animals nearby, a tribute to her original impulse to be a veterinarian, now turned to animal rescue with her husband, the executive director of an animal shelter in the town of Livingston, north of Yellowstone in the Absaroka Mountains.
Christofferson’s most recent book Grizzly Justice is about a recently fired ranger who disappears into the backcountry, hell-bent on saving a wounded grizzly bear whose fate is all but certain: euthanasia. Her current project Wolf Killer is more than timely; it feels ripped from the headlines after Montana Governor Greg Gianforte was reported to have trapped and killed a collared Yellowstone wolf who had wandered 10 miles out of the protected space of the park. (Gianforte was given a written warning for failing to take the required trapping course).
Even though she had started drafting the manuscript before the incident, the wolf, who was named “Max,” became a cause celebre. The issue of wolf hunting in Montana and the American West is classic Christofferson fodder for the kinds of stories she excels at rendering.
Generously, she attributes the beginning of those stories in part to her undergraduate years in Salt Lake City. “I’m a big fan of the University
of Utah,” says Christofferson, recalling the extra semester she spent after graduation working on the University Health campus, and her senior project in biology, when she had been studying the molting of snakes.
“I was obsessed with snakes,” she says. “I had 20 of them [Coluber constrictor foxii, commonly known as “blue racers”] in an aquarium in the greenhouse. I would go up there, weigh them, record my observations.” One day when she arrived, someone had left the aquarium open, “and there I was lying on the floor of the greenhouse, trying to catch snakes, with my husband helping me,” she says with a laugh.
We will have to wait to see if that story ends up in one of her books.
by David Pace
This story is an excerpt and update of Marcia C. Dibble’s profile of Ms. Christofferson that appeared in the U’s Continuum, now Utah Magazine, in winter 2007-08.
March 14, 2022
March 10, 2022
‘Meg 2: The Trench’ Adds Sienna Guillory, Skyler Samuels and Sergio Peris-Mencheta
Sienna Guillory, the Resident Evil actress last seen in Clifford the Big Red Dog; Skyler Samuels, who starred in Fox’s superhero show The Gifted; and Snowfall actor Sergio Peris-Mencheta have signed on to Warner Bros.’ sequel to its 2018 surprise hit featuring a very hungry prehistoric shark, known as a megalodon, which fights a very svelte Jason Statham.
Additionally, Cliff Curtis, Shuya Sophia Cai and Page Kennedy are reprising their roles, joining Statham in more shark-hunting shenanigans.
Peris-Mencheta is playing one of the film’s antagonists, a hard-edged mercenary. Guillory is the head of an applied sciences division, while Samuels is an adventure-loving member of Statham’s submarine crew.Read more
March 9, 2022
Chinese Superstar Wu Jing Joins Jason Statham in Warner’s ‘Meg 2,’ Li Bingbing Exits the Mega-Shark Franchise
Wu Jing, the highest-grossing male actor of all time in China, will join British action star Jason Statham in Warner Bros.’s “Meg 2: The Trench,” sources close to the production have confirmed to Variety.
The giant shark actioner, however, will be without Li Bingbing (“Transformers: Age of Extinction”). The Chinese actor, who played a female oceanographer, embodying both brains and beauty in Jon Turteltaub’s testosterone-fueled 2018 “The Meg,” is not returning to the franchise at this point.
With Ben Wheatley in the directing chair, production on “Meg 2: The Trench” began at the end of January at the Warner-owned Leavesden Studios outside London. It will continue there until May before switching to outdoor locations, likely to be in Asia.
The 47-year-old Wu is a former martial artist who has successfully parlayed a career as both actor and director in film and in TV. A protégé of the iconic action choreographer Yuen Woo-ping
March 7, 2022
Read all about Born to Talk Radio Show's with Marsha Wietecha upcoming interview with Ken Atchity
AUTHORS, BORN TO TALK RADIO SHOW, ENTERTAINMENT
Ken Atchitywith Marsha Wietecha
My guest on the Born To Talk Radio Show Podcast, on March 7th, from 1-2PT is Ken Atchity.
Ken is the CEO of Story Merchant. He is the author of over 20 books. His latest is My Obit: Daddy Holding Me. It was named the Hollywood Book Festival Award Winner for 2021.
Let’s Meet Ken.To start with, Ken spent his first career as a professor focusing his efforts on understanding stories and helping writers get their stories told. “I believe we can change the world through stories. I believe in making a difference in the lives of others through the power of storytelling.” Ken has served storytellers since 1996 as a literary manager and producer, developing and selling hundreds of stories for film and television. Ken is a self-defined “Story Merchant.” Not only is he an author, but he has also been a professor, producer, career coach, teacher, and literary manager. Ken is responsible for launching dozens of books, films, and brands.
Over his career, Ken has produced over 30 films. Now Ken’s Story Merchant companies provide full-service development, management, production, and brand launch for commercial and literary writers. Atchity Productions brings stories of all kinds to the big and little screens, developing film and tv productions.
Story Merchant.The Story Merchant Companies were formed to serve the needs of storytellers, publishers, and production companies. Each company provides a different service that is supported and supports the other three. If they believe your story has commercial potential but needs work they can use their coaching or editing services. Through The Writers Lifeline or Story Merchant, they can bring it to market standard before pitching to publishers or film companies.
Author.My Obit: Daddy Holding Me.
When asked why he wrote his book, his answer was crystal clear, “Because I didn’t want anyone else to write my obit.” Filled with humorous anecdotes, pictures, and a unique perspective from an immigrant’s child growing up in the south. This memoir offers the reader a dive into childhood trauma and learning to rethink those experiences.
I love his explanation of patience. “I learned that patience is the root of accomplishment. It can be a bitter root unless you turn it sweet. What turns patience sweet is finding something else to do while you’re waiting.”
In Closing.
Accordingly, Ken’s life passion has been finding great storytellers and turning them into bestselling authors and screenwriters. You might find inspiration in writing your own story, we all have them. Some are the same and some are entirely different, but that’s what makes life interesting.
Trust me when I say this, Ken is a very interesting man with a great story!
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March 4, 2022
Ken's Weekly Book Recommendation: Grizzly Justice by April Christofferson
AVAILABLE ON AMAZON
When Yellowstone backcountry ranger Will McCarroll is fired for breaking the rules one time too many, he disappears into the backcountry to continue his decades-long mission of protecting the park’s wildlife. Will is hell bent on saving a wounded grizzly bear whose fate is all but certain: euthanasia.
March 2, 2022
Book to Film: Do It Yourself
In the past couple of years, I’ve been involved in turning writers into filmmakers. As an author, one of the hardest things about trying to get a film made based on your work is that you really are going to producers hat-in-hand. You’re carrying around what’s called a “naked property”—a naked script, a naked book. If you’ve published an e-book, then it’s even worse than naked. Hollywood knows that an e-book is not the same thing as a traditional book, and they don’t want anything to do with it, at least not unless you’ve sold thousands and thousands of copies.
The obvious solution is to clothe your book—make it not be naked. How do you do that? Get a major director interested. To most people, it seems like that would take a miracle. But if you have a few connections, it might be easier than you think. Or you could get a major star or an investor interested. Any of those three will make your book jump to the front of the line.
We have an amazing situation in the United States. We have probably more talented writers than any country in the world with the possible exception of India. As a result, it is thousands of times harder to become a known writer here than it is in Canada or Mexico or Italy or many other countries in the world simply because there’s so much competition. Our market is the most jungle-like market imaginable, and the only thing that breaks through the crowd is success. And it’s usually success measured in sales. That’s what writers are up against, so you have to do whatever you can to make your book stand out. If you manage to get a book on The Today show, everybody knows that could be all the breakthrough you need. But it’s not an easy task, and it’s exactly why I spend a lot of my time doing strategic coaching for writers, trying to help them figure out how to bring attention to their work.
February 28, 2022
A NOVELIST’S TOOL KIT
Perfecting Your Craft
Nothing takes the place of practice. A famous athlete once said, “If you’re not practicing, someone out there is practicing. And when he meets you he will beat you.” Writing isn’t just a talent, it’s a craft that requires the honing of skill and technique. In this chapter I’ll give you several concrete suggestions about how you can improve yourself as a commercial novelist.
A novelist’s toolkit
A novelist’s medium is story, his form the contemporary novel. His most basic tools are character, action, setting and narrative voice. From the alchemy created by mixing these, a story emerges. Let’s examine each of these elements in turn.
Major, minor, and supporting characters
Character is by far the most important element of a novel. To the extent that your readers are “on board” with your protagonist, they will stay committed to your story. An unforgettable protagonist, even if he appears complex and multifaceted to the reader, is made up of just a handful of key components:
1.) Motivation: What makes your protagonist tick? What does he want? Your character must be struggling with one of the major human drives, including love, hate, fear, anxiety, vengeance, rage, jealousy, ambition, and greed. Your readers know these drives intimately; odds are, they’ve grappled with them in their own lives. They’ll respond to them.
Identify one drove for each of your characters and develop it. The best stories take a single, profound emotion and plumb its depths through all the characters like variations on a theme in music; the worst stories skim the surface of many different human drives, leaving their readers lost, confused, and unsatisfied. A well-constructed protagonist may possess two drives that are in conflict with each other, but rarely more than this. He is driven by greed and fear, for example, so that each step toward his goal of riches increases his psychological pain. In real life, people run a gamut of emotions, explore many drives, but not in well-made fiction. The beauty of the “what if” pattern (“What if a man driven by greed was as strongly driven by fear?”) is that it allows us to isolate and explore the ramifications of action issuing from such a character.
2.) Mission: Your protagonist needs a job to do, a goal for his drive. If it’s greed you’ve chosen, you may want to be the man who aims at being the top player on Wall Street, the woman who corners the oil exploration business, the couple who want to have more than anyone else at their country club. It doesn’t matter whether the character chooses to undertake the mission himself, or it’s thrust upon him. The mission should relate directly, in one way or another, to the character’s motivation.
The mission must be involved enough and challenging enough to sustain the story for the duration of the novel. It must lend itself to challenges, both in the form of obstacles, and in the form of an antagonist.
An antagonist, by definition, is a force that works against your hero’s mission—your protagonist’s nemesis. Your antagonist will not necessarily be a bad guy—he might not even be a person at all. In Sebastian Junger’s novel The Perfect Storm, nature is the antagonist. It’s the storm itself that foils Captain Billy Tyne’s mission to come home with a boatload of swordfish. In Steve Alten’s Domain, the antagonist is the other-worldly dragon creature who rises from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico after lying dormant for millions of years.
3.) Obstacles: Action happens when your hero struggles against obstacles to his mission. The obstacles you choose to confront your protagonist must be appropriate for him—don’t pit Bambi against the Galactic Empire. Arrange your series of obstacles in ascending order, so that the tension rises throughout your story. Your obstacles, ideally, should relate to one another in some fashion. And like all the other elements of your story, they must have a beginning, middle, and end.
4.) Relatability: If your audience can’t identify with your protagonist, they’re not going to be able to involve themselves in your story. Beginning writers often get the impression that a protagonist has to be likable. But if that were the case, we couldn’t enjoy Bill Murray’s performance as the irascible Frank Cross in Scrooged. Readers don’t have to like your protagonist. They just have to relate to him. They have to see the direction you’re pointing him in, and root for him to go there. If he’s a jerk, the audience must hunger for his redemption. You can’t help rooting for Hero’s Bernie LaPlante, even if you do want to kick him.
5.) Change: Over the course of the story, your protagonist must face his shortcoming, or his fear, or whatever it is that’s really keeping him from achieving his mission. He must grow into his ability to meet the goal you’ve set for him. In real life, human change is nebulous, messy, imprecise. In fiction, it can’t be. Your character’s change must progress in a logical, clear series of steps. See Lajos Egri’s The Art of Dramatic Writing for a thorough discussion of the steps that lead a character from state A to state B.
All five of these elements must be present in your protagonist. And as you’ve no doubt noticed, all of these attributes link directly to your novel’s action. Because in a good story, the action happens as it does because of who your protagonist is. Conversely, your protagonist develops as he does because of the way the action unfolds. Action and character drive each other.
All the elements in your novel must support this single line of protagonist in action. This holds true as well for all the other characters who populate your novel. Whether major, minor or functional, characters only belong in your story to the extent that they serve the action line.
Minor or supporting characters have a “tag”: a single attribute that defines them and makes them memorable. Any supporting character who isn’t memorable should be instantly thrown out.
A minor character’s “tag” can be just about any attribute: greed, lechery, or like Sally’s friend in When Harry Met Sally, an all-consuming desire to get married. Don’t spell it out, though. If a character is absent-minded, show it in action, thought and dialogue, don’t use the phrase “absent-minded” or you rob audience of the chance to figure it out for themselves.
A minor character can have a motivation but not a mission—that’s your protagonist’s job. They, too can evolve, but not along the same lines as your protagonist. Your minor characters are there to make his life more interesting. Establish them quickly, then move on.
Function characters play an even less important role than supporting characters. They perform a single function without being involved in the main character’s motivation. They ride in at sunset to deliver the fateful telegram, then ride away again. They serve the drinks, drive the cabs, do their duties, then go upon their way. Unlike your protagonist and minor characters, they’re supposed to be forgettable.
Keep function characters simple. If you spend too much energy on them your readers will start to think they’re more significant than you mean them to be. Then when the character disappears, it will feel to your readers like you left something dangling, or worse, like you misled them.
Keep in mind that your characters are not real people but devices that you invented for the sole purpose of capturing and holding your reader’s attention. As such, it’s your primary responsibility to keep them interesting. The best way to do that is to give them, at all times, something significant to do.
Your audience wants action. The best writers don’t get wrapped up in the complex psychological machinations of their characters. They write to satisfy their readers’ expectations. Your audience wants more than anything to see how your protagonist gets out of the corners you paint him into. All you have to do to create a compelling novel is: don’t disappoint your readers!
