Kenneth Atchity's Blog, page 8

Author Spotlight: Luck of the Irish Leads to Hollywood Deal

 

Luck of the Irish

Leads to Hollywood Deal

 

AN AUTHOR from Weston-super-Mare has published her third novel after pitching to Emmy-nominated Hollywood producer, Ken Atchity.

Vicki FitzGerald, a former regional journalist, and PR company director followed her dreams to become a published author in 2017, with her debut crime thriller, Briguella.

Two years later, the mum-of-two flew to the Dublin Writers Conference to pitch her second draft manuscript, Kill List, for a novel adaption into a movie or TV series.

Vicki was selected from 50 people for the final ten to pitch again to Ken and Binnur Karaevli, writer and producer.

Ken, who has produced more than 30 Hollywood movies, including sci-fi shark blockbuster, The Meg, loved the concept and published Kill List via Story Merchant Books.


Vicki said: “When the conference organizer approached me and said my name was the only one given to him by Ken for a film treatment, I was stunned.

“I prepared the plot breakdown and several months later, while recuperating in hospital from multiple leg fractures, my dreams come true. Ken offered to publish Kill List.

“Good things come to those who wait and are brave enough to chase their dreams.”

Kill List has already attracted five-star reviews since publication on March 24, 2021. The pair are finalizing the film treatment to pitch to Hollywood agents.

Ken said: “Kill List is an extremely high concept idea, and those do not come around often. I believe it has the potential to make a fantastic series adaption, possibly spanning several seasons.”

Kill List, Briguella, and Vicki’s memoir, Still Standing, are all set in Weston and feature landmarks and locations across North Somerset.




About Vicki FitzGerald

After a decade as a journalist, Vicki founded the South West public relations firm, Paramount PR, which focused on tourism and the hospitality industries before committing to writing full-time. She has now published three novels and is working on the fourth.

What Are You Waiting For?

 

Story Merchant E-Book Deal: Kill List by Vicki Fitzgerald

FREE February 3 - February 7!

"This woman is clearly REALLY twisted, and frankly scares me." 

Bestselling author, ADAM CROFT.

AVAILABLE ON AMAZON US
AVAILABLE ON AMAZON UK

Emilia has a secret hobby; killing. 
She’s hunting the Dark Web gamers who stole her life. 
The players underestimated Emilia’s will to survive and her thirst for vengeance.It’s her game now. Her rules, her kill list, and she’s an unlikely accomplice teaching her how to get away with murder. 
But revenge has a price that’s breath-taking and disturbing. 
Can Emilia overcome betrayal and tragedy to settle the score and end the game? 
 
READ MORE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stealing Time for Your Dream in 2025!

Jack Smith: “God created time so that everything wouldn't happen at once.”

Atchity: Then how come everything keeps happening at once?

Dreamers know that if you follow your dream, by definition, you can't fail. Success lies in the pursuit. If you have a dream, you have the responsibility to yourself and to the source of dreams to make it come true. 

But that means finding time to do what you have to do--the very opposite of "marking time." Our minds experience life on a timeline of their own invention, a continuum that stretches from our first moment of consciousness to our last. "The end of the world," said Bernard Malamud, “will occur when I die. After that, it's everyone for himself.”

And finding time for dreams in our accelerated world where we hear of "flextime," "time-elasticity," “the sweet spot in time," “virtual time,” “time shifting,” and "time slowing down” is more confusing than ever before. A little over a century ago, if you missed a stagecoach you thought nothing of waiting a day or two for the next one to come along. Today you feel frustrated if you miss one section of a revolving door! So many of today's "time-saving devices" prove to be frauds---requiring more time to select, install, maintain, and update than it used to take without them. It's hard to believe that a few short years ago we had not yet become addicted to email, voicemail, FAX machines, microwaves, VCRs, earphones, IPods, I Phones, blackberries. All these inventions, as helpful as they can be to your onboard Accountant’s output level, suck up our time in ways that, unless they are examined and acknowledged, become quite destructive to the realization of the dream. More and more demands are being made on our time. Faith Popcorn (The Popcorn Report) puts it this way:

We're pleading to the big time clock in the sky: "Give me fewer choices, far fewer choices. Make my life easier. Help me make the most of my most valued commodity--the very minutes of my life.”

Things have gotten so bad that we can¹t really manage time any more. We’re now forced to steal it, invoking the assistance of Mercury, messenger, salesman, trickster, and thief of the gods. Like any professional thief, Mercury insists on knowing as much as possible about the object of his theft and its natural habitat and characteristics before he goes into action. This series combines observations about the nature of time and work with practical suggestions about employing Mercury’s caduceus--that magic wand with the snakes entwined around it--to steal the time you need.

Kurt Vonnegut’s Bokonon: “Busy, busy, busy.”

Ecclesiastes: “Consider the ants. Yes, you are busy. What are you busy about?”

Our Puritanical upbringing has led the Accountant to want us to keep busy. “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” One day I was consulting with an attorney who, by everyone’s standards but his own, is quite successful. We were talking about forming a new marketing company. “Why do you want to do this?” I asked him.

“Because I want to get rich.” He added: “I have to stop selling my time.”

I nodded. “That’s interesting.” I was thinking of the reversible equation I’d written about in A Writer’s Time: “Time is money, money is time.”

“What brought you to this conclusion?” I asked him.

He told me that a self-made, wealthy, genius friend of his kept coming to California for a visit. Each time, he’d say, “You’re so smart--why aren’t you rich?” The attorney had no answer for him, but the question continued to gnaw away at him.

Finally, on one visit, the friend had to sit in the attorney’s law office for an hour waiting for him to complete some phone calls. He observed what was happening in the office.

On their way to lunch, his friend said: “You know that question I’ve been asking you all these years?”

“Yeah, of course I remember it--it drives me crazy. If I’m so smart, why aren’t I rich?”

“I know the answer now.”

“Tell me.”

“You’re too busy to be rich.”

Doing the wrong things, no matter how fast, or how well, you do them, or how many of them you do, will not advance your dream. One of my partners put it this way: “Don’t confuse efforts with results.”

Those who break out of busy work and into the success they’ve dreamed of have learned to redefine time. If you recognize that time is merely a concept, a social or intellectual construct, you can make the clock of life your clock; then determine what you do with it. More than the quantity of activities or completed projects I’ve experienced in my various career transits, what I value most is the quality of time I’ve managed to steal from all those committees and examination-grading sessions. When someone asked me years ago to make a list of “things I do that I don’t enjoy” I was happy to realize that it was difficult to think of anything other than my two or three hours per week of desk work that I didn’t thoroughly enjoy. Then I found a way of enjoying desk work, too! By hook or crook, you need to steal the right kind of time for your dreams.

[first in a 5-part series]  next: “What is time?”

Story Merchant E-Book Deal

FREE January 27 - January 31! 

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One by one, graduates of a highly selective medical school class at Georgetown are kidnapped. Meanwhile, around the globe, archeologists discover secrets to an ancient mystery, possibly older than history itself. Like the strands of DNA, the two storylines are linked, uniting in an explosive chase and attempted rescue – and a discovery central to the future of human evolution.

Follow Noah Scott, the only Georgetown physician to escape kidnapping, Annie Van Stuyvesant, an eccentric archeologist, and Sebastian Kane, one of the world’s wealthiest men, as they pursue the interlinked secrets and stand to answer the most important question this ancient mystery raises: What would you do to live forever?

PRAISE FOR DAVE DAVIS

Dave’s commentaries in the Hamilton Spectator have been regularly praised for their sensitivity, humor, and insight; they draw on Dave’s rich experiences as a family doctor, husband and father. His first novel, A Potter’s Tale, was recently named 2021's Independent Press Distinguished Favorite in Science Fiction. His second, The Last Immortal, is bound to attract readers interested in an intelligent, thought-provoking thriller. They’re both books in The Noah Series.

The Joy of Less By Pico Iyer

“The beat of my heart has grown deeper, more active, and yet more peaceful, and it is as if I were all the time storing up inner riches…My [life] is one long sequence of inner miracles.” The young Dutchwoman Etty Hillesum wrote that in a Nazi transit camp in 1943, on her way to her death at Auschwitz two months later.
Towards the end of his life, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen,” though by then he had already lost his father when he was 7, his first wife when she was 20 and his first son, aged 5. In Japan, the late 18th-century poet Issa is celebrated for his delighted, almost child-like celebrations of the natural world. Issa saw four children die in infancy, his wife die in childbirth, and his own body partially paralyzed.

In the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno’s arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.

I’m not sure I knew the details of all these lives when I was 29, but I did begin to guess that happiness lies less in our circumstances than in what we make of them, in every sense. “There is nothing either good or bad,” I had heard in high school, from Hamlet, “but thinking makes it so.” I had been lucky enough at that point to stumble into the life I might have dreamed of as a boy: a great job writing on world affairs for Time magazine, an apartment (officially at least) on Park Avenue, enough time and money to take vacations in Burma, Morocco, El Salvador. But every time I went to one of those places, I noticed that the people I met there, mired in difficulty and often warfare, seemed to have more energy and even optimism than the friends I’d grown up with in privileged, peaceful Santa Barbara, Calif., many of whom were on their fourth marriages and seeing a therapist every day. Though I knew that poverty certainly didn’t buy happiness, I wasn’t convinced that money did either.
So — as post-1960s cliché decreed — I left my comfortable job and life to live for a year in a temple on the backstreets of Kyoto. My high-minded year lasted all of a week, by which time I’d noticed that the depthless contemplation of the moon and composition of haiku I’d imagined from afar was really more a matter of cleaning, sweeping and then cleaning some more. But today, more than 21 years later, I still live in the vicinity of Kyoto, in a two-room apartment that makes my old monastic cell look almost luxurious by comparison. I have no bicycle, no car, no television I can understand, no media — and the days seem to stretch into eternities, and I can’t think of a single thing I lack.
I’m no Buddhist monk, and I can’t say I’m in love with renunciation in itself, or traveling an hour or more to print out an article I’ve written, or missing out on the N.B.A. Finals. But at some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn’t want or need, not all I did. And it seemed quite useful to take a clear, hard look at what really led to peace of mind or absorption (the closest I’ve come to understanding happiness). Not having a car gives me volumes not to think or worry about, and makes walks around the neighborhood a daily adventure. Lacking a cell phone and high-speed Internet, I have time to play ping-pong every evening, to write long letters to old friends and to go shopping for my sweetheart (or to track down old baubles for two kids who are now out in the world).
When the phone does ring — once a week — I’m thrilled, as I never was when the phone rang in my overcrowded office in Rockefeller Center. And when I return to the United States every three months or so and pick up a newspaper, I find I haven’t missed much at all. While I’ve been rereading P.G. Wodehouse, or “Walden,” the crazily accelerating roller-coaster of the 24/7 news cycle has propelled people up and down and down and up and then left them pretty much where they started. “I call that man rich,” Henry James’s Ralph Touchett observes in “Portrait of a Lady,” “who can satisfy the requirements of his imagination.” Living in the future tense never did that for me.

Perhaps happiness, like peace or passion, comes most when it isn’t pursued.

I certainly wouldn’t recommend my life to most people — and my heart goes out to those who have recently been condemned to a simplicity they never needed or wanted. But I’m not sure how much outward details or accomplishments ever really make us happy deep down. The millionaires I know seem desperate to become multimillionaires, and spend more time with their lawyers and their bankers than with their friends (whose motivations they are no longer sure of). And I remember how, in the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno’s arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.
Being self-employed will always make for a precarious life; these days, it is more uncertain than ever, especially since my tools of choice, written words, are coming to seem like accessories to images. Like almost everyone I know, I’ve lost much of my savings in the past few months. I even went through a dress-rehearsal for our enforced austerity when my family home in Santa Barbara burned to the ground some years ago, leaving me with nothing but the toothbrush I bought from an all-night supermarket that night. And yet my two-room apartment in nowhere Japan seems more abundant than the big house that burned down. I have time to read the new John le Carre, while nibbling at sweet tangerines in the sun. When a Sigur Ros album comes out, it fills my days and nights, resplendent. And then it seems that happiness, like peace or passion, comes most freely when it isn’t pursued.
If you’re the kind of person who prefers freedom to security, who feels more comfortable in a small room than a large one and who finds that happiness comes from matching your wants to your needs, then running to stand still isn’t where your joy lies. In New York, a part of me was always somewhere else, thinking of what a simple life in Japan might be like. Now I’m there, I find that I almost never think of Rockefeller Center or Park Avenue at all.

Read more

Pico Iyer’s book, “The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama,” is out in paperback.

Congratulations Story Merchant Author Leo Daughtry!

Talmadge Farm is a FINALIST in the 2024 Goethe Book Awards novel competition for Late Historical Fiction!



 

ALMADGE FARM is a sweeping drama that follows three unforgettable families navigating the changing culture of North Carolina at a pivotal moment in history. A love letter to the American South, the novel is a story of resilience, hope, and family - both lost and found.
Leo Daughtry is a life-long resident of North Carolina. He grew up among the tobacco fields of Sampson County which served as inspiration for his debut novel, “Talmadge Farm.” After graduating from Wake Forest University and its School of Law, he established a private law practice in Smithfield, N.C. He was a member of the N.C. House and Senate for 28 years, including serving as House Majority Leader and House Minority Leader. When not practicing law, Leo enjoys spending time in Atlantic Beach with his wife and daughters.

 https://www.leodaughtry.com/ 
https://bookshop.org/p/books/talmadge-farm-leo-daughtry/214660

Suite T Reviews Leo Daughtry's Talmadge Farm

Leo Daughtry Creates A New Drama

AVAILABLE ON AMAZON 

Leo Daughtry's debut novel, "Talmadge Farm," transports readers to the tobacco fields of 1950s North Carolina. "Talmadge Farm" (Story Merchant Books, June 4, 2024) reflects on the dreams and struggles of the American South, made more poignant by the author's personal experiences growing up among the tobacco fields of Sampson County, North Carolina, during periods of turbulent societal change.

It's 1957, and tobacco is king. Wealthy landowner Gordon Talmadge enjoys the lavish lifestyle he inherited but doesn't like getting his hands dirty; he leaves that to the two sharecroppers - one white, one Black - who farm his tobacco but have bigger dreams for their own children. While Gordon takes no interest in the lives of his tenant farmers, a brutal attack between his son and the sharecropper children sets off a chain of events that leaves no one unscathed. Over the span of a decade, Gordon struggles to hold on to his family's legacy as the old order makes way for a New South.

TALMADGE FARM is a sweeping drama that follows three unforgettable families navigating the changing culture of North Carolina at a pivotal moment in history. A love letter to the American South, the novel is a story of resilience, hope, and family - both lost and found.
via SuiteT


Leo Daughtry is a life-long resident of North Carolina. He grew up among the tobacco fields of Sampson County which served as inspiration for his debut novel, “Talmadge Farm.” After graduating from Wake Forest University and its School of Law, he established a private law practice in Smithfield, N.C. He was a member of the N.C. House and Senate for 28 years, including serving as House Majority Leader and House Minority Leader. When not practicing law, Leo enjoys spending time in Atlantic Beach with his wife and daughters.
 https://www.leodaughtry.com/ 
https://bookshop.org/p/books/talmadge-farm-leo-daughtry/21466057

NEW FROM STORY MERCHANT BOOKS!

 

Frances Angelina's Virtuepops Series of Children's Books EMOTIONAL LEARNING BOOKS ABOUT HAVING GOOD-FOR-YOU FEELINGS.

AVAILABLE ON AMAZON
In this first bountiful book, you learn that virtues are simply good feelings and emotions that we all need to have inner peace and happy hope. Angelina's educational virtues book is a life skills book that can open locked doors for self-help, and helping others, by exercising the victorious virtues.     

  AVAILABLE ON AMAZON 
In Frances Angelina's Bobble Pops Series, you learn that virtues are simply good feelings and emotions that we all need to have inner peace and happy hope. The Virtues of Acceptance, Blessings, Cleanliness, Discipline, and Empathy come to life in fun, positive, and educational manners, by the Bobble Pops and Paradise Animals. Through daily learning, teaching, and modeling this book’s valuable virtues, you help your child/student gain values that benefit them in all stages of their life.                 



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Are you looking for a book that helps you and your children acquire good feelings and peaceful emotions? If so, here is a happy gift wrapped in love to feel your best. The Virtue of Faith, exercise, and sports are highlighted in this first book of my “Thank you for Rainbow Adventures 8 Book Series” educational virtues books. Be excited to learn that faith is an important emotional learning life skill to be used as a daily happy healthy habit. 

Website:  https://virtuepopsineducationandmore.study/

Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/VirtuePopsinEducationVirtueBooks/

Twitter:   https://x.com/VirtuepopsnEdu

LinkedIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/virtuepopsineducationvirtuebooks/

Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/virtuepopsineducation/

YOUTUBE:  https://www.youtube.com/@virtuepopsineducationandmore/channels

About the author

My self-help and educational virtue books teach healthy happy habits that I call victorious virtues like faith, charity (sharing), perseverance, patience, love, respect, being humble, and being truthful. Please be a happy POP and join our #ValueVirtue movement. www.virtuepopsineducationandmore.study

WRITE THE WORLD!

TAP-DANCING ON THE RAZOR’S EDGE


If you’re an authorpreneur, a writer, an artist trying to make it in today’s toughly competitive global market, you’re tapdancing on the narrowest bridge in the world—spanning the cactus fields of the UNKNOWN world and THE PROMISED LAND where the grass is greener, and the trees are tall and mighty.

It’s the smallest and most dynamic and most important bridge in human experience—one that everyone would like to be standing on, but few have the courage to attempt:

It’s the bridge of VISION--that links dream with reality.

It’s a very small bridge and very narrow and uncomfortable when you first step onto it. But the longer you’re on it, the more maneuvering room you realize you have. The more comfortable it becomes standing on what you recognize as the razor’s edge.

You learn to tap dance.

You learn to laugh and cry again.

You learn to enjoy the dance, to sing while you dance.

You learn perspective. You build character. You turn from butterfly to lioness.

Sooner or later, you should begin to feel, as I do, incredibly fortunate to be doing what we love the most—storytelling—and getting paid to do it. As a producer, editor, literary manager, author consultant, and brand launcher, I get to be an alchemist, turning stories into gold.

And as someone who tries hard to always think OUTSIDE THE BOX—especially since the boxes either are crumbling or have already crumbled--it has been thrilling to see my clients’ DRACULA THE UNDEAD on page one of cnn.com and on the New York Times extended list—after I added a brand name to the mix; and to be producing my clients’ Jerry Blaine and Lisa McCubbin’s THE KENNEDY DETAIL, which appears from Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster after we found a way to get Clint Hill to write the forward, and we managed to set up, with our reality partner Renegade83 a 2-hour Discovery Sunday special which garnered an Emmy nomination. These clients danced the danced successfully, and because they, like all storytellers, are inveterate masochists are already back on that bridge dancing that crazy dance again.

No one is forcing you to do this. Remind yourself of that when the going gets toughest. You’ve chosen this career, and you can only lose at it if you quit.

What you are doing, in business terms, is creating the most valuable commodity on earth, “intellectual property.” And today that is worth more than real property! 

You are entering an infinite profession, of unlimited potential. Not even the sky is the limit—my client Nik Halik’s The Thrillionaire has been in outer space! In this world of studios crashing, networks retrenching, publishers conglomerating, where everything is changing all the time—at least one thing is constant: the need for stories never ceases.

“Trackers” are highly paid by the major studios to find stories and bring them in.

No wonder storytellers were considered sacred among the ancient Greeks--because they were the channelers of STORIES, stories that described reality in terms humans can relate to.

Therefore don’t let your ego prematurely destroy your career, as I have seen it do for so many writers. “No ego” should be your mantra, as you take your WORK, not YOURSELF, seriously.

Eventually, on that razor’s edge, you’ll learn that though the Promised Land IS worth the promise it’s the struggle to get there that is the most valuable experience of your life.

As storytellers who are here this weekend because you actively pursue your vision, you know full well how narrow the bridge we stand on is, how fragile. But you should also know that we’re heroes for even attempting to cross this bridge. I’d like read a tribute to your work by the greatest Greek poet since Homer and Sappho. His name was Constantine P. Cavafy, and he lived in Alexandria, Egypt, and died less than a hundred years ago:
The First Step


The young poet Evmenis
complained one day to Theocritus:
"I've been writing for two years now
and I've composed only one idyll.
It's my single completed work.
I see, sadly, that the ladder
of Poetry is tall, extremely tall;
and from this first step I'm standing on now
I'll never climb any higher."
Theocritus retorted: "Words like that
are improper, blasphemous.
Just to be on the first step
should make you happy and proud.
To have reached this point is no small achievement:
what you've done already is a wonderful thing.
Even this first step
is a long way above the ordinary world.
To stand on this step
you must be in your own right
a member of the city of ideas.
And it's a hard, unusual thing
to be enrolled as a citizen of that city.
Its councils are full of Legislators
no charlatan can fool.
To have reached this point is no small achievement:
what you've done already is a wonderful thing."

So let’s pause to celebrate--and applaud ourselves right now--for even being here today, on this step—whether it is your first, or whether you’ve taken a few steps already. If you are among the latter, you’ll appreciate the words of the great playwright-poet Samuel Beckett: “Do not come down the ladder. I have taken it away.”

Let’s also face it: you’re in “show BUSINESS,” as my client and partner Michael A. Simpson constantly reminds me; and you must deal with it as the BUSINESS of SHOW. What years have taught me is how important it is, never more so than today, to understand the BUSINESS of being a visionary, a person others call “mad” or “insane.” Remind them of Salvador Dali’s response: “The difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad.”

I always say that the difference between a visionary and a con man in the creative world is SUCCESS. No one believes you can really do it, because everyone has told them how hard it is—and they themselves are too fearful to try.

Yes, it is difficult. That’s why, though everyone in the world has a story, NOT everyone—only YOU—are doing something about it.

Your personal cutting edge difference will be dealing with your career as a business on all fronts. Business requires a plan, an investment, a marketing program, and unceasing determination to move the flag across the field, remembering, for consolation, that if you die in the midst of your own dream that, by definition, has to be a happy death!

As Muriel Rukeyser said, for us humans, “the universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” Whatever it’s really made of, all that matters is how we perceive it. And it’s through stories that we form our perception.

When you’re standing on the razor’s edge in fear, or complaining—as all of us constantly do--remind yourself:

No one is FORCING you to tell your stories to the world. No one is holding this gun to your head but yourself.

You’re here by your free choice, while they are behind their counters or their commuting dashboards or their tellers’ windows because they are afraid to take the chances you are getting used to.

Meanwhile, you are following your dream.

Welcome to the world of storytellers:

What is a storyteller? A storyteller is a simply a communicative dreamer—a person who dares to learn how to communicate her dreams to all of us.

Doing so is not only his privilege, it’s his responsibility. I always told my Occidental College students, “If you have a dream, and fail to express it, you have denied all of us a unique vision that only you can bring us.”

But Aristotle said, “Excellence is not a plan.” Dreamers need to plan. An authorpreneur who truly wishes to succeed in the commercial world of storytelling needs to analyze it from a business point of view. AMBITION and VISION are NOT ENOUGH. You must equal them with CRAFT, TECHNIQUE, AND SKILL.

In my book, A WRITER’S TIME, I wrote that four things are needed to succeed in Hollywood:

1) Persistence (endurance, determination)

2) Contacts (networking)

3) Being a fun person to work with (and its corollary, “Staying off everyone’s life is too short list”) and

4) TALENT

It’s sobering to realize that any one of the first three are sufficient in themselves. Bad movies can be made through sheer persistence; mediocre books can be published just through strong contacts. But the 4th, the one we’re all looking and hoping for, is NOT sufficient. Talent alone must be combined with the others.

And add LUCK or GOOD TIMING and, remembering what someone said that the “harder I work the luckier I get.”

You might also add ORIGINALITY—which Joe Roth defined as “being able to think of something that hasn’t been on TV!”

Recently, trying to maintain the business of show business, my company has evolved. We raise independent financing for films, and encourage writers to become filmmakers to move their projects forward. We consult with writers on their career strategies one on one. We launch brands. As literary managers, we look for the next Sue Grafton or Robert Ludlum whose vision CLEARLY extends into the future.

What we learn from the tap-dance on the razor’s edge is:


TOUGHEN UP.

KEEP MOVING FORWARD DESPITE YOUR PRESENT MOODS. A week from now, you won’t even remember how you feel today; so don’t let it stop you from working. My wife Kayoko is always reminding me that Gandhi said, “Full effort is full success.”

PERSIST. NEVER GIVE UP. Yes, you may be going through hell. But “if you’re going through hell,” Winston Churchill advised, “keep going!”

NEVER PUT DEADLINES ON YOUR CAREER.

TAKE YOUR CAREER, NOT YOURSELF, SERIOUSLY. Don’t go from saying “I just want to be better” to “I just want to write what I want to write.” I’ve repeatedly seen clients lose the humble perspective created before success hit them, and sabotage their careers.

NEVER PUT ASIDE YOUR VISION, BUT PERFECT IT, PERFECT IT, PERFECT IT and make allies of those who can help you do that to bring your craft and skills to the level of your talent and ambition. If you continue pursuing your dream no matter what until you achieve it—and then you’ll have bigger dreams, of course—by definition, YOU CAN’T FAIL. Carlyle put it this way: “Success is steady progress toward a worthy goal.”

Walt Disney was turned down 302 times before he got financing for Disneyland.

Frank Herbert’s DUNE was rejected 36 times. Don’t let your representative give up at 32!

George Lucas was forced to put up his own money to pay for “Star Wars” because NO ONE believed in his vision. By the time the film came out, he was bankrupt. He is now fabulously wealthy of course—PRECISELY BECAUSE HE WAS UNABLE TO SELL ANY OF THE RIGHTS TO THE FILM OR ITS SEQUELS. Shakespeare played politics to get the Globe Theater built for his own plays. Sophocles and Aeschylus had to do the same thing in the time of classical Greece. Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, in fact most late nineteenth century novelists began their careers SELF-PUBLISHING.

Jerzy Kosinski’s STEPS won awards, but was rejected by publishers 34 times—once by its very own publisher, after it had already been published.

Remember what William Goldman observed, in his Adventures in the Screen Trade: NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING.

In today’s tough world of authorpreneurship, be flexible and always THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX.

Yes, the business of becoming and being a professional writer is hard. The hard part is the great part. That’s why you’ve chosen to do it. The river is wide between where we are now and the success and attention we want is on the other side. The razor’s edge is thin and dangerous. You don’t NEED to do this. You’re DESTINED to do this.

What could be a happier mission in life?

How can you fail at being yourself?

And now you know what the bridge is—a razor’s edge--and how to dance on it, just promise me and yourself that you won’t fall off.