Just another WordPress site
Imagine wearing a vest-like device while reading a book, so that when you come upon a scene brimming with heart-racing tension, the vest emits vibrations to increase your heart rate and compresses your ribcage to convey the tightness felt by the protagonist in the throes of his peril.
Sounds like the stuff of science-fiction, but it is not.
Read more on the Huffington Post >>
Jesse Ball’s new novel Silence Once Begun has just been released by Pantheon. His three previous novels are The Way Through Doors, Samedi the Deafness, and Curfew. He’s also written several works of verse. He won the 2008 Paris Review Plimpton Prize and is the recipient of a 2014 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship. He teaches at the Art Institute of Chicago’s MFA Writing Program.
Silence Once Begun concerns a Japanese fishing village where eight elderly residents have disappeared. Although he didn’t commit a crime, Oda Sotatsu signs a written confession prepared by Sato Kakuzo. He’s arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to death, yet remains inexplicably silent throughout this ordeal. The novel is written as a series of transcripts of interviews with those who knew Oda, providing different versions of what may have happened.
Read more on the Huffington Post >>
As 2014 approaches, I think about what I would like to see happen in the world of books. I know they often say, “Be careful what you wish for,” but here are my wishes for the coming year.
Read more on the Huffington Post >>
A sense of incipient dread spreads though me when I first sit down to begin a new novel. No matter how many times I’ve done it before, the initial reaction is the same: where will this go? Will the attempt lead me to a dead end from which I can’t be extricated?
Perhaps it’s a crisis in confidence, but it’s far more than just a case of writer’s block. In fact, I’m not sure “writer’s block” is a valid name for this state of mind.
A novel is an organic thing. In a very real sense, it lives, breathes and takes on a life of its own, independent of my initial outline or plot summary. The outline never ensures full-blooded characters, not does it guarantee a rich plot, with compelling narrative drive. Hopefully, the story will grow or even change direction from the first plot summary, and the end result will be something I’d never anticipated. I never truly know the outcome — even as I’m traveling the novel’s trajectory — which can be part of the pleasure and nightmare of writing. In fact, whenever I look at the final product — the published novel — I find myself wondering where it all came from.
Once I barge past that initial feeling of immobilization, the writing assumes its own energy. Many things emerge. They seem to come from some deep mental recess. The experience can seem like a mystifying, dreamlike process, or even a strange form of magic.
But it’s not magic. Rather, mine is the writer’s oneiric landscape over which the quest occurs to capture in words, the thoughts and feelings of my characters in their turbulent stories.
I wonder if every writer experiences this when beginning a new work. I don’t know. I can only speak for myself.
Some people claim to experience this peculiar form of paralysis they call “writer’s block.” It seems to me, they just can’t get past the nightmarish fear of not knowing where it will all go, and beginning the hard work a novel demands — the brutal and beautiful slog of writing fiction.
Mark Rubinstein
Author of Mad Dog House and Love Gone Mad
As an author of crime-thriller fiction, I’ve occasionally been asked about violence in my novels. Typical questions range from, why is so much violence in your books? to another, more personal one: Is violence part of your personality or is it totally contrived for your novels?
Read more on the Huffington Post >>
I’m thrilled to announce that my new novel, Love Gone Mad, has officially launched and can be purchased online at amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com and bookstores in your neighborhood. It’s available in soft cover and also as an eBook.
One thing that a writer needs to do, if he’s to keep publishing his work, is to sell his books. So what follows is a great review from Library Journal. I’m hoping this will encourage you to go to your local library and suggest that they purchase a copy. Of course, you’ll also want one for yourself!
Rubinstein, Mark. Love Gone Mad.
Thunder Lake. Sept. 2013. 352p.
ISBN 9780985626860. pap. $12.99.
Divorced heart surgeon Adrian Douglas is living a comfortable but lonely life after leaving his job at Yale two years ago to work at Eastport General. Everything changes after a chance cafeteria encounter with attractive RN Megan Haggarty. Adrian is instantly smitten and begins a seemingly idyllic relationship with Megan, but he soon learns that even the most perfect woman can have some secrets. One of Megan’s biggest secrets is ex-husband Conrad Wilson, a hulk of a man who takes possessiveness to a whole new level. Anonymous threats and vandalism against the couple soon escalate to life-threatening encounters, and Conrad is the prime suspect. As Adrian and Megan’s relationship grows, the rage in Conrad intensifies, with all of his negative energy channeled toward them. VERDICT Rubinstein’s second foray into the fiction arena (after Mad Dog House) is an intense thriller that promises readers surprising twists, heart-pounding suspense, and a bird’s-eye view into both the mind of a madman and a dizzyingly realistic account of how it feels to be stalked as prey.—Mary Todd Chesnut, Northern Kentucky Univ. Lib., Highland Heights
PS. If you’d like to catch me in person or listen to me on the radio, check out my website’s list of events.
Andrew Gross is the best-selling author of many thrillers including The Blue Zone, Eyes Wide Open, Don’t Look Twice, 15 Seconds, and his latest novel, No Way Back. Andrew received a degree in English from Middlebury College in 1974 and a Masters in Business Policy from Columbia University
He worked for many years in the apparel business, but left the corporate world to attend the Writer’s Program at the University of Iowa. At 46, he finished a draft of his first novel, Hydra, which received dozens of rejections from agents and publishers.
Read more on the Huffington Post >>
I always had dreams.
It’s May 1956 at Ebbets Field, a bandbox of a baseball stadium, home of the Brooklyn Dodgers. My all-time hero, Gil Hodges, stands at first base. We’d snuck down to the first baseline box seats from our perch in the bleachers. In the blink of an eye, I’m standing next to Gil and talking with him. We’re teammates. A 14-year-old boy’s fantasy.
Baseball was in my DNA; I was a fine ballplayer. I had an uncle who, at 9, left home, heading for Vero Beach to try out for the Dodgers during spring training. He got as far as Philadelphia, where he was picked up by the Children’s Aid Society. His was a kid’s fantasy, a dream, like mine. I read sports novels and developed a love for fiction. Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jack London, Edgar Allan Poe and Ernest Hemingway became my new heroes.
I read voraciously and lived vicariously. I wanted to become a novelist.
But I lacked the courage to write.
Read more on the Huffington Post >>
Over the years, I’ve co-authored five non-fiction medical books for the lay reader. Now that I’m writing fiction, I’ve been asked to compare fiction and non-fiction.
I’ve been lucky in a very real way. When writing non-fiction as a physician, I often had to write case histories of patients (without revealing their identities, of course). These were always fun to do because each person is unique, and in dealing with psychologic issues, each has a unique story to tell. So, there was some inventive license in describing case histories to illustrate various points.
But one thing was certain in non-fiction: its purpose was to convey information about a specific topic (heart disease, breast cancer, psychotherapy, or child-rearing) in an informative, readable and reasonably entertaining way. So, the creative freedom was limited.
Fiction, on the other hand, involves a synthesis of experience with what the author knows of life, along with wholesale flights of imagination.
You just know when reading a novel that the author knows a great deal about certain subjects ( For instance, in Peter Heller’s “The Dog Stars,” he obviously knows plenty about flying an airplane, fishing, hunting and hiking, among other things). But he engages in wholesale flights of imagination that take the reading to another level of knowledge and beauty.
It’s that soaring imagination that propels the novel, and it’s much more difficult to capture those chimerical flights of ideas and fantasy on paper than it is to write effectively about a non-fiction topic.
Writing fiction is far more satisfying to me that non-fiction, after all, making stuff up is pure fun. Kids do it all the time.
To paraphrase what Saul Bellow once said, “When I was a child I was called a liar. Now, I’m called a writer.”