One of my favorite writers is Neil Gaiman. He has an imagination that creates some fantastical, out of this world stories and the writing talent, skill, and ability to make those stories believable.
In this short four minute video, Mr. Gaiman reveals where he gets his story ideas from. It’s not from the Idea of the Month club, as one writer answered, or a little store in Schenectady, NY, as Harlan Ellison claims.
You might be surprised.
It’s the birthday of Jack Kerouac, born Jean-Louis Kerouac in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1922. He was from a working-class French-Canadian family; he grew up speaking French, and he wasn’t fluent in English until he was a teenager. In New York City, he met a group of friends who would eventually be known as the Beat Generation — Allen Ginsberg, William S. Boroughs, Neal Cassady, and others. Kerouac wrote his novel “On the Road” in 1957 about Cassady.
Kerouac famously wrote “On the Road” in just 20 days, during a coffee-fueled writing spree in the spring of April 1951. He typed it on translucent draft paper that he found in a closet at a friend’s apartment — he cut the paper to size and taped it together so it would work in his typewriter. It’s true that Kerouac produced that version of “On the Road” in just a few weeks, but the novel itself was a long time in the making. In 1947, Kerouac began collecting material for a new novel. In 1948, he described it in his journal: “Two guys hitch-hiking to California in search of something they don’t really find, and losing themselves on the road, and coming all the way back hopeful of something else.” Notes and ideas for the novel filled hundreds of pages of journals, letters, and notebooks. In a letter to a friend, he wrote: “These ideas and plans obsess me so much that I can’t conceal them […] they overflow out of me, even in bars with perfect strangers.” Throughout those years of writing Kerouac continued to take cross-country trips with Neal Cassady, and recorded their adventures and conversations.
In late March of 1951, his friend John Clellon Holmes had just finished a novel about the Beats, and he showed Kerouac the manuscript. Kerouac was angry, feeling that Holmes had stolen his subject matter. Kerouac’s wife convinced her husband that instead of stewing about it, he should go ahead and get his own novel written. He began writing on April 2nd and finished on the 22nd. He wrote to Cassady: “Story deals with you and me and the road […] Plot, if any, is devoted to your development from young jailkid of early days to later (present) W.C. Fields saintliness … step by step in all I saw. […] I’ve telled all the road now. Went fast because the road is fast … wrote whole thing on strip of paper 120 foot long (tracing paper that belonged to Cannastra) — just rolled it through typewriter and in fact no paragraphs … rolled it out on floor and it looks like a road.”
Once Kerouac finished that draft, he rewrote it, typing it up on normal paper. Then he tried to get it published, but it was rejected again and again. In 1957, “On the Road” was finally published by Viking, who had previously turned it down. Viking editors insisted that Kerouac change the names of real people so they couldn’t be sued for libel, so Neal Cassady became Dean Moriarty.
When it was published, “On the Road” got mixed reviews, but its success made Kerouac famous — and uncomfortable. He wrote to a friend: “I really wanta dig into my art like a maniac and pay no attention to promotion (which everybody wants me to do … what a waste of sweet life!)”
His books include “The Dharma Bums” (1958), “Doctor Sax” (1959),”Visions of Cody” (1960), and “Big Sur” (1962).
Most people in Central Florida are familiar with what has become known as “The Kerouac House”, located in College Park, a suburb of Orlando Florida. It is the home Kerouac lived in beginning in July of 1957 and while writing “The Dharma Bums” between November 26 and December 7, 1957. To begin writing “The Dharma Bums”, Kerouac typed onto a ten-foot length of teleprinter paper, in order to avoid interrupting his flow for paper changes, just as he had done six years previously for “On the Road.” Today, the home serves as a writer-in-residence facility for the Kerouac Project.
Kerouac died at 5:15 on the morning of October 21, 1969 due to internal hemorrhaging caused by cirrhosis of the liver as a result of his lifetime of heavy drinking. He was 47 years old.
Thanks to “The Writer’s Almanac” for portions of the above.
Do you remember the Book of the Month Club? I can recall that my mom was a member when I was growing up. You could initially join by choosing 3 or 4 books from their catalog of bestselling books and authors for the low, low cost of $1 each, IF you agreed to purchase a subsequent minimum number of books (usually 2 more books) at the regular price over a certain time period (usually a year, sometimes 2 years) from their monthly offering that arrived in the mail like clockwork. There was typically a “Featured” book that was priced below the retailer’s price and a small catalog of other books, fiction and nonfiction, that you could peruse.
If you wanted the featured tome you did nothing and you would be sent that offering the following month with a bill for it which included shipping and handling. If you did NOT want the featured book you had to return the enclosed “reply card” to prevent it from being mailed and billed to you. You could also use the reply card to order books from their small monthly catalog.
The Writer’s Almanac provides this history of the Book of the Month Club:
The first Book-of-the-Month Club book was published on this day in 1926. The club was the brainchild of Henry Scherman, a former copywriter for J. Walter Thompson in New York City. He built the idea off of the enormous popularity of the “Little Leather Library,” which he also co-founded. The Little Leather Library was a mail-order venture that published classic books in a small format and bound in cheap leather. Scherman and his partner, Robert K. Haas, wanted to perform a similar service for new fiction.
They devised a plan to send a new book to their subscribers every month. The books were chosen by a Selection Committee, whose names and qualifications were made known to subscribers. The club’s first selection committee included such luminaries as Christopher Morley, Dorothy Canfield, and Heywood Broun. The club targeted a middle-brow demographic; or, as committee chair Henry Seidel Canby described a typical subscriber: “the average intelligent reader, who has passed through the usual formal education in literature, who reads books as well as newspapers and magazines, who, without calling himself a litterateur, would be willing to assert that he was fairly well read and reasonably fond of good reading.”
The first “book of the month” was Lolly Willowes, or The Loving Huntsman, by English novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner. It was about a widow who moves to a town that is involved in witchcraft. The novel wasn’t a huge hit among the club’s original 4,000 subscribers, but that didn’t stand in the way of the venture’s ultimate success. Twenty years later, the subscriber base had grown to 550,000. Membership numbers peaked in 1988, with 1.5 million subscribers; the advent of the Internet and huge chain bookstores spelled its eventual decline.
Were you ever a member of the Book of the Month Club? Give it a shout out in the comments.
Yeah, that’s the way it usually goes…
On National Grammar Day, we honor our language and its rules, which help us communicate clearly with each other. In turn, clear communication helps us understand each other—a critical component of peaceful relations. March 4th is observed as National Grammar Day not only as a date, but with the imperative to March forth on March 4th to speak well, write well, and help others do the same!
I first discovered Dr. Seuss when I was 5 years old and in kindergarten. Our bookshelf contained “The Cat in the Hat”, “The Cat in the Hat Comes Back”, “Horton Hears a Who”, “Green Eggs and Ham”, and “How The Grinch Stole Christmas” and perhaps a few others that I can’t recall for sure.
Born Theodor Seuss Geisel on March 2, 1904 in Springfield, MA, he was a poet, writer and cartoonist who published 46 children’s books in his lifetime.
In 1997, the National Education Association designated National Read Across America Day as a day to celebrate reading and to be held on the school day closest to March 2nd, the birthday of Dr. Seuss.
Dr. Seuss passed away on September 24, 1991 in La Jolla, CA at the age of 87. But he still lives on in all the wonderful children’s books he wrote and published.
After reading and reviewing “What Every Author Should Know”, I leapt at the chance to receive an Advance Reading Copy (ARC) of Deb Vanasse’s latest book for writers, “Write Your Best Book.”
Vanasse begins by dissecting the “exceptional book” which includes high concept, transcendence, and how we’re all wired for story (or narrative) from infancy to adulthood, as well as how each writer needs to be aware of their audience, their genre, and why we write.
She then covers where ideas come from, rabbit trails and strategic meandering when we daydream, and the seemingly eternal question of whether to outline or not.
With the above foundation, Vanasse has prepared us to cover the ingredients of writing our next book, such as a great beginning, character, conflict, plot and plot pacing, back story and endings. She also discusses the beauty of language, voice, metaphor, dialogue and fine tuning the effect of revision.
Finally, the book examines the habits of effective writers, rituals, scheduling, avoiding time sucks and the importance of always writing.
One of my favorite features of the book is the “Try This” suggestion at the end of each section, helping you put the offered advice into action in your own writing.
Like “What Every Author Should Know”, Vanasse lays out the foundational basics that every writer either needs to know or has experienced. This isn’t some “pie in the sky” book that offers platitudes and not much more. This is the nuts and bolts of producing the best book you can.
If you truly want to make your own next book into the best it can be, Deb Vanasse’s latest work will give you all the guidance you need to Write Your Best Book.
I follow a Twitter feed called VeryOldPics and this one caught my eye.
Theists have their idea of heaven (whatever it may be), but this is my idea of heaven.
Back on Sunday, February 8th, New York Times bestselling author Tim Dorsey was appearing late in the afternoon at the downtown branch of the Orlando Library. I really wanted to go, but I already had a previous engagement that prevented my attendance.
I first met Mr. Dorsey almost a decade ago in February of 2006 at an Orlando Writers Conference in Maitland, FL where he was the keynote speaker and subsequently reviewed one of his books that I bought during that meeting. This is the book review I wrote in April of that year.
This past February I attended my first Orlando Writers Conference up in Maitland where the featured keynote speaker was Tim Dorsey, a former newspaper reporter and editor who has written eight novels featuring his principle protagonist, Serge Storms, a light-hearted but obsessive serial killer who limits his murders to the same kinds of bad guys we’d all like to “off” once in while. Mr. Dorsey was so funny during his speech that I had to see if his writing was comparable, so I purchased “Triggerfish Twist” from him that evening. Due to having a stack of books in waiting, I did not get to start reading this one until last week.
In “Triggerfish Twist” mild-mannered Jim Davenport, a corporate efficiency consultant, is moved with his wife and children by his company from the Midwest to beautiful, balmy Tampa, Florida and a house on a typical residential grid street named Triggerfish Lane.
I thought my neighborhood was weird, but this one has it beat all to pieces. There’s the redneck little league coach across the street who has some real control issues and a rabid pit bull; the house full of college students who do nothing but stay drunk and/or high; Rastafarians who don’t smoke dope; pizza deliverymen who race through the neighborhood; four spunky old ladies known as the E-Team (all their first names begin with the letter “E”); an old man who pretends to be the rich head of a large corporation that likes to take test-drives in Rolls-Royces and Ferraris; a speed-snorting landlord who took an infomercial real-estate course and is intent on running any normal homeowners out of the neighborhood by filling his rental houses with the strangest people he can find; and of course, the newest tenants in the neighborhood, Serge Storms and his stripper girlfriend Sharon plus Serge’s coke-addicted crony, Coleman.
Within 320 pages, Dorsey weaves a seemingly complicated tale of multiple threads int a cohesive yet wild ride of a story. Jim loses his job shortly after arriving and accidentally kills a member of the notorious McGraw Brothers Gang. Jim is cleared by the police, but not by the other brothers who are intent on revenge. Jim is also being stalked by a former bank employee who was “downsized” because of a consulting report that wasn’t written by Jim, but has his name on it nonetheless. In the meantime Serge, who has an obsessive knowledge of Florida lore and trivia, poses as a college professor for a semester (even being invited to be the commencement speaker at the graduation ceremony) just for fun and systematically, but with a dash of fun and style, murders a whole host of bad people. By the time the climatic finale arrives the laughs and the body count are piled up higher than the SunTrust Center building in downtown Orlando.
I know what you’re thinking; a funny serial killer? I had my doubts too before reading but Dorsey does pull it off with a style that is part crazy, part outlandish, part unbelievable and all funny.
That being said, Dorsey’s style is like the chocolate dessert I sampled today…much too rich for constant consumption. I liked the story and found it enjoyable and entertaining, but I’ll wait a while before reading another of his books. Otherwise I think I’d make myself sick in a hurry.
My new business cards arrived in the mail yesterday.
The following story about James Joyce is told by Stephen King in his famous memoir, “On Writing” (which I need to read again).
A friend came to visit James Joyce one day and found the great man sprawled across his writing desk in a posture of utter despair.
“James, what’s wrong?” the friend asked. “Is it the work?”
Joyce indicated assent without even raising his head to look at his friend. Of course it was the work; isn’t it always?
“How many words did you get today?”, the friend pursued.
Joyce (still in despair, still sprawled facedown on his desk) replied, “Seven.”
“Seven? But James… that’s good, at least for you.”
“Yes,” Joyce said, finally looking up, “I suppose it is but…I don’t know what order they go in!”
Writers know that it can be exactly like that some days. Sometimes you can even achieve a full page’s worth of words in a day, but you will sit there and agonize endlessly over whether all those words are in the best order they can be in to get your message or feeling across. It CAN be despairing when you want to convey something through the use of your written words and just don’t feel like you are talented enough or skillful enough to do so properly.
Thankfully, Joyce did manage to produce a few works of literary art of the highest level.
Despite our feeling otherwise, we can do so too.
Fourteen year old Kevin Gillooly and his mother retreat to her father’s Appalachian mountain home in eastern Kentucky following the horrific death of Kevin’s three year old brother. There, both mother and son heal under the wise and caring influence of “Pops”, while Kevin begins a friendship with local boy Buzzy Fink that will be tested as Kevin navigates the secrets and behaviors of a mountain people that are strange to him, deals with the hate crime murder of a beloved town resident, and watches his grandfather oppose the power hungry actions of a local man who wants to continue his coal-mining company’s process of blowing tops off of mountains to obtain scarcer and scarcer veins of coal.
By the time a mysterious figure appears trying to kill Kevin, Buzzy and Pops as they go on a two week “tramp” up and down the beloved mountain property of Pops, Kevin finds he will have to dig deep to apply what his grandfather has been patiently teaching him and what his family’s heritage will make of him.
“The Secret Wisdom of the Earth” is a classic coming of age story blended with a story of personal and familial redemption that initially intrigues the reader and then relentlessly pulls said reader along as the plotting and pace leave no other choice. The first half of the book I found myself reluctant to put down while the latter half was impossible to leave.
Christopher Scotton is a writer who writes with such compelling imagery (“…diligently weaving his anger into a smothering blanket…” is one of the early and favorite phrases that grabbed my attention) and ability to move the story at the pace it demands that you would never guess this is his first published work. His characters are, for the most part, full and complete, giving the reader the feeling that he knows who these people are and why they do what they do. No small feat and one that many writers find difficult or impossible to accomplish.
I highly recommend “The Secret Wisdom of the Earth” and look forward to Mr. Scotton’s next work.
Below is a book review I wrote back on February 20, 2006 for a now-defunct blog. It’s hard to believe this was nine years ago. In that time, Morris has written three additional books starring Zack Chasteen; “Bermuda Schwartz”, “A Deadly Silver Sea”, and “Baja Florida”, all of which I need to read…soon.
You may recall a little over a month ago I went to the downtown branch of the Orlando Public Library to meet and listen to Bob Morris, our own local celebrity author who used to write a column for The Orlando Sentinel and went on to write and serve as editor for several travel magazines. While there I bought both his novels (his first forays into fictional writing) to read and I finally got finished with the first, “Bahamarama.”
And I don’t say “finally” like it was a difficult book to read; quite the contrary, the story and pacing made it a book I did not want to put down. For me it has been a matter of time and a schedule so full that I haven’t even had time to put up the 2006 calendar I received as a Christmas gift yet. No joke, it’s sitting in a corner of my living room with the plastic skinwrap still around it and here it is almost the end of February. So my “pleasure reading” time has been relegated to bedtime, where I crawl into bed, open the book and read for maybe 10 minutes before my eyes rebel by closing and I place the bookmark where I left off and turn off the nightstand lamp.
“Bahamarama” introduces us to the book’s central character (as well as that of the second novel, “Jamaica Me Dead“) Zack Chasteen, a former strong safety for the Miami Dolphins who is just getting out of the Federal Penitentiary in the panhandle after serving 2 years for a crime he did not commit. Everyone but his girlfriend and closest friends still think he is guilty of the crime, his boat was seized by the government and auctioned off and it looks like he is going to have to sell the house that has been in his family for generations to have some money while he looks for a job. But his first plan is to join his girlfriend in the Bahamas where she is on a photo shoot for the magazine she publishes. Before he can meet up with her, his girlfriend is kidnapped and held for ransom and her ex-boyfriend is murdered, forcing Zack to enlist the aid of his best friend and a local police inspector as he attempts to solve the murder mystery and rescue his girlfriend before the kidnappers kill her. The icing on the cake is that the criminals who originally got him in trouble with the law are chasing him down as well, claiming he has something of theirs that they want back.
The story is fast-paced and loaded with action, mystery and a colorful cast of characters that bring excitement and diversity to every page of the book. One of the best things is that Morris, being a native Floridian, brings a certain realism and knowledge to the story that other natives (like myself) or even long-time residents of our fair state can appreciate and relate to when reading. And as a frequent visitor to the Caribbean, he can authoritatively write about that setting in his stories as well.
With breakneck speed and pacing, Morris takes us on a rollercoaster ride of a story as we try to solve the murder mystery along with Chasteen and wonder if he’ll rescue his girlfriend in time or ever clear his name. If you haven’t read it yet, this is a great book to take to the beach this summer, where you can soak up the sun, sand and sea atmosphere of the story while doing the same thing in reality.
“Bahamarama” is out in paperback now and available at local bookstores as well as online.
Laura Ingalls Wilder was born on this date in 1867 in Pepin, Wisconsin. I have to admit I’ve never read any of her books, though I used to immensely enjoy the TV series “Little House on the Prairie” starring Melissa Gilbert as Laura Ingalls Wilder during the part of her life spent in Minnesota.
And I drove by one of her residences when I was working in Iowa in 2008.
Here’s a short biography of her life, courtesy of The Writer’s Almanac:
She grew up with three sisters in a pioneer family. Her father was a restless man, and every couple of years he packed the family into their covered wagon and moved on in search of a better place. During her childhood, she lived in a series of shacks, cabins, and sod houses in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Kansas, Iowa, and South Dakota. She began teaching when she was 15 years old; she didn’t like being a teacher but she needed to help support her family. Three years later, she married the most eligible bachelor farmer in town, and they had a daughter, named Rose. They eventually settled in the Ozarks in Missouri, where Wilder lived for the remainder of her life.
They lived a hard life of manual labor on their Missouri farm, which included chickens, a dairy, and an apple orchard. Their daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, left as soon as she could and became a journalist in San Francisco. When she built them a beautiful new stone cottage on their farm, they were skeptical, and when she bought them a car, her father ran it into a tree.
Laura Ingalls Wilder had begun writing under the name Mrs. A.J. Wilder for the Missouri Ruralist and the St. Louis Star Farmer, articles like “Economy in Egg Production,” “Spic, Span and Beauty,” “Just a Question of Tact,” and “Making the Best of Things.” At the age of 63, she decided to try writing an autobiography. She wrote by hand with a pencil. And by the time she was finished, she had filled six lined tablets with her story, which she called Pioneer Girl.
Wilder gave the rough draft of her manuscript to Lane, who used her contacts to get it into the hands of Virginia Kirkus, a children’s book editor at Harper & Brothers. Kirkus read the manuscript on the train ride home to Connecticut from New York, and she was so fascinated by the story that she missed her stop. She bought it and offered Wilder a three-book contract. Little House in the Big Woods (1932) and its sequel Farmer Boy (1933), about the boyhood of Wilder’s husband, Almanzo, were a big success even though bookselling was slow during the Depression. Wilder continued to write books about her childhood, drawing on her own memories and those of her relatives. She earned enough to be financially comfortable for the rest of her life.
Her books include Little House on the Prairie (1935), On the Banks of Plum Creek (1937), and These Happy Golden Years (1943).
Little House in the Big Woods ends: “She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the fire-light and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.”
And you may have noticed that today’s Google image is a scene from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie.
It’s the birthday of novelist Charles Dickens, born in Portsmouth, England in 1812.
By the mid-1850s, Dickens was a popular and successful writer; his novels included The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836-37), The Adventures of Oliver Twist (1837-39), The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39), A Christmas Carol(1843), and David Copperfield (1849-50).
In 1856 Dickens helped his friend Wilkie Collins write a play called The Frozen Deep. Dickens hired the cast, which included an 18-year-old actress named Ellen Ternan. Forty-five-year-old Dickens fell in love with Ellen and became increasingly frustrated by his marriage of more than 20 years and the 10 children he had to support; he felt that his wife, Catherine, did not match his energy and intellect. Dickens’ affair with Ellen Ternan lasted for the rest of his life, but he was very careful to keep her out of the public eye, even using fake names to buy her homes.
Dickens went to work on his final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, but before he could finish it he died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 58.
Over at AbeBooks, they’ve assembled a list of 11 Charles Dickens Facts. Here are my rankings of 3 of the 11 facts. The strangest is number 5 where we find out Chuck stuffed his pet raven when it died; The funniest is number 7 in which he gave all 10 of his children nicknames, including Skittles (how did he know about the modern-day fruit-flavored candy back in the 1800’s?); and the coolest is number 11 because every writer should have a secret door that looks like a bookshelf.
I’ve read Dickens’ Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield and A Tale of Two Cities. Which of his works have you read?
It was 78 years ago today that “Of Mice and Men” by John Steinbeck was first published. I remember reading it for the first time in my 10th grade American Literature class 47 years ago and it’s probably time for me to read it again in the near future. Because of its vulgarity, offensive and sometimes racist language, it appears on the American Library Association‘s list of the Most Challenged Books of 21st Century. It also is ranked number 6 on Amazon’s Top 100 Books of all Time list.
Here’s what today’s The Writer’s Almanac had to say about the book.
Of Mice and Men was Steinbeck’s fifth novel (he had also published an excerpt from a novel and a book of short stories). His first novel, Cup of Gold (1929), was a total flop — it didn’t even earn back the $250 that Steinbeck received as an advance. That year, he wrote to a friend: “The book was an immature experiment written for the purpose of getting all the wise cracks (known by sophomores as epigrams) and all the autobiographical material (which hounds us until we get it said) out of my system. […] I think I shall write some very good books indeed. The next one won’t be good nor the next one, but about the fifth, I think will be above the average.”
He began work on Of Mice and Men in 1935. He and his wife, Carol, were living in his family’s three-room vacation cottage near Monterey Bay. It wasn’t meant for year-round living, but Steinbeck built a fireplace and closed off the porch, and they made do. Carol worked as a secretary, and Steinbeck’s parents gave him an allowance of $25 a month. Steinbeck’s new book was titled Something That Happened, but then he read the poem “To a Mouse” by Robert Burns, and was struck by the lines: “The best laid schemes o’ mice and men / gang aft agley, / An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, / For promis’d joy!” So he retitled his work Of Mice and Men. Steinbeck wanted to write in a new style, more like a play than a novel. He considered his audience for the story to be poor working-class people, and he thought they would be more likely to see a play than read a book.
Steinbeck had worked in California as a farm laborer, and he wanted to write about the terrible conditions he witnessed. Of Mice and Men tells the story of two laborers who are best friends: Lennie, who is big and strong with limited mental capabilities, and George, who is small and smart and looks out for Lennie. The story ends tragically after Lennie, unaware of his own strength, kills a woman. Steinbeck based the character of Lennie on a real farm laborer he knew, who killed a ranch foreman with a pitchfork after one of his friends was fired. Steinbeck made sure that the novel was tightly plotted and heavy on dialogue, ready to be adapted to the stage.
Steinbeck wrote in the spring of 1936: “My new work is really going and that makes me very happy — kind of an excitement like that you get near a dynamo from breathing pure oxygen […] This work is going quickly and should get done quickly. I’m using a new set of techniques as far as I know but I am so illy read that it may have been done. Not that that matters at all.” Then his new puppy, Toby, chewed up half of the manuscript. Steinbeck was furious, but a couple of days later, he was able to write to a friend: “Minor tragedy stalked. My setter pup, left alone one night, made confetti of about half of my ms. book. Two months work to do over again. It sets me back. There was no other draft. I was pretty mad but the poor little fellow may have been acting critically. I didn’t want to ruin a good dog on a ms. I’m not sure is good at all. He only got an ordinary spanking with his punishment flyswatter.”
He was forced to start over, but work went quickly again, and he managed to get the work to his publisher a few months later. When Of Mice and Men was published, it had already been chosen by the Book-of-the-Month Club, and got great reviews. The famous playwright and director George S. Kaufman offered to produce it as a play, and Steinbeck spent a week at Kaufman’s Pennsylvania estate, where the two men worked on adapting the work for the stage. About 85 percent of the novel’s original dialogue ended up in the final play. After his week with Kaufman, Steinbeck left the East Coast. When a reporter asked him if he would stick around, he replied: “Hell no. I’ve got work to do out in California.” He refused to come back either for rehearsals or to see the final product. He did ask his publisher to call and give him a full report on the play’s opening night, but he had to go to a friend’s house to use the telephone since he didn’t have one of his own. The play was a huge hit.
Have you read “Of Mice and Men”?
As a child, I was a voracious reader (still am), and one thing my mom told me, whenever I came across a word I did not know and would ask her what it meant or how it was pronounced, was “Look it up in the dictionary.” (“Dictionary” was changed to “encyclopedia” if it was a research issue of a subject) After a few dozen times I got the hint and just naturally reached for the dictionary whenever I needed to pronounce of define a word.
Most people did not think this was normal, lol. I touched on this story about 6 years ago in this post. One Sunday, when I was 7 or 8 I think, we were going to visit a couple my parents knew and my mom said, “They don’t have any children, so bring yourself something to do while we’re visiting.”
I, of course, brought a book I was reading.
While they sat at the dining room table visiting I sat on the couch in the living room and read my book. At some point I came across a word I did not know and so I walked into the dining room and politely asked the woman if she had a dictionary I could borrow. She said she thought she did, but what did I need it for? When I told her she looked at my mom with astonishment on her face, got up to find the dictionary and returned in a few seconds and handed it to me wordlessly. Then, as I walked back to the living room, I heard her tell my mom that she thought I was just an amazing little boy, why didn’t every child do this, etc., lol.
Granted the dictionary in our home, most other homes and the elementary school library was a Webster’s Dictionary. But in junior high school, to my weird, nerdy delight, I discovered the Oxford English Dictionary. Today marks the first date of publication of the first part of the first edition (which only spanned the words, “A” to “Ant”) in 1884.
Here’s some wonderful information about the history of the Oxford English Dictionary from The Writer’s Almanac:
The Philological Society of London had conceived the idea for a new dictionary almost 30 years earlier, back in 1857, and then in 1879 they worked out an agreement with Oxford University Press to publish their ambitious project. The Society felt that the English dictionaries that existed at the time were “incomplete and deficient,” and they wished to write a new dictionary that would take into account the way the English language had developed from Anglo-Saxon times.
The dictionary, they proposed, would take 10 years to complete, fill four volumes, and amount to 6,400 pages. They were halfway (five years) into the project when they published the first volume on this day in 1884, and they’d only completed from “A” to “Ant.” In the end, the dictionary took 70 years (not 10) to complete, and it filled 10 volumes (not four) and it was 15,490 pages, more than twice as long as they’d originally estimated to their publisher. The last volume of the first edition of the dictionary was published in 1928. It defined more than 400,000 word forms, and it used 1,861,200 quotations to help illustrate these definitions.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, a Supplement to the OED was published in four volumes. And then, in 1989, a big Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was published. It’s the one you’re most likely to find in a library today. Its 21,730 pages fill up 20 volumes, and it weighs nearly 140 pounds. There are more than 615,000 definitions for words in this edition, which also contains 2,436,600 quotations.
In 1992, a CD-ROM version of the Oxford English Dictionary was published. Now the dictionary is online, where it’s constantly under revision.
Most of us can make do on a daily basis with a Webster’s, but for those who wish to delve deeper into words, the Oxford English Dictionary is the gold standard.
Getting this information out there early so that folks have as much time as possible to prepare to take part in International Book Giving Day on February 14, 2015.
International Book Giving Day is “a day dedicated to getting new, used and borrowed books in the hands of as many children as possible.”
Readers of this blog already know that I’m all for getting books out to people, and getting into the hands of children is a great opportunity to contribute to the life of a child. I find it difficult to imagine what my life might have been like if I had not had books in it from the moment I could read.
If you plan on taking part in International Book Giving Day this year, I’d love to hear of your actions in the comment below, either before or after the official day.
My favorite works of Poe’s are “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Masque of the Red Death”, both written in 1850 by Poe and read by me (the first time) in junior high school. But he is most well known for “The Raven.”
From The Writer’s Almanac:
Today is the birthday of Edgar Allan Poe, born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1809. His poem “The Raven” is one of his best-known works, and it is also one of the most popular poems in the English language. Even people who have no interest in poetry can usually recite a line or two. It’s narrated by a studious young man who is mourning the loss of his lover, Lenore. When a talking raven visits him on a bleak December night, we follow his descent from amusement into madness. At the time he was writing the poem, Poe’s young wife, Virginia, was slowly dying of tuberculosis. Poe may have gotten the idea for a talking raven from a Dickens novel: Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of ‘Eighty (1841). There was a talking raven in the Dickens book too, but it didn’t bear much resemblance to the sinister bird of Poe’s poem.
Poe brought the poem to his friend George Rex Graham, hoping he would publish it in Graham’s Magazine. Graham turned him down, but gave him $15 anyway. The American Review agreed to publish it, and paid the poet $9. It appeared in the magazine’s February 1845 issue, under the name Quarles. It was also published around that time in the Evening Mirror under Poe’s name. “The Raven” was an instant sensation and made Poe a household word. One critic called it subtle, ingenious, and imaginative, and predicted, “It will stick to the memory of everybody who reads it.” Over the next several months, “The Raven” appeared in journals throughout the country and it was such a rousing success that Wiley and Putnam published two of Poe’s books that year: a collection of prose called Tales and also The Raven and Other Poems(1845). That was his first book of poetry in 14 years.
Saturday, January 24, 2015 will see the observance of the first National Readathon Day, sponsored by Penguin Random House, GoodReads, Mashable, and the National Book Foundation.
The purpose is to raise funds to “…educate, tutor, create and sustain a lifelong love of reading.” and to raise awareness of the benefits of reading. Even if you’re unable to donate financially, you can support the effort by participating in the Readathon by “joining readers across America in a marathon reading session on Saturday, January 24. From Noon – 4 PM in our respective time zones, we will sit and read a book in our own home, library, school or bookstore.”
You can get more details here.
