Last week yet another memoirist was outed (this time by her sister no less!) as nothing more than a lowly fiction writer; once again begging the question: why didn't they just publish their works as fiction in the first place?

Ego and greed, probably.

Not discounting these writers' duplicity in dealing with their publishers, what's truly troubling ( Read more... )

Driving down Flatbush with Deb a few weeks ago, we discovered the answer . . .


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A line from Woody Allen's masterful 1989 film Crimes and Misdemeanors, which is airing on TCM as I write this, reminded me that the subject of yesterday's post is nothing new:
Show business is dog-eat-dog. It's worse than dog-eat-dog: it's dog-doesn't-return-other-dog's-phone-calls.
The Internet has just taught an old dog new tricks.

Yesterday morning an old friend called from Los Angeles and recounted how earlier this month he and his band had their first real meeting with a bona fide record label. By all indications, the encounter went well and ended on a positive note with the record executive saying all good things about their music and hinting toward a time when they, ( Read more... )

An e-mail this morning from my nephew Tim, wildlife photographer and web-designer extraordinaire, got me thinking . . .

When I said goodbye to Corporate America back in 2005, among the many benefits I forsook were a company car (along with its requisite fuel and insurance), an expense account, a laptop, and wi-fi. Looking back, though, there was ( Read more... )

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A week ago yesterday morning, while I was working on the introduction to Paul Nelson's essay about Jackson Browne's The Pretender, wherein Paul wrote with stark exquisiteness about the 1976 suicide of Browne's newlywed wife, I received a call from my best friend telling me that, the night before, he had come home from work to discover that his wife ( Read more... )

If we're fortunate, we return from every journey (each of which constitutes one more leg in the overall journey that is our life) knowing a little bit more than we did upon our departure. Such was the case with our week-long trip to Salt Lake City, which equipped me to enter the new year with the following knowledge-some of which I already knew but ( Read more... )

It's been over three months since I last contributed anything to these pages and, what with my two-year anniversary in New York only two days away, it seems as good a time as any to return to the fold.

On the upside, the time away from here has been well spent--not just writing and working with my publicity clients, but enjoying family life and ( Read more... )