MEMORIES OF FIDEL

Fidel Castro has just released his 1,000 page autobiography. I knew Fidel. You'll find the beginning of our interaction and friendship below:

It was in the early ‘50s that I first met Fidel, and looking back on it now, I must admit, honestly, that I did play a role, quite innocuously really, in the revolutionary events that swept Cuba just a few, short years later. In those days I was working for the old New York Herald Tribune as the weekend restaurant critic. Fidel had come to my attention, not as politician or chef, but as a budding intellectual who had established himself as an enfant terrible among New York’s literati. . . .read the rest of my story within these pages: Little Leaves That Never Appeared in The New Yorker. 

A NEW BOOK - LITTLE LEAVES THAT NEVER APPEARED IN THE NEW YORKER

LITTLE LEAVES THAT NEVER APPEARED IN THE NEW YORKER has now been published for the Kindle. A collection of humor and satire pieces, many new, the book is priced at Amazon's ubiquitous e-book price of 99¢.

FEB 1ST AND 2ND ONLY, THERE IS NO COST FOR LITTLE LEAVES THAT NEVER APPEARED IN THE NEW YORKER  

THE CHOOSER - Two Days Only

Starting Sunday, January 15th, THE CHOOSER will be available at no cost for two days only. The promotion ends Monday, January 16th.


"A delightfully quirky novelette with a Jewish flavor set in the 1950s. The Chooser is a story of a journeyman magician seeking a new trick to boost his sagging career. An old illusionist and his young protégé offer some magical assistance."


Click on the link above or go to the cover art on the right side of the page and click there.

On Negative Campaigns

They work in practice; it's the theory that's suspect.

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The Good Old Days

"A billion here, a billion there, sooner or later it adds up to real money." Evertt Dirksen

An Excerpt From The Plot Against Marlene Dietrich (get the complete story for free)

“Don’t hang around with entertainers, huh? Just Coloreds with their dingis hangin’ out, right? I seen you around those Bojangles types. I could hold you as a material witness.”

“Oh, c’mon. You’re not going to do anything, how's that goin’ to look, me beating you out here and all. And I took the train.”

“La Guardia and the commissioner ain’t gonna like this, not at all. Hope this isn’t a murder, Rada.”

“Murder? Who said anything about murder?” Rada took a last drag on his smoke and ground it out on the concrete. The swirls of surf pulsating in his ears came into consciousness. It gushed.

He stared off at the sea, wondered about how she died, and about the Negro up the beach. Then there was a quick glance at Detective Impolitari. Rada shrugged. “ . . . .You could always pin it on the Colored boy, I suppose.” . . .

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THE DOWN AND DIRTY WAY TO CONQUER WRITERS BLOCK

I’m not a prolific writer. In fact, I’m rather slow. It’s a bit difficult to dash off five or seven thousand words a day when you write historical fiction. Worse, sometimes I encounter writers block – but I know how to conquer that.

“People don’t want to write, they only want to have written,” Dorothy Parker famously remarked. Most of us writers, at one time or another, have subscribed to that sentiment, particularly in those dry periods when we find it almost impossible to come up with anything solid to write about.

What goes on in these fallow periods? Why doesn’t the creativity we know is there flow like the headwaters of the Amazon?

Over the years writers have asked me this question in my psychotherapy practice, and I’ve certainly thought about it in my own fiction writing.

Somerset Maugham had a unique approach to writers block that I’ve incorporated in my own work, and my work with clients. Writing at the turn of the 20th century, Maugham faced a blank page on his typewriter and pecked away his name: ‘I am Somerset Maugham, I am Somerset Maugham, I am Somerset Maugham . . .’ – until something came to him. His extraordinary Freudian-laced short story ‘Rain’ came to him in just such a way.

Okay, okay, I’m getting to it. What was Maugham really doing? Well, the trick was just sitting down at the typewriter. So when clients ask me how they can overcome their own writers block, I say 'sit down at the computer and write just two sentences. Just two.' It turns out it’s like that potato chip advert, ‘bet you can’t eat just one.’ In this case two.

Really it’s a matter of overcoming inertia. If you do sit down at the computer, once you start writing, it’s a bit difficult to actually stop at just two sentences. The trick to fooling the unconscious is to sit at the computer and begin, any beginning really.

It’s a rather simple ploy, but it works! I wrote a complete first draft of The Plot Against Marlene Dietrich by using this method. Two sentences became twenty, and then two hundred and then – hey, almost a complete draft.You might want to give it a try.

Take heart, it could be worse. James Baldwin called the place he wrote in Paris (in Paris, yet!) the torture chamber – but that’s another story.
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THE PLOT AGAINST MARLENE DIETRICH - NOW ON KINDLE

Just click on the title above to go to the Amazon page for The Plot Against Marlene Dietrich (now 99¢ through July). Hope you enjoy it. Also, check out The Principal of Rivington Street also on Amazon and other e-readers.

YOU CAN CLICK HERE FOR -- THE PRINCIPAL OF RIVINGTON STREET ON AMAZON

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