Joe's Bar and Grill offers iced iced-tea, iced tea in ice tea cups. iced-tea: The drink of the working world! What do you say, sir, when you come to town? Iced-tea: Iced-tea is best iced-tea, if not the best, and we at Joe's love iced-tea. For two bucks we make you look like you've got class. We've got an electric iced-tea blender in the kitchen if you want some of that.Joe's: Where will you get off on your quest for the best iced-tea?Me: Well, I'll be over there on Main Street, drinking iced-tea, and wondering about that.Joe's: You be careful there with your teeth. You don't want to be the reason we had to close this place.
And on and on this went, including a description of how the owner met the author at Ketchum, a tiny town near Sun Valley. Joe's Bar and Grill had never been cited in anything of any note, and yet it was central to this book's story. Then the second chapter was about the woman who made the tea, and she happened to be on her way to Joe's. It just goes to show the power of "the most useless fact in history."
One book I reviewed was about the author's relationship with her boyfriend's ex-wife, who had left her in the past and had recently moved back in with him in the present. This is a fact that many books about the past use to tell the present story. Here is the narrator's recollection of what she heard about the ex-wife: "The ex-wife had had an affair with some woman, who was the wife's second ex-husband. The ex-wife's daughter told me this, having told me a lot about herself already, as an example of how we can learn all kinds of things about the people we love from strangers."
The book also mentions a couple in the present who met at Joe's Bar and Grill. At one point the narrator asked a neighbor at the restaurant where the couple went after they left Joe's and was told it was a little bar over in this small town. This was the place to which the ex-wife had gone when she arrived home. As the author's friend and neighbor of twenty years told me recently, "That's a fact I learned from that book." My neighbor, as we chatted about old books and the latest gossip, suddenly said, "There's so much we never learned about."
Then she continued, "It's a whole lot easier to write about these things than to try to make something up. I had no idea how much interesting stuff went on around me that I was never even aware of."
It's a nice feeling to know you have something in common with others. Even a writer's need to know, which is a lot more useful in knowing the past than making up stuff about it.
Monday, May 23, 2016
How to Write a Bestseller: The Two-Year ContractAuthor by BenBellaPublished by BenBella Books on May 24, 2016From Amazon's Book of the Week: In How to Write a Bestseller, the award-winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author of the memoir Cinderella’s Big Secret tells how she sold three books based on her book proposal and proposal presentation; she teaches writing the way she sold them, offering the strategies that won’t result in rejection and rejection.
In How to Write a Bestseller, Elizabeth Gilbert reveals what it takes to make the bestseller list. Gilbert will show you how you can start by having a story or idea. But this book goes far beyond the basic steps. She will teach you, based on her experience and the experience of other authors, about how to avoid obstacles and keep moving ahead, even if you get rejections and even when you have your book contract in hand.
About the author:
Elizabeth Gilbert was born and raised in New York and attended Hampshire College for one year before moving to Virginia to attend graduate school at the University of Virginia, where she began her novel in progress, The Signature of All Things, which has evolved into the memoir, Big Magic. She also wrote Fresh Manure, a collection of essays, and the memoir Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia, both New York Times bestsellers. A regular contributor to the New Yorker and her articles appear on her blog, Rumpus.com. Gilbert lives in Richmond, Virginia.
Tuesday, May 17, 2016
I finished my second reading of "The Complete Fairy Tales" by Hans Christian Andersen when I was five. I had read the tale "The Emperor's New Clothes" over and over until I finally understood it. I then used to tell the tale every time I had a party or social gathering or something fun in a class. Every time I tell the tale, someone leaves the party. All because I tell it with my first foot pointing out when the Emperor is naked and people do not believe me. I love reading the fairy tales, but some versions are not as interesting to me as others, and I have reread one particular tale many times.
In this fairy tale there is a man who has lost his wife. So he is walking through a field when a king tells him to collect as many pebbles as he can and return to the palace. A wise man says that if he can collect fifty pebbles, the king will die and another will take his place. The man goes home and gathers fifty pebbles and goes back to the king. The king takes one look at the one pebble that is not there and faints dead away. Then the wise man tells him what he did.
My favorite part of this fairy tale is the moral that comes at the end. First, if you fail, you will learn from your mistake. Second, a small step leads to a bigger step. And third, an action always has a consequence. The last couple of weeks, since I have been on the road and have had a number of things broken, stolen or destroyed. A broken window, a flat tire and a bike stolen. All because I broke a window, a fan belt and the chain on my bike. What does this mean? When I got home, I saw it. If you break it, you lose it. Don't break anything, or you lose more.
And this is another little gem: "The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. I wonder if the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence in heaven." I always tell people the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. That grass will be poison to you, and you will die.
Thursday, May 12, 2016
One of the things I have wanted to see was an honest-to-goodness firefly that did not belong to somebody in my neighborhood. So I went to the Nature Conservancy in Kensington, Delaware. There was a house that was abandoned. So I took a few photographs. And saw something much more interesting: an old boat. The boat is actually on fire. That is why I thought it was so much fun.
There was also a pond near the Nature Conservancy and it also has a firefly. What is neat about it is it belongs to the firefly. It is named Lutz' Sunfish because it was given to me by my friend, Rick Lutz, as a gift. I had an early birthday, so I kept it for almost a week, until he gave it to me. So it was a happy surprise for me to have this firefly. It is a sunfish.
It is not a happy surprise to find that I have a lot of things on my to do list and some of them are more pressing than others. Because some things require more time than others. Even though the world is shrinking, we still have plenty of things on our to do list.
So how to choose? What are the order of what is urgent and what is the order of what is not urgent. Maybe, order is not the right word. What I can think of right now is my to do list.
1. Get the furnace serviced. This has to be done by Monday. I've been dealing with this problem for almost four months. I have been putting off doing something about it because I do not have time. I am a little behind schedule on getting my taxes done. I have a to do list and the furnace is the number one to do on that list.
2. Clean the house. This is a to do list. But when you have to clean the house, and there are three days of cleaning to do, it is more than what one wants to do. It will not be done on time, but it will be done. I will not have the time to do what I would like to do. It is not always possible to do what you would like to do. I do not expect to be in perfect order all of the time. But I do expect my house to be clean.
3. Clean the house. Again, this is not done. But if something else comes up, like working on the furnace, I will not get to my house. So I have to take care of that first. That means my house is not going to get cleaned. If I don
