My Hands Were Clean by Tom Bradley

			My Hands Were Clean Price: $5.00		2 used & new from $5.00
It's just ephing insanely brilliant,  Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?) This review is from: My Hands Were Clean (Kindle Edition) You will either love this slim psycho-memoir-prose-poem-mind-trip or you will hate it. I can't imagine any reader falling in the middle. This is evocative, provocative, balls-out writing, and in all the love and hate to come, I want to cast the weight of one overwhelmingly normal, middle-aged literary warhorse on the love side. MY HANDS WERE CLEAN goes down like Hunter S. Thompson, Salvador Dali, or the intricate work of that lady who tatted stories into lace during her tenure at a Victorian insane asylum. There are uncomfortable moments when you wonder if the author is pranking you and exhilarating moments when you feel like you're partying with Iggy Pop. I salute any reader brave enough to take it on. Quoting from the opening pages: "The eating of some medium-strength acid might be in order."

BEAUTIFUL SOON ENOUGH by Margo Berdeshevsky

Gorgeous, gorgeous writing,  Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?) This review is from: Beautiful Soon Enough (Paperback) I loved this book for the same reasons I love Paris. It's rich in emotional history. The architecture of it treats beauty and art as necessities. Sensuality and sense memory are everything. Lovely, lovely prose by a fearless, magnificently talented writer.

Cloud Atlas

  In keeping with my longstanding "read it before you see the movie" rule, I'm using my post-op downtime to inhale David Mitchell's amazing novel. Before I go, I'll also revisit Omer Mozaffar's "Six Keys to Cloud Atlas."

LAST MAN OUT OF EDEN by Dan Holloway

gotta love a good kick in the head,  Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?) This review is from: Last Man Out of Eden (Kindle Edition) I'm addicted to little poetry books on Kindle, and this is an excellent one. It's gut-wrenching and neck-tightening in turns, hard to expose oneself to - which is often the case with truth. I just love this writer. I've met him only once in person, but he radiated an amazing energy, which made me go out and buy his books. Sure enough, he turns out to be an incredibly talented wordsmith. This book of poems brings that word to mind because it's exactly that sort of molten, pounding, clanging craftwork. My favorite moment, from "Her Body": She is not the sum of all who went before. Her body's not a metaphor. Her unkissed lips are not a funeral pyre, Her gaping wrists are not the mouths of liars, Her clitoris is not the primal fire (the truth of it is infinitely higher.) Yeah. It's like that pretty much throughout. I would love to hear Holloway perform some of these in person.

Now That We Found Love

Adrian White's DANCING TO THE END OF LOVE

unexpected, chilling and beautifully written

DANCING TO THE END OF LOVE has been on my TBR list since I read - and loved - Adrian White's novel An Accident Waiting to Happen. This one's kept me up until after 2 AM. I couldn't stop reading until the surprising and beautifully wrought end.

This story winds like a spiral staircase around a fatally flawed protagonist who plainly says about himself, "I'm not the right man for anyone in her right mind." With a chilling frankness, he lays out both his ugliest intentions and his heartbroken regrets. There's something very Camus about this solitary man as he roams the world, intersecting the lives of various women, manipulating people he encounters in a casual - almost sporting - way, until he's grabbed and brutalized by authorities who suspect him of terrorist activities. The ordeal is described with the same detached sorrow as his manipulative sexual encounters, but we begin to see a depth in him that gives us hope as the story winds back to where it began.

Adrian White is a masterful writer. Readers who are smart enough and open-minded enough to trust him for the duration of the telling will be rewarded with a story that's rich in imagery and moral complication and ultimately brings redemption in a most unexpected way.

Originally posted on Amazon.com as Joni L. Rodgers

Neal Pollack's JEWBALL

Two words: Neal. Pollack. (Or Read. Jewball.)

As a longtime Neal Pollack fan, I've been waiting patiently for this release since the sample chapter zinged my interest a few months ago. Finally got to read JEWBALL on a flight back from NYC tonight, and it did not disappoint. It's a smart, funny, thought-provoking mover/shaker of a novel. (You know you're into a good book when you hear yourself say, "Dang! We're landing already?")

This high caliber of indie published fiction gives me hope for the future of American lit. Here's an author in the full presence of his craft, taking creative control and (sorry to mix sports metaphors) hitting it out of the park

Originally posted on Amazon.com as Joni L. Rodgers.

The Illustrated Gaff (my favorite binder memes)

Last night in the presidential debate, Mitt Romney's handlers must had experienced a collective palm-to-forehead gasp when he said that his request for women candidates for his cabinet yielded "binders full of women." First of all, is it really such an ordeal to come up with qualified women for those positions? He gets special credit for the afterthought that it would look good to have some women on his staff? It would be easy to get serious about the subtext of the gaff. But it's a lot more fun to just hold it up to ridicule.

A few of the greatest hits:

GLASS GUARDIAN by Linda Gillard

			THE GLASS GUARDIAN Price: $2.99
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful  Quickly becoming one of my favorite authors,  Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?) This review is from: THE GLASS GUARDIAN (Kindle Edition) Linda Gillard keeps making me read books that I wouldn't normally read, and I love that. I'm willing to open my mind because her writing is just so very, very good. I suppose this book would be labeled as a "paranormal romance" in the world that feels a need to label things, but (as with other Linda Gillard books I've read) the standard labels don't prepare you for the beautiful character development, wit, depth and insight within. This is a terrific book: an engaging love story in an evocative setting with rich characters and real insights about love, life, solitude and connection.

Bald Ambition: Lisa Hamilton takes her show to NYC

Here's the Kickstarter video for Lisa Hamilton's workshop performance of the one-woman show based on my memoir. I love the poster! Gorgeous.

I wish I could take any credit here, but when Lisa first approached me a few years ago, I was so won over, all I did was step back and say, "Run with it girl!" I've seen the show twice. Lisa blew the doors off the place and remained very true to the original text. It's thrilling to see this book that means so much to me experience this amazing reincarnation. Go, girl, go!

The Tao of Mac

Gary sprained his hand last night at work, and it's swollen up like one of those old fashioned baseball mitts. For years I've kept bags of frozen peas on hand for the purpose of icing my aching wrists and hands after hours of typing. I got one out, and it was frosted solid. I realized I haven't had to ice my hands since Gary gave me this MacBook Air for Christmas.

I'm not one of those Apple heads. (I haven't been thrilled with my decision to switch from a Droid to iPhone - especially since a recent update left it navigating like a drunken sailor.) But I have to give credit where it's due. I love my MacBook.

Please understand, this was a profound improvement in my quality of life. There are times when my ghostwriting schedule forces me to crank out 3K words a day (and if you're a writer, you know that 3K good words means also typing 5K off-the-mark words that end up cut or reworked.) Many was the midnight hour that found me lying on the floor fighting tears of agony, my forearms decked with frosty delights from the Valley of the Jolly Green Giant.

The realization that it's been 10+ months since I had to plan for and facilitate that pain - it just blew me away. How did I not notice that? How was I not celebrating it every day?

I suppose it's because the MacBook allows me to focus on (and celebrate) what I'm writing. The presence of pain is impossible to ignore; the absence of pain is something we take (if we're lucky) completely for granted.

A hallmark of great technology: it disappears into its own functionality. Instead of cluttering and upstaging life, it provides a vehicle for it. Like a really good bass player (or a really good ghostwriter), it provides structure and soul without calling attention to itself.

This is your brain on storytelling

A fascinating little video about the astonishing physical effects of storytelling on our blood chemistry, heart rate and brain function. Makes me wonder if there's such a thing as extreme readers. Like there are extreme tasters.

Because I might be one...


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Character Actor Stephen Tobolowsky on Characterization

Unfortunately for my writing workday, yesterday was errand day. But it wasn't a total washout because it gave me an excuse to listen to veteran character actor Stephen Tobolowski's interview on the wonderful NPR show Fresh Air. Tobolowski was there hawking what sounds like an entertaining new book, The Dangerous Animals Club, which I plan to pick up, since I found this "everyman" actor so engaging. But what impressed me most was this bit about creating "small roles," which struck me as so analogous to the novelist's job in creating minor characters.

From the show's transcript (with thanks to NPR!):

DAVIES (Fresh Air contributor Dave Davies):Is it harder to get a script where you've got a small part and figure out the character? TOBOLOWSKY: Oh, it's one of the real challenges. It's what people don't expect as a difficulty of being a character actor. When you go back to the roles that have two names - Harrison Ford, Johnny Depp, those guys - everything they do is in the script, their entire day. You see them drinking coffee, you see them taking a shower sometimes. Their entire throughline is in the script. If you play their buddy, or worse the plumber of their buddy, you have a day, too, and you have a throughline to your day, too, but you have to do that work outside of the script. If - I know a lot of actors listen to this show, and I want to bring this up. One of the quick ways I use as a character actor to get into any part is I ask two questions: What is my greatest hope? What is my greatest fear? And usually you don't have a lot of time as an actor to study your part, but if you can answer those two questions, they will form a tightrope upon which almost any other question in the script can be answered, and those are the two I go for. Yeah, that is the work of being a character actor, doing that work off-camera.

I've added italics to show the spot that particularly struck me. Have you asked these two important questions of every character in your story? If not, give it a try and bring your manuscript's secondary characters to life!