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Norman Mailer, Prisons and Me

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I first read, In the Belly of the Beast by Jack Abbott when I was spending a year as a reporter inside a maximum security penitentiary doing research for my book, The Hot House: Life Inside Leaven worth Prison. If you are not familiar with the Beast book or Abbott’s story, here’s a brief review. 
The son of an Irish-American solider and Chinese prostitute, Abbott had spent nearly all of his life in jails and prisons. In 1977, he learned that Normal Mailer was writing a book about Gary Gilmore, the first prisoner to be executed in 1977 after our nation re-started the death penalty ending its short constitutional hiatus.
Mailer’s book about Gilmore, The Executioner’s Song, won the Pulitzer Prize and helped revive his career.

My Mom’s Eyesight and Best-sellers

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Life threw me a curve ball a few days ago when my mother stepped into my office and said she could no longer read the dial on her over-sized watch.

I immediately suspected the worst.

About twenty years ago, my mom went in for what was supposed to be the routine removal of a cataract from her left eye. Instead, an incompetent doctor in Rapid City, South Dakota, damaged her optical nerve and blinded that eye.

My mother, being who she is, simply went on with her life.

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Books, Technology and the Future

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Three comments:

(1.)  In the early 1990s, Tom Clancy and I shared the same New York literary agent. Clancy was on a roll, having published a string of international best-sellers. He was being called the father of the “techno-thriller,” a new genre that combined accurate information – about military tactics and weapons – with a fictional adventure stories.

So I was surprised when my agent told me that Clancy was putting writing aside for a few months to concentrate of developing a video game.

Huh?

Why I wondered, would someone who was at the top of the writing game and was earning millions of dollars worldwide bother to waste time creating a computer game?

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Enough is Enough!

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The last several days have been odd. I had a discouraging telephone call with my long- time editor during which he told me that the only nonfiction books that have been selling lately are partisan political attacks on the opposition or memoirs. He rejected a fabulous true crime idea that I had proposed and said “no”  when I mentioned a possible book about a spy. He already had rejected a book that I wanted to write about homelessness and one that I had proposed about successful programs that are helping persons with mental illnesses.

As you can imagine, since all of my books have been about true crime, spies, or mental illness, it was a depressing conversation that left me wondering if I should have taken my mother’s advice and stuck around at the Washington Post .

And then —

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Publishers and Money

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A friend in publishing sent me an email saying he felt my blog entitled Do Publishers Owe Us More was unfair. You might recall that I suggested that publishers had an obligation to print books exposing social problems even if those books might not be profitable.
“70 % of all books published do not earn back their advances,” my friend wrote. “What other business operates with those losses? To incur more losses – regardless of the importance of the subject matter – would further weaken the industry.”
I’ve always been suspicious of that 70% figure.  Here’s why.Click to continue…

Thomas Silverstein, Hot House convict

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Before I began writing about the need for mental health care reform, most visitors came to my webpage to read about Thomas Silverstein, a major character in my book, The Hot House. 
 He has been held in solitary confinement since 1983 — the longest any convict has been kept isolated by the federal Bureau of Prisons.
About once a year, I get a telephone call from a reporter from some national news organization asking about him. A couple of weeks ago it was CNN Writer/Producer Stephanie Chen seeking an interview.
I used to talk about Tommy, but not anymore.Click to continue…