Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“Write quickly and you will never write well; write well, and you will soon write quickly.”―Marcus Fabius Quintilianus
I get lots of email from this blog’s readers about books with the number one question being: Why haven’t you written any books lately?
The short answer is nobody asked me to. I also haven’t pitched any book ideas to publishers in a long time either and while in the past few years some publishers have approached me about writing a book but they never closed the deals. For instance…
One publisher asked me to write a book about black and white digital photography and I was excited about the idea. They asked for an outline and a sample chapter to see if I could write a photography book. The 37 other books I’d written were not enough proof, it would seem. I submitted the requested material along with 30 plus illustrations. A committee reviewed my images and text—nobody in book publishing likes to make a decision if they can blame it on someone else if the book doesn’t sell. They liked my outline but didn’t like the sample chapter. They never told me why they didn’t like it and asked me to write another chapter. I declined telling them I already had already seen that movie and Lucy always pulls the football away at the end.
There was a time when the publisher of my last four books talked to me writing a book about shooting with Micro Four-thirds mirrorless cameras and I was excited about this idea too. The problem was that instead of text and images, he wanted the book to be a series of horizontal photographs along with captions. I understand minimizing costs and I’m sure book designers are expensive. This is a trend I’ve seen in other recent photo books, including one written by a friend that was clearly not designed; pictures were just slapped onto pages with no concern about their relationship to the text. The mirrorless project went nowhere for reasons that I’m still not sure about. And now the publisher has moved on from publishing books to video production. But he’s still trying to sell all the books they previously published, so you can still pick up some of mine including Studio Lighting Anywhere.
My Reading Habits
As I type this I am reading my 56th book of 2023 (see below) and not surprisingly, to regular readers of these posts, book number 55 was a Rex Stout Nero Wolfe book–Where There’s a Will. So that brings up a question I’m also asked from time-to-time: Are you a fast reader? I don’t think so. I am a lover of words and like to take my time reading. If the author provides them, I really enjoy experiencing their use of words and will often read a well-turned phrase more than once for the sheer enjoyment of savoring the language. Some writers can create magic with their use of language, some do not. For the latter group, I enjoy the plot, the characters and, if you will, the ride. For others, like Rex Stout, reading their words is a magical experience, at least it is for me.
To further answer the question about being a fast reader, I spend more time reading books than, say, watching television. We have a 4K OLED TV that Mary calls it our “home theater” but it is a far cry from what my definition of “home theater” is. Mary seldom watches TV but we have a few streaming series we like we watch when she has the time; we don’t have cable or satellite. Me? I prefer to watch movies and i have a modest collection of films in DVD, Blu-ray and 4K formats. (Check out Joe’s Movie Club posts and videos if that topic is of interest.)
What I’m Reading
I’m not a conspiracy theorist* but I lived through the times the next group of books cover. Even though I was, more or less, an adult during the sixties my own life was so busy that I didn’t pay attention to many details about what was going on outside my own little bubble. Years later these books have helped me put it these days into perspective:
Book number 56 in my “Books Read in 2023” is Too Many Bullets by Max Allan Collins, which is the latest in his Nathan Heller series of well researched historical fact/fiction books. This books opens with the assassination of Robert Kennedy providing breathtaking details in an almost “you are there” filmic quality of a type I haven’t read in many books. I ‘m only part way through it and after those early pages it starts to settle down and then you read one character asking, “what about the girl in the polka dot dress?/” NO SPOILERS. And from that point the book erupts forward like a rocket.
If you aren’t already reading this series of books I highly recommend it it. In the back of all the Nathan Heller books, Collins always includes actual historical information and reference material and his two books about the JFK assassination—Target: Lancer and Ask Not—introduced me to the non-fiction book JFK and The Unspeakable by
A note from Joe: If you click any of the links for any books that are mentioned in these posts, Amazon pays me a small commission BUT it does not increase the cost of the books (or movies) to you. It all goes to help support this blog and cover the expense of operating it. And if you do, many thanks!.
*Joe’s Movie Club: I am not normally a fan of