Basically, there are two kinds of cooks in the kitchen: the free-form cooks, who may look at recipes for ingredient ideas, but create their own dishes by the way they feel, and the systematic cooks ,who follow recipes and ingredients to the dot. The major problem for free-form cooks is that they can rarely duplicate a dish that turns out particularly good. Professionals and better cooks are in the second category; they need to be able to reproduce a recipe exactly every time with only slight modification according to their own taste.

If you are a committed free-form cook, you may never need a thermometer, but if you want your dishes cooked to perfection, you are not likely to be without one. In fact, you’ll likely have two or three. Many professionals consider thermometers as their second most important kitchen tool, right after their knives, and will carry one around at all times.

To ensure that your oven is set at exactly the heat the dial reads, add a simple and inexpensive oven thermometer to your collection. It is easy to reset most ovens, particularly one with a digital dial. The adjustment for most non-digital models is inside the knob that dials the oven temperature. Carefully remove the knob and look for a tiny screw inside that adjusts the thermostat setting.

A candy thermometer is useful when dealing with high-temperature liquids: usually oil or melted sugar.

But the primary, and most critical, thermometer is a small, thin-stemmed digital unit. This helps in many, many different kinds of cooking tasks: having the meat, poultry, and fish cooked to perfection, not overcooked but totally safe; scalding milk without boiling; deep-frying without soaking up oil; cooking with gelatin; proofing yeast goodies; testing baking breads or potatoes for doneness; checking if the freezer and refrigerator are maintaining the correct temperatures, and so on.

Digital instant-read thin-stemmed thermometers are inexpensive, but it’s best not to buy the bottom of the line. Here are some features you should look for:

• A range from freezing to 400⁰F. With this wide range, you can dispense with candy and deep-fry thermometers.
• On/off button to extend battery life.
• Waterproof cover for keeping clean and saving it should you drop it into the dishwater.
• A clamp that attaches to sides of pots, as well as to your apron pocket.

Some cooks like a programmable thermometer with a probe that remains in the baking item while in the oven (I don’t; to me, simplest is best). You can check the progress without opening the oven door. Or if pre-programmed, it warns you when that roasting item is ready.

Totally different types are the costly infrared and laser thermometers, and many cooks consider them as unnecessary toys (myself included). They do read quickly and conveniently, but are no better than their cheaper cousins. They instantly measure the surface of a sauté pan heating up on the stove, if that’s important to you. Professionals stick to simple digitals and attach them to their apron pockets like engineers with their set of pens and pencils.

An inexpensive analog thermometer is also useful; digitals tend to lose their battery power at the most critical time. A simple analog thermometer is a nice backup on such occasions.

Your cooking can only improve when you acquire the habit of using a thermometer in the kitchen all the time, even if you are a total free-form cook.

About Columnist George Erdosh

George Erdosh is a culinary scientist, food writer and certified cooking teacher (and now a cookbook reviewer) with a strong science and research background (Ph.D., McGill University, Montreal). Originally an exploration geologist for some 35 years, he switched career to be a high-end caterer, a business he ran for over 10 years, before switching to food writing and running cooking classes.

He is the author of 10 published food-related books: a six-book series for young readers Cooking throughout American History and The African-American Kitchen; Start and Run a Catering Business (in its 4th edition, translated into five languages), Tried and True Recipes from a Caterer’s Kitchen, and What Recipes Don’t Tell You, as well as numerous articles in magazines and newspapers.

Contact George with questions or problems at howfoodswork@volcano.net.

Writing hot sex is. . .hard.

I wrote a romance novel when I was sixteen. I’d hardly even been kissed— all my education on the subject was from dog-eared, coverless bodice rippers procured at garage sales. To my adolescent mind, these provided all the “education” I needed. I scribbled The Pirate’s Treasure at camp as a series of installments I read aloud each night to my giggling cabinmates. Fabulously tawdry, it featured many of the following words, which should be avoided in any actually hot sex scenes:

Turgid
Hairy
Throbbing
Slippery
Veined
Twitching
Swarthy
Rosebuds (of either the upper or lower kind)
Pulsating
Moist

While I’m not a romance writer per se, writing a good sex scene is indispensable in any writer’s arsenal, and will usually come up at least once in every novel. (Right now I’m “doing” a romantic suspense, and it’s come up more than usual.) As important and commonplace as writing sex is, it’s actually not that easy.

Over the years I’ve come to believe in a state called “reader’s brain”—a semi-hypnotized trance in which the reader seamlessly enters the writer’s world, and voluntarily—as in a good movie—suspends disbelief and embarks upon a journey filled with sounds, smells and experiences they will probably never come across in their own messy, annoying, boring real lives.

This is the joy of reading sex. And since we’re being honest, the joy of writing it too.

And those words listed above, those mood-killing words, are the sand in the vagina of the reader at a critical moment.

The best sex scenes are anchored in details that bring the reader into the bedroom with the characters—but are never tacky or clichéd.

The tender spiral of an ear.

The elegant turn of a shoulder, the shadow of a pulse in the neck.

“Please. Have mercy.” A husky voice, vibrating with need like prayer.

The slow, meticulous act of removing a high heeled shoe. (And leaving the other one on.)

The sucking of a finger, drawing patterns on a naked body. (What are the patterns, wonders the reader—and where will they end?)

Sometimes, it’s rough and desperate, just as we are—a gasping clutch of slamming fulfillment, a rushing together, clothed, against a wall. Sometimes, it’s the clash of warring bodies that turns to hunger, to melting in the hot pour of a shower. Careful details, combined with a glossing-over of the mechanics of the actual act—combine to make scenes that fairly leap off the page.

Overall, whatever “explicit level” is chosen, the scenes in a piece should be kept consistent. If crude words and anatomical details are used, then they should be consistent with the overall tone of the piece, not a delicate flowering suddenly gone rogue with cries of “F—ck me!” (That could be fun, if done believably. If you find a book like this, email me, I want to read it.)

If the usual situation is to bring the reader to the door, then draw the curtain (as I do most of the time in the Lei books) then when the characters actually have sex with us watching, it’s something built up to and handled tactfully. In a more gritty book, it’s fine to use street jargon and such, as long as usage is consistent throughout the scenes, and with the overall tone of the book.

A book with a PG-13 overall rating for violence and tone that suddenly goes Rated X on the reader is discombobulating. In a critique I did of a friend’s sci-fi romantic suspense, we went from intergalactic intrigue to a bedroom scene in zero-gravity with cocks and pussies abounding—which just didn’t fit with the overall language of the book. (Of course, if the book is erotica, forget all the above tips—in that genre, plot is just a device to link the sex scenes. I’m talking about general fiction in this article.)

What I find jarring—other than Forbidden Tacky Words—is when the author suddenly veers away and pulls the curtain on a built-up-to moment and you know they just chickened out on writing the scene. This is a form of playing coy that annoys readers.

Or, a writer flubs it with crudities, overly explaining what goes where, or too many uses of key words, as if saying them over and over imitates the act. One of the challenges of writing hot sex is not overusing the basic words you’ve chosen to describe the parts involved—good writing means avoiding repetition, inside or outside the bedroom. And only one use of the word “penis” per book, please. “Penis” is just not a hot word, sorry guys. If it’s any consolation, “vagina” isn’t very hot either. Must be all those sex ed classes we all had in junior high. But then, over-use of euphemisms doesn’t work either.

Did I mention writing a good sex scene is…hard?

Overall tone consistency, carefully-crafted action that enhances characterization, and creativity in word choice combined with anchoring physical details are what this writer finds make a memorable, believable sex scene.

What are some of your pet peeves with sex scenes, and how do you approach this difficult writing task?

About Toby Neal

Toby Neal was raised on Kauai in Hawaii. She wrote and illustrated her first story at age 5 and has been published in magazines and won several writing contests. After initially majoring in Journalism, she eventually settled on mental health as a career and loves her work, saying, “I’m endlessly fascinated with people’s stories.”

She enjoys many outdoor sports including bodyboarding, scuba diving, beach walking, gardening and hiking. She lives in Hawaii with her family and dogs. Toby credits her counseling background in adding depth to her characters–from the villains to Lei Texeira, the courageous and vulnerable heroine in the Lei Crime Series.

Toby’s website

Links to Blood Orchids:

Book publicists do a number of things to help authors prepare for their interviews, but sometimes—and especially when there are big national media interviews, like NPR and the morning tv shows, at stake—-we hire media coaches.

These coaches are usually people who have worked extensively in broadcast media, often as television, or radio hosts. As such, they understand the time constraints, end goals, and thought processes behind broadcast media better than anyone else.

Publishing houses hire media coaches to work with authors for blocks of time, anywhere from 3 hours to a full 8 hour day, several weeks before the interviews are set to take place. They have read the book in question and have access to the full press kit the publicist has created. With this background knowledge, coaches sit down with the author and discuss the “Why?” of the book, fleshing out the most important talking points and making the case for why readers should pick it up. In a sense, coaches help authors refamiliarize themselves with the text and examine it as if they had never read the book before.

After establishing the talking points, and these are a list of concise, easy-to-remember ideas, coaches help the author get comfortable talking about them. It’s one thing to be used to talking about your book with your editor or publicist or significant other; it’s a completely different ballgame to discuss your book and its merits with a stranger, let alone before a large audience, whether it’s in-studio or at home.

Coaches have all kinds of tips and tricks to help authors make the most of their interviews, from the importance of repetition (it’s NOT a bad thing to repeat your core ideas and phrases…that’s how you make your message hit home!) to techniques for taking difficult, controversial, or nonsensical questions and answering them in such a way that gets your own point across, regardless of the answer a host may be seeking. One of the ways coaches do this is by having an author take part in multiple mock interviews, answering sample question after sample question in varying formats. Often times, coaches will tape the interviews so that they can watch and critique it with the author afterwards.

While the methods may vary, the end result of media coaching is the same: Authors feel more prepared and more comfortable for their interviews. They have the confidence and the practice to handle curveballs because they know exactly how to talk about their book no matter how the questions may be phrased.

About Christina Mamangakis

Christina Mamangakis is a publicity manager at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.  Prior to that, she worked for Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, and W. W. Norton & Company.

After completing my first novel, I didn’t mind when people came up to me after a reading and talked to me as if I had personally experienced the wars between Palestine and Israel in the 1960s. I must admit it was flattering after so many years of being a mere shadow on a landscape upon which my mother, great-grandmother, and great-great grandmother were born. My mother’s family were native Jewish Palestinians, dating far back to the beginning of the nineteenth century when my great-grandmother and great-grandfather settled in ancient Jerusalem, beginning our family. My grandfather founded and ran the very first department store in old Jerusalem, my uncles, aunts, and mother all fought in the Jewish underground from the 1930s through the creation of the State of Israel. Some branches of the family even dated as far back to Palestine as the 1600s. Though I had never personally experienced the causalities and sorrows of the constant war in Jerusalem, I felt a rightful heir to its history, current and past. So I did not bother to correct the many people who assumed that, like my main character, I had absconded behind the borders as a young girl of only fourteen, running off with an American diplomat’s son. I didn’t of course do any of those things and was usually safe inside my grandmother’s home when I visited Israel as a child, the fighting far away.

During my many visits to my mother’s family house in Jerusalem from my home in America, I wasn’t even permitted to go into the streets if there was news of another skirmish. Still, I relished the new self-definition my first novel gave me. Though I lived in America, my mother took me every three years to spend summers in Jerusalem since I was a very young child. When I published, Edges. I was suddenly recognized as a person who had a “voice” in a history where, before I had felt an outsider, only a child in a vastly fascinating, though violent and foreign, land. I had finally laid claim to my heritage by writing a fiction convincing enough for people to think I had lived its history myself.

I had no idea where this new presumptuousness would lead until I wrote and published my second novel, Hysteria. This time, Hysteria, I wrote about a psychotic woman incarcerated inside a mental institution in 1974.  Set in the turbulent 1970s, HYSTERA is a story of a young woman who retreats from the outside world into a world of delusion and the private terrors of a New York City Psychiatric Hospital.  Suffering from a sexual delusion and just plain “crazy,” I had hoped my character would be affecting and moving to readers. I took great pains trying to describe her inner life as authentically and convincingly as I could.  I wanted to make her feel “real” to the reader, the issues of mental illness were so pressing for me, I had witnessed too many people suffer under society’s stigma.

What I didn’t bank on was that readers, as with Edges, would immediately assume I was writing pure autobiography. That the mentally ill character was really me.  I was introduced as a “memoirist” many times (thought the novel is written as a narrative in third person) and everywhere I read, people looked at me with great consternation and concern. Many said things like “I am so sorry you went into a mental hospital when you were young. I do hope this writing was therapeutic for you.” What? I wanted to scream. It’s not me, I’m not her. No I was NEVER crazy like that. But the more I protested, the more people thought I was only being defensive, nodding but not believing me, “Sure, I understand,” they would retort.

I don’t have a clear answer for the contradictory pleasures in creating a fiction narrative that convinces readers that you, the writer, are, indeed, the main character. It is both a fine compliment and a curse that people believe your fiction is so “real” and you can congratulate yourself for achieving such convincing, authentic-sounding prose. Perhaps this confusion on the reader’s part reflects a more profound problem in our story-telling world that now includes reality TV shows, and a myriad of confessional tell-all memoirs, rarely separating truth from fiction.

But it is a given these days as a published writer, that although you’ve published your work as “a novel,” the first question in nearly every interview and book club visit is whether the book is based on a true story. How one answers that has proven to me to be a lot more complicated than I once imagined. Where does truth end and fiction begin when, often, if a book is good, it will tell a deeper truth through inventing a fiction to contain it, or as Picasso once said, “Art is the lie that tells the truth.” In such a blurring of boundaries, there are a lot of spaces the reader will fill in. How an author will suffer or delight in the mix-up seems a new challenge.

About Author Leora Skolkin-Smith

Leora Skolkin-Smith was born in Manhattan in 1952, and spent her childhood between Pound Ridge, New York, and Israel, traveling with her family to her mother’s birthplace in Jerusalem every three years. She earned her BA and MFA and was awarded a teaching fellowship for graduate work, all at Sarah Lawrence.

Her first published novel, Edges was edited and published by the late Grace Paley for Ms. Paley’s own imprint at Glad Day books.

Edges was nominated for the 2006 PEN/ Faulkner Award and The PEN/ Ernest Hemingway Award by Grace Paley; a National Women Studies Association Conference Selection; a Bloomsbury Review Pick, 2006: “Favorite Books of the Last 25 Years”; a Jewish Book Council Selection, 2005; and won the 2008 Earphones Award for an original audio production narrated by Tovah Feldshuh. In addition, it is currently in development as a feature film, produced by Triboro Pictures.

Leora was recently a panelist, on “Israel in Fiction” at the The Miami International Book Fair, 2006, and a panelist, on “War in Writing”, at the Virginia Festival of the Book, 2006. She is currently a contributing editor to readysteadybook.com. and her critical essays have been published in The Washington Post, The National Book Critic’s Circle’s Critical Mass, and other places.

Her latest novel, Hystera, will be published by Fiction Studio Books this November.

I recently attended IBPA’S Publishing University, where I consulted authors in various stages of publishing. Some had several books under their belt, while other’s books were still seedling ideas. No matter the story, there was one recurring theme among the crowd: “I’m overwhelmed!”

In one of the sessions, a speaker turned the discussion to a new Google tool and people began heading for the door. For many authors, the thought of learning and managing yet another social media platform is daunting. Check, please!

The Internet has brought about unlimited ways to build a following (good news, right?), but all the options have many authors bewildered (not so good news). Marketing and publicity to-do lists are growing daily for authors, thanks to the web, but stick around because getting started is often only a temporary hurdle.

Before you start looking for the nearest exit, clarify your strategy. Come up with a written road map, tailored to your specific goals. This clearly defined plan will make your book promotion more manageable. Here’s a sample strategy, broken down into six main areas.

One:

Hone your online brand:

• Step one in book publicity and marketing is branding, and yet so many authors miss it. Do not proceed to the steps below until you have established your online platform.
• A publicist is essential in helping you develop and streamline your message and brand. Work together to come up with the best plan for how you will be positioned online and in the media.
• Both consumers and media will visit your website before making a commitment. So make sure your online persona is ready-to-go prior to launch time. It should reflect you and your book accurately and look professional. You’ll be judged on design quality and content, so invest in professional help.
• Your website should have these key pages: Blog, Press, About the Author, About the Book, Appearances, Contact. It should also be integrated with your social media platforms.
• Build your social media network early. Start blogging at least 3-5 months before your pub date. Same goes for Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Twitter: don’t wait for your book to launch to be active on social media.

Two:

Employ NetGalley:

• Work with your publisher or publicist to get your book on NetGalley 3-5 months before pub date, in order to meet editorial guidelines. Your publicist can help you manage and track downloads and other activity.
• By posting your manuscript on NetGalley, you allow librarians, media, bloggers and other publishing industry pros to have early access to your book, in lieu of galleys and extensive mailouts.
• A great benefit of NetGalley is the built-in community of reviewers and other book industry professionals.

Three:

Organize an online book launch:

• Rally your personal contacts for a special one-day push that can help push your sales and up your web presence. Entice your friends and family to participate by hosting a contest.
• Ask them to post an Amazon review, blog review, and share it on Facebook and Twitter. For each post or purchase, they get another entry for prizes.
• Give away a Kindle, iPad, free consult, or something relates to your book.
• A publicist can manage this process and help you engage your network creatively and effectively.

Four:

Connect with bloggers:

• Online book reviews are a great way to boost your book’s visibility.
• There are dozens of online articles about Virtual Book Tours, so if you’re going the DIY route, start early and allow significant time for research, shipping, and follow through.
• If a blogger reviews your book, return the favor by promoting their review through your social media channels.
• The reasons to hire a publicist for your blog outreach or Virtual Book Tour are many:
• Because publicists work hard to build networks of bloggers for all kinds of book tours, you’re more likely to get better results (in quality and quantity).
• Blog tours are labor-intensive and require close attention to detail and full-time follow up.
• Publicists know how to package a book review pitch with all the right elements to secure quality reviews. They’ll work creatively to get you the best possible exposure.

Five:

Reach out to online media:

Although it hasn’t always been the case, online media is treated with the same respect and guidelines as traditional media. That’s why it makes sense to hire a publicist to handle online media outreach. Keep in mind, an editor is more likely to act on a pitch from a publicist he or she trusts. And unfortunately, your unsolicited emails may go unread.

A good publicist knows the in-roads to your target media. He/she has established relationships and knows which outlets are hungry for content.

But if you haven’t hired a publicist, don’t be afraid to make connections at your favorite blogs and local outlets. Ask if you can contribute a guest post, op-ed or excerpt. Think about what you can do to make an editor’s job easier. Forging a relationship could be mutually beneficial.

Six:

Measure your results:

• Find out the best online publicity recipe for your book by looking closely at sales and visibility indicators: Amazon rankings, website analytics, social media connections, Google Alerts, etc.
• If you hire a publicist, ask about their reporting process. You’ll want to have regular updates and easy access to current activity and results – both positive and negative. A publicist can also help you get the most mileage out of each media hit.

About Stephanie Ridge

Stephanie Ridge is a publicist at PR by the Book (Austin, Texas). In 10 years of literary publicity, she has represented all kinds of authors—from chef to mafia expert, first-timer to bestseller. She loves crafting headlines and isn’t afraid to pinch-hit for clients when duty calls. (Ask her about the time she moonlighted as Mama Bear on a Berenstain Bears book tour.) She was also a publicist at WaterBrook Press, a division of Random House, and at Phenix & Phenix Literary Publicists.

Because of the overwhelming (and quite honestly, surprising!) response to our Children’s Book Week project for our May issue, we’ve decided to launch a brand-new insert into our existing San Francisco Book Review and Sacramento Book Review publications.

About Kids’ Book Review

Starting with our June 2012 issue, Kids’ Book Review (KBR) will be a monthly insert going inside our regular publications and will be written entirely by children (from the little guys to high school age). We will also run our regular Children’s, Tweens, and Young Adult sections that will be written by our adult reviewers.

As I mentioned, the Children’s Book Week program has drawn unprecedented participation since we first ran the program three years ago. We have 157 reviews being written by the kids for our May issue! And the kids are just so adorable with their books (we’re including their photo alongside their review in the publication).

A Sampling of the Kids

If you’re a Children’s, Tweens or Young Adult publisher, just keep doing what you’ve been doing — which is sending us your books. We’ll be sure to provide you with a good mixture of adult vs. young reviewers for them.

We will also be linking the kids’ reviews with our Kids’ Book App, which has more than 5,000 users.

Advertising Opportunity!

Kids’ Book Review

Support children’s literacy by taking out an ad with us for Kids’ Book Review.

We have great advertising opportunities for you children’s book publishers. Please let us know if you’d like to advertise.

Interested In Having Your Kids Participate?

More details about Kids’ Book Review  will be flushed out once we get past our huge May issue, celebrating Kids Book Week. If you’re interested in having your child/ren participate, fill out the brief form below, and we’ll get back with you.

Yes, I want to participate and need more information.

Media Links…Who’s Talking about Kids’ Book Review

http://www.bookweekonline.com/local

Cathy Luchetti is the author of eight books about the settling of the American West in the 18th and 19th centuries, from religion to cooking and cuisine to courtship rituals and child-rearing. She was invited by Laura Bush to come to the White House to be part of a discussion of Women in the West. She has received numerous honors, including the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award for Literary Excellence for Women of the West (1982) co-authored with Carol Olwell. Her book Home on the Range: A Culinary History of the American West received the James Beard Best Writing on American Food Award in 1994. Medicine Women: The Story of Early-American Women Doctors (1999) was short-listed for the Willa Cather Award in non-fiction. Other books include Under God’s Spell: Frontier Evangelists, 1772-1915, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (San Diego, CA), 1989; “I Do!”: Courtship, Love, and Marriage on the American Frontier: A Glimpse at America’s Romantic Past through Photographs, Diaries, and Journals, 1715-1915, Villard Books (New York, NY), 1995; The Hot Flash Cookbook: Delicious Recipes for Health and Well-Being through Menopause, Chronicle Books (San Francisco), 1997; Mama Says: Inspiration, Wit and Wisdom from the Mothers in Our Lives, Loyola Press (Chicago), 1999. Her book Children of the West: Family Life on the Frontier, Norton (New York, NY), published in 2001, was named by the Los Angeles Times one of the Best Books of 2001—The West.

Zara Raab: You got together with a friend, Carol Olwell, to write the first of your histories of the American West. I imagine there are some deep streams in your own personal history, your childhood in Texas, that may account for your motivation for writing so many wonderful books about the American West.

Cathy Luchetti: I am a “Woman of the West.”  I grew up in Texas with lots of bedtime stories about the West. One set of my great-great grandparents came West across the Great Plains in Conistoga wagons. They settled in what became Baker, Oregon.

ZR: Where is Baker, exactly?

CL: Baker is east of Portland, in a desert area––in a place you don’t imagine could be in Oregon. It’s desert with a. little bit of grassland, like eastern Washington State.

ZR: Was Baker a family name of yours? The town of Baker is named in honor of U.S. Senator Edward D. Baker, is that correct? And wasn’t he the only sitting senator to be killed in a military engagement? He died in 1861 while leading a charge of 1,700 Union Army soldiers up a ridge at Ball’s Bluff, Virginia, during the American Civil War. 

CL: Yes, that’s correct. One Baker signed the pioneer register. Frederick Waymire, on my grandfather’s side, was part of the Oregon Continental Congress, had 17 children, and was called the “Far West Davy Crockett.” Another ancestor, also a great-great grandfather, started the second oldest winery in Napa in 1855 and called it To Kalon, which is Greek for “The Highest Good”. His name was Henry Walker Crabb. He was from Germany or Wales, we’re not sure which, and he brought with him all these strains of plants and planted them and built a big beautiful old house. Crabb’s wines were widely known and his Black Burgundy was especially highly regarded in the West,

The house burned, but it has been rebuilt, so it’s still there. Mondavi owns the winery now and kept a To Kalon history room up until a few years ago.  My mother and I would get trotted out every few years to represent the family. The vineyard became rather famous in the 20th Century as the source of the Georges de Latour wines. But yes, I had a pioneer background that made me interested in the lives of these pioneers who came West in the 19th Century.

ZR: Did any of these relatives or ancestors write letter or keep diaries?

CL: Unfortunately, no. Well, wait. There were a number of interviews or articles written about Crabb’s winery back at the turn of the century. Those are on recorded at the St. Helena Historical Society. No letters, which is another reason I was curious.

ZR: What about old photographs?

CL: Unfortunately, only a few photographs. But if you go into the pioneer museum in Baker, Oregon, you can see my great-great- grandmother’s signature.

ZR: You’ve written eight books, mostly about the American West and the people who settled it in the 19th Century. These are large books, full of fascinating details and wonderfully evocative period photographs. Tell us how you went about gathering materials from diaries and other primary sources for your books.

CL: I owe everything to librarians at the archives and historical societies around the country. Every one of my books was prefaced by a massive mailing to a hundred different archives asking them if they had any lesser known correspondence in their files that had to do with the themes of the book. “Yes,” they would write back to me, “We have this collection, that collection.” Sometimes they would be able to photocopy parts of letters for me. Other times I would travel to the place to research the materials, or I would hire someone to do the research. Over time, I would get a sense of what the collections had and as more things became available on line it was easier to look there. But the work was always done with the generous support of the librarians and archivists who with their knowledge and expertise would unearth these little known collections of  letters and diaries.

My usual practice in beginning a book was to accrue information on the subject until it got to be the shape and size of a book. So the first part of writing was a treasure hunt for information. It was a great way to combine travel with research.  For example, North Dakota has a fabulous collection of some of the most beautiful photographs and best diaries I’ve ever seen. They hardly charge anything for the use of their materials. Here in California, Susan Snyder at the Bancroft Library has been extremely helpful.  So I really enjoyed working with the Bancroft. The California History Library in Sacramento has got a wonderful collection, too, as does the Colorado State Historical Society.

ZR: I notice you use some photographs from the collection of Paul Palmquist. Did you work with him?

CL: Oh, yes, I worked with Paul Palmquist for years. He was local, so I always included his photograph. Then he was so unfortunately killed. The photographs in his collection are extraordinary.

I also developed a real relationship with the University of Nevada. I donated almost all my research materials to the Nevada Historical Society. I also did a lot of work at the Mormon Archives both in Salt Lake City and the Oakland LDS Temple Archives.

ZR: What are the fees for the use of photographs?

CL: The Library of Congress or the National Archives or any of smaller places would charge very little. The Amon Carter Museum in Texas will have the very same things the Nevada or Nebraska Historical Society has, but charge five times as much for it. The use fees occur on an enormous sliding scale from $250 to $12.50 for a single photograph. Sometimes I’d find the same photo in a junk or thrift store, or in one of the ghost towns in the Sierra selling memorabilia. Then the cost was very little.

I did a lot of work at the National Archives and the Library of Congress. I spent a lot of time in North Dakota, one of the most desolate places I’d ever been.

ZR: One diary you use in your texts describes crossing what is now Jayhawker Mountain in the desert around southern California. The hardships people underwent just going from one place to another were extraordinary. 

CL: I was just down there backpacking with my son. The idea that anybody could cross that desert is all but unbelievable. In fact, we passed Jayhawker Mountain and we were thinking of climbing, but it was the driest, most desolate place I’ve every seen. That diary tells just how confused people could get without maps and navigation aid. They had the Drinking Gourd and the North Star and one guide and somebody had to make a decision about whether the guide knew where he was going.

ZR: I understand you are involved with the environmental group Desert Survivors. Tell us about that. 

CL: I grew up in the desert in Midland, Texas. Right outside my door there were sand dunes. Rattlesnakes, too. And of course all I could do was get out of there:  I couldn’t wait to leave Texas. But then as you grow up, your roots come back, so I longed for the desert. I found this group called Desert Survivors, an odd group of people who drive hours and hours just to be in the desert, longing for vistas, and dry terrain and all the things that the desert offers. So I’ve participated with them backpacking, hiking and exploring for well over 20 years.

ZR: Are people re-enacting pioneer times when they do this? Like the Civil War re-enactments that are so popular in the South?

CL: There is a desire in this age of complete comfort to pare back and experience things on an extreme level. Going out into the desert gives you a chance to do that. I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily in the sprit of the pioneers. I do not go in costume. I doubt if the women in my book Women of the West were interested in mountaineering or exploration. But there are some parallels

ZR: Let’s turn to Home on the Range: A Culinary History of the American West, which won the James Beard Writing on American Food Award in 1994.

CL: Yes. The James Beard Foundation Award ceremony was held in New York at the Lincon Center.

ZR: So in addition to being a marvelously gifted writer, you’re also known for your cooking. What kind of kitchen did your own mother have when you were a child?

CL: I hate to say this, but I’m sure I’m interested in cooking because my mother was a terrible cook. She was a devotee of the casserole, especially if it had Fritos or potato chips on top of it.  I‘m interested in good cooking because I never got much of it. She showed how she felt about being a housewife through her cooking. She became a much better cook in her sixties. She developed a kind of interest in it.

I like to experiment. I like to take something that you already have and imagine you can make it more interesting. It’s like a puzzle. That’s definitely what the pioneers did. They had dribs and drabs of things. And they had to make something of it. Being in the Peace Corp was instructive, too, in this regard. There were no stores. People would come around selling eggs one day and meat another day. Being in the Peace Corp was the first time I have ever been hungry. It made me think about food in a way I had not thought about food before I developed a curiosity about how to doctor dishes and make them more interesting. I like to do signature pieces, not necessarily fancy but different. As a kid, I was always trying to feed my brother things I’d made from roots and berries and seeds, bird nests and lawn clippings. I served up dishes from whatever happened to be around. And he was smart enough not to eat them.

ZR: When we were kids, we’d mash up acorns and make a paste of that. It was part of a staple for the native Americans.

CL: My kids and I would do that at a family ranch in Middletown. We’d put the acorn meal in the stream over night, and the next day mix it up with Bisquick. I don’t’ think I’ve ever tasted anything so good.

Now it’s called wild crafting and bush crafting. Lots of people are eager to find foods in nature. All kinds of people give classes in how to go about it.

ZR: Have you every given a class in this?

CL: No, but when my book Home on the Range came out, I’d prepare recipes for bram brack, buckwheat or hoe cakes in the fire place for the author interviews.  I’d make Birds on Toast and Washday Rice or drip coffee with roasted carrots whenever I gave a lecture.

ZR: Talk about your lectures. 

CL: Every time a book came out, I’d be invited to give talks about it. And because I’m basically very shy, I made a power point show, where I combined the most interesting parts of each book, anecdotally, into one presentation, and if someone wanted me to talk at a book store, I’d take my presentation. I remember being in the Tattered Cover in Denver, the head of the Storytellers Association came up to me and asked if I would  be a key note speaker, with hundreds of people in the audience, using this power point show. It turned out just fine despite my nervousness.  I would always respond, albeit somewhat reluctantly, if someone asked me to make a presentation. The power point show was a good device and I was happy to use it. I gave a presentation at the Library of Congress and at the National Archives. These were televised.

ZR: Impressive. Are the videos available to the public?

CL: Yes, the videos are archived.

ZR: Home on the Range mentions recipes from the wild west like ragout de prairie dog, mountain sheep antelope, roast grizzly bear, elk steak, codfish balls. Have you tasted these things? Is it possible to? Area these places in the foothills of California where it is possible to go into a restaurant and order, say, a “Hangtown Fry”(an egg and oyster dish)? Or how about beans cooked in the bean-hole method—larded with pork fat and buried in live embers? What about walnut catsup? [65]

CL: In the Mother Lode country, probably you can get Hangtown Fry or some version of it. I gave a lecture at the Virginia City opera house where some of these dishes were offered. There was also a Nevada State Historical Society event for which I’ve had professional chefs prepare elk steak and Birds on Toast.

ZR: Your books inspired you to do these unusual things.

CL: On another occasion some of these dishes were given away as part of a raffle in Nevada. The people who bought the tickets and won the raffle got to come to my house where we served elk steak. It was a big money raiser for the Nevada Historical Society.

ZR: You were enterprising in a very pioneer spirited way.

CL: Yes, I guess I was–including screenplay gigs in Hollywood. One screenplay was called “Hot on the Trail,” produced by William Wyler’s daughter, Kathleen Wyler. The filmmakers wanted to do a documentary on the West and hired me to be the screenwriter. I went to New York and was held captive in the Port Authority Building. It was really interesting. The images would be on screen and I would write the script.   I had to write the script quickly as the images came flowing across this massive screen.

And then there was the enormously popular TV western of the 1990’s, with Jane Seymour as the lead––Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. They used my books and actually flew me to Hollywood several times to consult on how the surgeons would operate on patients. Would the early doctors really sew up a wound by putting a 50-cent piece under the skin? My publisher said, “Well, gee, since this program is willing to fly you to Hollywood, why don’t you write a book?” So that’s how I came to write Medicine Women: The Story of Early-American Women Doctors.

ZR: Medicine Women was the book short listed for a Willa Cather Award in non-fiction in 1999?

CL: Yes, that’s correct.

ZR: What other entanglements with Hollywood did you experience?

CL: A major film company was doing a documentary on courtship and marriage in the West and they, too, flew me to Hollywood to be their consultant. They used photographs and stories from my 1995 book “I Do!”: Courtship, Love, and Marriage on the American Frontier, but of course the photographs are in the public domain, so I didn’t really benefit. They used me as the research tool. I can’t say the photographs were mine, but the collection was mine. I flew down with my son Zack and we played Hollywood-for-a-day.

Every so often Women in the West is optioned by a movie producer. Then it’s dropped, because no one can figure out how to make it into a film. But they keep trying. The book is used by many producers and other writers as resource material. Sometimes this gets acknowledged.

ZR: Could your agent have protected you?

CL: If any of them had optioned the book, yes. But the movie people were just using me as a consultant. These experiences were little adventures into a totally foreign world. The phone would ring, and a little Hollywood voice would say, “Darling, it’s just heavenly. The book is heavenly” in a soft, Southern drawl. And then the option would drop. I should say: “Darling, it’s just funny. Very funny.”

In the end, though, despite all the interest shown in it by movie producers, Women of the West was never made into a film. A play, a theater production, has been created from it, with little vignettes from the book. It was quite effective.

ZR: It should be a TV series, because it’s episodic. . . What are your thoughts of novelists who draw on the West for their stories, writers like Wallace Stegner? Did you ever think of writing a novel?

CL: No, never. Writing a period novel does not interest me at all.  I don’t read historical fiction and I don’t write it. I love literature, though. Stegner’s Angle of Repose is fabulous literature. The general Western is fiction dressed up as history; it a way of introducing readers to the West.

ZR: Regarding Women of the West, did you ever look at Mary Hallock Foote’s letters later published as A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West and later still used by Wallace Stegner as the basis for his novel Angel of Repose?

CL: Wallace was utterly bona fide in taking life events such as Hallock’s story and using them in his fiction. The book gives her credit for the letters. Just as a personal aside, the movie The Descendants got an Academy Award, not because it was such a great movie, but because the Oscar people think they should give an award to things that have to do with history. I think that’s why The Descendants got so much notice in the Oscars. We haven’t really honored Hawaii and its roots this year. So the director of that film was lucky enough to step into a category that the right people felt obliged to award.

ZR: What are you working on now? You have a new book in the works.

CL: I am working on a manuscript I’m calling “Travels with My Headache.” It’s basically traveling with my headache and examining folkloric, food and other remedies and apocrypha having to do with headaches. I’m going in to the direction of my earlier book, The Hot Flash Cookbook.

ZR: What are your travel plans these days? I know you and Peter have traveled extensively in the past.

CL: We’ve traveled in Tibet, Peru, China, Mexico, and Greece. We’ve been in Mexico again recently, and I’m writing little stories about it, investigating the teas and remedies that people there have for headaches. I’ve anthropomorphized my headache. This book is a whimsical approach to a self-help book. There are a lot of books on how to cure a headache, and mine is going to be a more folkloric, travel guide approach to the subject. It’s interesting and it’s fun. I get to riff on lots of weird, interesting stuff. For example, did you know that the philosopher Wittgenstein loved to destabilize complete strangers as well as colleagues with questions like, “Do dogs have headaches?” For him, words were the salvation and damnation of everything.  Do dogs get ice cream headaches? I am asking my veterinary friends.

Every time a new headache question of a magical, apocryphal or whimsical nature comes up, I pursue it . This book is not going to be the Merk manual for headaches—more like an “Eat, Pray, Headache” kind of narrative.  But I will say I‘ve probably read at least a thousand diaries and journals from the old West and no one complained about headaches. Not that they didn’t have them; I’m sure that they sallied forth even with a headache. It’s one of those things that people accommodated. I’m looking at all the people in literature who had headaches, like Virginia Woolf, to see how headaches affected their lives. We’ll see. It’s fun to write.

ZR: Will there be photographs?

CL: Not really just text. I don’t see it as visual.

ZR: What are you reading now, and how do you decide?

CL: I am reading Peter Diamandi’s book Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think. It’s so optimistic. I’m not really a doom and gloom person. I don’t focus on the end of the world and how terrible things are.

I read lots of Mexican and South American books. Rain of Gold, a novel by Victor Villiasenor is one. I like nature  writing, too, like Craig Childs’ The Secret Knowledge of Water: Discovering the Essence of the American Desert, for example. I love H.P. Lovecraft, and I keep a Guttenberg text of James Joyce’s Ulysses my desk.

This is the first part of a two-part interview. Please log in next month for Part 2.

About the Interviewer, Zara Raab

Zara lives in Berkeley and is one of the first women to graduate in architecture from UC Berkeley. She grew up along California’s North Coast, attending school in Portland when she was fourteen, and later Mills College and the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) for college and graduate school. In her twenties, she traveled, living in Paris, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., where she made a living as a freelance editor and writer, participating for a time in the Capitol Hill Poetry Group, before returning to the West Coast to raise her children.

Early California is a subject of her book Swimming the Eel, just as the drama of family life is the subject of  The Book of Gretel. In leaving behind the rural counties, she became a part of the human potential movement of the 1960′s, and that movement perhaps more than anything, shapes her life and her work. Since she was a teenager, she kept journals, and sometimes returns to those early notebooks for ideas. Her poems appear in many literary reviews and magazines, including The Dark Horse, The Evansville Review, River Styx, Crab Orchard Review, Nimrod, Dos Passos Review, Arts & Letters, and others. She also review books and writes essays on literature for various publications, including the Redwood Coast Review, Poetry Flash, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Colorado Review, San Francisco/Sacramento Book Reviews, and The Boxcar Poetry Review.

We all know that the job market is tough. That makes now a better time than ever to hire a few interns. An intern can be a college student who hopes to go into publishing or journalism and needs some hands-on experience to build a good portfolio to show during job interviews. It might be a college or high school student who thinks that maybe publishing or publicity or marketing is what they want to study, and by doing the job, they might discover they love it or perhaps learn they should look at other career paths.

We have used college students for many years as interns. Some have been great and really took on a lot of tasks that were falling by the wayside as “more important” tasks were tackled. Some have needed a lot of hand-holding and almost seemed to take more time than they were contributing, but I still knew I was helping someone and knew I only had to keep them busy for a few more weeks or months.

Some colleges—and even some high schools—give academic credit for the time they spend as interns.

Students aren’t the only ones who might agree to work for experience or at minimum wage with no benefits. There are young mothers who want to get out of the house for a few hours a week when their children are in school or want to keep up their job skills for when they go back to work full time. And don’t forget the baby boomers or even some seniors who are full of life experience and are looking for a way to stay in the thick of things.

How do you find an intern? Contact the job placement at any nearby college and see about posting a notice with them. Put up a notice on one of the social media sites. Ask friends and family if they know of anyone looking for some part-time (or full-time work). Even your church office may know of members who could really use a part-time job. We have found that since we can be flexible and work around their needs, people are happy to work for us (especially since many employers will say to part-time workers, if you can’t be here when we schedule you, forget it).

To pay or not to pay? Some schools don’t allow interns who are getting credit to receive a salary. In those cases, we would give them a bonus at the end of their semester, which was equivalent to what the course cost them. Most we have paid minimum wage. And a few who actually became full-time were paid a little more.

But companies—or individuals—can set their own rules about the work the interns will be doing and what would be a fair wage.

Many small presses and independent publishers/authors just can’t find enough time in the day to get everything done. Consider some of the tasks that could be assigned an intern and determine if this is a way to ease your load. An added benefit: if you get a high school or college student or recent grad, remember they have grown up on the computer and are often much more comfortable and adept at doing research online or helping get out there via social media.

Get the help you need while helping someone else is certainly a win-win situation.

About Kate Siegel Bandos

Kate Siegel Bandos has been doing book publicity for more than 40 years, the past 22 on a freelance basis from KSB Promotions. Over the years she has worked with thousands of books and authors, and can’t imagine how many media contacts she has made during that time. It still amazes her when she realizes she makes a living reading and working with books – the things she loves most (after her family).

Isn’t every book a travel book? There you are in your sad little living room — the rug needs a vacuum, the dog’s barking at the neighbour, and dear God who the hell’s crying for a sandwich? You scrunch down deeper into the couch, and start to think about those absentees who briefly appear in the first chapter of a Coming of Age novel. Oh you know the ones: ‘My father went out one night for a pack of cigarettes and never returned.’

Now that may not be a good option for most of us, although I do keep both a lighter and a blackmarket passport in my laptop case because you just never know. Much easier and infinitely less likely to involve Interpol is to escape the drudgery by opening a book. People, even family members who sort of qualify as people, at least hesitate before interrupting reading. It’s rather like prayer: ‘Could you dry the dishes – oh! – I didn’t realize you were talking to God.’ Watching television is being a lazy lump – reading is improving your mind.

So if travel is a way of changing your dull physical environment, reading is traveling out of your even duller mental environment. I suspect this is why so many of the great authors have written formal travel books at some point or points in their careers. Graham Greene was a master of the form, as is the man who is in some ways his descendant Paul Theroux. Twain did it, Dickens did it, even James Bond’s Ian Fleming did it: Let’s do it! Let’s pack a bag!

In that spirit, I was instantly curious when I ran across a reference to A Journey into Dorothy Parker’s New York while I was looking up a quote or two from the great Dorothy Parker. I am a massive fan of hers; frankly she is both my favourite reviewer and humorist of all time. Each fed the other by the way. Because she was a theatre and book reviewer, she knew where to find the telling details that can create a word picture for readers. Because she was funny, she knew how to make those word pictures entertaining.

I could go on about Mrs. Parker forever yet I will restrain myself to one last paragraph, here in the form of two Did You Knows? Did You Know: That among various phrases whose invention are attributed to include – chocolate bar, face-life, what the hell, and daisy chain…the sexual kind. (A friend of mine didn’t know about the latter, looked it up on Google and made the entertaining error of clicking Images. You are forewarned.) And finally, Did You Know that Dorothy Parker left her entire estate when she passed away in 1967 at the age of 74 to Dr. Martin Luther King, whom she never met but greatly admired? When Dr. King was assassinated her estate, including all royalties, passed to the NAACP. In choosing literary heroes, you could make worse picks.

Hell, I would have.

My interest so peaked, I looked up the publisher of Kevin C. Patrick’s book — the cheerily named Roaring Forties Press — and found that they have an ArtPlace Series of these travel guides. They aren’t just based on authors: others include  A Journey into Matisse’s South of France, the Transcendentalist’s New England, and the just-released Elvis Presley’s Memphis. Having read two of them, I feel safe in vouching for the whole collection.

Packed into 150 pages and spread amongst maps, pictures, and off-set quotes is a surprisingly full textual biography. One actually learns things. For instance, in R. Todd Felton’s  A Journey into Ireland’s Literary Revival (the apostrophe in my last name is a dead giveaway as to why I chose that one), I realized that despite many years spent doodling in the margins of academia, I had never truly appreciated what a colossus William Butler Yeats was in terms of Ireland’s development of a culture beyond the stereotype of a drunken farmer stumbling about with a pig under his arm. Granted when James Joyce met Yeats, as Felton recounts, Joyce sniffed, ‘I have met you too late. You’re too old.’ yet that was the exception that proved the rule. Yeats was a man to be sought out and he didn’t mind the seeking, whether it was from Joyce, John Synge or Sean O’Casey. Yeats was in such national esteem that he was elected to the Republic’s first Senate. I defy any poet to stand for Senatorial election today in the English-speaking world without being laughed out of the room.

I dare say that these neat, square-shaped books have lit the lamp that draws the travel bug. They can supply the theme to a pleasing journey. For after all, what does a tourist actually do? Generally, we check into a hotel, venture out as far as a two-block circle, eat something unusual, drink the local wine, then pretend that we now know the whole thing. I now want to go to the Aran Islands and hear a story that might have ignited Synge or to sit in the Algonquin Hotel lobby, close me eyes and hear someone say something as sharply witty as Dorothy Parker.

Yes you’re right, I may well doze off before the latter happens. But it will be such a lovely nap of dreams.

Be seeing you.

About Hubert O’Hearn

Hubert O’Hearn has been a newspaper columnist and arts reviewer for the past fifteen years. From their beginning in Thunder Bay Ontario, Canada, his book reviews have grown to include ten publications across North America. He is also available to perform his lively and humorous discussion of books – A Book and a Martini Live! – in support of charitable causes. Always appreciative of comments and book suggestions, he can be reached athlohearn@gmail.com . An archive of Hubert O’Hearn’s work is housed atbythebookreviews.blogspot.com.

I have this friend. Let’s call him…Dave. He’s the literary equivalent of panning a river in hip waders and discovering a big fat chunk of gold. He’s intelligent (something of a Martian philosopher, I like to think)–talented, eccentric, and decadently debaucherous. He effortlessly mixes high-minded discourse with raffish juvenilia, and has no qualms about public nudity after heroic feats of drinking. As Melville once wrote, Dave “stands ready in a sensible way to play the fool.”

Between those blurry nights and lost weekends, I have accumulated a collection of stories so vast I could fill a Proustian cycle of novels based on his exploits. Sounds great, right? A writer should be so lucky as to have such ready-made inspiration plopped in his or her lap. Not wanting to squander such an opportunity, I heedlessly carved a few sides from Dave’s juicy butterball and created the character Satch for my novel, The Great Peace. Good job, I thought. Now rest up and await a call from the Pulitzer committee.

It wasn’t until the manuscript began making its rounds that I realized the ethical pickle I was in. I hadn’t bothered to notice that Dave, like myself, is a young professional working in a competitive industry. His boss and co-workers probably wouldn’t appreciate his after-hours antics as much as I do. Squares, I figured. They probably wouldn’t dig his ability to wake up nude in unfamiliar places either. Prudes, I concluded.

But what about Dave? Did I ever consider what he might think about my Rabelaisian depiction of him? I never asked, after all. Slowly I began picturing myself being excoriated in the court of personal opinion, with Dave and Satch sitting side-by-side at the plaintiff’s table.

“Tsk tsk, young author, how dare you!” the judge would say.

“I thought you were cool, man,” Dave and/or Satch would rejoin.

Perhaps I would even land in a real courtroom, hopelessly making a case for my literary flights of fancy, the most indefensible of defenses.

“To the slammer you go, young scribe!” says the judge, sentencing me to a lifetime of shame.

People do have a right to be left alone and although the intricacies of defamation are beyond the scope of my little musings here, the thought sent chills through my manuscript.

That got me thinking. Does our friendship give me the right to take small pieces of Dave’s personality and exaggerate them to fit whatever situation my book requires? Moreover, does that license allow me to broadcast it publicly, damn the rest? As a writer, it’s easy to hide behind the curtain of ART, write large, when in reality I’m really just versifying the equivalent of incriminating Facebook photos.

But wait, I thought, who wouldn’t want to be memorialized in the pages of a novel? The answer, I suppose, may lie in a familiar place.

How many of you have heard this old chestnut: write what you know. All of you? Precisely. It’s an expression so ubiquitous I feel like it should have some Latin origin chiseled in ancient stone tablets. If I may be allowed to beat that tired drum once more, I would argue that the statement is more or less correct. Characters are man-shaped balloons (or lady-shaped balloons, or Dave-shaped balloons) waiting to be inflated. They can’t be wooden or one-dimensional; they must embody the many facets of our nature and become the floating exclamation point to whatever it is we’re trying to say.

“Guilty!” cries the cranky old judge.

“Whatever,” says Dave and/or Satch.

That being said, “write what you know” has obvious limitations. What if your friends, family, or neighbors are, well, boring? To paraphrase Kerouac, what if they always yawn or always say a commonplace thing? In my opinion, there’s little benefit to the author or reader if proximity trumps imagination. Literature is supposed to create a diversion from the ordinary, enliven it, take it apart, examine its guts. Even in our hyper-realist age, where the minutiae of our daily lives can be instantly reported and commented on, the need to transcend the mundane still matters.

“The kid has a point,” the judge opines.

It was under this fattening cloud of doubt that I nervously awaited Dave’s response upon sending him the manuscript.

“Satch is my favorite character!” he gushed.

I wonder why, I thought with a grin.

Then, in a delightful turn of art imitating life imitating art, Dave texted me a not-safe-for-work photo depicting the following caption, “Too many Heinekens last night, woke up with no pants on. I totally pulled a Satch.” To which I gently reminded him: Satch is a fictional character. Any resemblance to actual persons is purely coincidental.

About Author Ryan George Kittleman

Attorney, author, and musician Ryan George Kittleman founded Colony Pictura in 2010. His goal was to create a law firm ‘by artists, for artists’ and help provide an open and cooperative link between the legal world and the arts and entertainment communities. Since its founding, Colony Pictura has provided affordable, artist-friendly legal services to numerous filmmakers, writers, designers, artists, musicians, startup companies, and other creative minds.

Ryan has been a musician and songwriter for more than 15 years, playing in bands on both coasts and releasing solo albums under the names The Three Potato 4 and Spent Waves. His 2009 release, Album Savant, received international acclaim and was called “adventurous and visionary home-recorded pop” by Best Kept Secret.

As an author, Ryan’s first novel, The Great Peace, will be published nationwide by Exploding Books on May 1, 2012.

To visit Ryan’s corporate website, please click on the logo below:

To follow Ryan’s musings on his blog, click HERE.