Thank you, bagster. You’re very kind. I moved from technical writing to fiction while trying to deal with my mother’s death, and found so many good people who worked to make me better at the task. Then I found movie scripts and my life was ruined. They are the most natural art form to me because they move like a bat out of hell, and you spend your time writing alone in a cellar that is inhabited by all the other members of the production crew of whom you must stay aware and on whose toes you must not step. My NYC book agent represented John Grisham and, when Writers & Artists wouldn’t tell us what was happening to my scripts over my two year contract, offered to take a novel from me. AND I COULDN’T WRITE IT! My writing had been so affected by screenplays that I was dead in the water. One of those moments you always regret.
Stories. At iBM Research I was surrounded by brilliant minds. One of the most brilliant and eccentric was John Cocke, whose interview I have up in my computer history playlist. John was so incoherent that most people never understood what he was saying and he never wrote anything down himself. They tried to task my husband to follow him around and write down what he said, but husband wanted to do his own research. Everyone who followed John around became famous. The director told his own story of being interviewed and writing part of his thesis on John’s blackboard, thinking it was a field of which John would know little. John took the chalk and wrote the rest of Abe’s thesis.
Mardie, what are a few of your favorite books?