August, 2009 | Warren Adler

Month: August, 2009

Our Short Story Contest

Posted on: August 20th, 2009 by Warren Adler 5 Comments

5th Annual Warren Adler Short Story Contest has Arrived!

We have just chosen the winner and the runner-ups for the Fifth Annual Warren Adler Short Story Contest. Our submissions have been steadily increasing and the aggregate of submissions in the five years of our experience has been running into the thousands.

My motivation for establishing this contest was to enhance the popularity of the short story which was once a staple of American literary output with numerous magazines offering them to their readers. Indeed, it was once possible for a fiction writer to earn a good living by having his or her stories published in these venues. Sadly, that market has dried up.

Nevertheless, the art form endures and will surely catch on again in the age of electronic reading, which stresses brevity and compactness, although making a living from writing short stories is probably a very dubious possibility.

My observations from reading these submissions is that there is quite an array of literary talent out there and, more importantly, a palpable desire to be read.…

The End of Life Debacle

Posted on: August 18th, 2009 by Warren Adler 2 Comments

At the risk of throwing a figurative match into a giant batch of kindling, I would like to weigh in on the subject of “end of life issues” that has prompted an angry response by citizens at town hall meetings in which they confront their elected representatives.

The issue is deeply embedded in the human psyche touching on the most basic philosophical and religious tenets that are fundamental to our concept of mortality. We know from the very moment when intelligence dawns on the human brain that we are going to die.

So what is all the mystery about? Of course people are angry. It is the paramount issue of human life. We are well aware of the inevitability of death. We are well aware too that the highest expenditures of government health care occur in the last year or so of life. Couple this fact with the necessity of saving money on our health care programs and what you get is the logical progression that leads inevitably to the of economics of dying.…

But Is It Good For Authors?

Posted on: August 15th, 2009 by Warren Adler 10 Comments

On the surface, the surge in the popularity of e-books and the proliferation of devices on which their content can be read seems like a boon to authors. At first blush the benefits seem too good to be true.

Books will never go out of print, a term that will have to be revised. In fact, all books that have been out of print, via Google’s vast undertaking, will be reincarnated. Everything ever written and published will be available to everyone who is tethered to cyberspace, which means the bulk of the literate world.

Moreover, everyone who creates content, whether it bears the indicia of a traditional publishing house or is self-produced, will be able to enter the world library, easily accessible to the eye-balls and minds of every literate person on the planet. Soon, very soon, the availability of e-books will permeate every electronic device across the full spectrum of gadgetry from laptops to cell phones to e-book devices to whatever new technology bursts upon the scene.…

The Dividing Line

Posted on: August 10th, 2009 by Warren Adler 4 Comments

As I grow older, I have become fascinated by “pop memory” and the difference between what I deem popular and what younger people see as popular. This has led me to contemplate where the dividing line is between this generational phenomenon.

For example, if I am sitting in a waiting room and pick up a copy of People magazine, devoted to the happenings of today’s popular celebrities, I quickly discover that I have absolutely no knowledge of who they are or why I should be interested. This is true of most items I am confronted with in the popular media. I used to be an avid reader of gossip columnists, a rabid movie fan, and I prided myself of an acute awareness of the popular culture with an encyclopedic knowledge of the names, lifestyles and antics of so-called celebrities.

No more. I am out of the loop.

Indeed, I sometimes enjoy tweaking my many younger friends with a barrage of questions about what I thought were the well-known names of celebrities only to discover a blank stare and a lined forehead in response.…

The E-Book Is Winning

Posted on: August 6th, 2009 by Warren Adler 8 Comments

The e-book is winning. Its ultimate victory was never in doubt.

This does not mean that the printed book will disappear. It will fade out slowly as a viable mass economic enterprise as this new reading technology takes hold. The basic issues were, and still are, about marketing and its twin sister packaging. The product has always been the same, content delivered by words, sometimes embellished by speech and illustrations.

Trade book publishers, using the familiar technology of print on paper and packaging their product for shelving, utilized every practical inducement device to make their product attractive to the potential consumer. They came up with eye-appealing colorful cover art to make their product stand out in stores, created advertising and publicity campaigns, best seller lists, advanced review copies, and endorsements from prominent authors to hawk their product. It worked for years. It still works, but it is morphing into other forms, some yet to be invented.…