Centerfolds for Dummies

I could have made my living in fiction, had I had the luxury to devote more time, and the business sense to keep my work circulating with editors. Perhaps I will yet. A career and wife and 2-year-old tend to take me from my keyboard, so what little time is left is best used for small outings like this.

(Then again, I'm in marketing, maybe I already work in fiction?)

I do believe some writers do their best work later in life, in spite of (or because of) being addled by drugs or alcohol or crumbling friendships. Capote is a good example; Music for Chameleons is as perfect as writing gets.

Read Centerfolds for Dummies, rated MA➚

[2016.01.20: In October last year, Comcast/xfinity removed everyone's personal directories, so there is no more /~cairnsc, which is where experimented with some rudimentary coding, and if you were here, why this link was broken; I moved this story to Google Drive. I know I have some other tweaks to make due to this. When my book is done and I'm blogging regularly again, I'll put my house back in order.]

Unfortunately, there are so many counterexamples (poor writing later in life), that is what usually comes to mind. Michael Crichton's Next is abominable.

(There is some suspicion that Pirate Latitudes, published posthumously and pretty good, was written earlier and set aside, but pulled out of moth balls and finished by someone else to take advantage of the brief window of popularity his death provided. Crichton himself was no stranger to opportunism, in a very benign way. Although he was sometimes at the fore of a trend, eg dino DNA in Jurassic Park, he was more often responding to what was popular and had a market. He probably worked on Pirate Latitudes when Pirates of the Caribbean was developing traction and promising a spike in interest in pirates.

It reads just like The Andromeda Strain, The Great Train Robbery, etc. You can see 1970's stars and cinematic conventions on every page, and that, for me, is a wonderful treat. Crichton wrote for the movies even when writing for the mind.)

One of my favorite pirate movies to this day is Swashbuckler ➚, with a terrific set of actors that appear to be just having fun (including Robert Shaw, James Earl Jones, Geneviève Bujold, Beau Bridges, and someone you may not remember, but I do, very fondly, Avery Schreiber). Great fun from the 70's, but decidedly not Crichton's brutal portrayal, which would definitely be softened for filmgoers who want more Johnny Depp than throat-cutting.)