A Word From Our Sponsor...

It's been far too long since I have composed another posting for my blog. But now I am back and I must begin with a reminder of what prompted me to begin this blog in the first place. It was the publication of my ebook, Safe On Third, and my desire to promote it that led to the creation of this blog.  Safe was published in July of this year, and now, to reward those of you who have been kind enough to read this blog, I would like to offer a half-price coupon for the purchase of my book at smashwords.com.  Simply use the following code, SH84W (not case sensitive), which you enter prior to completing checkout. As a result, you will only have to pay $5.00 for Safe On Third.  At Smashwords, you have a choice of formats for downloading the book.  They are set out below.

Available Ebook reading formats:

When you purchase the full book, you gain access to all formats. 

Format	Full Book	Sample First 30%
Online Reading (HTML)	Buy	View sample
Online Reading (JavaScript)	Buy	View sample
Kindle (.mobi)	Buy	Download sample
Epub (open industry format, good for Stanza reader, others)	Buy	Download sample
PDF (good for highly formatted books, or for home printing)	Buy	No sample available
RTF (readable on most word processors)	Buy	No sample available
LRF (for Sony Reader)	Buy	Download sample
Palm Doc (PDB) (for Palm reading devices)	Buy	Download sample

Giants Win and Fox Sports Loses: A Geography Lesson

In recent posts I have described myself as “exhausted.”  That is not the case today.  This morning I am in a celebratory mood, still enjoying the Monday night victory of the San Francisco Giants in the World Series.  Yes, I am still savoring the pitching of Tim Lincecum in the fifth and final game against the Texas Rangers, along with Aubrey Huff’s sacrifice bunt, Brian Wilson’s ninth inning finish, and the wonderful home run hit by Edgar Renteria that won the Series for the Giants.  

Unfortunately, I had no choice but to watch the fifth and final game on Fox Sports, burdened with the painful commentary of Buck and McCarver, but even that did not spoil my enjoyment of the action on the field, and I remain amused, too, by the Fox graphic, shown during one of the later innings, which was about the year 1954, when the Giants last won the World Series.  According to this Fox Sports graphic, a gallon of gas was 21 cents that year. The U.S. President was Eisenhower.  I Love Lucy was the #1 TV show, and there were “NO MLB TEAMS WEST OF MISSISSIPPI.”    

Talk about Eastern Bias or maybe myopia.  When I saw this graphic, I almost fell out of my chair.  My geography may not be very good, but I grew up in St. Louis as a Cardinals fan and I always thought the city was west of the ”Big Muddy.”  Of course, that was a long time ago, and I may be confused, although I remember a big river on the east side of the city that is the home of the baseball team that has won more World Series Championships than any other NL team.  Yes, difficult as it might be to believe, the midwestern city of St. Louis is the home of the team that first won the World Series in 1926, defeating the East Coast's New York Yankees.  I wonder, too, where the lowly St. Louis Browns of the American League played before they went to Baltimore after the 1953 season.  Maybe Sportsman’s Park was really in East St. Louis.  That would explain everything.  But what do I know, anyway?  After all, I was just a kid growing up in the suburbs.

The Giants Win The Pennant! The Giants Win The Pennant!

No, it's not 1951, although Russ Hodges's famous call of Bobby Thomson's pennant winning home run comes to mind. But with a called third strike on Ryan Howard, the 2010 Giants have won the pennant after a series of very tense, dramatic play-off games with a superior team, the Phillies, and I am exhausted. As a result, I have let things slip here and, with the World Series starting in San Francisco tomorrow, I don't know how soon I will be back on track. I will not grow a beard and dye it black. Nor will I wear a rally thong, but I have caught Giants Fever.  I am in a state of delirium that makes it difficult to concentrate on anything other than baseball, and so Bobo Newsom and Safe On Third will have to be put aside for now, while I follow the exploits of Posey, Lincecum, Cain, Lopez, Wilson, Sanchez (Freddie and Jonathan), Bumgarner, Uribe, Torres, Burrell, Huff, and Cody Ross.

More Baseball In A Purple Haze

Baseball is still very much on my mind, and I had intended to provide a few anecdotes about Bobo Newsom in my post today, but my plan was sidetracked after I went to see Robin Williams perform his stand-up act live last night before a sold-out crowd at the Berkeley Repertory Theater.  It was an exhausting experience for I spent two hours laughing, and it's hard to even remember all the topics that were covered because Robin Williams's mind is so quick, his wit so sharp, and his energy seemingly unlimited, as he keeps moving quickly from one subject to the next.  I do recall, however, that he did describe in wonderful detail what it must have been like for the late Dock Ellis of the Pittsburgh Pirates, when he pitched a no-hitter while hallucinating on LSD.  Intrigued by this story, I decided to save Bobo Newsom for another day. I did a little research and found that, indeed, it was on June 12, 1970, that Dock Ellis pitched a no-hitter against the San Diego Padres. While high on LSD. Ellis walked eight batters and hit one during this game. In a 2008 interview that was excerpted on the Public Radio Program, Weekend America, Ellis explained in great detail what he actually had experienced in his "purple haze." He said that he took Benzedrine to try to even things out right before he warmed up, that sometimes he saw his catcher. Jerry May, and sometimes he didn't, that the ball kept changing in size and weight, that for much of the game he had no idea what the score was, and that he had no interest in holding runners on base. For more about this see  Big Hair and Plastic Grass: A Funky Ride Through Baseball and America in the Swinging '70s  by Dan Epstein, published by Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin's Press, LLC. Also check out a wonderful animated short made by James Blagden,"Dock Ellis & the LSD No-No." This film uses parts of the soundtrack of the Ellis interview of 2008.  The URL is www.dockshort.com/dockshort/.

Go Giants!!!

Baseball is very much on my mind these days, because the San Francisco Giants are up, two games to one, in their division playoff series with the Atlanta Braves.  It's an exciting time for Giants fans like myself, hoping that the team's fine pitching by Lincecum, Cain, and Sanchez, will lead them to the National League Championship Series against the Phillies and, perhaps, beyond to the World Series.

Of course, in my novel, Safe On Third, baseball also plays an important part.  Percy, one of the central characters is a sportswriter who covered the New York Giants of the Polo Grounds and John McGraw for many years, and several scenes are actually set at ballgames in 1940, including a spring training game and an opening day game at Griffith Stadium, with President Roosevelt in attendance along with the main fictional characters in the book, as the Senators play the Red Sox.

Yes, I like baseball very much, and in an earlier, unedited version of Safe On Third, I indulged myself by following closely the American League pennant race in 1940 on a parallel track with the presidential campaign.  That 1940 race was quite exciting.  The Yankees were favorites.  They had won four straight pennants and four consecutive World Series titles.  Cleveland and Detroit traded the lead back and forth with the Yankees right behind them, and finally the Tigers, who had finished fifth the year before, won the American League championship. Thanks to the hitting of Hank Greenberg and Rudy York, along with the pitching of Bobo Newsom, Tommy Bridges, and Schoolboy Rowe, Detroit won the pennant and went on to face the Cincinnati Reds in the World Series.

There are still references to Newsom in Safe On Third, but in earlier versions of the novel, Bobo Newsom played a larger role, actually appearing in several chapters. He was an interesting “character,” and he comes to mind now, because we are once again in the midst of exciting October Baseball, and I am reminded that October 8th was the 70th anniversary of the Detroit Tigers' 2-1 loss to the Cincinnati Reds in the seventh game of the 1940 World Series.  Bobo was the losing pitcher that day, starting on only one day of rest, after winning the first and fifth games for the Tigers. (After his first Series victory, Newsom's father died that same night, and Bobo went on to win the fifth game, a shutout for his dad, before losing game seven.)

Allow me to explain that Louis Norman "Bobo" Newsom was a big, burly, undisciplined righthander from Hartsville, South Carolina, who won twenty games three times and led the league in losses four times over the course of his 20-year major league career. Newsom was an eccentric, flamboyant, superstitious, and boastful workhorse, not always friendly, not gifted or eloquent, who changed teams sixteen times. Newsom liked to talk about himself in the third person. He addressed everyone as "Bobo," and adopted that as his own nickname. His best season was 1940, when his record was 21-5, and his ERA was 2.83, the second lowest in the American League that year.

I have more to add about Bobo Newsom.  I would like to share some anecdotes and background information about him that I had to remove from Safe On Third, and I shall do so in my next post.   

Go Giants!!!

Too Much History?

I began this blog in conjunction with the publication of my “historical” thriller, Safe On Third, as a Smashwords ebook, and at the time I submitted the manuscript to Kirkus Discoveries, which reviews works by self-published and independent authors.  It’s been several weeks since I received my Kirkus review.  It contains a number of positive comments, but I have been stewing over it, and because I want to discuss it, I am now presenting it here, in its entirety:

            Zorensky’s debut is a meticulous historical novel set during the 1940 U.S. presidential campaign.

           As Franklin Roosevelt begins his run for an unprecedented third term and Nazi agents prepare schemes to sway the electorate, British-American sportswriter Percy Brown finds himself caught up in a dangerous spy game. A recent recruit of British intelligence, Percy serves as liaison between the beautiful Elsa—a German-American double agent keeping tabs on dour Nazi spy Karl Mueller—and impatiently irascible SIS operative Nigel Dunderdale. But as Elsa gets closer to discovering the extent of Karl’s ties to a ring of German saboteurs, Percy gets increasingly in over his head. The care with which Zorensky painstakingly recreates the physical, cultural and political world of 1940 is plainly evident; his characters drive on the same roads, walk the same streets and visit the same sites (including a downtown Manhattan gun shop) that flesh-and-blood people of the period would have. Zorensky makes good use of historical cameos, too, peppering the text with visits from the likes of Charles Lindbergh, labor leader John L. Lewis and a few dozen professional baseball figures. Indeed, if Zorensky errs in any direction with regard to historical accuracy, it would be in making the work almost slavishly adherent to it; his plot and characters often feel yoked to the chain of factual events—including the New York World’s fair bombing and an explosion at a New Jersey powder factory—and are given too few chances to breathe on their own. Zorensky’s passion for sharing interesting details—both historical and drawn from his character’s rich back stories—is sometimes too apparent, and often results in unfortunate digressions of exposition that stop the plot cold, as characters spend whole chapters telling each other things they already know rather than cutting to the chase. A fun, melodramatic and authentic spy thriller is contained in the text, but is yet to be carved out by a final, brutal edit.

           A mighty swing, but out at home.

“A mighty swing, but out at home.”  Ouch!  I thought the Kirkus reviewer must have enjoyed that last line, that it was a predictable play on the title, too easy, too clever by half, and certainly unnecessary.  But more troubling to me was the reviewer’s specific, underlying objection to “making the work almost slavishly adherent” to history.  After all, the book is an “historical” novel.  It is not an alternative history; the fictional characters are acting within the framework of actual events in 1940.  I regard this as a positive element of the book, and I make no apology for being passionate about the historical details, which make Safe On Third more than a simple thriller.

     
Still, the review suggests that all this history stops the plot cold, and that while “(a) fun, melodramatic and authentic spy thriller is contained in the text, Safe On Third needs a “final, brutal edit.”  I am not sure how to react to this, because the book already has received such an edit from an independent, “consulting editor,” Alan Rinzler, an extremely intelligent and experienced individual, who for many years was an acquisitions and developmental editor at major publishing houses and has edited many New York Times Best Sellers, including thrillers by Clive Cussler and Robert Ludlum.  With Alan’s capable guidance, I streamlined the manuscript, reducing it in size by half and eliminating many historical elements, including a subplot that followed the American League pennant race of the Detroit Tigers on a parallel track with the presidential campaign. 

      
Perhaps it is just a matter of taste.  Is there too much history in Safe On Third? We know what a Kirkus reviewer thinks, so be forewarned.  But I leave the final decision to each reader.

On The Road Again

Yes, it's been a long time, and my children are upset with me for failing to keep up my posts. Since the beginning of the month, however, I have been on the road.  I have just returned to California from Nantucket after a quick trip down to Washington, D.C., and then a 3200-mile drive across country from Nantucket with only a Labrador Retriever accompanying me. Driving six or seven hundred miles a day with a black Lab sleeping in the backseat, I was not in the proper frame of mind to blog about anything when I finally stopped for the night, and I’m afraid my mind is still mush.  I still feel a bit disoriented and unsettled after so much time behind the wheel, so much inedible road food, and so many uncomfortable beds, although I can't really complain for my trip was certainly much easier than that of the first intrepid drivers to go from coast to coast.

As I learned by chance several weeks ago in D.C., when I visited the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, the first coast-to-coast trip by automobile was made in this country back in 1903 by Dr. Horatio Nelson Jackson and Sewall Crocker, who drove from San Francisco to New York City with a bulldog named Bud. They rode in an open two-seater touring car made by the Winton Motor Carriage Company in Cleveland, Ohio, with a two-cylinder, 20-horsepower engine beneath the driver’s seat that had a top speed of 30 miles per hour. Their trip took them 63 days, and at the time there were only 150 miles of paved roads in the entire country. There were no gas stations, either. They purchased fuel used for farm machinery from local general stores. Ken Burns has made a film for PBS about this cross-country journey, called “Horatio’s Drive: America's First Road Trip," and the car that was used is now on exhibit at the Smithsonian, where I saw it along with the goggles that were worn by Bud, the bulldog, who rode up in front and whose eyes were irritated by the dust rising around the open touring car.  

Of course,  Jackson, Crocker, and Bud never got stuck in rush hour traffic or found themselves boxed in by two eighteen wheelers, but I never had to drive on the tracks of a railroad trestle to cross a river, and I never got stuck in any buffalo wallows.  I don't even know what a wallow is.  Nor did I have to provide goggles for my dog, but, as I say, she was in the backseat, and she never complained.