Guest Post: From Milton C. Toby: Books We Read, Books We Use


If your house is anything like mine, there are books everywhere. Some shelves even have rows of paperbacks stacked behind other rows of books, which means that I can’t remember which ones are hidden, and couldn’t get to them even if I could recall their titles.

For now, though, let’s concentrate on two areas within easy reach, the reading table beside your bed and the place where you write.

Because I write mostly non-fiction, that’s what I generally read. The stack of books on my bedside table as I write this includes a mix: Cormac McCarthy’s Cities of the Plain; Mark Bowden’s The Finish: The Killing of Osama Bin Laden; Douglas Waller’s Wild Bill Donovan: The Spymaster Who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage; and Lawrence Scanlan’s The Horse God Built: The Untold Story of Secretariat, the World’s Greatest Racehorse.

(Analogous to bedside table books are the audio books on my iPod. I just finished David McCullough’s National Book Award winner The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal 1870-1914 and cued up John Sandford’s Virgil Flowers novel Mad River.)

These are the books I read.

More telling, though, might be the books that I use every day, the ones beside my computer, lined up like soldiers waiting to be called into action:

The two-volume Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (everyone needs a good dictionary, and this is one of the best); The Oxford Desk Dictionary and Thesaurus; The Chicago Manuel of Style (the guide required by my publisher); The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law (the style Bible for people who write for magazines); two different editions of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style (if you’re going to rely on one general usage stylebook, this is the one); Bill Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words; and Eats, Shoots & Leaves.

Which books do you read? Which ones do you use in your writing?

Note from Ambrosia: Made me smile to know I am not the only one with rows of hidden books 🙂

Blog Tour Guest Post: Josi Kilpack


Within my process of learning to write, I can attribute a great deal of my education to becoming a critical reader. Up until I began writing, I had been a voracious reader for many years, reading anything I could get my hands on. I finished nearly every book I picked up and very rarely did I not like a book. However, after writing my first story I realized there was an actual craft; a set of skills necessary to write the rightway just as there is a craft to architecture or painting. I already read books on parenting, marriage, cooking, and personal finance; certainly there were books out there that taught someone how to write. In fact there were, but beyond non-fiction books on novel writing there was also the realization that every novel I picked up was an instruction manual in disguise. I quickly found that by studying the way an author told their story I could learn a thing or two about the craft and get my reading fix in the process. So, instead of just reading for entertainment or edification I started reading to learn the craft of writing, the structure of fiction, and how to best develop characters people would want to read about for three hundred pages. I would finish reading a book and ask myself what I liked, what I didn’t like, what I would have changed. Did I like the ending? Did I relate to the characters? Were there any parts of the story that could have been stronger, were some things overstated? It was rather fascinating to dissect plots and characters, holding each piece up to the light as I studied it from a new perspective. I then tried to bend and mold the elements I learned into my own stories.

But, something happened through these exercises; something I hadn’t expected. Once I was critically evaluating the elements of a book it became harder and harder to get lost within the pages. Whereas I used to finish 98% of every book I picked up, I soon found my percentage dropping farther and farther as I found more and more storylines that, for one reason or another, I just didn’t like. These days, I probably only finish 1/3 of the books I pick up. The downside of the development of this critical reader who is consistently reading over my shoulder, is that it’s not always easy to find a good book. When I’m reading it’s hard to turn off my “internal editor” and let the story sweep me away.

The upside is that when I like a book, I really, really like it. Another benefit is that reading is very much an educational experience for me. Not only am I learning about whatever time period, culture, or person the story features, I’m also learning about the book’s structure, character development, plot, and basic usage of words, dialogue, and description. Since I only get captured by great books, I figure I’m getting the best education I possibly can. It’s not uncommon for me to be reading and stop in order to scramble for my notebook where I write down a certain word I liked, or a sentence structure that had great texture, or I jot down a character idea that was triggered by the story. Then I run back to the book and get lost once again. In this sense I’ve learned to write from some of the great writers of my time—Sue Graphton, John Grisham, Mary Higgins Clark, Susan Elizabeth Phillips, John Shors as was as some of the classic writers such as Mary Stewart, Agatha Christie, and Edgar Allan Poe. What better teachers could a writer want? And they’re all available for nothing more than a library card.

There are days when I pine for the reader I once was, the reader who was happy with anything over 200 pages, and yet in the long run the sacrifice of that part of who I was, has made room for another part of me that even a year before I wrote my first novel I didn’t know existed. It’s an amazing journey, these lives we live, and a fascinating vista when we stand on the verge of who we are and look back at where we’ve been and all the people who helped us get here. Once we can look over what we’ve done, we can then turn and face the horizons of where we are going. It’s my core belief that regardless of who we are and where we want to end up one day, good books will lay that groundwork one way or another. I know it’s been true for me.

Blog Tour Guest Post: The Decline of Self Control by J.R. Slosar


The Decline of Self-Control

The only thing that might be surprising about public displays of rude behavior is that the recent episodes of three public occurrences were one right after another. The incidents of yelling “you lied” at the President, or ranting and cursing at a line judge in sports, or grabbing the mic at an awards ceremony to announce someone else’s entry was better, were incidents that cut across politics, sports and entertainment. These public examples are symptomatic evidence for the decline of self control. We can blame media, politics, competition or even the insistence of our Constitutional rights to express ourselves anyway we want too. But clearly, it is a cultural trend. Loss of self-control is evident in many areas and emerges from a culture that is defined by excess. Excess is everywhere. Americans are overweight, buried in debt, overusing medications, and cheating more than ever before. We even put more people in prison per capita than any other country. Our budget deficit and health care spending seem to have no upper limit. When you consider all of these problems of self control, verbal rudeness is just a minor symptom.


The only thing that might be surprising about public displays of rude behavior is that the recent episodes of three public occurrences were one right after another. The incidents of yelling “you lied” at the President, or ranting and cursing at a line judge in sports, or grabbing the mic at an awards ceremony to announce someone else’s entry was better, were incidents that cut across politics, sports and entertainment. These public examples are symptomatic evidence for the decline of self control. We can blame media, politics, competition or even the insistence of our Constitutional rights to express ourselves anyway we want too. But clearly, it is a cultural trend. Loss of self-control is evident in many areas and emerges from a culture that is defined by excess. Excess is everywhere. Americans are overweight, buried in debt, overusing medications, and cheating more than ever before. We even put more people in prison per capita than any other country. Our budget deficit and health care spending seem to have no upper limit. When you consider all of these problems of self control, verbal rudeness is just a minor symptom.

The decline in self-control is connected to an increase in cultural narcissism-our sense of entitlement, grandiose expectations, immediacy, and demand that we are so special-we deserve everything now. Entitlement and immediacy leads to impulsivity and declining self-control. Researcher Jean Twenge has written two books describing the growth of narcissism-her recent effort is titled The Narcissism Epidemic. The growth is a cultural trend, with roots in the 70s, and initially put forth by social critic Christopher Lasch. Today’s version, Cultural Narcissism 2.0, has created a culture of excess that involves three factors. These are the speed of technology, technology coupled with media, and extreme capitalism. These factors are cumulative and interactive and define our day to day behavior and relationships. We haven’t fully realized the cumulative effect of these combined forces on our lives. The water level has been slowly rising, but now we sense it is above our shoulders. Even then, we run the risk of drowning. Like the frog that will jump out of hot water, but if put in water that slowly boils, it stays in the water and dies.

All of our social and legislative policies reflect our cultural narcissism and encourage and advance the decline in self-control. Deregulation has become a religion and has led to extreme risk taking that caused the financial collapse. Extreme risk taking is a behavior that emerges from declining self-control. The road to success in today’s deregulated “free market” is not to choose a profession and to be competent. That takes too much time and is too hard. Instead, it is far easier to be a broker. A broker in a deregulated jungle is king. The dismantling of rules and boundaries wafts down to the individual. In an era that prized deregulation, we have deregulated our internal mechanisms of self-control. Self-control at this point can only be reined in by what everyone seems to resist and hate—increased rules and regulations. Just as a child cannot grow without rules and boundaries, an economy cannot recover and grow without them either.

Some call today’s youth Generation Me. But many of them want to become Generation We. This new generation will have the courage to regulate, the courage to overcome the arguments of socialism. They will dispute the entitled positions like the one that says we have the best healthcare system in the world. They will replace consumption with competence. They will replace self esteem with self-control. They will redefine what success means. Their internal mantra will be an old one —moderation in all things.

J.R. Slosar is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Irvine, CA, and an adjunct assistant professor at Chapman University, Orange, CA. In the past 25 years he has provided direct clinical and consulting services in a variety of diverse settings. He is the author of The Culture of Excess: How America Lost Self Control and Why We Need to Redefine Success (ABC-CLIO, Nov.. 2009) Visit http://www.cultureofexcess.com or call 949-851-8277 for more information.

Guest Post: Jeffrey B Allen Author of Gone Away Into the Land


Continuing on with our posts this week from the wonderful blog tour with Goneaway into the land is a fantastic guest post by Jeffrey B. Allen.

And My Question for our wonderful guest post:

What does one go through when dealing with writing such emotional stories?

Emotions buried beneath the thin skin of the writer; emotions unknown
to the writer, and emotions aching for a way to express themselves, to
be felt and heard. I believe writing is a form of self evaluation.
It is a therapy of sorts, but so are all forms of artistic expression.
There is a need for artists to expose themselves through their
medium. You may wonder why, but to me it is simple. Authors, like
painters, sculptures, or actors, want to stir the emotions in others.
An author who writes romance or an author who writes horror both wish
upon their audience the same thing, to invoke a reaction.

GoneAway is a complex tale of reconciliation told from the point of
view of a twelve year old boy. Dark thoughts are common in boys of
that age, especially if they are traumatized. On the other hand, a
journey into a place where a young boy would fantasize about killing
his father would have to be taken from the context of what the boy is
familiar with, and what he loves most. In John’s case, he loved
powerful machines such as locomotives, and he loved candy, as most
children his age do. And he adored his mother and his sister Marny.
Most of all, he hated his father, and rightly so. His father was a
nasty beast, abusive, self absorbed, and embittered by having been
excommunicated from his community of religious zealots.

I was forced to confront many of my demons while writing GoneAway. I
found places inside myself where I did not want to go, and I wrote
upon the pages descriptions that I was not sure would be understood by
my family. In the final analysis, GoneAway is a story for everyone.
Let it be known that I was not abused as John was, and I did not name
my father a beast. What I did do was to draw upon pleasant and
unpleasant periods of my childhood and my adult life to develop the
threads within the story. I drew on philosophical and historical
knowledge, and I also spent many hours researching mythology and
biblical facts and fables, as well as ancient history to bring life’s
diversity into the story. Then I used my ability as a writer to cause
the many threads of GoneAway to be cohesive for my reader.

There are some who say I succeeded in evoking emotion. I hope they
are correct. Time will only tell.
Thank you for the opportunity to be interviewed.


Jeffrey B. Allen

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