By Shawn Coyne | Published: September 16, 2011
Fifteen years ago, I worked at St. Martin’s Press. It was (and still is) one of the big six publishing players. If ever there is a sitcom about book publishing, it should be set in the 1990s at St. Martin’s Press. What a cast of characters…
Anyway, the head of the company was a man named Thomas McCormack, a real autocrat with more than a few eccentricities. Every day, Tom would order a tuna fish sandwich and a small cup of Vanilla ice cream from the ancient delicatessen across the street (http://www.eisenbergsnyc.com/). He wasn’t a publishing lunch schmoozy kind of guy… Invariably, he’d not have time to finish the sandwich or even get near the ice cream, so when you went to his office for one thing or another, Tom would open up his mini-fridge and offer you one of the tens of little freezer burned ice creams stuffed inside.
Tom was the boss of bosses at St. Martin’s (actually started the whole thing years before) yet he also served as SMP’s Editor in Chief. He ran the editorial meeting every Wednesday morning at 9:30 a.m. sharp in the flatiron building’s seventeenth floor conference room. Imagine CBS’s Leslie Moonves meeting once a week for six hours with every in house producer and show runner to approve or reject his or her story ideas. Crazy for a CEO to get his hands that dirty, right? He should be riding his own elevator (like another famous publishing CEO at the time) and looking for strategic long term growth alliances… (more…)
By Steven Pressfield | Published: September 14, 2011
Thanks to our dear friend Jeff Sexton, who sent in this clip of sci-fi superstar Harlan Ellison cutting loose with one of his tastiest rants.
If you haven’t got three-and-a-half minutes, here are a few tidbits from Mr. E’s sulfuric screed:
“I don’t take a piss without getting paid for it.”
“I’m supposed to give a freebie to Warner Bros.? What, is Warner Bros. out on the sidewalk with an eyepatch and a tin cup?”
“It’s the amateurs who screw things up for the professionals by giving it away for free.”
“Pay me! Cross my palm with silver!”
“Are they any less the media whore than I? I think not. I sell my soul, but for the highest rate.”
Of course, Harlan Ellison is not a media whore. He’s a pro in the best sense of the word, who has delivered some of the choicest speculative fiction ever, on dozens of Star Trek episodes and his own shelf of novels, not to mention “the greatest sci-fi movie never made,” the adapted screenplay to Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot.
Then what’s he so exercised about? He doesn’t like getting screwed (in this case by studios and producers trying to exploit his work for their own profit while stiffing him in the process.)
Most of us don’t have Harlan Ellison’s high-end problem. Most artists and entrepreneurs are giving it away—and grateful to be able to do even that. But we’re all getting screwed and we’re all in the same boat. (more…)
By Steven Pressfield | Published: September 12, 2011
Was there a greater war story, ever, than Homer’s Iliad? It’s almost a crime to call the Iliad a war story, by so many magnitudes does it transcend that and every other genre. What works of literature stand beside it? The Bible. The Bhagavad-Gita. The collected works of Shakespeare. Not much else.
The death of Sarpedon, from the Euphronios krater, 515 B.C.
I took a full-semester course in the Iliad in college. I got a D. I wish I could take that class over, because, after a few decades in the trenches of the storytelling craft, I’ve acquired a keen appreciation for the challenges that Homer faced in conceiving and composing this epic—and for how masterfully he solved them.
Today let’s consider one item only: minor characters.
The architecture of the Iliad has heroes stacked in tiers, if you’ll forgive a term from this season’s presidential debate coverage. As Homer’s champions duel each other before the walls of Troy, third-tier heroes (Agenor, Teukros, Antiphos) fall to second-tier heroes (Odysseus, Diomedes, Aeneas), who in turn are slain or bested in other ways by first-tier heroes (Hector, Achilles).
Glaukos and Sarpedon are third-tier heroes, but look at the speeches that Homer gives them (translation by Richmond Lattimore):
SARPEDON: Glaukos, why is it you and I are honored with pride of place, the choice meats and the filled wine-cups in Lykia, and all men look on us as if we were immortals, and we are appointed a great piece of land by the banks of the Xanthos, good land, orchard and vineyard, and ploughland for the planting of wheat? Therefore it is our duty in the forefront of the Lykians to take our stand and bear our part of the blazing of battle, so that a man of the close-armoured Lykians may say of us, “Indeed these are no ignoble men who are lords of Lykia, these kings of ours, who feed upon the fat sheep appointed and drink the exquisite sweet wine, since indeed there is strength of valour in them, since they fight in the forefront of the Lykians.” (more…)
