Authors Electric

  "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, For they shall be filled." - Matthew 5:1:11 New King James. And blessed are those who await hell freezing over. I've personally known three people who were murdered. One was a writer, Susan Berman, another was my former sister-in-law, Lola Steele, another was a noted, much admired Los Angeles Times colleague, Ruben Salazar , murdered by police. Not one of their killers has been brought to justice. One of the murderers, however, has been convicted. That happened in Los Angeles just a week before this writing, but this came a full twenty years after the New York real estate scion, Robert Durst, shot his friend Susan to death at point blank range at her Los Angeles hillside home. The wealthy Durst has appealed his first-degree murder conviction, but getting off - as he apparently has for two other killings, seems unlikely this time. Knowing three murdered people perhaps would not be many if I were an emergency ...

Daisy Ridley's Ophelia swims with the fishes It's a writer's nightmare. You've put everything into a novel based on an idea that you thought was original, only to discover that it's already been done - maybe better, and perhaps famously. How did you overlook it? Just like that, your shiny new bicycle has a flat and you're out there pedaling with no pants on! No matter. Call it "a reimagining" and carry on. Writers have done it for thousands of years, most notably, William Shakespeare, that all time master of tales retold in iambic pentameter. Romeo and Juliet , was already a popular Italian tale when the Bard made it the subject of his masterpiece, as were other most famous plays. He based Hamlet on a very old Danish play entitled "Ur-Hamlet" which in turn was derived from a lengthy, 1200 A.D. compilation of Norse legends written in Latin: Saxo Grammaticus' Gesta Danorum, or History of the Danes , telling of the rise and fall of t...