Authors Electric

Mary Reinholz '70 West    The jobs I had as a kid and even later, as a young man don't exist anymore. I had no inkling I'd work on a newspaper or write books, or be in "media." My "big get" was getting a job. I started earning pocket money at age 10 delivering newspapers to home subscribers on de Luxe Schwinn I loved that sleek, red-and-black bike, with its whitewall balloon tires, shiny streamlined chrome fenders, built-in horn, head-and-tail lights, front-wheel shock-absorber and rack to carry the afternoon dailies I delivered to my afternoon paper's forty subscribers.  I became adepted at sailing fat copies of rubber-banded,  Hollywood Citizen News onto subscribers' front porches without breaking a window - most of the time.  Schwinns of that era were like our plush, chrome-laden, dreamboat, fintailed cars -  as stylish as they were unsafe, gas-guzzling, and impractical. I lusted after just a second-hand one that I could restore. To save up, ...

  I've always been ambivalent about having cut my teeth in the cigar-hazed city room of the Los Angeles Times , then a 1960s metropolitan newspaper with more editorial lineage than any other nationwide. That was back in the days when "stop-the-presses" could be taken literally! I can never figure out if that initiation by printers' ink sharpened or dulled me as a latter-day author. My early years as a journalist, followed by decades of magazine freelancing and sitting behind an editor's desk certainly instilled me with deadline discipline and fetishes for facts, factoids and specificity. I've always feared my nose would grow if I didn't get whatever I was writing right. It was always a balancing act on the high wire of deadlines. Self-doubt and existential angst be damned! Get it right, or leave it out. Get your best in on time.  But no dithering. To succeed, the working journalist must become tougher than the average literary bear.  Mary Ford - author of...

  "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 ...

Words matter - as writers we know that more than most. And clarity of definitions matter as well - as the recent hoo-ha over the definition of 'alert' (here in the UK) shows only too well. I can't be the only writer who can spend half an hour thumbing through a thesaurus looking for a 'right word'. Feelings matter too. As writers, we know there are times when we need to put words into a character's mouth while, at the same time, making it clear that they are thinking and feeling the opposite. On the page, we can use asides, parentheses, detours in the narrative to show that feelings might not mirror the words. When it's words we listen to, things can get complicated. For instance - most mornings, I wake to the dulcet tones of Michal Husain and Nick Robinson on Radio 4's Today Programme (I need burbling, not music, in the morning). At the height of the pandemic their voices were appropriately subdued, full of grief for the dying and awe for the hopel...

I recently met a group of neighbors.   I sat next to the city Mayor but it was the woman seated on the other side of me who teaches at Pasadena City College (PCC) that asked me about writing.   I described my writing background. It goes back to scribbling notes as a child for my mother, to writing for the middle school newspaper to writing in journalism classes.   Writers don’t need a degree to write, but I should add that had I majored in journalism I would have had the sheer discipline required to write sooner. The skill of turning out stories people would want to read, stories that were carefully structured, grammatically correct with no spelling mistakes, factually correct and reader-friendly. I had a love hate relationship with writing until I found journalism, which was a perfect outlet because I then had a concrete goal, could be compensated and I pursued it with a passion. I never turned a story in on time, they were always early but it required hard w...