James Allen Willis

I caught up with Elaine Miller at the recent Montrose Christian Writers Conference (MCWC) and asked her about the courses she was teaching, her book and about the MCWC. She’s a great interviewee! In fairness to Elaine, this was an “on the spot” interview and she, like many of us, were getting little sleep. Even so, she gives a great spontaneous interview.

In the interview Elaine credits the MCWC with her start in writing and getting her first book published. Elaine said it was at MCWC she learned about the craft of writing and sold her first article to Salvation Army’s War Cry magazine (that article later became the first chapter in her book Splashes of Serenity: Bathtime Reflections for Drained Moms).

It seems a trend at some coffee and sandwich shops in New York City is to ban computer use, at least for a few hours each day. In a New York Times article on August 2, author Nick Bilton relates his experience with “please put down the Kindle sir.”

The interesting bit of news from the article (for me) comes near the end of the story:

On Monday, Ian Freed, Amazon’s vice president for digital, told CNet that the number of e-books Amazon sold in the first quarter of 2010 had tripled compared to a year earlier.

Amazon also recently said that e-books have been outselling hardcover books for several months. And Apple said in early April that iPad owners were downloading hundreds of thousands of e-books from the iBookstore.*

E-books are now outselling hardcover books at Amazon—who woulda thunk? E-books are certainly no passing fad or trend. Authors need to pay attention to this very important market. In fact, e-books are a new market forming around us, and a golden opportunity for enterprising authors.

*New York Times (Aug 2) – No E-Books Allowed in This Establishment

Frank Westcott has been attending the Montrose Christian Writers Conference for years with his wife Beth. Frank is a pastor from Moravia, NY. He’s a great guy! And a talented ventriloquist too.

The following quote from Jason Epstein is from an article he published in the The New York Review of Books, March 11, 2010:

“The transition within the book publishing industry from physical inventory stored in a warehouse and trucked to retailers to digital files stored in cyberspace and delivered almost anywhere on earth as quickly and cheaply as e-mail is now underway and irreversible. This historic shift will radically transform worldwide book publishing, the cultures it affects and on which it depends. Meanwhile, for quite different reasons, the genteel book business that I joined more than a half-century ago is already on edge, suffering from a gambler’s unbreakable addiction to risky, seasonal best sellers, many of which don’t recoup their costs, and the simultaneous deterioration of backlist, the vital annuity on which book publishers had in better days relied for year-to-year stability through bad times and good. The crisis of confidence reflects these intersecting shocks, an overspecialized marketplace dominated by high-risk ephemera and a technological shift orders of magnitude greater than the momentous evolution from monkish scriptoria to movable type launched in Gutenberg’s German city of Mainz six centuries ago.” (emphasis mine)

A couple of things to note here. First, why should we listen to Jason Epstein? Because in 1952 Jason is the man who launched the trade paperback book in the United States. If anyone is qualified to step back and look at where things are heading in the publishing world, it’s Jason.

So when he says first of all, a transition to e-books is now underway and irreversible, you have to stop and take notice. But second, did you catch what he said at the end? Jason says this “technological shift” from print to e-books is not only as big a deal as Gutenberg’s invention of movable type, he says it’s “orders of magnitude greater!” Wow.

I first heard Fran Fernandez speak at last year’s MCWC. Fran was attending this year’s conference and I had the chance to record this interview. She credits the Montrose Christian Writers Conference for the knowledge and inspiration to write and get her first book published: The Best Is Yet to Come: 60 Devotions. She gave me the ultimate gift, a signed copy of her book for my wife Judy. Thanks Fran! (Fran gets bonus points…her publisher, Zondervan, has made her book available in a Kindle version too.)

Author Shirley Leonard talks about her “second family” at the 2010 Montrose Christian Writers Conference. Shirley’s devotionals have appeared in the The Secret Place, The Quiet Hour, Devotions, and Penned from the Heart. Her stories and articles have been published in Live, Women Alive, and Pennsylvania Magazine. She is a contributing writer for American Window Cleaner Magazine.

This review was originally posted on Nov. 30, 2008 on a different blog (no longer maintained). I’m re-running it here because I think this is an important movie. It is now out on DVD. I encourage you to rent it and watch it. Powerful.

This is not an easy review to write. Not because I don’t like or recommend the movie–I enthusiastically do! But because I don’t want to give away any of the plot, and because even two days later as I write this, the movie still haunts me.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is based on a book by the same name. I have not read the book, although I’m going to look for it now. I was only peripherally aware of the movie’s theme, the Holocaust, when we attended. Last year my wife and I attended a play by the name of “A Shayna Maidel” which was also about the Holocaust. It is one of those profoundly important pieces of history about which, just a generation later, we do not know enough. This movie will definitely educate you.

The movie (and presumably the book) takes a unique approach. It shows us the Holocaust through the eyes of an 8 year-old German boy named Bruno. His father is a Nazi officer who has received a promotion, and along with the promotion comes a move to the country and a new posting. The family moves to a house not far from a Jewish internment camp, and Bruno, being a curious 8 year-old, finds his way to the edge of the camp where he befriends another 8 year-old boy (a Jew) on the other side of the fence.

There are a lot of themes skillfully woven into this movie: Like how adults (and society) tell us one thing, but sometimes the things we’re being told don’t line up with truth and the reality we know. Sometimes there’s a disconnect. Yet, we play along anyway. We also see the internal struggles some of the German families must have had in dealing with what was happening around them. And the results of speaking out against accepted societal norms. We experience that tension. It’s as if we’re a member of the family ourselves–we are “in the picture.”

The cinematography is excellent, the dialog well done. The characters are fully developed–people you really care about (especially the children). And the subject matter, well, what can one say? Tragic, unsettling, horrific. But important. I think if you go and see this movie, at the end you will come away as moved as my family and I were.

If you live in the Greater Binghamton area, this movie is currently (and only) playing at Regal Cinemas. It’s a shame that nationwide it’s only brought in $2.6M after 3 weeks in the U.S. This is a movie everyone needs to see. Go and see it before it’s gone from theaters.

One note of caution: We took our 12 year-old boy with us to see it. If I had known more about the content and plot, I would have elected not to take him. I would say children no younger than 13-14 years old be allowed to watch it–at least not without a parent seeing it first to judge its appropriateness. I am, however, strongly recommending to my older children (19 and 17 respectively) that they should go and see it. You should too.