From: Jack Saunders
To: Doug Marlette
Subj: Positive comment on booksALIVE keynote speech

I enjoyed your speech at booksALIVE. It made me buy your novel, The Bridge.

I graduated from FSU in anthropology in 1968, and did a year of graduate work in anthropology at FSU.

I stole your line about the mating cry of the Southern Belle and put it in a book I am writing, at www.thedailybulletin.com/newweb.htm.

I gave you credit for the line, though.

Fraternally yours,

Jack Saunders

I call the memoirs I write novels.

If I wanted to write fiction, I'd call them memoirs.

One disservice to readers James Frey did is by making up lies and passing them off as true, he made it harder for someone who is writing the truth to get published.

Of course, to paraphrase Ambrose Bierce, whenever you see something true published in a newspaper, it is followed immediately by a retraction and an apology. Which is why you seldom see anything true in a newspaper.

I would add "or in books."

The book business has been as corporatized as editorial cartooning, and if you switch from cartoons to novels it's like jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Maybe not, in your case.

Hope not.

I write series of related novels, and post them online, daily, as I write them.

It's like doing a comic strip.

Working under deadline.

But Dickens did it.

I've been doing it a long time.