Eat Pray Sleep: Thoughts on the movie and my own memoir

Eat Pray Love, the absolutely non-epic journey of author Elizabeth Gilbert's, publisher advanced funded journey through the supposed ravages of a divorce from a marriage that didn't seem so bad at all, makes you wonder if the privileged class of writers in New York just maybe expects a little too much out of life. The book was recommended to me over two years ago by a very good friend who had read the beginnings of my memoir, Wild Wild East, in hopes that I would see something in this 'chic-lit' or 'priv-lit' that would help me see my own work a little better. It did. But unfortunately I had to sit through a Julia Roberts at 43 film that depicts Gilbert at 32 that never reaches the literary heights described by Jennifer Egan of The New York Times as, "fueled by a mix of intelligence, wit and colloquial exuberance that is close to irresistible" As Roberts' films go, there was a whole lot more of that attitude in Pretty Woman. Whatever wit there might have been in the book, it was clearly swept away by the incredibly inept screenwriting team, and thereby the acting to a truly flaccid script. In the film, Julia Roberts plays a scene in India where she has been sworn to silence in the ashram and it speaks more to her predicament than all the lines given to her by the script assistants on set. (Ms. Roberts, too-old-for-the-role performance reminded me of Jodie Foster falling over the hill in the dreadful, 'Anna and the King' (ie: The King and I)

An already successful writer divorces a not-so-bad-but-maybe-not-so-inspiring husband, takes up with a less-than-inspiring actor, then bolts her whole dreadful existence - and it is dreadful (travel writing assignments in Bali with unlimited mini-bar privileges - oooooooooooh!), to go around the world to truly commercial places that only rich white people go to and find herself? Give anyone an advance from Viking to a paid personal odyssey, a 157 week New York Times Bestseller book release and the cash from selling the screen rights to two more reasonably inept screen writers and I think they can find themselves. After this, maybe Gilbert will take a page from John Irving and take her own screenwriting into her own hands next time.

As for my writing and reflection on this tale, coupled with recommendations that I refer to Susan Jane Gilman's 'Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven' and James Sullivan's 'Over the Moat' as examples of the expat cannon of adventures, I know now that my tome needs to be better written, have more genuine insights and end with a discovery that is much more than cursory in the exploits of white people who leave the US to find themselves in other places. Good luck to me. I'm working on that, because as my publishing coach, Robin has said, "There is hope";

Personal Branding is Not About You Saying Good Shit About You

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Peggy likes Peggy McColl - New York Times Best Selling Author & Online Marketing Expert on Facebook and suggests you like it too.

Peggy says, "Would love it if you would join my page. With gratitude, Peg".

With the best of luck, and articulate execution, Personal Branding is about other people saying good shit about you. You can help it along, but the above is no way to do that. There's nothing worse than blowing your own horn. The best Personal Branding simply sets it up for other people to blow your horn for you. A few weeks ago the Wild Wild East Dailies was picked up by the Wall Street Journal. How did I do that? And the answer is, that I don't know - but through years of writing, years of syndicating and publishing, it happened. And it happened for a reason.

The best Personal Branding simply sets things up. It doesn't push. It doesn't convert. It simply attracts - organically.

I'm A Crack Addicted Underwater Basket-weaving Aborginal Holocaust Survivor And Now A Best-Selling New York Times Author!

"Meet Margaret Seltzer, pen name Margaret Jones, who until this week was a half-white, half-Indian gangland drug runner who grew up a foster child in predominately black South Central Los Angeles. Her memoir was hailed as a "raw... remarkable book" in the Times, won her tentative online admirers and became the 28th best selling memoir on Amazon after it was released Friday. Of course Seltzer basically made her whole "memoir" up, being entirely white, having grown up in the predominately white San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles, having gone to a fancy private school and having been raised by her biological family. Her book tour was supposed to start today in Eugene, Oregon but her publisher, a division of Penguin Group, has canceled all that and recalled her books. How did she get caught? Her lies worked too well: Seltzer's adulatory press was her unraveling. After a profile last week in the House & Home section of the Times, Jones' older sister called her publisher to rat her out." – You can read the whole sordid affair on Gawker.

Seeing this whole business, and having a book myself in the works, set the wheels a spinning in that little devious mind of mine. I riffled through the stack of rejection letters, poured over my frustration with agents and editors incapable of using simple email or fearing attachments because they're still on Windows 95 and decided to do a little guerilla work myself.

I spent a few hours compiling a short-list of those agents whom I had heard nothing from in response to my query letters of last year and sent the following brief note:

"Maybe publishers are now ready for a real memoir."

No preface. No mention of the above story. I didn't have to. Every agent and editor was busy at their respective water cooler wondering who was going to take a beating for this debacle and waiting for axes to fall.

And guess what? I got two requests for proposals from agents on both coasts. Fucking amazing. They didn't even know what my book was about. And maybe reality TV has finally taken it's toll.

Both new agents are still technologically Flinstonian and think that mailing large reams of paper, through communists censors, in a third-world country is a cheap walk in the park, but, I'm making progress. Or at least as much progress as one can make, dealing with an arcane industry that hasn't seen what the music business has done to itself in the last 10 years.

Two more agents on the hunt! Maybe I can sell the ones I don't pick on Ebay later.

Wild Wild East. Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction.