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ExactingEditor.com is the work of Frank Gregorsky, a text and sound editor in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. It's a resource for imaginative -- and rigorous -- producers of non-fiction text. Some 80% of the text here showcases authors and the "how" of their work. The Q&As are grouped in the categories of Business, History, and Ecology. The unifying premise is that producing a trustworthy and timeless book goes way beyond the self-centered forum and blog modes that took over the web.
Novels receive the PR hype, but nonfiction books build their drama with diligent research and new truth. In fact, the "life course" of a book is its own drama -- from the founding idea, to the push for sponsorship (which can take various forms), to the sift and sort of themes and personalities, to the budgeting and marketing, to repackaging under pressure. This Q&A with Kathie Durbin conveys that palpably pulpy process superbly: Learn how one generates a book about 40 years of business and politics in and around the planet's largest temperate rain forest: Born in Tennessee, Maury Klein "came to the University of Rhode Island [in 1964] to begin a teaching career that, to my astonishment, continued there for 44 years." Our Q&A centers on his Days of Defiance (1998), The Power Makers (2008), and the in-progress "A Call to Arms: America Mobilizes for World War Two" (Bloomsbury USA). Klein became a historian because it occurred to him "that in a history class one could teach anything that interested him [and] one of the most recurrent themes in my work is the most basic question of all: What is an American?" www.ExactingEditor.com/MauryKlein.pdf Partly due to an intimidating price tag, this book has never been reviewed, but here's how it came into being. Authored by Boston-area historian James J. Kenneally, it's the biography of the only Republican House Speaker between 1930 and 1995 -- Joseph W. Martin Jr. of Massachusetts. "He never went to college. He worked for the Sun Chronicle first as a newspaper delivery boy and then as the managing editor" and ultimately became Speaker during the GOP-controlled 80th and 83rd Congresses. This Q&A is for U.S. congressional aficionados especially: www.ExactingEditor.com/Kenneally-Martin.html Frank Gregorsky is writing a history of Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives from Watergate to now. The book will illuminate House GOPers balancing principle and electoral needs while functioning as legislators. (As for Democrats? They provide background noise.) Forty interviews have been conducted, and the opening chapter -- URL below -- is here as a preview, along with one on Newt Gingrich during 1980-84. A core premise: Rank-and-file GOPers should quit expecting to find a Perfect President and instead build resilient coalitions that keep control of Congress: www.ExactingEditor.com/Seventy-Five.html
In Why Decisions Fail, Dr. Paul C. Nutt serves up 15 case-study "debacles" and shows us how to prevent big trouble. This Q&A is for people who see "strategy" as a discipline; who consult for or otherwise guide parts of larger enterprises; and who are wary of management books that romanticize individualism while slighting structure and systems. By contrast, if you get jazzed by one glorious concept and shun the logistics, Paul Nutt is here with a stream of cold water. But it cleanses!
www.ExactingEditor.com/PaulNutt.html An early authority on bed & breakfasts, Myrna Oakley is both writing coach and travel author. Gregorsky visited her to dig into travel-guide "assembly” -- the design work, verification and updating only hinted at in the actual book. Any methodical tourist will love Oakley's Off the Beaten Path series for OR and WA. But this site is about research, writing and editing. So? Let’s hope you’re open to the “how” of a travel book, using the distinctive “where” of the Northwest:
www.ExactingEditor.com/MyrnaOakley.html Donald Worster
gave us the definitive account of John
Wesley Powell and will soon do the same for John Muir. For this website, Worster
outlined what a writer discovers -- in historic nooks and crannies, as well as
about himself -- in striving to produce a landmark biography. Our Q&A also has
him describing a movement less and less easy to pigeonhole: “What does it mean
to be an environmentalist in www.ExactingEditor.com/DonaldWorster.html These profiles were created to (a) build “conversational case studies” for other non-fiction innovators, and (b) add to the toolkit that Frank Gregorsky brings to literary collaborations.
(703) 281-1674 FrankGregorsky@aol.com Via Linked-In |
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