This will be brief—for two reasons. First, I’ve only got one piece of information to impart. I think it’s a significant one, but it shouldn’t take all that many words to convey it. Secondly, I’ve got a train to catch; my Frequent Companion and I are actually taking an out-of-town vacation for the first time in a year and a half. We’re going only a couple of hundred miles, and we’ll be gone for only ten days, but in a few hours we’re outta here—and I can’t wait.

So here’s the story. In the early 1980s I developed Write For Your Life, an interactional one‑day seminar for writers, and the aforementioned Frequent Companion and I spent the better part of several years presenting it all over the country. It was enormously satisfying work for us, and it worked wonders for the people who took it, but a few years was plenty and I was glad to pull the plug and get back to full-time writing.

What lived on after the seminar was history was the book version: Write For Your Life: The Home Seminar for Writers. I’d self-published it as a trade paperback in 1986, and it soon sold out and went out-of-print. (This was ages before ebooks or print-on-demand; I had 5000 copies printed, sold them all, and that was that.)

Then technology. The book has been available for a few years now, first as an ebook and more recently in paperback and hardcover editions. It wound up getting a better reception now than it did back in the day, and is regularly to be found among my bestselliing titles.

You very likely know all this, and you probably know as well that I’ve self-published audiobook versions of 40+ of my backlist titles, through Audible’s ACX division.

But I held off on Write For Your Life—not because I doubted its prospects in audio, but because I felt it was a book that ought to be author-narrated. I’ve provided the narration for several of my books over the years, and WFYL was a logical candidate—but it’s become clear to me that I’ve just plain aged out of the enterprise of voicing an audiobook.

Really? Don’t they say age is just a number?

Indeed. And when they do, I reply that auto-defenestration is just a suggestion. I’ve done enough narration to know I can no longer perform the task to my own satisfaction. My voice falls apart an hour or two in; even more important, the work demands more undiluted concentration then I have in reserve.

So in recent years I’ve enlisted superb voice artists to stand in for Your Humble Author. Michael Bonner has done so for The Liar’s Bible and The Liar’s Companion, plus my memoir of racewalking, Step By Step. Mike Dennis has voiced Writing the Novel from Plot to Print to Pixel, as well as the novels Borderline, Sinner Man, and The Girl with the Deep Blue Eyes. More recently, Peter Berkrot’s narration of my early-days memoir, A Writer Prepares, has been generating no end of raves.

For Write For Your Life, I turned to Richard Neer, the accomplished voice artist who stood in for me to great effect in two previous books—The Crime of Our Lives, a collection of my observations of crime fiction and the people who write it, and Spider, Spin Me a Web, an instructional book for writers of fiction.

Spoiler Alert: Richard did a superb job with Write For Your Life. It’s available right now at Amazon and Audible.

When I looked for it on Amazon the other day, it said it included the Affirmations For Writers tape. Then I looked again just now, and it no longer said anything about the tape.

I know.

Back when we were offering the seminar, I made a tape of affirmations, designed for repeated listening, and backed by an original music track by Jeremy Wall of Spyro Gyra. I thought we could incorporate it in the new audiobook, but I was mistaken. I’d mentioned the tape in an early version of the audiobook product description, and that turned up in the Amazon and Audible listings until we were able to correct it.

So I can’t get the tape?

You can, but it comes as a separate MP3 download. Buying it couldn’t be much simpler: just remit $10 by PayPal to lawbloc@ gmail.com, and be sure to enter your email address and the words “Affirmations MP3” in the message space PayPal provides. David, my indispensable assistant, will send you the requisite link and easy downloading instructions.

Actually, it’s better to keep them separate. Plenty of people would rather have the printed book—but they still might want to fall asleep listening to the Affirmations tape. And, you know, vice versa.

I’ll take your word for it. Anyway, that’s all I got. And I haven’t quite finished packing, and my train’s not going to catch itself, and…

Cheers,

PS: As always, please feel free to forward this to anyone you think might find it of interest. And, if you yourself have received the newsletter from a friend and would like your own subscription, that’s easily arranged; an  email to lawbloc@gmail.com with Newsletter in the subject line will get the job done.

LB’s Blog and Website
LB’s Facebook Page
Twitter: @LawrenceBlock