Jackie Collins marks 40 years of "guilty pleasures"

British author Jackie Collins is still inadvertently teaching teenage girls about sex through her steamy novels that have seen her regularly grace bestseller lists since her first book was published 40 years ago.

Collins -- who refuses to reveal how old she is, except to say that she is still several years shy of 70 -- released her 26th novel, "Married Lovers," in the United States on Tuesday.

"I get the 15-year-olds all the time going 'I read my mum's book under the covers and you taught me everything I know about sex,"' Collins said of e-mails she receives, adding married couples also thank her for spicing up their love lives.

While disliked by critics, the younger sister of Hollywood actress Joan Collins has sold more than 400 million books in more than 40 countries and all of her previous 25 novels remain in print, according to her publisher St. Martin's Press.

"I'm a storyteller. I'm not a literary writer and I never pretended to be," Collins said. Many of her novels have been made into hit television movies and mini-series.

During an interview in a luxury New York City hotel suite, she told Reuters she is "horrified" by the fact it has been four decades since her first novel, "The World is Full of Married Men," was published in the United States and Britain.

"It's ridiculous, time goes by so fast when you're having fun. I think I am the only writer still on the bestseller list all these years later," said Collins, who still handwrites her novels on yellow legal notepads.

Her debut novel, reportedly deemed "filthy and disgusting" by author Barbara Cartland and banned in Australia, she says, "was way before its time" with its tale of a woman who cheats on her husband and another who likes sex with married men.

The latest offering from the Beverly Hills-based author follows a story involving three high-powered Hollywood couples, two affairs, one underage Russian ex-prostitute and a murder.

A self-confessed pop-culture junkie, Collins said she pulls all her stories from "real life and it's toned down."

"All the characters I write about are really characters that I know, I've seen, I've observed," she said.

She began writing when she was just 8, picking up her talent for love scenes after secretly reading her father's copy of "Lady Chatterley's Lover," which Collins says was kept in a brown paper bag beside his bed.

"It's my passion, it's my hobby, it's my everything. I just love to write," Collins said. "I'll write 'til I'm like 100 and whatever and I will drop with a pen in my hand going 'And he looked into her eyes and it was..."'

Michelle Nichols for Reuters

06/28/08 9:33pm

Debut!

Danielle Younge-Ullman writes from Tononto. Her debut book is Falling Under (Plume)

“Falling Under is an edgy urban drama about a troubled artist who has painted herself into a corner.”

Writing Habits: “My toddler wakes me up at 7:30am in the morning, so self-preservation dictates that I write in the morning and early afternoon.”

How Did You Get Your Break? “I entered Falling Under in some chick-lit writing contests. I was a finalist in two of them but the judges said it wasn’t chick lit—it was too dark, edgy and literary. This gave me the confidence to finish the book without worrying about genre.”

Time Frame: “Four and half years.”

Secret To Success: “I didn’t censor myself. I allowed myself to follow any tangent, go to dark place, funny, places, and play with language and style. That made the story and writing unique.”

Advice: “Find something you’re burning to write about, get it written and then edit, edit, edit. You’ll need faith, diligence, patience, more faith, perseverance, more patience and a sense of humor.”

Influences: “I love John Irving, Alice Walker, Barbara Kingsolver, Guy Gavriel Kay, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Jane Austen, Marion Zummer Bradley, W. Somerset Maugham and Robertson Davies.”

Weird Hobbies: “I like to move furniture. It doesn’t matter if everything is perfectly arranged; I still need to move it all around every few months.”

What’s Next?: “I’m working on my next book, which is top secret and making me crazy.”

06/03/08 4:09 Writer’s Digest June ‘08

Have You Ever Been Fired? Well These People Have

"From We Got Fired?....And It’s The Best Thing That Ever Happened To Us" by Harvey Mackay.

1. In April 1978 Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank was fired from Handy Dan Home Improvement Center, a chain of 66 stores. The two went on to create Home Depot.

2. Katie Couric was fired from doing on-air work by CNN after the network’s president said he never wanted to see her face on a TV screen again.

3. Walt Disney was fired from his newspaper job for a lack of ideas. From Mickey Mouse to Daffy Duck, his ideas laid the groundwork for one of America’s most creative corporations, the Walt Disney Company (the parent company of ABC News).

4. Burt Reynolds was fired from an acting job and told he couldn’t act. Afterward he became the No. 1 box office draw for five consecutive years.

5. Lee Iacocca was fired from Ford on his 54th birthday after 32 years at the company. He led a struggling Chrysler back from the brink with the help of a loan from the U.S. government, a loan that was paid back in full.

6. Mark Cuban was fired from a computer store because all he wanted to do was sell and work on computers, instead of sweeping the floor like the owner wanted. Today, he is an Internet billionaire and owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team.

7. David Hasselhoff, the star of “Baywatch,” was fired along with the rest of the cast when the show was canceled after the first season. He believed in the show and bought the show’s rights. It ran for 11 years in 140 countries in 32 different languages.

8. And New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg was fired from Salomon Brothers, an investment firm--albeit with a $10 million goodbye-gift.Bloomberg was thirty-nine at the time. He could have stayed history and pounded the beach of Costa del Sol for the rest of his life. Instead, he made history. He founded Bloomberg L.P. and became a billionaire.

9. Joanne Kathleen Rowling, aka J.K. Rowling, was fired from some secretarial jobs because she was found writing creative stories on her computer. She used her severance to write Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone while her daughter took naps. When she ran out of money, she received a grant to finish the book. She’s also a billionaire.

Talk about your silver linings. Lol!

06/03/08 3:11am

Paulina Porizkova: From Supermodel to Budding Novelist

I was browsing through Lifetime’s website and was shocked that formersupermodel, Paulina Porizkova, was now a novelist. It was an interesting article. She is still married to Ric Ocasek from The Cars which I kinda felt she would be anyway, but the novelist part --- didn’t get that vibe from her! Anyways its nice to see she’s not just another pretty face. She also says some stuff about the other supermodels Tyra Banks, Heidi Klum, and Janice Dickinson. I was so proud to read this. The article is by Carla Hay and its dated 08/24/07.

Back in the ’80s, Paulina Porizkova was one of the world’s top supermodels — she appeared on hundreds of magazine covers and made millions as a longtime spokesperson for Estée Lauder. The 42-year-old Porizkova has also had stints as an actress and a TV host, but she’s now focused all her energies on writing.

Her critically acclaimed novel, “A Model Summer,” [1] is about a Czechoslovakian-Swedish teenager named Jirina who begins her modeling career in Paris, and plunges deep into the highs and lows of the fashion industry. It sounds a lot like Porizkova’s life, but she says that her book’s protagonist is not a fictional version of herself.

When asked how much of her book was based on real events, Porizkova says coyly, “Kind of everything and kind of nothing. I lent [the Jirina character] some of my experiences, but it’s not me and it’s not my life. When I first went to Paris, I had a slightly different personality from my protagonist. I was much tougher than the girl I created, and I have a much better sense of humor. So I was much better prepared for that world than she is. The book is not a memoir; it’s a memory.”

However much of the book’s fiction is based on fact, Porizkova does admit that some of the book was inspired by her best friend, Joanne Russell, who was a model during the same era as Porizkova’s modeling heyday. The two pals and Adam Otcasek (Porizkova’s stepson) also cowrote the 1992 children’s book “The Adventures of Ralphie the Roach.”

It took about five years for Porizkova to write “A Model Summer,” she says. “I didn’t have a ghostwriter. I did not have a publisher when I was writing the book. I’m very serious about being a writer. It’s blood, sweat and tears.”

And she’s ready to tackle her next novel, although she’s keeping most of the details under wraps for now. Porizkova says, “The only preliminary thing I can tell you is that it will be about the interesting dynamics of the modern family.”

If family will be the subject of her next book, Porizkova has lots of experience from which to draw. Married since 1989 to musician Ric Ocasek (the former leader of the band the Cars), Porizkova is also the mother of two sons, 14-year-old Oliver and nine-year-old Jonathan.

Plus, Porizkova’s own childhood had enough drama to be made into a book. Her parents were Czech refugees who emigrated to Sweden and left her behind to be raised by her grandmother until they could reconnect. When her parents tried to regain custody of their daughter, they encountered obstacles and delays due to international government politics. After seven years apart, the family was reunited, but Porizkova’s parents divorced shortly afterward.

Nowadays, Porizkova is a naturalized U.S. citizen who lives in New York. And in some ways, she’s a typical American wife and mother. She confesses that she’s addicted to reality shows. “They’re a guilty pleasure,” she says. “It’s like candy. You can’t stop at just one, and it can make you sick if you have too much.”

And, of course, she watches all of the fashion-related reality shows. Porizkova notes, “‘America’s Top Model’ is fabulously addicting but it has no bearing on being a model. Tyra Banks is a smart cookie and she’s amazing for building this empire, but they haven’t broken a top model yet. I love ‘Project Runway.’ That’s a show with a little more substance. Heidi Klum cracks me up. ‘The Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency’ kind of reminds me of watching ‘The Anna Nicole Show.’ I felt sick for not being able to avert my eyes from that train wreck. I’m only human.”

Her love of reality shows, Porizkova says, is one of the reasons why she jumped at the chance to be on “Dancing With the Stars.” And even though she was the first person voted off during the show’s fourth season, she doesn’t regret the experience. “What surprised me was how incredibly rewarding it was to spend that time on the physical stuff and actually be able to do it. The camaraderie of the celebrities backstage bonded us together.”

As for Porizkova’s thoughts on today’s modeling industry, she doesn’t hold back her opinions: “It’s a lot harder right now because celebrities have taken over supermodels [on fashion-magazine covers], thanks to computer retouching. I was so incredibly fortunate to have the career that I did when I did. It was a perfect time to be a model. The industry has clearly changed for the worse. The sample sizes are now double-zeroes. Nobody but anorexic-looking ‘coat hangers’ will fit into that. Either you’re naturally ridiculously thin or you have to really diet to get a job. And that’s not a good thing.”

Although Porizkova is best known for being a supermodel, she’s not one to live in the past. For example, she confesses that she didn’t keep a lot of mementos from her glory days.

She elaborates, “I never saved anything like my magazine covers. I don’t care. How many pictures of myself can I have? I became a model accidentally, through blind, dumb luck, and I’m extremely grateful for it. All the fame and fortune I got was sort of handed to me. I never felt like I did anything to deserve it. And maybe because I feel like I wasn’t quite deserving of it, I never took it very seriously. I took my job seriously. I showed up on time and was very professional, but I never took myself seriously in it. I was just in the right spot at the right time.”

06/03/08 12:38am

Jackie Collins and new book Drop Dead Gorgeous

Here’s part of an interview on Jackie Collins when she put out her book “Drop Dead Gorgeous” about her famous character Lucky Santangelo. The full interview is at Lifetime. The interviewer is Patty Lamberti.

You could call Jackie Collins the godmother of all Lifetime movies: She was the first female authors to tell stories about women who triumph over seemingly impossible odds and usually get the hot guy in the end as well. So we could think of no better woman to interview.

Interviewer: Tell us about what you’re writing exclusively for LifetimeTV.com and how it relates to your new book.

Jackie Collins: I wanted to write a prequel to the novel. It includes a series of email exchanges between Lucky and her daughter, Max. It’s obvious that one day Max will take over Lucky’s throne, and I wanted to show her at the same age I showed Lucky in “Chances”---as a 16 year old wild child. Except this is 2007, and the world is different. Still, like Lucky, Max thinks she knows so much more than anyone else.

Interviewer: What do you and your sister, Joan, gossip about on the phone?

Jackie Collins: Like all sisters, we talk about the things that annoy us. People are always writing that we don’t like ach other, and that pisses us off. But we laugh about it because we know it’s not true. The truth is, we’ve always been the best of friends. When she got married, there was this whole to-do in the press that I didn’t attend her wedding in London. But I was producing a movie here in LA at the time. She visited me just before her wedding, and I threw her and her husband a wedding party with 80 people. But the media doesn’t mention that, of course.

Interviewer: If “Drop Dead Beautiful” were made into a movie, who would you want to cast in it and why?

Jackie Collins: Before she won an Oscar and was on the cover of every magazine, I wanted Angelina Jolie to play Lucky. She would have been perfect. Nicollette Sheridan ended up playing Lucky in the movie version of “Chances”. If Nicollette agreed to play Lucky now, 15 years later, she’d still be fantastic. In “Chances”, she wore a dark wig to hide her blonde hair. And many people don’t realize that a young Sandra Bullock played Lucky’s mom [in a flashback scene].

Interviewer: What’s one of the most memorable run-ins you’ve ever had with a fan?

Jackie Collins: There are these male twins who are very sweet, but they pop up everywhere I go. I’ll go to the makeup counter at Neiman Marcus, and the clerk will tell me, “The twins were just here looking for you.”

Interviewer: If someone were going to write a new book about you, what you want it to be called?

Jackie Collins: well, I’d prefer they wouldn’t write a book about me at all. I’ve had a few written about me, and they’re appalling. The author will write, “And then she thought…” I say to myself, I don’t think that way. It I want anyone to tell my story, I want it to be me.

Interviewer: So are you promising me you’ll write an auto biography?

Jackie Collins: Maybe in 10 years I’ll write my autobiography. I definitely know I’ve got at least another 25 novels in me.

06/03/08 12:18am

Perseverance

People who fulfill their dreams are not merely lucky; neither are they necessarily the most talented. Rather, they understand the value of perseverance and determination. They believe that setbacks are simply a means to grow, and that small failures only pave the way for new insights. They know where they are going even when others do no not and believe in their own dreams when other doubt. Their vision comes from within---and it is always burning in their hearts.

- Lisa Crofton

06/02/08 11:49pm

An Indonesian author tossed 100 million rupiah ($11,240) from a plane overnight to promote his new book, prompting a scramble for cash among poor residents below

Tung Desem Waringin showered the cash from the plane over Serang, 75km west of the capital, Jakarta.

About 500 people scooped up the money, organisers said.

Millions of Indonesians live on less than $US2 ($2.09) a day.

Waringin promoted his first book, a bestseller, in 2005 by riding a horse along Jakarta's main streets dressed as one of the country's most celebrated war heroes.

His second book is on marketing.

He carried out his latest stunt after being denied permission to shower cash over Jakarta.

From news.media.au

06/02/08 6:16am