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Anne Rice Heads For the Desert
From: www.writerswrite.com

" Bestselling author Anne Rice is heading for warmer climes: she's selling her house in La Jolla and moving to the desert.

Less than a year after buying a luxury home in the city's tony La Jolla neighborhood, author Anne Rice is selling the dwelling and moving to the desert for a warmer climate and simpler life, her real estate agent said. "She still loves La Jolla very, very much," said Connie Adams of Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage. "She had been used to the heat of New Orleans for so many years, and she found La Jolla cold."

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Rice decided to move west in 2004 after attending a book-signing at Warwick's bookstore in La Jolla. Her son, Christopher, lives in Los Angeles and her husband had died in 2002.

She bought a 3,000-square-foot home in downtown San Diego for $2.35 million, but quickly decided she needed more space and put it back on the market. Last February, she bought the three-story, 10,089 square-foot La Jolla home for $8 million and replaced the deck with French limestone balustrades, said Adams, who represented her in the purchase. The 13-year-old home, which sits on a third of an acre of land, has six bedrooms, nine bathrooms, a gym with a sauna and steam room, an upgraded media room, wine cellar, elevator, four-car garage, pool, spa and ocean views, according to the property listing. The selling price includes the furnishings, some of which come from the finest antique stores in New Orleans, Adams said.

"It's completely furnished, down to the last fork and napkin," she said. Rice recently closed escrow on a $4.2 million home in Rancho Mirage, a desert community 85 miles northeast of San Diego.

"Although some of the facts have been questioned ... that underlying message of the redemption of James Frey still resonates with me, and I know that it resonates with millions of other people who have read the book," Winfrey said in a surprise on-air call to CNN's "Larry King Live," on which Frey was a guest. "Whether car wheels rolled up on a curb...is irrelevant to me."

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"I am disappointed by this controversy," said Winfrey, who selected Frey's memoir for her readers' club in October. "I rely on the publishers to define the category that a book falls within and also the authenticity of the work," Winfrey said in an apparent rebuke of how the book was marketed.

Frey, who is also a screenwriter, defended his work as a "truthful" but "subjective recollection of my life," and said the "essential truth" of the work should not be eroded by challenges to the veracity of some of the events he described. Frey said his embellishments, which he did not address directly, were far outweighed by the basic truth of his experiences.

Frey urged readers to look beyond the fabrications to what he said was an honest evocation of the anguish in an addict's life. But he acknowledged that the questions raised over his embellishments led to inevitable questions about the other more private events in a book set mainly during his time in rehab. "That's something I'm going to have to deal with," Frey said.

A film version of Frey's best-selling addiction memoir "A Million Little Pieces" could need a rehab of its own after a story posted Sunday on the muckraking Web site the Smoking Gun raised serious questions about the veracity of the author's gritty true-life account. On his Web site, Frey said, "I stand by my book and my life, and I won't dignify this bullshit with any sort of further response." He is scheduled to appear tonight on CNN's "Larry King Live" to discuss the controversy.

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As for the film adaptation of Frey's "A Million Little Pieces," one agent who requested anonymity said that the project will suffer because it no longer will be able to attract A-list talent. "I can't imagine that a star is going to want to do what in essence is a biopic of a guy whose biopic is incorrect," the agent said.

But a top literary manager, who also requested anonymity, said that people should concentrate on the writing rather than the story behind the writer. "With 'A Million Little Pieces,' part of what makes it great is this notion that it's a true story and that it's his memoir," the manager said. "And yet, if you were to strip that away, is it still a provocative and engaging and dramatic story? Well, I think it is, so I don't know if it hurts him." While the project might hit snags, it's uncertain whether Frey's burgeoning screenwriting career will take a hit. He is currently writing "Prep," a teen drama for MTV Films.

"No matter what happens, James is still a really good writer," said JC Spink, who is executive producing the film. "Besides, haven't most of us in this town been guilty of embellishing at one time or another? If anyone was going to hold that against me, I'd never work again."

1. Muck out my study.

My study is easily the messiest room in the house, and probably our street; I won't say in the whole of Edinburgh, because there must be a squat somewhere that's worse. Frankly, I shudder to think what I will find when I finally reach the bottom of all these teetering piles of garbage. However, as I currently have to negotiate an assault course just to reach my desk I think the time has come for my annual tidy-up.

2. Do not lose any more notebooks.

After a somewhat panicky few weeks I have finally located a missing notebook. As always when I mislay these things, I had been 'remembering', in its absence, that it contained notes so essential and ideas so imaginative that I would never be able to duplicate them, and the whole of the next book would be impoverished if they were never found. Now that I have said notebook beside me on this desk, however, I see that it contains few useful nuggets amid a lot of complete dross. Nevertheless, the stress I endured while believing it to be the notebook equivalent of the Holy Grail was enough to remind me that I must take better care of my working materials.

3. Be ruthless about protecting writing days

Ie, do not cave in to endless requests to have 'essential' and 'long overdue' meetings on those days. The funny thing is that, although writing has been my actual job for several years now, I still seem to have to fight for time in which to do it. Some people do not seem to grasp that I still have to sit down in peace and write the books, apparently believing that they pop up like mushrooms without my connivance. I must therefore guard the time allotted to writing as a Hungarian Horntail guards its firstborn egg.

4. Follow advice from critics on how to be a better writer.

I always try to act on constructive criticism. When I fail, I attempt to embrace my faults and call them my 'style'.

"If you start out with an ax to grind, then you write a bad play or movie," said Kushner, winner of a Pulitzer Prize for the landmark stage epic "Angels in America." "I prefer to have a much more exciting and rich conversation about politics and the meaning of violence.

"I start from a place of my own perplexity and then explore. Steven and I, we started out with some very strong feelings about the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians -- not necessarily in the same place or for the same reasons -- and we surrendered our arrogance and assumptions."

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If Kushner and Spielberg had a point of view they wanted to guide their filmmaking, it was portraying everyone in the film as a human being, the playwright/screenwriter said.

"It's an uncomfortable movie for some, because we don't portray terrorists as bad' and nothing more," Kushner said. "All the terrorists of the world are not that simple, which doesn't mean that you approve of what they did, killing unarmed people. "But there is a [dramatic] law: Nothing human is alien to me," Kushner said, quoting the ancient Roman playwright Terence. "We dehumanize people so we don't have to trouble ourselves with the way we deal with them."

Reporters Without Borders said Iraq was the world's deadliest place for media members for the third consecutive year -- with 24 journalists and five assistants killed, the group said.

Most victims in Iraq died in insurgent and terrorist attacks, while three were killed by the U.S. military, Reporters Without Borders said.

A total of 76 journalists and media staff have been killed since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, the group said. That was more than the 63 reporters killed in the 1955-1977 conflict in Vietnam, the group said, citing figures from U.S.-based press advocacy group Freedom Forum.

Jean-Francois Juillard, director of information for Reporters Without Borders, said fewer journalists and media organizations covered the Vietnam conflict, and media members in Iraq can be targeted by insurgents.