Tag Archives: Joseph Bentz

Guilty As Charged!

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Joseph Bentz asks, “Do you ever worry that other writers seem to get so much work done each day while you find yourself mired in delays and procrastination and frustration?” I’m less worried than astonished by how much writing Joe gets done while leading a life that’s at least as busy as mine.

He’ll be sharing his “Top Ten Strategies to Become a More Productive Writer” at this year’s ACFW Conference — oh, to be a fly on the wall!

He explains one of these strategies in his guest post on the ACFW blog, “Don’t Mistake Ideal Writing Conditions for Necessary Writing Conditions.”

I felt like he was holding a mirror up to me when I read this part:

Let’s look more specifically at how this works. Take the “I Need Big Blocks of Time” condition for writing….

If those writers insist on that ideal condition, their thinking may go something like this: 1. I need big blocks of time in order to write. 2. I don’t have big blocks of time. Therefore, 3. I won’t write! I’m off the hook! I have a perfectly good excuse for not being productive, and no one can blame me.

Once I get over that, think of how much fanwriting I’ll get done!

[Via Diana Glyer.]

Keeping Company in Glendale

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Diana Pavlac Glyer and Will Vaus Students in Narnia costumes

Diana launched the paperback edition of The Company They Keep with a book signing at Glendale‘s Mystery and Imagination Bookstore on October 25. She appeared in tandem with Will Vaus, who is doing a tour for his youth-oriented biography of C.S. Lewis, The Professor of Narnia.

A lively crowd of more than 40 came out to hear and meet the authors, including a whole batch of high schoolers in Narnian costume, the students of John Long, one of Diana’s former research assistants.

We’ve eagerly awaited the paperback edition, which is just coming out now (announced for October 30). The publisher arranged an expedited shipment of copies for the event.

Will Vaus blogged about it afterwards, and posted some nice pictures.

The Professor of Narnia teamed up with Inklings expert Diana Pavlac Glyer, author of The Company They Keep, for a special Narnia Night at the Mystery & Imagination Bookshop in Glendale, California last night. We were joined by many and various Narnia characters. . . .

Thanks to John King Tarpinian for connecting us with the bookstore. (John himself had an excused absence, to escort Ray Bradbury to a showing of King Kong at the Alex Theatre down the street.)

The only thing we wish might have worked out in a luckier way would have been for our friend Joseph Bentz, who attended the signing, to have realized right then that Will Vaus is the son of J. Arthur Vaus, gangster-turned-evangelist. Bentz is currently writing a book about conversion stories, and the elder Vaus is one of his subjects.

Will penned an entire book about his dad, My Father Was a Gangster. Will also met the local crime kingpin:

My father worked for the infamous Hollywood gangster, Mickey Cohen, during the late 1940′s. Despite the fact that my father quit organized crime in 1949 he and Cohen remained friends. Thus it was that when Cohen got out of jail in 1972 I got to meet him and spend time with him on a number of occasions. Cohen was the epitomy of respectability around women and children. In fact, he gave me a signed photograph addressed to “my little buddy Billy”.

Coincidentally, this week the Los Angeles Times is running a seven-part series on the LAPD’s old Gangster Squad and its efforts to nail flamboyant gangster Mickey Cohen. Vaus, mentioned in the second and third parts, worked for the Cohen organization as a wiretapper.