Writers

Matt McCarthy's professional baseball career flamed out after one season, 2002, with the Provo Angels in the lowly Pioneer League. He was quietly released the following spring. Now, McCarthy has published "Odd Man Out: A Year on the Mound with a Minor League Misfit," and the notoriety the memoir has generated ensures that he will be enshrined in baseball and publishing lore.

In Hollywood, lives are shortened all the time by envy and jealousy, but only screenwriters die of encouragement. People are happy to tell writers how much they adore their scripts, but actually getting them made is a whole other story. You can win an Oscar and still put in years of struggle trying to get your next project going. But here's one exception: Robert Mark Kamen.

Few online entertainment ventures today make money. Yet that has not deterred striking Hollywood writers, eager to bypass the studio system, from forming start-ups to distribute their work on the Web. At least three start-ups, each with a different business approach, are unveiling their corporate monikers and the names of their founders as they intensify the search for venture capital and top management. With names such as Hollywood Disrupted and Virtual Artists Inc.

As the writers strike drags on, there's at least one small corner of the industry that hasn't been grinding to a halt over the last months: literary departments at the major talent agencies, which are getting inundated with book proposals and story ideas for novels from out-of-work screenwriters.

By all rights, Deborah Gregory should be sitting pretty: As a first-time author, she wrote the Cheetah Girls novels, a bubbly, 16-book series that became hugely popular with American tweens and teens. And she appeared to hit an even bigger jackpot when she sold the dramatic rights to the Disney Channel. Her breezy, street-smart tales of five girls chasing pop music careers were turned into two hit television movies, and a third is now being filmed in India.

I was 12 the first time I read W.C. Heinz. I've never forgotten the story: "The Rocky Road of Pistol Pete." It was a bittersweet look at Pete Reiser, undone by his own fearlessness when he was the Brooklyn Dodgers' golden child and marooned years later as a bush league manager with a bad heart and a rattletrap Chevy. You wouldn't think a kid plowing through True magazine's 1957 Baseball Annual would care, but I did. And even today what Bill Heinz wrote still gets me in the heart and the gut.

The gripping memoir of "Margaret B. Jones" received critical raves. It turns out it should have been reviewed as fiction. The author of "Love and Consequences," a critically acclaimed autobiography about growing up among gangbangers in South Los Angeles, acknowledged Monday that she made up everything in her just-published book. "Jones" is actually Margaret Seltzer.

The late Norman Mailer, a novelist and cultural provocateur who was rarely at a loss for words, was remembered at a memorial service Wednesday as a man whose deep and abiding commitment to the American novel will be his most enduring legacy.

NOT LONG ago, I found myself seated with a pimp and three high-priced escorts, the kind favored by the former governor of the great state of New York. I was in a lawn chair while the four of them were in a hot tub -- what is the word? -- gamboling in the steamy water and . . . But I'm getting ahead of myself. Once upon a time, an author published a book and left the selling to the experts in the marketing department. This was the case as recently as last week.

One afternoon two summers ago, labor union lobbyist Barry Broad sat through a dull legislative hearing at California's ornate Capitol building. As lawmakers droned, he fell into a daydream. Broad, an avid news consumer and armchair geopoliticist, began pondering the Middle East, terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. "What if CIA secret agents could engineer a Chernobyl-like nuclear meltdown that would stymie Iran's ambitions to build a nuclear bomb?" Broad mused.