COPY EDITING LAUNCH ANALYSIS RESEARCH TRANSLATION NONFICTION BOOK PROPOSAL SCREENWRITERS GHOSTWRITERS STORY MERCHANT NEWS DESK OUR TRACK RECORD PERSONAL CAREER COACHING FOR WRITERS AT ALL LEVELS "Story Merchant" Dr. Ken Atchity has spent his lifetime helping writers get started with and improve their careers. For nearly twenty years as a professor of literature and teacher of creative writing at Occidental College and UCLA - then since 1995, through through Writer's Lifeline and as a literary manager with AEI Online Dr. Atchity has helped literally hundreds of writers find a market for their work by bringing their craft and technique to the level of their ambition and vision. More Download a FREE chapter of Ken's How to Escape Lifetime Security (MS Word) RESEARCH Share Few books or scripts are written without any research at all. Even when you "write what you know," you soon discover that you don't know all of it. As a writer, you know that sometimes your characters have a way of living their own lives, going their own way without stopping to consider your personal level of expertise in the waters they have waded into almost before you even noticed they were on the beach barefooted. Too late to call them back, there they are, swimming out to sea, and carrying your story with them! There's nothing left for you to do but acquire some knowledge of ancient Mesopotamia, or medieval glassblowing, or city parks in Minneapolis. It is impressive to read that such and such an author "spent 7 years living in the Amazon jungle researching this novel," but for the majority of writers, especially new ones, this is not practical. Most writers will have to rely on the kind of research that used to involve multiple trips to the public library and surrounding oneself with piles of microfiche and thick, frayed copies of the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, but today it's done from the comfort of a chair in front of a computer monitor. Whether the medium is bits of paper or bytes of data, research is a valuable skill that all writers should cultivate. In actual practice, the exigencies of making a living and writing a book at the same time can present a challenge. Some writers find that their literary gift did not automatically come with research skills of any kind, and even more vexing, the 24-hour day is holding steady at 24 hours and their clone inventory is holding steady at zero. Writer's Lifeline offers a full range of research services tailored to your individual requirements. We love research and are good at it! If your budget is small and you're a fast reader and feel at home on the web, our customized pointer lists might be all you need. If your time constraints are greater, you can upgrade to a summarized list. Summaries will be brief or extensive, according to your needs and preferences. If you're really pressed for time, or you don't know how to navigate the web, inquire about our full-service report package. We do all the work, so you can concentrate on developing your story. NOTE: Availability and quantity of information is not the same for all topics. Discuss your project and research needs with us.We'll help you develop a customized, time-saving research plan tailored to your specific needs. Our trained editorial researchers will provide historical, biographical, technical, political, scientific, medical research to fit the needs of your writing project. State of the art on-line as well as traditional library and telephone research will ensure that your nonfiction and fiction is based on accurate facts, events, and situations. We are able to help you with all countries, time periods, and subject matters and provide full written and annotated reports for easy citation and rights clearance. SPECIAL! $75 Quick Writing Analysis Details QUOTE OF THE DAY IN YOUR INBOX! FEATURED CLIENT Larry Thompson, author of The Trial, began his legal career at age twenty-three and successfully tried seven district court cases before his twenty-fourth birthday. Early in his career as a trial lawyer he would often try fifteen or twenty cases in a year. Now he has tried over three hundred cases with a success rate exceeding ninety percent. He has been named a "Texas Super Lawyer" ... More OUR SUCCESS STORIES Dr. Nicolas Bazan's "fable of music and the mind," Una Vida, has appeared from Five Star Publishing (Linda Radke). Born in the tiny town of Los Sarmientos in Tucuman, Argentina, Nicolas Bazan's defining moment was witnessing an aunt suffer a seizure while walking him to a music lesson when he was a young boy, putting him on the path to becoming one of the worlds premier neuroscientists. Jesse Ventura - We worked with him to find the "mythic substructure" of his life adventure culminating in being elected governor of Minnesota - and built the book, which became a New York Times bestseller, around the "Labors of Hercules." Steve Alten - After a few months' work with Writer's Lifeline, he went from being broke to having a million dollar studio deal, and a two million dollar book deal to launch his career as a New York Times bestseller.