Singalong
songbooks
now for sale

Easy sheet music
for 300+ favorites

$39.95*

Including free templates
for audience lyrics sheets

Finally, a singalong songbook of sheet music with easy-to-follow melody lines, chords and lyrics for more than 300 oldtime favorites. songbookIdeal for singalongs at nursing homes, senior residences or just at your own home. Bound in a loose-leaf binder of durable vinyl, unsnaps for access to pages. (To see a photo of the book, click here.)

Each songbook comes with templates for copying lyrics of more than 240 songs to hand out to audience members, a great way to get audiences involved.**

To order Sing along with ease, email sidleavitt@yahoo.com directly or enter your email address as a comment in our latest blog entry and we will email you. (Your email address won't appear in the comments section.)

To review our sales procedures and philosophy, click on our entry entitled We trust you.

*plus $5.79 shipping in U.S.

**An electronic version of these templates is available free to customers who wish to reformat lyrics sheets on their own computer.

Free books
still offered

from frustrated writers
to adventurous readers

This site offers a library of original text works – nonfiction, fiction or poetry of all lengths, published and unpublished – that have been submitted free by their authors. To find these, please visit the 'Works' section in the upper righthand column of this page. This site does not claim copyright to any of these works, and no modification of any work has been done except for style formatting. No work may be reused commercially, and any noncommercial reuse must give credit to the author.

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Readers are free to download any listing from the 'Works' section, subject to the aforementioned restrictions, and to provide comments to the site administrator at sidleavitt@yahoo.com for publication in the 'Comments on works' listing. To comment on any excerpt or other post shown in the center column, simply do so directly beneath the post by clicking on the '(No) Comments' link. Unless otherwise specified, all comments will be published, subject to libel guidelines.

About us...

This blog was started as a nonprofit website giving writers a place to publish their work at no cost and readers a chance to read that work and, if they chose, to comment on it. Now we are concentrating on a singalong songbook, also an idealistic project that promotes volunteer music programs at nursing homes and senior residences as well as family singing at home, all through easy, low-cost sheet music. Although we no longer accept new works from authors, all previous submissions are still available in our 'Works' section. We also maintain a blogroll of diverse sites, all well-written, for readers to explore, although at present, no new sites are being accepted for listing. The site's founder and administrator is its first nonfiction contributor, Sid Leavitt, a retired newspaper editor who lives in Lake Katrine, N.Y.

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Sour and sweet

March 30, 2008

gerard

OK, you just might find a picture of Gerard Jones under ‘curmudgeon’ in the dictionary, but like most snarly guys, he can be a sweetheart, too.

That’s why his website is the latest addition to our blogroll.

The site, Everyone Who’s Anyone,* isn’t a blog in the traditional sense but has sporadic posts dating back to mid-2002, most of them diatribes against publishing and entertainment that live up to their title, Chronological Ranting & Raving.

Jones also is author of Ginny Good, a memoir of sorts — he calls it a ‘nonfiction novel’ — that chronicles his classic love of the 1960s, a love that like all classic stories is a tragedy. It also is the only book of his ever to be put into print by a publisher, a considerable achievement in light of this soon-to-be 66-year-old’s attitude toward publishers.

And now the good-guy stuff:

Jones has reacquired the rights to Ginny Good and is offering it free as both an e-book and an audio book, each of which we plan to pass on to our readers.

We don’t know if Jones is independently wealthy (we suspect not), but he certainly is independent, fiercely so, and that gives a certain integrity to his other free offerings — notably, his extensive listings of literary agents, publishers and other influential figures in print, broadcast and film media.

We came across his site in a search for literary agents. Jones has all the important ones — thousands of them — listed with contact names, telephone numbers and both snail mail and email addresses. It’s the kind of stuff you have to buy for several hundred dollars a year from other sources.

Jones, who spent years compiling his lists, provides them for free. And he weeds out the phonies and predators wherever he can.

What we liked about his list of literary agents is that Jones includes his correspondence with some of them. Here’s an exchange with a snippy agent who reminded Jones that a “professional writer acts as such before they are published”:

How does one ‘act’ professional? Is that some kind of code word for being a kowtowing, no-talent, kiss-up gerbil who couldn’t write his or her way out of a paper bag? Just curious. G.

No, more along the lines of not writing a nasty response when receiving a letter declining representation.

Oh, come on, you think Kafka didn’t get a little ticked when nobody published any of his stuff while he was alive? And yet if you had one of his ‘nasty’ responses you could auction it for more money than you’re gonna make in the next ten years. Chill, dudette. G.

To her credit, the agent replied simply:

I’m sure that’s true. Happy Holidays.

And sometimes the invective becomes a volcano, as in the following note to an unresponsive agent (our deletions):

Hey, Warren, it just dawned on me what a total f—ing c— you are. Has it dawned on you lately what a total f—ing c— you are? It really should, you know. It will. You’ll see. It’ll send a little chill up your spine when you get a glimpse of your total f—ing c— self in the mirror, you total f—ing c—. Oh, and after you’re done looking at your total f—ing c— self in the mirror, how about sending me my book back? Thanks. G.

But notice that last word. The explosively angry guy still takes time to say thanks. This clue didn’t escape Linda L. Richards, an author and editor of January Magazine, when she reviewed Ginny Good in 2004:

Jones brings a sort of careless insouciance to Ginny Good. An early hippie devil-may-care- ef-em-if-they- can’t-take-a-joke attitude that pretends to mask deeper feelings. Pretends, of course, because it’s clear that Jones cares deeply about everything that befalls him and Ginny and the others we meet in Ginny Good. And he wants us to know he cares, but he wants us to find our own way to that conclusion.

Richards calls it an “intelligent respect for the intelligence of his reader.” We’re reading Ginny Good, and we agree. We hope you do, too. You can find the book right at the top of his website, and we’ll soon be serializing it as well.

His is a refreshing voice in these present days of ours when most of the guys you’d describe as fiercely independent are apt to grab one of their guns and shoot you.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

*That’s just the short version of the title, which continues “. . . in Adult Trade Publishing, Newspapers, Magazines, Broadcasting and Tinseltown, Too.”

Posted in Uncategorized |

5 Responses

  1. Gerard Jones says:

    Hey, you did what you said you were gonna when you said you were gonna do it. Yippee! G.

  2. Sid Leavitt says:

    I should be thanking you, Gerard. We at R&W Blog are very impressed with your book, Ginny Good, and plan to serialize it on our site starting Sunday.

    Just so our other readers understand, I told Gerard we would be adding his site to our blogroll and would post an entry in our blog when we did so. And so we did.

  3. Thomma Lyn says:

    Ginny Good is one of the most amazing books I’ve ever read, and if anything’s better, then it would have to be the audio book. To readers who love beautifully-written, emotionally-engaging work: check out Ginny Good. You’ll be glad you did.

    I read widely, and Ginny Good, which I read two years ago in its print version, is still the only book I’ve ever read that had me laughing my ass off and bawling my eyes out … at the same time. Several times throughout. It’s a rare writer who can do that to me. :)

    And I’ll mention this, too: I started GG after I’d finished a Pulitzer prize winner. Gerard’s book is better.

  4. Sid Leavitt says:

    Thank you. We couldn’t agree more about the qualities of Ginny Good, and we feel privileged that Gerard has allowed us to serialize it.

    (Thomma Lyn is a novelist, short story writer and author of the weblogs Tennessee Text Wrestling and Thomma Lyn’s Shorts.)

  5. Gerard Jones says:

    She also knows how to read…it’s harder to find someone who knows how to read than it is to find someone who knows how to write…the two go together…without good readers there aren’t gonna be any good writers. Pulitzer Prize Winners, pfssh. G.

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