The ADK MOGUL Blog

Welcome to the resource blog of the Lake Placid-based production company ADK MOGUL. Our mission is to help foster the growth of film and writing in the Adirondack regional community, as well as to serve as a beacon for Upstate, New York, inviting filmmakers and writers to work here by connecting them with people who can bring their vision to life. Creative life, like a ski mogul, is a bumpy one, so we're here to help you along.

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Co-founder T.J. Brearton's new novel has been released!

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The Lake Champlain International Film Festival is now taking submissions:

PLATTSBURGH, NY -- As the date for the first-ever Lake Champlain International Film Fest gets closer, the festival team is seeing film submissions come in from all over the country and the world.

Open to all types of film categories, from documentaries and fiction to short and feature length, the period for entering a film closes at11:59 p.m. EST on Sept. 15. Entry fees are $20 for shorts (defined as under 60 minutes in length) and $30 for features. A $10 late fee will be added for films submitted after Aug. 31. 

Submissions, film entry forms and additional submission guidelines are available at www.lcifilmfest.org.

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The Tenured vs Debut Author Report finds that self-published authors make a better living than Big Five published authors. 

• Big-5 publishers are massively reliant on their most established authorsto the tune of 63% of their e-book revenue.

  • Roughly 46% of traditional publishing’s fiction dollars are coming from e-books.

  • Very few authors who debut with major publishers make enough money to earn a living—and modern advances don’t cover the difference.

  • In absolute numbers, more self-published authors are earning a living wage today than Big-5 authors.

  • When comparing debut authors who have equal time on the market, the difference between self-published and Big-5 authors is even greater.

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The all-new, all different, (but still the same people) newsletter is available to read online: 

Good evening, Astronauts. 

Some of you may have been wondering what we've been up to, well here is currently what is happening in the worlds of ADK Mogul co-founders T.J. Brearton and Dave Press. 

One correction though: Survivors is no longer free on Amazon Kindle, but $3.99. You should totally check it out.

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Paula Roy will host an Open Mic Night for writers on Wednesday, Aug. 13 at 7:30pm at the Old Forge Library. 

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The Sweet Hereafter directed by Atom Egoyan, adapted from the book by Russell Banks will be the first film in the 2014-15 Lake Placid Film Forum series.Here's the copy from the Adirondack Film Society's newsletter: 

Film Series Kicks Off in September with "The Sweet Hereafter"

The nine month Lake Placid Film Forum Series begins September 12&13 with multiple showings of the critically acclaimed film "The Sweet Hereafter." Special Guest Russell Banks will be in person for one of the screenings.

RUSSELL BANKS is the internationally acclaimed author of eighteen works of fiction, including the novels Continental Drift, Rule of the Bone, The Book of Jamaica and Lost Memory of Skin, as well as six short story collections.  Two of his novels, The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction, have been adapted into award-winning films.  Banks has been a PEN/Faulkner Finalist (Affliction, Cloudsplitter, Lost Memory of Skin) and a Pulitzer Prize Finalist (Continental Drift, Cloudsplitter).  His work has received numerous other awards and has been widely translated and anthologized.  Banks is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, was New York State Author (2004-2008) and was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame in 2014.  He lives in Miami, Florida and in upstate New York with his wife, the poet Chase Twichell.

THE SWEET HEREAFTER is the winner of the 1997 Cannes Film Festival Grand Prix. The film examines the effect of a tragic bus accident on the population of a small town. The Sweet Hereafter stars Sarah Polley and Iam Holm, is directed by Atom Egoyan, and is adapted from the novel by Russell Banks.

Tickets and exact showtimes will be posted by the Lake Placid Center for the Arts as the dates near.

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This Thursday at 7:30pm, Saranac Lake's BluSeed Studios presents graphic novelist Sabrina Jones's Race to Incarcerate: Creating Comics for Social Justice. Here's some more info. 

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The Rumpus Interview with Richard Russo

Mr. Russo, a frequent guest at the Lake Placid Film Forum is one of the best guys I've ever met. Ben Pfeiffer's characterization of Russo rings true:

It’s no accident that Pulitzer Prize–winner Richard Russo has a big, infectious laugh. The sixty-five-year-old novelist’s trademark humor and empathy fill his books, masterpieces of lower-middle class naturalism like Empire Falls and Bridge of Sighs. Even his more serious novels contain some good jokes along with their ambitious literary questions, but in the texture of his writing you can sense something else, too. Beneath the fiction there’s a tougher sensibility, a sharper edge—the moral outrage that comes from being raised in a postindustrial mill town like Gloversville, New York. You can tell that Russo has a quiet, uncompromising dedication to telling the truth and that sometimes, maybe because of that character trait, he gets into arguments. But you can tell he’d rather laugh about it, and maybe buy his adversary a drink or two, try to find something in common; he’d rather make something else—peace, jokes, art—than war.

In a recent letter at the Author's Guild--where Russo is a co-vice president--he talks about the Amazon-Hachette feud, but he wants to change the image of the guild to shape it towards what we're building in the Adirondacks: 

As one of three vice presidents of the Authors Guild (along with Judy Blume and James Shapiro), he wants to find ways to build a community for all writers. After more than a century, Russo says, the Authors Guild is reimagining its mission. All writers—traditionally and independently published, Amazon authors and recent MFA graduates, hobbyists and professionals—are invited to unite under the banner of the Authors Guild. The only requirement beyond being a writer and paying ninety dollars for the first year’s dues? Say you love literature, that you’re committed to books in all their forms, that you support other writers, whatever their stylistic quirks, genre choices, or artistic ambitions. Say that you believe books are different than other goods you can buy and sell and trade and steal.

He wants to open the guild up to independent, self-published, and young writers trying to break in: 

When I was at the AWP conference in Seattle this year, I spent the entire time talking to writers finishing up an MFA. Those folks all said the same thing: That once they left their writing community at the university, they found that there was no community to replace it. The Guild that we’re reimagining would fill that void. Instead of being only a New York operation, we’d have lots of things going on in different regions. Making sure we have a way to introduce writers to the world. Making sure that those talents have continued access to the rest of us. So we’re working hard coming up with new programs that will provide that sense of community to a group of writers who are despairing out there in a world of smaller advances and smaller support. We want to defend all writers and all formats. We want writers who are doing well to keep doing well, sure. But we want to lend a special hand to those writers who seem to be getting hit the hardest. Some of those are writers coming out of MFA programs.

By setting up social gatherings, readings, and many other things.

 ....we’d like to have targeted gatherings designed to introduce younger writers to established authors and their readers. I’m very hot on the idea of a literary introduction series. A regular feature—maybe at someplace like the Rumpus—wherein a well-known writer, by way of a review or conversation, introduces a writer who is tremendously talented but doesn’t have a name yet. We’re also looking at doing things like that with your local NPR station, for instance. We’d like to do forums on YouTube or Google Hangouts. You take a topic, like how to organize a book tour, something like that, and have a roundtable discussion with a group of experienced writers. All of this stuff would be geared toward writers who feel adrift and alone in an increasingly hostile publishing world.

Okay, Mr. Russo--where do we sign up? Oh right here. 

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Hi, everybody!

Way back when we were selling copies of THE DEAL we put together a newsletter for that release, and…we haven’t been back. To be honest, we have been missing in action to a certain degree. Between personal, professional, and creative developments life’s been pretty crazy this year. For example, Tim’s success with his first novel, the release of its sequel is reason to celebrate and reinvigorate, and the EKG that monitors my creative life (It’s alive! No, it’s dead! It’s alive and it’s better than…No, it’s dead on the slab) have made things very hectic for us as individuals.

But we're back, and like Marvel Comics we’re rebooting with a new first issue within a year.

That’s why we’re bringing the newsletter back. We'll talk about the things we’re currently working on like the 2014-2015 Lake Placid Film Forum series at the LPCA, The Shared Experience, book-related things, and the occasional personal aside on us and our individual creative lives. 

So, subscribe. We promise we won’t spam you every day. In fact, it’ll come out probably once a month, because--like you--we hate clutter in our inboxes. Amazon does enough of that for all of us.

Thanks and see you in the emails!

 --Dave.

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There’s a really terrific profile of filmmaker Richard Linklater in this week’s New Yorker. (Here’s a podcast of the writer, Nathan Heller (@nathanheller), talking about Linklater’s work—the drawing above is something I doodled at SXSW in 2009.)

10 interesting things I discovered…

8. He offers his stars percentage points instead of Hollywood fees. He calls this “betting on myself,” and if the bet is good, which it almost always is, it makes the director as free and self-sovereign as a novelist.

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That’s pretty interesting. 

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The Kollecker Film Project Presentation at the Saranac Lake Library; Monday, July 28, at 7pm.

From a release:

Within the Adirondack Research Room of the SLFL there is a collection of films known as the Kollecker collection. Mr. Kollecker operated a Kodak shop in Saranac Lake during the early and middle 1900s. After his death Mr. Kollecker's possessions became the property of the county; as the contents of his apartment were being removed to be taken to the dump, a number of his film canisters were rescued and deposited in the ARR of the SLFL. The films date from roughly 1924 to the 1960s. 

The SLFL is committed to the digitalization and public accessibility of these films. Currently there is roughly 25,000 feet of film in the ARR. Those who have viewed a short (42 minute) presentation compiled from the current partially digitized contents of the collection have described the film clips as "Saranac Lake's home movies." The films provide a unique opportunity to view everyday life, along with special events, infrastructure changes and historic places from Saranac Lake's rich past.

The event will be in the Cantwell Room of the Saranac Lake Library, beginning at 7pm on July 28.

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Dave's colleague and Man-of-all-Trades Craig Milewski is hosting a writer's workshop at Paul Smith's VIC this Friday. 

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From Film Forum to Filmmaking:

The story of how a student from Marist became a Fulbright Scholarship recipient and an international filmmaker.

It all began for filmmaker Nick Homler at the 2012 Lake Placid Film Forum. As a Marist College student participating in the Sleepless in Lake Placid 24-hr Student Filmmaking Competition, Nick attended a panel discussion the morning after his film showcased at a screening along with several other participating school teams. The panel discussion “Do Movie Theaters Have A Future?” sparked the idea of a senior thesis capping video on the digital conversion of movie theatre projection. The next year, “Coffee and Conversation,” a keynote presentation from producer and educator Ira Deutchman, convinced Nick to move forward with a documentary he called “The Shared Experience.” Now Nick is taking the project to New Zealand on a Fulbright Scholarship. Here’s Nick writing a guest post for us, telling the story in his own words.

Congratulations to Nick and thank you for the kind words. Have a blast in New Zealand.  

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Hey, co-founder T.J. Brearton's second novel, the sequel to Habit  comes out this Tuesday:

It’s been two years of bad dreams. The phone rings. One of Brendan Healy’soldest and best friends is dead. To find out why, Healy must return home to Hawthorne, NY to face down the ghosts of his past and enter a world of staggering darkness and power.

SURVIVORS releases July 1st 2014 in the US and the UK.

Published by Joffe Books. 

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A neat writing workshop at the Spring Street Gallery in Saratoga Springs: responding to visual art through poetry. That's pretty neat. 

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Adirondack Literary Award Winners!

From Nathalie Thill's press release: 

BLUE MOUNTAIN LAKE –Writers, editors, publishers, and book lovers gathered at the stunning Blue Mountain Center in Blue Mountain Lake on Sunday, June 1, 2014 to hear the announcements of the Adirondack Center for Writing's (ACW’s) annual Adirondack Literary Award winners.

The Adirondack Literary Awards celebrate and acknowledge the books that were written by Adirondack authors or published in the region in the previous year.

All of the books submitted for consideration this year were on display, giving a visual sense of the scope of ourAdirondack literary achievements, and many of the authors had signed copies of their books for sale.

This year a record 51 books were submitted, also, for the first time featured articles were accepted as a category.

And the winners are…..

for Best Children’s Book:  Lost by LeeAnne Baker.  

This year there were two fiction prizes, one for best for short story collections and one for best novel. The award for Best Short Story Collection went to The Hypothetical Girl by Elizabeth Cohen, and the prize for Best Novel went to Jaime Sheffield for Here Be Monsters.   

Best Memoir went to Wet Socks by Carol Gregson.

The Best Book of Edited Collections in Nonfiction went to North Country Reflections/Adirondack Reflectionsedited by Neal Burdick and Maurice Kenny.

The Best Book of General Nonfiction went to Out of the Blue; Blueline Essays 1979-1989 by Alice Wolf Gilborn.

 The Best Book of Poetry went to Paul Pines for New Orleans Variations & Paris Ouroboros.

The Best Featured Article went to "A Phone Call and a Thank You Just in Time" by Chris Knight, published by Adirondack Daily Enterprise

For the first time the People’s Choice Award was tied, winners were Never a Dull Moment; A Tapestry of Scenes & Stories from an Adirondack Medical Practice by Daniel Way, M.D.  and Race to Incarcerate by Sabrina Jones and Marc Mauer.

ACW is very proud of the judges for the Adirondack Literary Award; they are careful and dedicated readers. The judges are:

Fiction:  Bibi Wein and Jerry McGovern

Nonfiction and memoir: Ellen Rocco and Joseph Bruchac

Poetry: Roger Mitchell and Stuart Bartow

Children's Literature: Ellen Wilcox and Nancy Beattie

Featured Articles: Rick Brooks (from the Wall St Journal) and Michael Corkery (from the New York Times)

The Adirondack Center for Writing is a non-profit organization that supports the literary arts throughout the Park. They present workshops, writing and publishing conferences, and also organize public readings where they present both regional and nationally acclaimed authors. They're supported in part by the New York State Council on the Arts. Members provide a great deal of the operating budget through membership dues and contributions. Come visit us at our office in downtown Saranac Lake.

Congrats to Jamie Sheffield and Chris Knight, and every other winner!

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The Lake Placid Film Forum 2014-2015: 

One film. Each Month. Multiple Showings. The Lake Placid Film Forum… Series

The Adirondack Film Society is pleased to announce The Lake Placid Film Forum Series. Beginning in September, 2014, the Film Forum will screen a series of films at the Lake Placid Center for the Arts. The program will feature one film, one weekend each month, with multiple showings.

“We’ve been working on growing our program,” says John Huttlinger, Chairman of the Adirondack Film Society. “Showing films at the LPCA venue is one way the Adirondack Film Society is evolving to bring our audiences the quality programming they’ve come to expect, and to embrace the changing medium of film exhibition.”