July 17, 2002
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

RETIRED OCC ENGLISH PROF, RICH LINDER,
WEAVES TALL TALE FOR FIRST NOVEL

It took the onset of retirement before Rich Linder -- an Orange Coast College professor of English for 29 years -- was able to find time to realize his lifelong dream.

Linder has just published his first novel, "Two Men Tall."

The work, classified in the mystery/suspense genre, was released in May. Linder dedicated it to his wife, Susan.

A long-time Laguna Beach resident, Linder retired from OCC's faculty seven years ago, in 1995. For nearly three decades he taught courses in English literature, creative writing, short story writing, and poetry writing. He began work on his novel shortly after teaching his final OCC class. The book was published by Creative Arts Book Company of Berkeley.

"It was a long process," Linder admits with a sigh. "I encountered my share of difficulties and frustrations along the way, but now the book is finally out and I can actually hold it in my hands. I feel very proud."

Linder completed the writing project nearly two years ago. It took Creative Arts an additional 21 months to publish the work.

"I've discovered that publishers move at their own pace," Linder says.

Set in a tiny lumber town in northwest Montana, "Two Men Tall" is centered around a Blackfoot Indian fable about a legendary race of forest giants who are "two-men tall."

"A wonderful combination of myth and mystery...Linder taps into atavistic human fears and explores the headwaters of legend with a deft and knowing hand," writes best selling Orange County novelist, T. Jefferson Parker, in a supportive statement contained on the back cover of Linder's new work. "(It's) a terrific debut," Parker concludes. Parker is a former OCC student, and a member of the college's Alumni Hall of Fame.

"Actually, I don't know Jeff, my publisher sent him a copy of the book for review," Linder says. "I heard him speak a few months ago at a writer's workshop at a Los Angeles hotel. I cornered him in the lobby as he was preparing to sign books and thanked him profusely for his kind words. He's a very generous guy."

Another best-selling novelist, JoAnn Mapson, who was one of Linder's OCC writing students a number of years ago, called "Two Men Tall" a "quirky, surprising tale, written in a fresh new voice (that) I hope to hear more from in the very near future."

Author Jake Fuchs said, "Vivid and suspenseful, 'Two Men Tall' stands on the boundary between mystery and horror. Rich Linder writes with power and precision."

Linder's friends and colleagues who've read the book label it a "page-turner."

The retired OCC professor, who previously had his poetry and short stories published in literary journals, was raised in Fresno and went on to earn a B.A. degree in English literature from UC Santa Barbara. He minored in French.

"That French minor is a well-kept secret," he warns with a smile.

He earned an M.A. in English from San Francisco State University, and began teaching shortly thereafter at Orange Coast College.

Linder spent summers during his high school and college years working in California's Sierra-Nevada Mountains. He pumped gas at a small mountain service station, worked at a boat house, was employed by an ice house and worked in a mountain grocery store.

"I love the mountains," he says. "I used to take extensive hikes into the back country alone, and I'd swim in the lakes at dusk. I learned a lot about being afraid while alone in the woods, and being alert to noises."

As an undergraduate at UC Santa Barbara, Linder met a girl from Arcata, a town situated on California's redwood coast.

"She told me stories, and they must have made an impression because I haven't forgotten them in more than 40 years. She talked about playing baseball on the fringes of the forest, and knocking the ball into the trees. She and her friends rarely went after a lost ball, however, for fear of stumbling onto Bigfoot. Loggers would tell the kids tales about Bigfoot sightings, and how their bulldozers had been turned over in the woods."

Bigfoot is an integral part of Linder's novel. Is the former OCC professor a Bigfoot believer?

"No," he confesses. "But I'm alert to the fact that nature is always coughing up new information, new organisms. There's still an undiscovered world out there on Planet Earth, and it fascinates me to learn that creatures thought to be extinct sometimes turn up."

Linder's novel begins with a prologue by Lucy, an ancient Blackfoot Indian woman.
"We were children," Lucy reminisces. "They were our friends. They were two-men tall. Tall as the sky, we used to say. Every day they brought wood and water. Every day we played. They swung us in circles, we laughed and sang, we ate berries together...

"They took us high in the trees -- we could see the world. They took us across rivers, over snow and ice, through dark forest -- everywhere. They took us into the high country, a place of wind and stone.

"At night they would leave. They went to the forest. We were children. They were our friends."

Although he's spent virtually all his life in California, Linder sets his distinctive novel against the backdrop of remote northwestern Montana.

"I've visited the area several times, and it provided me with the kind of isolation I needed for the novel," he says. "It's somewhat off the beaten path, and the natural world is ever present, rough and beautiful. Towns in the area look slightly forlorn.

"Winter hangs on for a long time in northwest Montana, and winter weather is essential for my story. The snow stays on the ground through May."

The book's protagonist, Floyd Jefferson, is a sheriff in the mountain town of Pollard Creek. He's only just been elected Ocahlo County sheriff when mysterious things begin to happen in his neck of the woods.

"The reader tracks Floyd as Floyd tracks his hunches to find out just what the truth is," Linder explains. "He faces lots of opposition from the townsfolk. Many don't want the truth to come out."

The book contains a cast of interesting characters, and a dash of romance.
Before the novel began to unfold on paper -- or at least on the hard drive of Linder's Macintosh -- it spent years spinning about in his creative mind.

"Susan and I visited northwest Montana on several occasions while I was still teaching at OCC," he recalls. "I was thinking about writing a novel at the time. I knew I wanted to place my story in Montana, but wasn't certain yet which direction it would go. I took lots of notes and pictures during our vacations.

"Following my retirement, when I seriously began to outline the story, I got out my National Geographic maps and began to plot the location and details. There were numerous false starts before it finally got moving."

He noticed a Blackfoot Indian reservation nestled near where his mythical town, Pollard Creek, would lie.

"I did a cold-call to the reservation one day so that I could get some background on Blackfoot lore, and ended up talking with two wonderful old gentlemen. They gave me lots of interesting material, some of which I was able to use in the book."

When he finally commenced to write, it took Linder three years to complete his first draft.

"I wrote on and off, and didn't work on it with as much consistency as I probably needed to," he says.

He wrote the book in the same fashion as Ernest Hemingway used to pen his.

"I didn't work on it every day, only periodically. Usually, when I sat down at the computer to write, I would be there for hours. On a good day, I'd produce five or six solid pages. On a not-so-good day, I'd have less than a page...maybe only a paragraph.

"Like Hemingway, when I sat down to write I would first reread everything I'd written to that point. That could take considerable time. I did that in an attempt to reenter the bones of my story. I wanted to make certain that the new language I was adding would match the mood and tone of the previous material. Because I read the book so many times, I became extraordinarily familiar with it. It got to where I was able to speed read the first 50 to 100 pages quickly.

"Ultimately, I almost had the entire thing committed to memory. It became a part of my DNA."

His first draft was 335 pages in length. He showed it to his agent.

"He suggested that I shorten the book, and I agreed. I ended up cutting three peripheral characters from the story, and shaved more than a hundred pages. I had to go back and rewrite many chapters in order to get the story to harmonize with character changes."

Linder did a huge amount of rewriting.

"Writing is actually all about rewriting," he says. "Once you've got your draft, you revise the heck out of it. The hardest thing about writing the book was satisfying myself that the sentences worked. I wanted precise words, and not words that would call attention to themselves. Another hard thing was keeping in mind the idea that I wanted to write a book that I, myself, would actually want to read."

Finally, everything was ready to go to a publisher in 2000. The book was accepted by a pair of California publishing houses, and Linder selected Creative Arts Book Company of Berkeley.

"They did a nice job," he says.

"Two Men Tall" is now being sold in bookstores, and also by the major online sellers, such as Amazon.com, Barnes&Noble.com and Borders.

Linder is currently at work on a second novel. That second work has nothing to do with the first.

"I think a sequel could be in order for 'Two Men Tall,' but I'm not ready to write it just yet," he says. "I'm now at work on a book that's set in Oyster Bay, N.Y., and also in Paris. It's about a painter who gets involved in some interesting detective work.

"I've got 60 pages that are complete and that I can get through without throwing up, so I'm feeling pretty good about it. Throwing up is the litmus test for whether or not you're on the right path. I have dozens of additional pages that are not yet up to snuff. I also have lots of notes, and a definite sense of where this thing is going. I hope to have a good final draft in about two years."

Linder is enjoying retirement.

"I don't miss teaching," he admits honestly. "I found teaching to be hard work. I don't consider myself to be a naturally gifted teacher, like many of my OCC colleagues. I had to work hard at it. I loved my students, but found myself spending an inordinate amount of time stressing over classroom minutia. When it was time to retire, I was ready."

In addition to writing, he's doing a number of other things in retirement.

For 30 years, Linder and his wife have maintained a booth at the famed Laguna Beach Sawdust Festival. Susan is a print-maker.

"We create art and sell it, and we've done quite well over the years," he says. "We spend six months out of each year creating our art -- from January through June -- and we display and sell it at the show in July and August. We were able to send our two daughters through college on money we made from the Sawdust Festival.

"We have many customers who return annually to buy our work."

The Linders' work has evolved over the years. They now create acid etchings of animal shapes out of metal, and paint them bright colors.

The Linders also enjoy traveling. They've toured the United States, Mexico and Europe. Linder doesn't do any writing while on the road, because he still hasn't purchased a laptop, but he takes his note pad with him and constantly scouts locations and possible story scenarios. He makes extensive notes.

This September, Linder will drive with Susan to San Francisco where he'll give readings from "Two Men Tall" at a pair of bookstores.

"I'm looking forward to that," he says. "One of the things I enjoyed most in my OCC classes was reading literature aloud to students. I liked watching their reactions as they heard the written word come alive. I would read excerpts from great literature, as well as from their own work.

"I'm trying to get my publisher to work up a road trip for us that would continue beyond San Francisco right up the coast into the Pacific Northwest. I'd like to read selections from my book in bookstores in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana."

It would be fun, he concedes, to read his book to audiences who actually live in the geographic region where the story takes place.

"If it goes over well with those audiences, it should go over well anywhere."

The retired Orange Coast College English professor has finally realized his dream of publishing a novel. He taught the mechanics of writing for 29 years to thousands of students -- some of whom actually became professional writers -- and he's now applying those principles to himself.

Things have come full-circle. For Rich Linder, life couldn't get any better.

Hey.. now this sounds like an interesting book!

Thanks for posting that Sosha! Neat article

Anyone read this one yet?

The list price is $14.95, but Walmart has it available online for $9.42.

http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.gsp...000000000040820

Think I'll run up there later on and see if they've got it in stock right at the store.