Fashion icon, Broadway and Hollywood insider, mob mistress, confidante to notorious gang members of both Crips and Bloods, wife, mother, award-winning journalist, Léon Bing has not followed the typical path through life. From her formative relationship with her mother to her days as a star model to her sisterly relationship with Mama Cass Elliot and ultimate reinvention as the author of the bestselling gang exposé, Do or Die, Swans and Pistols details Bing's always exciting and sometimes dangerous life. In a series of riveting stories of unconventionality, Bing wrestles with the themes of mothers, daughters, and reinvention-a concept inseparable from the experience of her early adult life in the 1960s and the city she called home.
Joseph Stalin knew Eleanor Stefanov when she was a girl, and he was a young Marxist revolutionary in Saint Petersburg. He admired this child for her beauty, intelligence, and courage, but what he admired most was seeing this lovely Russian girl as a committed church hating, Romanov hating, capitalist hating Communist. However, what Stalin didn't know was Eleanor, as a teenager, would be given a gift, a revolver, and that gift would change her life forever. Secretly she would develop the motto: A woman's right to own a gun is her right to be free.The Soviet secret police destroyed millions of lives. What if every Russian, whom the secret police had sought to arrest, had met their oppressors with a gun? Eleanor Stefanov did. Excerpt: "She knew how to use her pistol: clean and load. Sights on target. Squeeze the trigger. Problem solved. During the chaos of the February Revolution, which toppled Nicholas II, a member of the Red Guard had given Eleanor the revolver and taught her how to use it. She would report to work dressed as a humble proletariat secretary, but as soon as her duties were finished, she would rush home and change into men's clothing. For a season she drifted away from voluntary party activities, even though these were important for party advancement. The power of the gun was more alluring. Target practice became her top priority. Secretly she became very skilled. . . . The police never challenged her because there was no real police enforcement, just bands of armed, illiterate men with a few women mixed in. The old gentleman who had given her the revolver told her, "Protect your virtue with this pistol. A lot of men, Bolshevik or Menshevik, will rape a young woman like you and think nothing of it-like eating a meal-and then give the leftovers to their buddies. This will stop them. Don't hesitate for a moment, Comrade Daughter."
This book should be on every writer, would-be-writer, or reader's bookshelf. Unlike the hundreds of how-to books, Mr. Charlton leads us down a winding path to becoming a writer. Irreverent at times and solemn at others, he lays out his pratfalls of growing up but never mocks. His explanations are clear and concise. His short stories entertain but are there to draw from. This unique meandering through a writer's mind answers one of the essential questions writers answer in interviews: "How do you come up with _______?"Charlton introduces us to his formative people, explaining how he drew from each person to produce specific characters or circumstances. Consider this a cipher or companion handbook to his books. In his lectures on writing, Mr. Charlton explains writing dense or contextually rich novels that are not drudgery to read. In his mysteries, he drops clues like a flirtatious southern lady would drop her handkerchief. Even the most innocent offhanded reference should never be a throwaway line. Throwaway lines are indirectly filler or fluff. In this day of expensive printing, word count should be the last bloviated fixture in a novel. Learning to write concisely should be the goal of every writer. Charlton discusses writing to the changing word counts in journalism, or even to an exact word count for a contest. His writing exercises are merely for self-examination. He uses his family as a collection of tools and information about the varieties of family undercurrents. Ozzie and Harriet were good for thirty minutes each week in the fifties but became tediously plebian for a novel-especially in a mystery or thriller. Better to substitute Ozzy Osbourne for the paternal role. Once he shows his youth lessons, Mr. Charlton interjects some of his favorite short stories. These are the stories he uses as lessons, building characters real enough for them to snatch the storytelling from the writer and reveal the story, which is only theirs to tell. Characters, storytelling, novels, or movies will never be the same again. As Charlton loves to point out-not all mysteries are murders, and not all murders are mysteries.
