How to Use College to the Fullest to Discover Your Strengths and Find a Job You Love Before You Graduate
by Kat Clowes, M.B.A.
College today is not preparing students for the modern job market—at a time when young people can expect to change careers five times or more, students are graduating with insufficient and obsolete job skills. The old rules for succeeding in college just don’t work anymore.
Put College to Work is a new kind of college guide, written by a Millennial for Millennials and designed for today’s world of uncertain employment, rapid career changes, and high student loan debt. The author knows first-hand what works and what doesn’t in today’s economy, both from her own experience as a student and her career as a college planning consultant. At a time when traditional college planning is failing to prepare students for working world, Put College to Work is a supremely practical guide to start building your career plan, your business contacts, and your job prospects.
Put College to Work shows how to identify your strengths, find the right career field and major to pursue, leverage your skills, and create your own opportunities. You’ll learn how to network to employers through your university’s career center, alumni association, and major donors, plus the industry and research connections of your professors.
Put College to Work presents a step-by-step plan to use the resources available to you in college (the resources you’re already paying for!) to enhance your education with practical experience, make connections with employers, market yourself as a dynamic and creative employee—and land a job before you graduate.
Put College to Work is the new rule book to how college really works today that will empower you to take action now to build your education, your career plan, your business contacts, and your job prospects.
About the Author: Kat Clowes figured out college the hard way. Having been a college student without a clue, Clowes spent ten years after graduation learning how she could have used her college resources to launch her career. After earning an M.B.A. and building a successful executive career, Clowes is now an independent educational consultant helping students use their time in college to gain meaningful employment after graduation.
$18.95 ($19.95 Canada) • Trade Paperback • 6″ x 9″ • 280 pages
ISBN 978-1-61035-253-6
BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Careers •
BISAC BUS012000
The History of California’s Main Street
by Stephen H. Provost
Before it was a modern freeway, California’s State Highway 99 was the main street of California, a simple two-lane road that passed through the downtowns of every city between the Mexican border and the Oregon state line.
Highway 99: A History of California’s Main Street turns back the clock to those days when a narrow ribbon of asphalt tied the state’s communities together, with classic roadside attractions and plenty of fun along the way.
Illustrated throughout with historical photographs, Highway 99 documents the birth and development of the great highway, from its beginnings as a dream project by a handful of early motorcar enthusiasts to its 1920s incarnation as a narrow trail over the Grapevine to the modern superhighway of today.
Along the way, Highway 99 chronicles an amazing amount of history: the invention of basic highway equipment such as the center stripe and the road sign; the great Dust Bowl migrations of the Okies; the origins of California landmarks like Griffith Park and Magic Mountain; and the network of beacon towers for airplanes that briefly paralleled the highway in the 1920s; and numerous other stories.
Above all, the story of Highway 99 is the story of classic American roadside culture. Highway 99 witnessed the birth of the motor court motel, the drive-thru window, the theme park, and the truck stop, and Highway 99 unearths detailed histories of the innumerable gas stations, hotel, restaurants, amusements, and whole communities that developed to cater to the motorist.
From the foundations of America’s fast-food culture to the birth of the Bakersfield Sound, the history of California has happened around Highway 99, and Highway 99 brilliantly depicts that history.
About the Author: Stephen H. Provost is a journalist, author, and editor of The Cambrian newspaper. His previous books include Fresno Growing Up: A City Comes of Age 1945—1985, a history of his hometown. Provost lives with his wife on California’s Central Coast, where he blogs at his website, stephenhprovost.com.
$22.95 US • Trade Paperback • 8.5″ x 10″ • 350 pages
ISBN 978-1-61035-296-3
HISTORY / California • BISAC HIS036140
273 black and white photographs• Index
Book II of The Memortality Saga
by Stephen H. Provost
Available now from Pace Press and Quill Driver Books (imprints of Linden Publishing).
Somebody wanted Minerva Rus dead. They succeeded. But Minerva isn’t letting a little thing like death stop her.
In Memortality, the first book of The Memortality Saga, young Minerva Rus discovered that she had the Gift, the power to bring the dead back to life, reuniting her with her long-lost love Raven, but also plunging her into unimaginable danger. Because Minerva is not the only one with the Gift, and the power of resurrection can also bring back long-dead evil, with fatal results for Minerva.
Now, in Paralucidity, the second book of The Memortality Saga, Minerva’s adventures continue postmortem, with even higher stakes — the fate of the world.
After the dangerous adventure that killed her, Minerva has reconciled herself to being dead. She’s enjoying her romance with Raven and the companionship of the friends she has made — Carson, the taciturn secret agent, and Amber, the confident, self-assured doctor who has appointed herself Minerva’s big sister. The renegade government operator Jules, Minerva’s worst enemy, has been banished from reality and trapped in her own mind. It seems like Minerva is free to enjoy the eternity of her unnatural life.
But immortality isn’t safe. Minerva and Raven’s life-giving powers mysteriously fade, forcing them to take refuge in The Between, a shadowy realm of memories that lies between life and death. What’s more, their old adversary Jules is on the loose, partnered with a resurrected Nazi scientist planning a monstrous experiment that will change the destiny of the human race.
And now it’s up to a 21-year-old dead girl to save the world — again.
Audience: Contemporary fantasy readers from young adult to adult.
About the Author: Stephen H. Provost is a journalist and author. He has worked as an editor, reporter, and columnist at newspapers throughout California. He is the author of Fresno Growing Up: A City Comes of Age 1945–1985, a history of his hometown; Highway 99: The History of California’s Main Street; and Memortality, the first book in the contemporary fantasy Memortality Saga.
$14.95 US • Trade Paperback • 6″ x 9″ • 266 pages
ISBN 978-1-61035-318-2
FICTION / Contemporary Fantasy • BISAC FIC009010
Beat by Beat to a Better Script
by Jim Mercurio
No one comes out of a movie talking about script structure. What audiences love and remember about a movie are great scenes, the meaningful moments in a film that reveal character and emotion.
While previous screenwriting guides emphasize story structure at the macro level, The Craft of Scene Writing: Beat by Beat to a Better Script is the first book for screenwriters that focuses entirely on the micro level of writing powerful scenes. Story structure alone does not make a successful screenplay; it is the detailed craftwork of scene writing that breathes life into a story.
In The Craft of Scene Writing, accomplished screenwriter and master writing teacher Jim Mercurio explains the nuts and bolts of how to write emotionally resonant scenes that will elevate a script from ho-hum to extraordinary.
The Craft of Scene Writing analyzes and systematizes the individual elements that create dynamic scenes: beats, conflicts, character moments, specific actions and lines of dialogue. Mercurio demonstrates that every single scene in a script needs to be a story in itself that creates a surprise or reversal. And when a scene incorporates both a twist in the plot and a change in the characters’ internal states, it has the greatest potential to profoundly engage an audience.
The Craft of Scene Writing cites specific examples from popular classic scripts, old and new, to show how great scenes reveal character and advance the story. The Craft of Scene Writing also gives readers practical tools to immediately improve their scenes and scripts.
Writing amazing scenes won’t just make a screenplay a better work of art. Great scenes also make a script more attractive to producers, directors and actors — making a script more likely to sell.
An incredibly detailed exploration of screenwriting technique, The Craft of Scene Writing will help beginning writers to write great scripts and experienced writers to gain a more complete mastery of their craft.
Audience: Professional and aspiring screenwriters, playwrights, fiction writers and other creative storytellers.
About the Author: Jim Mercurio is a writer, author, screenwriter and filmmaker. He has directed or produced five feature films and has helped countless writers as a teacher, story analyst and script doctor. Creative Screenwriting magazine ranked him as one of the top screenplay consultants in the country.
$18.95 US • Trade Paperback • 6″ x 9″ • 400 pages • Index
ISBN 978-1-61035-330-4
Subtitle: Practical Plans to Get Your Business Mobile in Just a Few Days for Just a Few Bucks.
Creating a successful mobile web presence is achievable with the tools found in this guide, without needing to learn a programming language or become a Web designer. Such a presence is now a necessity, rather than a luxury, for all businesses, organizations, and independent professionals to stay competitive.
This quick, practical, hands-on introduction to the nuts and bolts of using the mobile web to grow a brand, improve sales, and increase profits is written for lay people and avoids jargon and programming concepts. Time and money-saving solutions are presented, teaching technical novices how to quickly adapt their existing websites to the mobile ones and how to easily create mobile applications without having to learn to program.
Step-by-step instructions stand alongside real-world examples of successful mobile-web transitions, and advice on best practices is provided to help business owners, entrepreneurs, marketing professionals, and creative professionals create the presence they need to help their business flourish.
This is the PDF e-book edition!
A Colorful Portrait of Where the Funeral and Entertainment Industries Met in Hollywood
by Allan Abbott and Greg Abbott
Even celebrities die — and he was the man who picked up the bodies!
Allan Abbott ran the leading mortuary in Hollywood and got an unprecedented glimpse of how celebrities really live and die. The Forrest Gump of the funeral industry, Abbott was everywhere celebrities died, from helping to prepare Marilyn Monroe’s body to standing next to Christopher Walken at Natalie Wood’s funeral.
Now in his new memoir Pardon My Hearse, Abbott tells the rags-to-shroud story of how he went from a young man with a hearse to the funeral director to the stars — a rollicking, unexpectedly hilarious story of glamorous funerals, mishaps with corpses and true-life glimpses of celebrities at their most revealing moments.
When he wasn’t transporting celebrity corpses, Abbott used his funeral limos to transport living celebrities to Hollywood parties and rented his vast collection of cars and funeral props to movie and TV productions. Pardon My Hearse presents a dazzling A-List of celebrities, living and dead, whom Abbott encountered during his career, including Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Joe DiMaggio, Robert Redford, Frank Sinatra and others.
Pardon My Hearse takes readers behind the scenes to tell the secrets of Marilyn Monroe’s funeral (where Abbott acquired the most unlikely souvenir of Monroe’s falsies) and dishes the inside story of disgraced crematorium operator David Sconce, who ordered an attack on Abbott’s business partner Ron Hast to cover up Sconce’s criminal mishandling of bodies and remains. Abbott also shares gruesome details of removing corpses from the devastation of the 1971 Sylmar earthquake, reburying corpses dislodged from the 1978 mudslide that swept through the Verdugo Hills Cemetery and more.
A treasure trove of insight and gossip you can’t get anywhere else, Pardon My Hearse is an eye-opening look at secret Hollywood from the man who literally knows where the bodies are buried.
$16.95 ($17.95 Canada) • Trade Paperback • 6″ x 9″ • 270 pages
ISBN 978-1-61035-248-2
Pardon My Hearse Media Kit
Behind San Quentin’s Walls: The History of California’s Legendary Prison and Its Inmates, 1851–1900
by William B. Secrest
It’s one of the most famous prisons in American history, featured in count-less movies and novels. Its inmates have included such diverse characters as Charles Manson, Sirhan Sirhan, Eldridge Cleaver, Merle Haggard, and Neal Cassidy. San Quentin State Prison is an iconic symbol of California, yet few people today know the prison’s origins or colorful early history.
Noted Old West historian William B. Secrest uncovers the forgotten beginnings of San Quentin in Behind San Quentin’s Walls: The History of the Legendary Prison and Its Inmates, 1851-1900. Going back to original source material of public records and contemporary newspaper accounts, Secrest tells of San Quentin’s unlikely beginnings as a real estate scheme and its essential role in taming the lawless California of Gold Rush days.
Behind San Quentin’s Walls presents the history of San Quentin as a microcosm of the settlement of California. Planned during the wildest days of Barbary Coast anarchy and Vigilante Committee lynch law, the state prison at San Quentin was the new state’s first attempt to impose the rule of law on a violent frontier society. Featuring numerous citations from contemporary accounts, plus period photos, illustrations, newspaper clippings, and maps, Secrest chronicles the political calculations that created San Quentin; the outsize egos of the men who built it; the mismanagement and frequent escapes that marred San Quentin’s early years; and the notorious ruffians and cutthroats who were housed there.
Filled with exciting true stories of gunfights, brawls, prison riots, daring escapes, and intrepid manhunts, Behind San Quentin’s Walls is also a rip-roaring Wild West tale of how men and women with immense talent for both good and evil tamed a new state and each other. Behind San Quentin’s Walls is a bold mix of serious history and lively writing that no fan of Western history should miss.
ISBN 978-1-61035-221-5
True Crime / California History • BISAC TRU000000 / HIS036140
Over 200 Historic Photographs and Illustrations • Bibliography • Index
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