Steven Moffat and Dr. Who

I've learned to follow writers, not series.

In books, it's easy. Most writers continue their own series, building each novel from the previous.

But in comic books and TV shows, it's difficult. A writer can sometimes create something, and leave it to another writer. The character may stick in your mind, and when the new writer comes on to take over that character, the character falters.

When I was a kid, I followed the character.

No longer.

Now I follow the writer. Ed Brubaker, Brian Michael Bendis, and Duane Swierczynski. I followed them no matter who they took on.

Steven Moffatt is that way. Moffat created the show Coupling. It was basically a funny version of FRIENDS and the pre-cursor to one of my favorite sitcoms, HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER. He sprinkled the sitcom with wonderfully bizarre but relatable characters. He played with time. He told smart stories.

I next found him in JEKYLL. A modern re-telling of the Jekyll and Hyde story. Jekyll was a wonderful, funloving, giddy killer. The character, as told by Moffat, dragged you through the story. Time was played with. Fun was had.

He did the same with SHERLOCK. He brought Holmes and Watson into the 21st century. Added cellphones. Made Holmes a bizarre character, aloof in his own world. The best kind.

I've loved everything he's done.

And now he's the Dr. Who showrunner. I've never liked Dr. Who. It's too out there for me. Too sci-fi. Too much history and at the same time non history to follow.

But now... now I'm trying it. Because of Moffat.

Writers'll do that for you.

And, if the season premiere is any indication, I'm sold.

If only for this line, to the episode's villain. Totally earned. And typically Moffat.

"I'm the Doctor. So, basically.... run."

But I need more opinions. Should I keep on? Why?

TV Gig

by
John McFetridge

A while ago I mentioned I was interviewing for a TV writing job and now I’m happy to report that I’ve just signed on to co-write the pilot episode of a new TV cop show. There’s a long way to go for it to become a series, but this is very exciting.

The show is going to be about narcotics cops in Toronto. It’s going to be on the CTV network (if it gets that far) and they’ve asked for it to be very episodic. This presents some real challenges for a show about narcotics cops.

Most network TV cop shows are about homicide cops – the shows often start with the discovery of a murder victim and the the next hour is finding out who the murderer is and then arresting them. So, it’s usually of a closed story.

With narcotics investigations the beginning and end aren’t so clear and the arrest is often not so satisfying as it’s usually just one link in a chain and often one that can be easily replaced. Something that was so well done on The Wire, but that was a very serialized show.

So, we’ve got some challenges ahead.

There have been a few TV shows about narcotics cops – The Mod Squad, Miami Vice, The Nasty Boys (I have to admit I’d never heard of this one about the Las Vegas narcotics squad).




Not that I’m asking you to do my work for me, but really, I need all the help I can get, so, what are your favourite TV shows about narcotics cops? What did they do well and what would you like to see in a cop show about narcotics cops?

Priorities

By Jay Stringer

Most people reading this probably aren't closely following English premier league football. But bear with me here. Wayne Rooney is an English player, currently plying his trade for Manchester United, who is a bit of a media obsession.

Every movement he makes -on or off the pitch- is documented, analysed and photographed. If he steps foot outside his house then there will be photographs. If he goes to the fridge in the middle of the night, there will probably be night vision pictures.

A few weeks back, in a game against Wigan Athletic, he committed an act of assault. With the referee looking elsewhere, Rooney ran up to a player and elbowed him in the face. If it had been done anywhere else -on the street, in the stands, on the side of the pitch- it would have been seen as a crime. He would likely have been arrested, charges would likely have been made. Expensive lawyers would have made expensive speeches written by expensive PR people.

The governing body of English football decided that they could take no further action. The newspapers laughed. Discussion was all based around whether he would get away with it, very little about the actual act itself or the potential damage done.

This week the same player scored a hat trick (when one player scores three goals in a game), bringing his team back from 0-2 down to eventually win 4-2. After his third goal, completing a remarkable turn around, he ran to the stands to celebrate and soon found a TV camera in his face. He swore a couple of times, then went and got on with the game.

He's just been handed a two-game ban. Letters of complaint are being written. The game has been brought into disrepute, and the newspapers are full of stories of a player out of control, and a celebrity who can't handle his own ego.

So you can commit assault and get away with it. That's fine. But if you swear on camera, thenyour ego is out of control and you cause a scandal.

Does it remind you of any genre close to all our hearts?

I remember talking to the brilliant Helen Fitzgerald once about one of her books. In a book that contained women being abducted, raped, beaten and set alight, the incident people were most shocked about was the killing of a cat. Be as violent as you want to a human, but don't hurt the bloody cat.

And recently reading reviews on Amazon for one of my favourite British crime writers, I was suprised to see reviews that complained about the swearing. This is an author who has had his characters chop up dead bodies, set fire to each other, crucify each other and commit multiple acts of brilliant deviance. But swearing? That's beyond the pale.

So how did it come to this?

Why are we entertained to see people, both real and fictional, tear lumps out of each other, kill, maim, elbow or screw, but we lose our stomachs and minds at something like swearing? How can we read about evils being carried out on innocent humans, but baulk at violence to a cat?

Foreplay For Readers

Darth Vader: There is no escape. Don't make me destroy you.
[pauses]
Darth Vader: Luke, you do not yet realize your importance. You have only begun to discover your power. Join me, and I will complete your training. With our combined strength, we can end this destructive conflict and bring order to the galaxy.
Luke: I'll never join you!
Darth Vader: If you only knew the power of the Dark Side. Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father.
Luke: He told me enough! He told me *you* killed him!
Darth Vader: No. *I* am your father.
Luke: No. No. That's not true. That's impossible!
Darth Vader: Search your feelings, you *know* it to be true!

You know that moment, in The Empire Strikes Back, when Darth Vadar reveals the truth. That's a great moment. Not only do you have the element of surprise for the viewers, but you get the total shock, disbelief, borderline disgust of the character who just had the rug pulled out from under them.

Yes, it's a great moment. Movies, TV shows and books are filled with moments like that, when a story builds up to a reveal. And if the reveal turns the story on its head? Even better. Think The Sixth Sense. Or The Usual Suspects.

But reveals are not the only way to grab a reader with a jaw-dropping moment. Sometimes, it isn't a revelation that you should be building towards. Sometimes, it's a reaction.

I love reactions. It's probably the reason I'm a sucker for Survivor. Man, last week, tribal council? That was beautiful. "Don't get overconfident." That was the icing on the cake. The look on the person's face was enough.

It's also the reason that soaps are so popular. I mean, the audience knows almost all the secrets, but what keeps them watching is the anticipation of the moment when the characters find out the truth... and the anticipation of what the characters will do when they find out that truth. You want to see a great reaction scene? Terriers. Watch the whole season. The whole freakin' show was one great scene after another.

It's important to play fair with your readers, and it's important to build a credible basis for any revelations that are coming in your book. If you feel as though the readers will figure it out and that moment of truth will lose its impact, just remember that anticipation is like foreplay. The sex is never as good without it.

(I picked both WIRE clips because the first event, at the end of season one, is what causes two would-be enemies to join forces at the end of season three.)

The guide to being an author in the age of the internet

by: Joelle Charbonneau

Yes – that is a lofty title to this particular post. Perhaps too lofty for me to accomplish alone. However, I’m going to take a whack at it in hopes that if I miss something someone will come to the plate and take their own swings.

Aside from the start of the major league baseball season, last week featured a terrible online moment for authors/writers/bloggers. You might have seen it. A blog featured a review for a self-published author that wasn’t entirely favorable. The author then decided to confront the reviewer in the comments section of the blog. Actually, the author commented more than once and was not only confrontational, but a bit classless. Word about the review and the author’s reaction spread over social media, as it has a tendency to do, and within hours there were over 300 comments posted. The author’s book also took a beating over at Amazon in the reviews section pulling 1 star reviews from people who were commenting on her online behavior and not on her writing.

We’ve talked about reviews here at DSD. Reviews are part of life. Good, bad, indifferent – authors have to deal with reviews and they are under an obligation to themselves to deal with them professionally. In the old days (yeah – I’m referring to less than ten years ago here), an author would get reviewed, tell all their friends and readers about the good ones and mourn the bad ones with a gallon of double fudge chocolate ice cream. If you didn’t subscribe to the trades, you never saw the review. Nowadays there is nowhere to hide. Social media spreads the word about good and bad – and let’s face it – it spreads the word about the bad much, much faster. Had the author from this week’s review meltdown kept quiet, the review would have basically gone unnoticed by the book reading universe. Her friends would never heard about it. Almost the entire pool of potential readers would never have seen it. The world would have moved on.

So here is my list of dos and don’ts for authors. Yes, some of these might seem totally obvious, but hey this week demonstrated that maybe for some they are not.

1. Keep your emotions and your conflict on the page – writers work hard at ratcheting up those things in their manuscript. Readers love emotion and conflict when it is central to your story, but they don’t belong as part of your public author persona.

2. Never put anything in writing online that you do not want to follow you for the rest of your career. A piece of paper can be burned but the internet is forever. Agents, editors, bloggers, booksellers and readers all can and do use Google. Trust me – you don’t want them finding this stuff.

3. Don’t create fake accounts on Amazon or on other review sites just to bump up the number of good reviews. Yes, people do this, and, yes, people get caught.

4. Always think twice before hitting send on any post be on Twitter, Facebook, a blog, e-mail or anywhere else. Refer to rule #2 for the reason.

5. Do not create a Facebook or Twitter account if you know you cannot control your emotions. This doesn’t make you a bad person or a bad promoter. This makes you self-aware.

6. Call your friends, family or favorite pizza place when you get a bad review. Never share that disappointment in public. It makes you look bad.

7. Never post on a blog where an author has created an unprofessional spectacle of themselves. You do not want your name associated with that kind of train wreck in any way, shape or form. With that in mind, you also don’t want to post Amazon reviews as a way of kicking an unprofessional author when they are down. Get out of the way of the train, watch it pass by and move on.

8. Posting a reviewer’s home address or phone number on Twitter (or anywhere else) and telling your fans to contact the reviewer to disagree with the review is never a good idea. (I wish this one had never happened, but a NY Times Best Seller did this. She has since heeded rule #5.)

9. Remember the Golden Rule. How you treat others online will determine how you are perceived. Does this mean you can’t disagree with people? Hell no! The best discussions I have on Facebook and Twitter are ones where there is heated disagreement. But it is the manner in which you argue and fight and even how you agree that is important.

10. When in doubt, turn off the internet and write. Hey – we’re writers. That’s what we’re supposed to be doing.

Well, that’s my list. What rules on your list did I fail to mention?

Where's the Mystery?

by
Scott D. Parker

A generation and a half ago, a little old lady looked at a hamburger and asked, "Where's the beef?" In 2011, I'm looking around at some of the things I've been reading and asking myself where's the mystery?

Lately, crime fiction comics have been my fiction of choice. Part of the reason is that I'm genuinely interested in the art form. The other part is, well, soon to be announced. What has struck me is--at least in some of the titles I've chosen (Gotham Central, Hunter, Coward (Criminal), and Incognito)--there is a distinct lack of mystery involved. Like a great deal of *crime* fiction, those stories deal with the lowlifes and criminals, their way of life, and the choices that they make. It's fun reading, to be sure, but it has brought up a question: is there a line between mystery fiction and crime fiction?

Here's how I tend to generalize the two. Mystery fiction is trying to solve a crime, usually murder, and figure out the killer. While there are undoubtedly titles out there that use criminals as the protagonists, this style of storytelling tends to focus on the good guys, the ones trying to answer the question of whodunit?

Crime fiction seems to be about criminals or ordinary people caught up in events beyond their control. Where mystery fiction ends when the killer is identified, that's often the place where crime fiction starts. Mystery can be an aspect of crime fiction, but not always. For example, a heist film has little mystery to it other than to show how the robbers pull off the deed (or not).

Perhaps I've not read broadly enough, or perhaps I'm looking for different things nowadays. I'm not sure. But it just seems that there is a chasm in the middle of this genre we call home that separates us. I wonder why that is?

TV Show of the Week: Body of Proof
The good: Dana Delany's Megan Hunt is a bit like Sherlock Holmes, so far ahead of others that she appears superhuman. Oh, and there are dumb cops. Odd to see Sonja Sohn (The Wire) on network TV. Delany has some good chops that are best shown when her character actually has quiet moments. The bad: For someone who is seemingly surrounded by idiots and still pines for her old job, Delany's character seems to flit through the episode without much care. Perhaps that's the way we are shown she has no friends. I enjoyed the pilot and will continue watching. Anyone else?

COST BENEFIT

By Russel D McLean

In case you’re wondering where I’ve been these last few weeks, I’ve been out on tour. Not physically. Oh, no. I’ve been working the blogs. Shaking my ass on other people’s sites. Working that moneymaker.

Which has been fun. Tiring. Exhausting. But fun.

And then someone asked me this question:

How much effort did you put into this? And how much benefit did you reap? Did you gain enough new readers to offset the time spent writing a new article every day? Did your sales go stratospheric?

If I look at the cold, hard numbers, the answer is that I’m not sure. I really, really don’t know. But then, as we’ve seen this last week, in the world of publishing no one knows anything. No one can agree on anything.

Looking back on the tour – and looking back on last year’s physical tour – I would say that in terms of cold hard numbers, both could be considered supremely inefficient. Yes, people got a kick out of them (honestly, I’ve had letters to prove it) and I myself had a ball. But in terms of extra sales, of word of mouth, of people who actually went out and bought a copy…

The effort to benefit ratio seems wrong.

Of course, I’ve never been a cold hard numbers person. I don’t understand cold, hard numbers (just ask my mum). Most of the time, I don’t get how they add up or why. Seriously. They seem more random than people give them credit for.

Perhaps more so in cases like this.

The fact is that I know my effort to benefit ratio is appalling when I do events, tours and so forth. But then the effort to benefit ratio in writing a novel is appalling anyway.

So why do it?

The key sentiment above:

“…people got a kick out of it and I… had a ball.”

I love doing events. I love doing interviews. I love doing blog tours. I may sometimes have to pass them up when things get seriously down to the knuckle (don’t forget, I also work a full time day job) but they’re part of what makes this job fun.

And besides, in the end, all I can do is have faith that the numbers will work themselves out. One way or another. Because like I said back there at the start:

in this business, no one knows anything.