Do Some Damage

Finishing what you start

2012-01-29T01:00:00.000-05:00

by: Joelle Charbonneau

Almost everyone I know loves to begin a new project. Whether it is a novel, a short story, knitting a scarf or building some cool new thing for the house – beginnings are exciting. Everything is bright and new and shiny. Kind of like a new toy on Christmas Day. There are endless possibilities as you imagine the fun you will have.

Beginnings are awesome.

Too bad beginnings can’t last forever. But they don’t and the bright and new and shiny wears off and you are left with something that no longer feels like fun. Instead, it feels like work.

Whether you are a third of the way through knitting a sweater, rebuilding a car engine or writing your manuscript—getting past the point where the activity feels like work can be tough. This is probably why so many people talk about wanting to write a book or knit a blanket, but never have a finished product to show anyone. They get distracted by an exciting new idea or a nifty knitting pattern and suddenly they have ditched the old one so they can have the “new toy” feeling again.

When new writers ask me what I think is the most important step they can take to becoming a published author my answer is always the same. Finish a book. It doesn’t matter if you realize halfway through that your midget werewolf, time travel, erotic mystery is not what the market is looking for. I don’t care if you say that you’ve realized your story has a huge hole in it. I don’t care about any of the reasons you have for not finishing the book. You need to keep going and finish the damn book!

Why finish something that won’t have a chance in hell of selling? Because finishing a project teaches you something very important. It teaches you that you actually can finish..

Why is that important? I mean, if the book will never sell, who cares. It doesn’t matter that you’ve finished the book. Right?

WRONG!

I know lots of aspiring authors who have been typing furiously for years and have never gotten to THE END. And while they keep blaming the story or the lack of time to write or the worry that the market isn’t going to want to buy what they are writing – they are just making excuses. With every new beginning comes the bright and shiny new toy moment. But for those that have never finished what they have begun that bright and shiny moment is laced with fear and uncertainty.

Uncertainty because you have never finished a project.

Fear that you never will.

Trust me when I say the first book I wrote will NEVER see the light of day. It sucked. Oh – there were good moments in it. It would be hard to write that many words without a few gems in the bunch. But I hadn’t a clue how to really construct a story. I didn’t have a feel for pacing or for keeping a scene focused. Face it—I didn’t have a flippin’ clue. The only thing I did right was I finished the sucker. All 134,000 words of it. (Yeah – now you can see why that book had problems…right?)

But that book taught me something very important. It taught me that I could sit down every day and fill the pages with words. Even though the story was less than perfect, it had a beginning, middle and most important it had an end. I learned that I could finish a book. Which meant when I started the next project, I KNEW that project would have an end, too.

I currently have two books on the shelves of your local bookstore with eight more under contract—only 3 of which are written. If I hadn’t proven over and over again to myself that I could reach the end of those as yet unwritten books I would be cowering under my bed. Instead, I sit at the computer every day and know that I will reach THE END of all of those books not just because I have to, but because I have proven to myself that I can.

We all like to talk about voice and sentence structure, pacing and characters, but so often we forget the most important milestone of a writer’s life is finishing that first book and banishing the fear. And when you are fearless, anything is possible.

Book Review: The Gentlemen's Hour

2012-01-28T01:00:00.004-05:00

by
Scott D. Parker

(Jay's sick, I'm without time enough to write a decent post. So, I present to y'all, a review of one of my favorite books I read last year. Back next week with new stuff.)

Remember the thrill of first love? That inexplicable, special something deep down in the pit of your stomach that feels like it's left earth's gravity and is caroming off into outer space? It happens with your significant other or spouse, but it also happens with books, too. The first time you discover an author, the special ways the prose is styled, the particular nuance of storytelling, it's magical. That's how I felt when I read Don Winslow's 2008 book, The Dawn Patrol. It was, by far, the best book I read that year and, had The Dark Knight not premiered in July of that year, Winslow's book would have been the best thing I consumed all year.

Finally, three long years later, the sequel arrives. The Gentlemen's Hour does exactly what a sequel is supposed to do: return you to the place you discovered, to the fictional people with whom you have a bond, in prose that breathes life into nonexistent folks. Boone Daniels is a man's man, the kind of guy someone like me pines to emulate but knows, in reality, could never be. He likes to surf with his friends. That's kind of about it. Whereas Anthony Bourdain has the mantra "I write, I travel, I eat, and I'm hungry for more," Boone Daniels would probably say "I surf, with my friends, and watch the sunset, what more do I need?" He's a PI only so far as to keep the lights on and pay for food. As bohemian as that sounds, it's not a lifestyle to be admired.

Which is why he basically takes almost any job that comes his way, seeing as he doesn't have a line of potential customers outside his door. Unfortunately for Daniels, the job that comes his way is with the defense attorney for Corey Blasingame. You see, Blasingame stands accused of killing one Kelly Kuhio, the absolute zen master of surfdom in SoCal, the kind of man all sides admire. This doesn't sit well with Boone's core group of friends: Hang Twelve, Hide Tide, Dave the Love God, and Johnny Banzai. They all think Corey should just be lynched. As does the rest of the SoCal surfing community. Heck, Johnny, a San Diego cop, was the detective on Blasingame's case, so any headway Boone can make on the case, he has to take on Johnny and take him down a peg or two. Not a good way to keep your friends.

Then there's Petra Hall. Hot British chick, lawyer for Blasingame's attorney, uppity, and definitely not a surfer. She's basically the one main female character in a book populated by macho men, so she has to hold her own. She and Boone have a thing, but neither knows precisely what it is. Sunny Day, the one female surfer from The Dawn Patrol, is absent from this one save for a scene. For most of the book, Petra and Boone struggle with determining what, if anything, they have together. There's the professional sides of both of them, and then there's that magnetism where opposites attract.

As you can imagine, the deeper Boone digs into the case, the deeper the fractures become among the Dawn Patrol. Friendship hang by a thread and loyalties are questioned. I'm not as versed in PI literature as other people are, but I know enough to know that many PIs are loners. Not Boone. He relies on his friends and hates to pursue this case. But he does it because that's what the dead Kuhio would want him to do. It's almost as if Kuhio is the Obi Wan Kenobi to Boone's Luke Skywalker.

For as powerful a writer as Winslow is, as completely as he controls the pace, the prose, and the scope of this book, if you don't have a good ending, the entire book could be tarnished. Have no fear. He delivers an ending that completely satisfied all that I wanted in this book. And he does it in a language so "of the area" that it makes me want to hope on a board and surf...even though I can't surf. Winslow's sense of place is that palpable.

The number one problem most of us have with sequels (or series titles) is the sameness of it all. Meh, we might say, I've seen that before. Or, whatever, there was just too much. Not so with The Gentlemen's Hour. Here, we have character progression in Boone, but his core remains the same. He still possesses that which we fell in love with back in The Dawn Patrol, but this is clearly not The Dawn Patrol II. That's what makes a good sequel.

To quoth the sage of surfdom, it was epic macking crunchy.

Open Minds

2012-01-27T03:00:00.001-05:00

By Russel D McLean (aged 31 and-a-half physically, but still only about 18 in his own head)

The other day I had the fortune of bumping into Alex Scarrow (Not to be confused with Simon Scarrow although I believe they are brothers). Scarrow is the author several adult thrillers, but where he has found real success is in writing for the YA/Teen market. He’s not one of those who jumped a bandwagon (I’m becoming increasingly annoyed with the cynical practice of writing younger versions of established adult protagonists or giving them an unexpected nephew etc and just writing the same book with slightly different linguistic tics) but seems to have been genuinely been excited by the prospect of writing for that market. In the same way that the brilliant Kevin Wignall has whole heartedly thrown himself into becoming KJ Wignall (and in doing so has charmed all the children’s booksellers that I know even if they’ve never met him).
I have no particular plans to write a YA novel (although I have an idea noodling around that I think would be great fun to write) but writing for that age group seems to be intensely more satisfying than writing for adults for one very simple reason:

Young people are not conservative.

What does that mean? It means that younger readers are open to new styles and opposing views. It means that they can get excited by story and not worry about whether it fits genre expectations (or that it doesn’t). It means that they seem to care more about whether the story actually grabs them than whether they think the story will. It’s not about what they expect. It’s about what they actually get.

I have a rule in my reading: it’s that I try to demand the same things I do now from a book as a writer that I did when I was a reader. In fact when I read a book, even if it’s for review or if it’s to check a section or two out for a close friend, then I do it with my reader head on first. Why?

One established author once told me they found it difficult to read books with the same joy they once did because “everything changes when you’re published”. Really? Does it? I don’t see why and I don’t see how. What made you a good writer was being a good reader (we’ll get to why you have to read to write another day - - that’s another issue that’s been banging around my noggin of late) and if you lose one you lose the other. Because in the end who are we writing for but readers?

In the same way I don’t see why we have to demand a dreary predictability in our reading as we get older. Sure, we can deal with more adult themes and ideas than when we’re younger and our own views might be less black and white (although I suspect in many cases its actually more so). What essentially changes about us in those years that we can’t get past what we expect? What makes us conservative and builds up these tiny little prejudices in our reading mind?

I won’t read crime.

I won’t read literature.

I won’t read non-fiction.

I won’t read horror.

We tell ourselves little stories as to why we won’t read these specific kinds of books. But the truth is that we don’t always have a reason and that we’re missing out on some great books by closing off parts of our minds to the experiences outside of narrow genre limitations.

Younger readers don’t have these pre-conceptions. And as such writers often feel freed up to do things with genre and storytelling they would never otherwise be able to get away with.

And it’s clear that adult readers feel trapped, too, judging by the numbers of them going straight to YA literature and the amount of crossover works that have appeared in recent years (Boy In The Striped Pyjamas would have been hailed as too depressing if it was an adult book as would Before I Die, while of course Harry Potter is seen as safe fantasy because it was written for kids, as ostensibly was Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy). In the end, I think adult readers, publishers and writers need to find their inner YA reader again and create adult books that deal with issues, that aren’t afraid to take chances with convention and that can shock, excite and surprise. Books that are written not for demographics but for the author’s inner reader, that ask the reader to put aside their own prejudices and take a chance at seeing the world through very different eyes. In short, we need to forget that we’re supposed to have learned everything by the time we become adults and accept that the joy of reading we has as YA and child readers – the joy of discovering new ways of thinking, new ways of engaging and new points of view we might never have otherwise come across – isn’t something we necessarily need to jettison. Life doesn’t stop when we become adults. We do not become set in stone. We should still be open to new ideas and entertainments that are greater than mere distraction through the familiar.

We should remember and foster our inner young adult. Even when writing and reading adult fiction.

From The Vault; Writers Block And Other Urban Myths

2012-01-26T07:07:00.002-05:00

by Jay Stringer

I'm blogging from a sick bed today, so I'm taking the easy way out and reposting something. I found it interesting to read though; it was my first post on DSD, way back in those crazy days of yore (2009), and my voice has changed a bit since then. Still, it's still an argument that I stand by, and one that always seems to annoy people.

I’ve been thinking a lot about writer’s block lately. I was recently asked for some advice on how to deal with it. I did manage to give a practical tip, but I'll leave that for the end.

Writer's block, in my opinion, is nothing more than a bogeyman to scare us at night. William Goldman believes in it, and I tend to go with what he says, but in this instance I’m not so sure.

Okay, perspective check; Goldman is an award winning writer. I’m a guy on a street corner, shouting ideas from a soapbox. I’ll let you decide who to believe, okay?

I see there being three kinds of problem that get labeled as writer's block:

The first kind seems to be an epic affliction. It’s the sort of illness that can only be suffered by very loud and angst-ridden people, who want to share their everyday drama with the world. It seems somehow both noir and arty at the same time. It can cause a writer to go decades –or in some instances half a century- between books. Now, this first kind seems very romantic. You can imagine Raymond Chandler being able to describe this kind of block in very writerly prose.

But myth buster time – is this an affliction, or simply a lack of ideas? Just because everybody has a novel in them, doesn’t mean that we should all be able to crank things out on a yearly basis. Sometimes we just don’t have anything to say, and it seems a peculiar thing to turn this into a great dramatic affliction. Let's face it, the vast majority of people in the world go their entire lives without feeling the urge to write a full-length novel, and yet they don’t go around stressing about being blocked.

The second kind, and the one I have most discussed with people, seems a very specific thing. There’s a deadline looming and the words won’t come, or chapter thirteen just doesn’t want to start. Maybe there’s an action scene that won’t make its way from your head onto the page, or no matter how you try, you cannot make the third paragraph flow. Douglas Adams called it “staring at the page until your forehead bleeds.”

There’s no drama here, though. Not that I can see. No great affliction. This isn’t writer’s block, this is writing. Your brain needs time to work these things out.

Maybe it’s just that I’m a different kind of writer, maybe the above issues are very real concerns for people who work in a different way. For me, I’m very comfortable with the fact that sometimes I may go awhile without setting words on the page. In that time, I may not sit and type, but I’ll be taking a lot of long walks, or way too many showers in a day. Maybe I’ll be re-wiring my guitar or learning a new recipe. Most likely I’ve just found a very interesting crack on the wall to stare at for a few weeks.

This is all writing. It’s giving the cogs in your brain time to spin, time to let things fall into place. I can’t find the exact quote, but I’ll paraphrase as best I can. When William Goldman was asked how long it had taken him to write Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, he answered “It took me a fortnight to write the script, but I’d been thinking about it for six years.”

Is there a third kind? Well, there’s always the issue of deadlines. And sometimes nothing can stop you working better than a deadline. Especially if you have the newest version of Football Manager. But this third version is to be expected, really. If you’re forcing yourself to do something unnatural –to force out the work before it’s ready- of course you’re going to struggle. So again, no drama, no mystery, no affliction.

So far I’ve found three versions of writer’s block. The first and the third one seem to spring out of not paying any heed to the second one. And the second one is not block at all. So I think it’s a myth. A romantic idea we’ve sold ourselves.

But what do I know? I’ve not even got a book out yet. I’d like to hear other people’s thoughts; maybe someone has a story they could share about struggling with it?

I do have one piece of practical advice to offer before I wrap up, something that I’ve found useful:Leave your brain wanting more.

Never finish the chapter you’re on. When you’re reaching the end of the day, or morning, or whenever it is you sit and write, stop early. Step back from the computer halfway through a scene, maybe even halfway through a sentence.

That way, when you sit down for the next session, you already know what happens next. You already know how the sentence ends, and you can simply start typing without the worry of a blank page ahead of you.

Zack Taylor is back

2012-01-25T03:00:00.001-05:00

Dale T. Phillips is today's guest. The tournament chess player and former JEOPARDY contestant is an indie author who lives in New England and has studied with Stephen King.

So I hear there's some new guy on the block. Name of Zack Taylor. Wasn't there a U.S. president with that name?

Long ago, yeah. This guy ain't no president, though. I hear he did a little hard time.

What for?

Busted up a Fed that leaned on him too hard. He wasn't dirty, but they thought he knew something. He was a bodyguard for some mob guy. But get this-- he doesn't like guns.

A bodyguard without a gun?

Yeah, some kind of martial arts expert. Didn't last too long in that job, though. Been a drifter, bouncer, that kind of thing.

What's his story?

Had some trouble in his past, never got over it, never settled down. Then someone killed his friend. Bad mistake. Everyone thought it was suicide but this guy. He left everything behind and went up to Maine to find out what happened.

Did he?

Hell yeah, but he tore everything up doing it. Guy's like a bull in a china shop. Got the crap beat out of him, almost got killed a few times, ran into some bikers, a real mess. Just keeps going until he gets answers, doesn't care who he pisses off. Even breaks the law to find out what he needs to.

Sounds dangerous.

Yeah, you never know when he's going off the rails. Funny thing, most of the time I hear he's a nice enough guy, even if he is a bit of a smartass. Reads a lot, keeps to himself. Get him mad, though, and watch out.

What's he like when he's drunk?

Heard he don't drink. Almost boozed himself to death when he was young, so he never touches it.

So where is he now?

Stayed in Maine. Even got himself a new girlfriend up there. I guess she's got him into some trouble again, though. Some cousin of hers accused of murder. Whole town thinks she's guilty.

Somebody better watch out.

You can say that again...

***

Hey there. I'm Dale T. Phillips, and those two guys were talking about the protagonist of my new mystery series. Last year, Zack Taylor made his debut in "A Memory of Grief," and is now back in "A Fall From Grace," now having the official launch. Both were released by Briona Glen Publishing, a small startup publisher. The third book in the series, "A Shadow on the Wall." is due out later this year.

Since I'm a big fan of John D. MacDonald's, this series was influenced by his work, especially the Travis McGee series. McGee was not a professional lawman, but a man with certain skills who helped out people troubled by dangerous predators. In the evolution of my own book's character and the place, a series came to be. It's got a tough-guy aura, so fans of Robert B. Parker's Spenser should enjoy it as well. Writing pros who've read the series like it, and the response has been terrific.

But why no guns? Well, I've read too many books where the hero gets into bad trouble, and whips out a gun for an instant solution. Life's a little more complex than that, and I wanted a protagonist that would have to think and fight his way out of trouble. And he does that. A lot. More interesting to write, too.

Maine's a different kind of place (Stephen King has proven that) and there are a lot of stories to tell. After spending too much time in places like Miami and Vegas, Zack comes to like the laid-back lifestyle, but even in Vacationland, he keeps finding trouble.

I've published over 20 stories, including mystery and crime tales in Crime & Suspense, Big Pulp, Short.Story-Me! and Over My Dead Body. I've collected five of them into an ebook (Crooked Paths) out on Smashwords.

Being an independent means we have to find readers the hard way. I'm inviting you to sample the work first, which you can do on Amazon and Smashwords, links below. You can also hear chapter 1 of "A Memory of Grief," which I've recorded as an audio file and is available on my website: www.daletphillips.com

Lots more information on the site as well, with a link to my other works and writing blog, and an article on Stephen King I wrote-- I had him for a writing teacher, back in Maine. I've got special pages on the site for writers, with recommended reading, good links, and other writers of note. Drop on by.

A Memory of Grief
Amazon Barnes and Noble
Smashwords ebook in all formats (no e-reader required, PDF and browser also available):

A Fall From Grace
Amazon Smashwords

The Wallowing

2012-01-24T03:00:00.001-05:00

Yep, you can tell by the title, I'm going to do some wallowing.

I don't really feel like a writer anymore. Besides occasionally kvetching about grammar on this blog and covering Rutgers basketball over here, I've hardly written a word since October.

It's not for lack of trying.

In mid-September, I moved. I'm between houses right now, stuck in a bedroom, barely balancing my laptop on my knee trying to get some writing done. I've been doing that since we moved. And each day I open my manuscript--I'm in the middle of revisions--and stare at it.

Sometimes I change a sentence. Some times I cut out words. I've made chapters better. But I can't get any momentum. I can't focus on it.

I've thought about ditching the revisions and starting something new. I have plenty of ideas. But here's the thing... the idea for this project? It's kind of been my dream project. It's an idea I've had for years. And I never thought I was mature enough to write it. Now I'm 3 and a quarter drafts in and I'm completely frozen.

Part of it is because there's something wrong with the ms and I haven't figured out what that is.

The other part is definitely my surroundings. I can't focus on anything. I've barely read any books in the past 5 months either. Just the ones I've reviewed here (and that should tell you how good they were.)

And even worse, I feel guilty. Each time someone talks about writing on Twitter, I get mad at myself. Each time I try to inspire myself and fail... I get embarrassed.

I need to get out of this funk.

I just haven't figured out how yet.

Until then... I'll wallow.

Which doesn't help... I know it.

Yech.

Bad Books & Bad Blood

2012-01-23T03:08:00.003-05:00

Author Adrian McKinty recently started a fire on the web with his post explaining why most crime novels are bad.

Why Are Most Crime Novels Bad? Because they are part of a series. And books in a series eventually run of steam. The author runs out of ideas and begins recycling old plots and old concepts and he or she doesn't really care because they know the books will sell. Publishers and bookshops love series because people buy them without thinking. And then read them without thinking. It's very rare that series titles retain quality after say book 5 or 6. They've almost certainly lost credibility by that stage because no character could possibly go through that much and not have a nervous breakdown (although clever authors include the nervous breakdown as part of the plot.)

The post prompted over a hundred comments - and for someone who generally gets two or three, that's pretty impressive - and running commentary on Twitter and other social media sites, with various authors taking exception to his comments.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the crime fiction community, things got heated in a discussion over the recent announcement of Edgar nominations.

Someone on SMFS did the math, and it turns out that only 2/5 of the Best Novel nominations went to female authors. Shocking. Absolutely shocking. Please insert my extremely-shocked-face emoticon here. Only 1/5 of the Best First Novel nominations went to female authors, and in the paperback category, it's also 1/5.

Yawn.

Here's the thing. None of this is news. Ironically, Jay had a great post just the other day about sexism, which had nothing to do with the Edgar Awards, but the first thing that sprang to my mind was the controversy a few years ago over different awards, with charges of sexism being cast against the organizations and the judges.

In fact, my husband Brian can't post a 'best of' list without someone telling him he's anti-woman.

The reason these things become the catalyst for arguments that last hundreds of comments, with points being made for days on end, is because some people are just looking for an excuse to take offense.

I mean, really, we're going to be upset because Adrian thinks that one of the problems in the crime fiction genre is the popularity of series books? The thing is, most of what Adrian said sounds rather familiar, going back to interviews several years ago. What does Dennis Lehane think about series characters and books?

*Dave: Now that you're two books out from the Kenzie and Gennaro series, do
you think you'll ever go back?*

Lehane: If they knock on the door, I will welcome them in with open arms because they bought my first house. That's true, and I'm very touched by how they went out into the world and became, in a bizarre sense, something beyond me. They spread in a way I never could have. So I'd love to bring them back, but I also said that I would never write about them unless they told me to. I won't plug them into a plot. And I do like the idea of leaving the stage on a high note. I think any series is going to run down, and you don't know where the tipping point is. But any series is going to wear out its welcome.

They haven't knocked. I see them, and whenever I picture them they're in some hotel room in the Caribbean, for some reason, and the phone rings. One of them says, "Don't pick it up. It's him." Because I beat the hell out of them. I beat the living shit out of those characters—psychologically, physically, emotionally. I think if they want to stay away, they deserve to stay away. If they knock on the door really hard some day, I will go right to the typewriter because I'd love to go back for one more, but I won't
plug them in and have them take a cruise where the chef gets killed and only Patrick and Angie can solve it. That sort of Hart to Hart shit, I don't want to go near it.

*Dave: It's true about the impact a long-running series can have, not just in literature—the most obvious example would be a television series. People get attached to it. They live with the characters over a significant period of time. But whereas your readers will wait for each new book, then devour it in a few days, you're working with these characters for years, every day.
*

Lehane: Also, I think TV series are a great example. I have a five-year rule on dramatic TV series: I will put it to anyone to name one dramatic TV show that didn't drop right off the cliff after the fifth year. Hill Street Blues went to shit. Homicide: Life on the Street, which was just about the greatest TV show ever, went to hell. You run out of storylines. Then what you do is you start putting the characters into personal situations. ER —the doctors are stuck in El Salvador. A very special episode of...

I think of The X-Files. I was an X-Files fanatic. Somebody said, "What did you think of the last episode?" I said, "Well, I stopped watching it for two years, and the last episode showed me exactly why I did." She's gonna get pregnant? You run out of things to say.

I wrote five books, and in the fifth book I noticed one of my characters— probably the most popular character I've ever created, Bubba Rogowski— in the fifth book, he started getting cute. Just a little bit. And I felt myself doing it. I knew that people loved him and they wanted to know a little more about him. I look back at him and I just go, He's exactly what I said I'd never make him. It's just hinted at in the fifth book; it's not all the way, but it's there.

That has a lot to do with it. Step off the stage. Nobody wanted to see Michael Jordan play with the Wizards. Nobody wanted to see Joe Montana go out with Kansas City. I don't really want to see Emmitt Smith play for whoever the hell he's going to play for next year. I felt that way about these characters. If they want to come back for one more hurrah, and it's the right book, I'm all in favor. But if they just want to stay away, I'm all for it.

Were you satisfied with the finale to X-Files, or do you think it was a let down?*

Sucked beyond suckdom. They should have ended the show when it was great, probably two years before they did. I could say that, however, about most great TV shows--Homicide, Hill Street Blues, ER, even Seinfeld--they should have ended *at least* 2 years before they did. And the same goes for book series. And again, that's why I'm so determined not to write a Patrick and Angie book unless it comes 100% from the heart, because the law of diminishing returns is very much at work in cases like these.

*Drood: What does this tendency to take on danger say about Patrick?s longevity?*

DL: I?ve probably used the warrior model a bit too much when it comes to Patrick, so his longevity prospects aren?t real good if he keeps getting ass-whupped at his current pace. And so, again, that speaks to the problems of keeping a series fresh, because sooner or later you run into questions of believability that are even louder than the ones you start out with when you decide to write a book in which your private eye character engages in actions which few real life private investigators have ever had to deal with. I mean, poor Patrick, his worst enemy isn?t himself or some deranged murderer, it's me.

*Drood: Will you continue the Kenzie/Gennaro series?*

DL: I think Spade and Marlowe remain icons because they didn?t wear out their welcome. Would Chandler be Chandler if he?d written 18 Marlowe books? I don?t know, but I wonder. Maybe Chandler could have sustained the level of quality, but the issue is more whether I can. And I have my doubts about that. The only artsy, metaphysical aspect of my approach to writing is that I can only write about characters when they come knocking on the door and tell me to. Patrick and Angie stopped knocking after Prayers for Rain. If they come knocking again, I?ll open the door and welcome them in with open arms because, well, they paid for my house and I?m exceedingly grateful. But if they don?t, then I?ll be content to let them live happily ever after without my dropping another case-from-hell in their laps. They deserve that.

And I know from your interview with Karen that that was a conscious thing, because two years ago you were saying that maybe it was time to do something else.*

Yes. I was beginning to write Mystic River when I had the interview with Karen. But yeah: I think there's a finite number in any series. You never hear people say: Oh, the 15th is the best. You never hear that. There's a point where a series has to end. I don't think I've reached that point, but I reached a point where it needed a break. And I do think that the number is rapidly approaching: whatever that magic number is, where it's going to be time.

*Do you have plans for a sixth Kenzie book?*

Yeah, they're loose plans. I'm not sure what will be my next book. I haven't decided yet.... I'm at a point now where it might be judicious to take a bit of a break. I've done five books, [and my characters] have been beat up a lot; they've had a lot of big cases. You want to ground these books in as much realism as you can. Because what's inherent in the whole genre is that it's unrealistic: Private eyes don't do that sort of stuff.

Those are quotes pulled from various interviews with Lehane, who clearly has reservations about series characters, and maintaining a series beyond its shelf life.

Fine.

The thing is, people read for different reasons. Some read for the writing. Some read for the story. Some read for the author.

And some read for the characters, and those readers want their series books. Sometimes, the most daunting thing about reading a book is that I have to learn a new landscape. I have to learn the setting, the characters, the writing style, and I could spend a fair bit of time trying to get into a novel and not like it. I love returning to a strong series, because I know what I'm getting. I am reading it because it's familiar, and comfortable, and because I'm spending time with a character I do care about. So sue me. I like some series books.

That said, I've stopped reading a lot of series. I recently picked up again with a series I'd read before, and read the latest, and felt it was fundamentally flawed. There was a critical action by one of the protagonists that I did not believe was consistent with their character. That's the risk with a series. As someone who's written three books with the same characters, I feel I know a little about the unique challenges of writing more than one book with the same characters, and in addition to the plotting and storytelling and character development, you have to say anchored in what came before, enough for there to be believability and consistency.

No, it's not easy. It's a different challenge than writing a standalone, but a challenge nonetheless.

I don't wholly agree with Adrian, or wholly disagree with him. Well, I disagree about an ideal world being where only first novels are published. I shudder with horror at the thought of that, actually. But that's okay, because I still like Adrian and I'll still read his books, even if he's wrong about this. ;) (WINK WINK, before someone yells at me because they took that too seriously.)

Personally, I think there are so many bad books because the publishing industry produces a lot of crap, both inside and outside the crime fiction genre. Editors don't have the time and budgets to do thorough edits, writers are pushing ahead of themselves to be published without taking the time for revisions and learning to write is less and less of a priority. I'd like to have a nickel for every person who told me they wanted to be a bestselling author, and then refused to do edits on their work while demonstrating they don't know how to use punctuation, never mind spell.

As for sexism and all that crap, what's quality is subjective. I've been a judge for a major award, and it was a waste of my time, truly. In a panel of three judges, not one of my top 10 titles picked in the category made the short list, while many of the titles that did were on the bottom of my picks from the books I was sent.

I don't want to see men, or women, nominated just because of their gender. I want judges to be able to read with blinders to all of that crap, and not think about the publisher/editor/agent/author/gender/subgenre and just find the best books.

And I have to accept that what they consider to be the best may not match my list for the year.

I'd rather authors and writers spend more time dealing with other issues of sexism in their writing. The Guardian had a recent article, crowning the five most pathetic female characters in film. I'm not a bra-burner, and my problem sometimes with the push for equality is that some people take it too far and want more than what the other side has, but when I stop and think about how women are portrayed so often in film and on TV, I have to admit, we have a long way to go.

If all the women in your novel are a) hot b) fuckable c) in to the protag d) all or some of the above... your book has a woman problem. ~ my husband

When people go off on a tirade about sexism in awards, they always talk about how few female authors are nominated.

They never talk about how badly women have been portrayed in the books that made the list.

And it's all those horrible, truly sexist, stereotypical portrayals that make the great female characters stand out that much more.

I do believe Adrian knows I think he's an amazing writer, hugely underrated, and to be honest if I were to take offense at nomination lists my list of issues would have to include questioning why he hasn't received more critical acclaim. So I don't completely agree with him. So what. I don't completely disagree, either. He has a point, and even as I type this blog post I find myself feeling frustrated with a sense of having had parts of this conversation before, with the awareness that the argument over the awards is almost an annual tradition.

I really thought we should consider going Oscar and having Best Male Novel and Best Female Novel so that people would shut the fuck up about it already.

Except then they'd be offended by the inference that women can't compete with men.

Would you like something to really be offended by?

At the end of the day, if people don't want to read Adrian's work because he's not the biggest fan of series books, it's really their loss, because he's pretty fucking brilliant.

What I have to say to all the people taking offense out there, over people who don't like series books and people who don't like the nomination lists for awards, is this: Get over it.

Coming up with a list of exceptions about series doesn't make some of Adrian's points less valid. Coming up with examples of great books be female writers who didn't get nominated this year doesn't make the judges sexist.

For every series that's stayed strong, there are more that have faltered along the way. And for every great novel written by a woman this past year, there are works by men who also didn't see their name on the short list.

For me, I'm going to go back to the manuscript, and whether it's a series book or a standalone I'm going to push myself to make it be the strongest work it can be, to show growth over prior works, and at the end of the day, I want to produce a book I'm proud of. Believe me, not even my agent is as hard to please as I am when it comes to my manuscripts. Real validation comes from the response of readers, and at the end of the day, given a choice between having readers or having award nominations, it's the readers I'll pick every single time.

Schizophrenic writer wanted

2012-01-22T01:30:00.000-05:00

by: Joelle Charbonneau

This is one of those weeks. The husband is out of town for a trade show. College auditions are approaching for some students. The tot is sick. My grandmother is in the hospital. A snow storm hit Chicago yesterday making things a little scary out on the roads and I’m racing to finish a manuscript. Which of course means this is the week that two sets of revision letters arrived. One was for MURDER FOR CHOIR which hits shelves on July 3rd. The other was for THE TESTING, my post-apocalyptic young adult novel that will make its appearance in the spring of 2013.

Now, I love revisions. I happily dove into the revisions on MURDER FOR CHOIR and had them out the door in lightning speed enjoying every minute of the revisions. (Yeah – go ahead and throw things. I’m betting I can duck faster than you can throw.) Fun, quick revisions are great, but I also I love revisions that challenge me to think harder, go deeper and work like mad to make the story the best it can be. So, I was totally stoked when I got a revision letter from my editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt that does that. They are the kind of revisions that scare the hell out of me when I first read them and then challenge my brain to work overtime. I’m having trouble sleeping because I have all sorts of great ideas rolling around in my head. Only—I can’t work on it yet.

Why, you ask? Well, I have about 4 or 5 chapters left of the current book I’m working on, END ME A TENOR. Why does that make a difference you ask? Well, if I keep to schedule, I should be typing THE END on the last page sometime in the next 10-14 days. Because of the family issues I’ve been dealing with, I’ll admit that getting this book done was a struggle. While it hasn’t taken me all that much longer to write (I started the first page near the end of October) it feels like it has taken years. I want to climb the last stretch of the mountain, plant my flag at the top and do a happy dance celebrating the completion of this round.

Of course, I could write on END ME A TENOR during the tot’s nap time and then work on revisions at night. In fact, I ache to do this. Only, there’s an even bigger issue.

My mystery voice is punchy and a little off the wall.

My YA voice is dark, taught and a bit plaintive. (At least, I think so…who knows what the critics will say.)

While some people excel at writing two projects at the same time, I’m mostly a tunnel vision kind of girl. I affix my eyes to the light at the end of the tunnel, no matter how small, and step by step work in a single-minded fashion until I get there. Aside from page proofs and copy edits, nothing interrupts that hike to the finish line. And while this week I was able to edit MURDER FOR CHOIR while also writing on END ME A TENOR, I was able to do so only because they were the same voice. There was no transition. No worry that one would bleed into the next. Last year, I made an attempt to write the opening to THE TESTING while I was writing the beginning of SKATING UNDER THE WIRE. Um…not such a good idea. Every time I sat down I had to work hard to keep my mind in the correct tense. It took twice as long for me to get that day’s work on the page. The minute I decided to focus on one project things fell into place. The first three chapters of Rebecca Robbins 4 were finished and polished in about 9 days. I then turned to THE TESTING and watched my fingers fly.

So I will wait. I will remember that while other people can write on two projects, and in two distinctly different voices, at the same time I am not one of those people. I have to stick with what works for me.

But of course, I am curious to know what works for you. Can you work on two projects at once? Are the voices similar? Or are you like me who looks at longing with that second project knowing no matter how much you might want to play, doing so will only make things more difficult?

Reading With a "Pencil"

2012-01-21T01:00:00.002-05:00

by
Scott D. Parker

It's amazing how technology can change the way you read.

I'm not sure when I started reading fiction books with a pencil in my hand. When it comes to non-fiction, it's a given that I read with a pencil or a highlighter to mark important passages and write notes to help me remember things that strike my fancy. Ditto for Bible reading. It became extremely important during graduate school and having to learn all the minutiae of history.

Fiction is a different animal. I read fiction for fun. Natch. But the more I write, the more that I realize that published books are the curricula of the School of Fiction Writing. Yes, it's obvious, but I'm someone who sometimes has to have Obvious Things hit me over the head before I see it. Moreover, I'm a relative latecomer to this mystery genre, so every new book I have read in the past decade usually contains some nugget from which I can learn.

It started slowly, with me making notes that I'd need for the review I planned to write. Soon, it migrated to notes as well as highlighting. Depending on the novel, outright annotation emerged. All of the annotations, understandably, happened on paper. These were the years before the e-book explosion, before the iPod, before the Nook, before the Kindle. After I finished a book, I could skim the pages, see my annotations, and remember the things I liked about the novel. And that book lived in one place: the bookshelf. If I wanted to look up a note, I needed to go to the bookshelf.

Now I have an iPod and a Nook Touch. I have the Nook app, the Kindle app, the Stanza app, and the iBook app. Given these new tools, new expectations emerged.

If I'm carrying around an iPod, I should be able to bring up my annotations wherever I am because, frankly, we're in the age of instant access and that's what we want. Does it really make a difference? No, but it's become important to me. I should be able to highlight good passages of prose as easy as I would if I were reading the paper book. I should be able to write a quick note with own thoughts as easy as if I had a pencil in my hand. And, most important for me: I should be able to extract those annotations out of the e-book.

Of all these apps listed above, I have found that iBooks works the best for me. No, I'm not an Apple fan boy. Up until iBooks upped its capabilities, Stanza was my go-to reading app. Now, iBooks is my go-to app. The highlighting is super simple. Heck, you can ever have different colors if you want. And it's fast, as fast as a pencil on paper. Notes are easy to insert and write. I can, within ten seconds, highlight some lines, write a quick note, and get back to reading. And, while you cannot sync the annotations via a separate file through iTunes, you can email yourself all the notes. It's a really good, usable reading app.

And, armed with iBooks, I now have a new favorite way to read a book: listen to the audio version with my iPod handy, loaded with the ebook. I get he story told to me while I can do other things and annotate along the way. It's a great way to read.

Do y'all have a favorite, non-traditional way to read?

Song of the Week: Bruce Springsteen's "We Take Care of Our Own" Yeah, as if I was not going to pick this song. To my ears, it's got a nice flavor of the Human Touch/Lucky Town era, my first new Springsteen albums after I "discovered" him. Fellow DSDer puts it bit more cleverly: "[The song] is like a fight between 1992 Bruce and unreleased '78 Bruce." Springsteen tends to neglect these songs in concert, but I still like those records. And I'm very much looking forward to the new record. Best thing about Springsteen: on one day, there is literally no news. The next day, you've got a new song, new album, and new tour.

Fact Or Fantasy?

2012-01-19T03:00:00.000-05:00

By Jay Stringer

I'm tugging at another thread that's way above my level today. I've been thinking of them sexalism issues again. I've written before about my feelings when writers accuse other writers of things like misogyny in interviews (coughGrantMorrisoncough) because it can be a cheap and nasty gimmick.

We've also talked on DSD before of the responsibility of dealing with racial issues (if memory serves, it was a great post from Sandra that kick started that conversation.) But I've noticed that terms like sexism and misogyny get thrown around a lot on the net at the moment, particularly in the days following popular television shows.

Quite recently there was a bit of a storm -largely an internet one, until The Guardian newspaper picked it up in print- about the first episode of Sherlock's second season. Now, I know the show hasn't aired in the U.S., so I'll avoid saying much more than that, but I couldn't sit on the issue until it turns up over there. What I will say, is that a lot of people raised questions about the decisions the writer, Steven Moffat, made about a woman in the show.

There was one post on the subject in particular that was a well measured and intelligent approach to the questions raised, and if you don't mind having the episode spoiled, you can click on over.

I certainly don't belittle the questions raised by the whole affair. In the specific instance of that episode, I can understand why people were concerned with the decisions made. I draw the line at making any personal assumptions of the writer, but I do understand why people had issues.

On the whole though, I often find myself concerned with the tone and the aim of the Internet criticism that seems to whip up so easily.

I wonder if people often fail to draw a distinction between then world they want to live in and the world we actually live in. Or that they have expectations that writers should deal with the former rather than the latter.

There are many, many poor representations of women in fiction, be it prose, films, TV or comics. But I also think there are people who don't actually want honest representations, they want fantasy. They want Buffy. They want myth. I enjoyed Buffy as much as the next teenager in the 90's. And often, when I go back and catch part of an old episode, I still find much to admire in the craft, the dialogue, the plot structure and the many bold, brave choices that the show took. It was very well made television. But the character herself is not a particularly brave bit of writing, in my opinion. I'm not interested in the super-powered ass-kicking "girl power" female characters any more than the shallow, cardboard Mary sue of the past. Neither version moves the argument forward.

I know some people simply want escapism from fiction, they want the fantasy of a better version of our world. But I also want social fiction. I want honest fiction. I want to read stories that treat me as an adult, and that face up to the fact that some groups of people get a shittier deal than others. Women get a raw deal. Immigrants, foreigners, children, the working class, the disabled, all of these people get the bad end of the shit-shovel, and they get it right from the get go, and to the benefit of people who are paler, taller, older, healthier or more male.

I don't see the benefit in fiction that hides from that. We don't have to like it, but we do have to be willing to show it. And I worry that, as the vocal minorities become more vocal, and less tactful, we will start to see writers scared of being honest in their fiction, for fear of being tagged.

Lets take the treatment of Steven Moffat as a example. There are my people who've articulated their issues without needed to resort to easy labels or making value judgements of the writer. But there are also people who want to make personal accusations, without any reproach or restraint, and these are the ones that tend to be loudest. The Guardian article itself, I felt, was crossing that line, and Moffat himself was clearly upset at the tome of comments being thrown his way.

I'm sure Moffat would welcome the fact that he writes popular (screen) fiction, that is seen by millions, and that encourages discussion of such serious issues. But can't we keep that discussion on a constructive level? A public figure might get followed around for years by a word that gets associated to them in Internet searches, and we should think twice before playing a part in that process.

Here's where the self interest comes in. As a writer, I take the representation of my characters very seriously. I work hard at trying to be as accurate as I can when I write a woman, or an immigrant, or someone who's politics are the opposite of my own. I don't always get it right, because none of us do. It's a constant struggle for all of us. And it's a challenge, to get out of our comfort zones and to stay out.

But with that honesty comes a trust. If we're putting in the hard work to try and get these things right, and to try and be accurate when capturing the worlds views of racism and sexism, I think readers and critics need to give writers the room to try a few things. Otherwise, why try anything?

Just today I was working on edits for the second book in my crime trilogy. The book takes on some big themes or gender, sex and race. At the moment I'm handling some of them more effectively than others, and the aim is to get the balance right by the end of the draft(s). It's on ongoing process, and one where you need to be willing to get things wrong on the road to getting them right. I was writing a scene today where a Muslim woman talked to a white male about her identity and views on mixed marriage. And I decided several times that I would probably be best served to simply delete the scene rather than risk looking like an idiot. But i want to keep fighting for the scene, for the characters, and for the story.

What we need is for writers to try and write real women and real men. Sometimes that means creating someone who is inspirational, sometimes it means creating someone who is cowardly, violent or needy. Often it means creating someone who is all of those things.

I get worried at the agenda of some the the people making these arguments. In talking of "better role models" and of the kind of characters they want to see, I again question whether they're wanting reality or fantasy. Writing the bold, strong, tough-as-a-man woman is the easiest thing in the world, but I don't see any art in it.

Perhaps I'm in the minority. Maybe most people come to fiction just looking to see a fantasy version of themselves cast back at them, like the best fun-house mirror ever.

There's going to be a level of personal taste in that, it's down to each of us where we draw the line. My personal line in the sand is character. I'm writing socially driven pulp, crime fiction that is a heightened reflection of the area I grew up in. I need to capture that immigrants often get treated like shit, or that women get manipulated by the system, or that we're failing whole generations of children. Where I try to earn the room to show that is in trying to give the characters some life. The first two books in the series are very much about how people get manipulated, objectified and traded, but I hope to at least make these people seem interesting along the way.

Writers need to be given the room to be honest. Sometimes that honesty hurts. Sometimes they (I, we) don't pull it off, and it's fair to talk about those times. As long as the conversation is open, honest and balanced, we can keep the issue moving forward. But let's play fair about it, eh?

Always Be Connecting

2012-01-18T03:00:00.000-05:00

By Johannes Climacus

Who are you trying to sell your book to? If you think you’re trying to sell your book to your “readers” then you’re a damned moron.

You wrote your book and now you're sending it out to People In The Industry. Good on ya, mate. Here’s a test to see who you want to buy the damn thing. Look in the email. Yeah, up there above where it says “Subject Line.” See where it says “TO:”? That’s who you want to buy the thing. Probably. Unless that person is trying to sell it to someone else. And, of course, unless that one is trying to sell it to someone else and so on. But you have to sell it to that one person. Let your editor sell it to the sales force and the sales force sell it to the buyer for the bookstore and the salesperson at the bookstore show it to someone in the store who goes home and orders it off Amazon. You don't need to worry about that. You just have to sell it to the one person in your "TO:" field up there.

If you’re trying to land an agent or an editor, you pretty much need to do two things. One: write a decent book. Presuming you’ve already done that, you’ll need to do one other thing: make them want to buy the book. That’s it. A two-step process.

Now, what makes people want to buy the book? Look, there’s a shitload of good books out there. Sure, you like to think that the cream will float to the top, but you know what else floats? A big old turd. You want your floating cream separated from everyone else’s floating turd. You have to connect with the buyer, whatever you’re selling.

I was in sales for a long fucking time. That Gary Ross guy says ABC stands for “always be closing.” Well, that guy's a moron. Stands for “always be connecting.” You connect, you sell. Simple as that. When I was selling crap, one minute I’d be a huge Vince Ferragamo fan. That afternoon, nobody could hold the jock of Kenny Stabler. The hell did I care? My job was 1. to sell widgets and 2. get from one end of the day to the other without getting blackout drunk. And the key to selling was and always will be connecting. (Someday I'll tell you the story of running into the woman playing Vanessa in 'Corvette Summer.' I think she took a liking to me, but I lost track of her.)

These days connecting is super-damn easy. You floating turds don’t know how easy it is. I’d have to scope out a site, look in the parking lot for the guy’s car and bumper stickers, talk to some nudge of a secretary. Take people to lunch. Talk to them. All the while I'm trying to memorize the names of his kids while he's throwing back a couple martinis on my account and I'm drinking perri-flippin-aye and sweating through a 10-year-old wool suit. All you people have to do is hit the internet. Google. Facebook.

I’ll show you how to do this.

Let’s say you’re sending your book out to an agent or an editor. Pick one or two, maybe three tops. Before you send your precious jewel off, track down the MyFace page of your target. Oh, she likes Bob Marley songs? Well, damn, Einstein, go grab a Marley quote and slap it up on your wall. Stay away from the pot references, though. Just to be safe.

Now let’s look at your next target. Books. Authors. Run through the list of authors this person likes. Maybe people this author represents. Then track those authors down on MyFace. Send a few of them friend requests. Most authors on MyFace are so competitive that they're just trying to get to 5,000 friends so they can do the old “I’m too popular and must create a FAN PAGE!!” Help them and yourself out at the same time. Friend that jackhole. Then when the editor or agent sees your names together, that’s gotta help. Or just say you like MURDER BY LANTERNLIGHT or whatever crap book your target also likes.

The key is to make connections. Like what your target likes. Unless you’re submitting to a Nickelback fan. Nickelback sucks.

You have to remember, the world is full of books that are just like yours. Oh, I'm sure you're convinced you have a precious flower unlike anyone else's. You know what you share with every other writer out there? The same thought. All writers think their book is the cream and not the turd. They believe in it. Why? Maybe because their friends told them so. Maybe they're in one of those writing groups in which everyone says nice things hoping to have their own works loved. Or maybe it turns out your book really is good. (Hell, I don't know. I haven't read your book. I'm too busy suing Jeremy Thomasson for the crap job he did on my ebook covers.)

So if you want your book to stand out from big pile of slush floating around out there, make a connection with your target. If the editor or agent likes you, they might give your book just a wee bit more attention.

Think about the times you've picked up a book because the author is from your hometown. Or has your first name. Or seemed like your kind of person on that local talk show. You connect with authors, don't you? You'll read the next Lee Child before you know what the plot is, won't you? Stand in line for the next Stephen King? As a reader, you're relying on connecting to these authors. Make sure you use this to your advantage. Connect with the agents and editors. You think Vince Ferragamo got to be the greatest California QB in the 70s without working his butt off? Or Stabler? Oh, you're from San Diego? I meant Dan Fouts. Go Bolts.

Jim Winter Stops By

2012-01-17T03:00:00.002-05:00

It's round 3 of guest bloggery as Jim Winter stops by to shill his latest e-release Northcoast Shakedown, er... I mean Northcoast....wait a second...Yeah... Northcoast Shakedown.

So what is Northcoast Shakedown? Isn’t that some book that came out from some penny-ante Baltimore area press that went under about five minutes before the sequel came out?

Yes, it is, and yes, it’s back.

In a nutshell, it’s about Nick Kepler, a Cleveland area insurance investigator who’s scored free office space and secretarial help from his former employers at TTG Insurance. We meet Nick actually in the middle of the action with a dead hooker and a rising star in local politics. Always start with a bang, and Sandy Lapinsky’s morning started off with just that. Back up a few days, and we learn Nick’s life would be a lot easier if 1.) he never picked up his phone on the way out to nab a worker comp cheat and 2.) told a TTG exec what he could do with his job reference for a cheating spouse case. From there, it gets complicated.

There’s sex, drugs, some rock and roll in the background, and little bedroom gunplay that doesn’t end well.

Nick was what I saw as one of the first Gen X PI’s. Others came out around the same time, including our own Dave White’s Jackson Donne. Only Dave liked to torture Jackson more than I wanted to torture Nick. I had a multi-book arc in which I send Nick to Hell, then take my sweet time bringing him back. Dave pretty much destroyed Donne in one book and dragged him kicking and screaming back in the second. (I liked that second book quite nicely, actually.)

But one of the things Dave and I used to talk about was our respective settings. Dave wrote in New Brunswick, New Jersey. I, of course, wrote about Cleveland. While Northcoast was in its polishing stage, I paid Dave a visit during a trip to New York City, and we, along with fellow writer Pat Lambe, did the Jackson Donne Tour of New Brunswick.

There’s something about a city that makes this type of story work in a way it doesn’t with other types of fiction. For instance, much is made of how chick lit used to be almost a creature of Manhattan. Come to Cincy during the warm weather. Look me up. I’ll take you to Mt. Adams or Hyde Park on a Sunday morning, and I swear to God, it’s every episode of Sex and the City you never wanted to see.

You could conceivably transplant a PI character from his environs, but it seldom works. I couldn’t watch Eight Million Ways to Die because, the Dude Jeff Bridges may be, when he starts out as an LA County deputy sheriff, the show’s over. Similarly, I tried to like the Robert Mitchum remake of The Big Sleep, but let’s be honest. Philip Marlowe is not an overweight Yank in London pushing sixty. (Didn’t help the movie was done by the same outfit that did Space:1999.)

No, Nick is definitely Cleveland. His is a generation that saw lifetime employment at GM and US Steel and Goodyear slip away before high school. He and his North Coast compadres spent the late eighties and early nineties listening to Led Zeppelin and lusting after Detroit muscle cars from the post-Woodstock era. But of course, those days are gone for him and everyone else. It’s not the city he grew up in, but it has that same gritty, roll-up-your-sleeves vibe you still see in Chicago.

So Nick is a creature of his environment. I toyed with sending him to Chicago or New Orleans, but it wouldn’t work. I love Chicago, and New Orleans holds a lot of promise for good storytelling, but they’re not for Nick.

Unlike his creator, who very nearly moved to Chicago before meeting his lovely bride a few years ago, Nick can never leave Cleveland. Or if he does, the story will be in him going back.

Crimes of Free Speech?

2012-01-16T03:06:00.000-05:00

With almost any right, there is a delicate balance, a dividing line between the sanctity of the right, and the crime of abusing that right.

If you want to find out if people really believe in free speech, say something outrageous and offensive and see how many of them defend your right to say it. Recently, many Americans took serious offense to this:

Personally, I find the offense only makes the whole thing more amusing. Maybe I just get the humor because I'm Canadian, but Brian was the one who saw the video first and passed it on to me, and every American friend I've sent it to thought it was hysterical.

Maybe my friends are just more enlightened. Or maybe they all truly believe in free speech.

However, I did find myself on the other side of the line recently on an issue that sparked a bit of debate in our house.

It turns out that in Calgary, some might argue that abuse of free speech equals obstructing justice.

It's easy to talk about freedom of speech, when you're not the one speaking to a funeral director.

That's the grim reality for two families -- making plans to buy coffins and say goodbye, less than 24 hours after the horror of an alleged drunk-driving wreck scarred their lives.

Two dead 20-year-olds, in what Calgary police say was a high-speed collision involving alcohol and a red light -- a light the suspected drunk driver missed, moments before her car slammed into a Mercedes.

The 25-year-old at the wheel lived, while her passenger and the innocent stranger driving the other car were killed.

What do these tragedies have to do with free speech?

It turns out that some people have created twitter accounts and are taking advantage of social media sites to inform the public about Checkstop locations so that drivers who've been drinking can avoid being caught by the police.

"It's freedom of speech. No one can tell me I can't do something if I don't feel like doing it, and that's the freedom of the Internet."

So says Aaron Pratt, one of a handful of social media regulars at the eye of a moral tempest involving drunk driving and the freedom to type whatever you like online.

Local government and police are not happy about the growing trend, and I don't think we've heard the last of this.

When I mentioned this article to Brian, he defended the right of free speech. I disagree, in this case. Whether or not the courts may ultimately agree with him or me has yet to be seen, but there are many instances in which the right of free speech is subjected to greater concerns. If a person threatens to assassinate the president, or goes into a crowded theater and yells, "Bomb!" they can try to hide behind the right of free speech all they like, but that won't help them in court.

When I read the article about the Checkstop tweeters, I wondered how these drunk drivers could actually read the tweets and register that they should take a different route. I wondered if anyone could prove in any of the cases mentioned that the drunk drivers, or their passengers, had read the Checkstop tweets.

I wondered about the motives. Why would a person go to the trouble of locating Checkstops and broadcasting that information through social media? Does their motivation limit or increase their responsibility for anything that happens as a result of sharing that information?

And then I thought about how many crimes go unreported, how many witnesses don't come forward and how many people endure abuse because people opt for their own convenience instead of standing up for someone else, and I found myself wondering why it is people have so much energy when it comes to helping others evade the law, but are nowhere to be found when people need help.

Today, of all days, is a day we should celebrate the right to free speech. It's a day we pay tribute to a man who literally did change the world.

But at the same time, I think we have to stop using our rights as justification for irresponsible behavior.

Get in shape

2012-01-15T01:00:00.003-05:00

by: Joelle Charbonneau

Time to get in shape.

It’s a new year. Not surprising, I’m hearing lots of people say that they want to get in shape this year. They want to lose weight, eat better and all in all feel healthier. I’m all for that. Being healthy is an important part of being happy. And trust me when I say I’m a huge fan of happiness.

When most people make their resolution, they often put a huge number on their goal to a thinner, happier self. 30 lbs. 45 lbs. Even 60 lbs. They make a huge long term goal that seems horribly difficult to achieve—especially in the beginning. Because the finish line to that goal is so far in the distance, it is hard for the goal maker to celebrate the small victories of 1 lb here and 2 lbs there. Because they aren’t celebrating those steps on the way to crossing the finish line, they are more apt to drop out of the race before the first month of the year is done.

So why am I talking about this? Well, I often hear writers say their resolution for the new year is to “finish a manuscript”. Is this an admirable goal? Hell yes. But it is a BIG goal. This is the equivalent to “I am going to lose 50 lbs this year” type of goal. It is easy to be enthusiastic about the goal when the year begins and by the end of the first month feel let down because reaching the goal is taking longer than expected. That’s when trouble sets in. It’s at this point that many writers stop sitting down at their desks with enthusiasm. They tell themselves they need a break to really work out the plot of the story. Many go back and rewrite what they already have written. Others come up with a bright and shiny new idea that they think is way better than the first and embark on that project with the same gusto as they with the old. In short—the book never gets done.

So, here’s the deal. For anyone that has set a large goal for themselves this brand new year– do me a favor and break that goal down into manageable chunks. If you are losing weight – go for a pound a week. If you want to eat better, don’t cut everything you love out of your diet. Trim a bit and go from there. Set yourself up to succeed.

As for writers who want to finish a book this year—try this instead. I am challenging all writers to the 100 words 100 day challenge. Get up tomorrow and write at least 100 words on your story. You can write more if you want, but you have to write at least 100. No editing. Just writing. Then get up the next day and write 100 more. Do this for 100 days. If you skip a day, you go back to day one and start all over again. 100 words. 100 days. No skipped days. No excuses. No apologies. No giving up.

Why 100 words a day? Because no matter how busy your work and personal schedule gets, I promise you can manage that amount every single day. And guess what? When you flex your writing muscles every day they get stronger. Like any diet or workout plan, the first couple days are the toughest. The words won’t come as fast. The story will struggle. But you KNOW you can write 100 words, so you’ll do it. The more you flex your writer muscles on this story, the easier those 100 words a day will be. Heck, it might turn into 500 or 1000 words a day. By the time those 100 days are over you might be halfway done with the book or even close to THE END. A manageable goal that you can reach every day means you have a shot of actually finishing your ultimate goal much sooner than you might think. You just have to take the plunge and do it.

So, let’s all make this the year of achieving our goals, no matter what they are. Deal?

And for those writers who are interested on taking the 100 words, 100 days challenge – let me know! I’d love to check in with you during the challenge to see how you are doing.

Why I Outline: A (Short) Case Study

2012-01-14T01:00:00.001-05:00

by
Scott D. Parker

Thirty-six days ago, I made a commitment: write some amount of prose everyday. And, to date, I have a 36-day writing streak. Some days, I crested one thousand words, others, a mere paragraph or two. I wanted to create the habit of writing, to create that yearning to know that, even if it's 11pm at night, I still have one additional item on the to-do list. So far, that impetus has succeeded.

I also wanted to test out something: could I write a short story (or novella as the word count is expanding) with only knowing how the story starts and, more or less, how it ends. Many writers write their tales this way and I wanted to give it a go in a smaller, contained piece. While the story does feature my railroad detective, Calvin Carter, I am consciously trying something different: a more traditional style of story. Less of a shoot'em up and more of a brain thing. Who knows how it'll turn out. Maybe I'll go all pulp in the rewrite and strip out all the boring parts.

During the writing, I've struggled with how the story should play out. In the first week, I even changed narrators and that was an interesting experience. It was the only day in which I went "backwards"--that is, did some rewriting--but I have not done any since. Forward, march, as they say. More than once, I wanted to stop the writing and plan out the rest of the story. For this story, I resisted. I wanted to see how it played out.

The time to write has varied. The week between Christmas and New Year's was great. I was on vacation and each morning I'd get up at my usual work time (6:00 am), grab the coffee, and start typing. Once the usual workdays started up again, that went out the window as did the nice large chunks of word counts. I also miss my morning writing times, being forced, by all that the day requires of me, to start writing around 10:00 pm.

And here's where I get to my issue with outlining versus "just seeing where it goes." I start getting tired around that time even though I usually stay up until midnight. My day job blew up this week and has required me to work into the night, including participating in conference calls. The last thing I want to do is write a few lines or pages. I have, and it is in these times I've struggled the most.

You see, when I outline and map out the story, I put all the information on notecards. When it's time to write, pick up the next notecard and just write that scene. Easy as pie. Now, on some nights, while I don't experience writer's block--I know generally what's coming next--the flow isn't there. While I know what to write, I don't always know what to write. Yes, that does make sense. Additionally, with the structure in place, when life throws you for a loop, you can hang your writing self on the structure and use it to get your writing habit back in order.

I'll finish this story in the manner in which I started it: just seeing where the story leads me. Or: since I have this idea for an ending, I'll see if I get there or not. But I'm pretty confident that once I type "the end" on this story, I may go back to the structure that I know.

Do y'all ever try to write something in a way definitely different that your usual method? Have y'all had success?

Acting Up

2012-01-13T03:00:00.001-05:00

By Russel D McLean

I wanted to be an actor.

That’s the long and short of it. I wanted to be an actor. Not for the fame and the glory, but for the ability to become someone else, even if only for a short amount of time. This had nothing to do with being unhappy in who I was, but there was something about becoming someone else, of reacting to the world in a way that was atypical to the norm that I found exciting.

I only had one problem:

I didn’t like actors.

Okay, that’s not fair. What I didn’t like were people who wanted to be Actors (with a capital A). You know, they wanted the luvvie lifestyle or to pretend that they in and of themselves were interesting. I didn’t want to be in the limelight. I wanted whoever I was supposed to be to be in the limelight.

Not that I was method, or anything. No, I was something else. I quickly found that dialogue was what made acting interesting to me. The right script could sing off the page and it was like you barely had to do anything at all to understand it. You just let the script use your body in the same way a musician might use a guitar. The dialogue and the action allowed you to perform. You didn’t need to question why a character might do something. If the script was in tune, you just goddamn knew why.

Maybe that’s the other reason I never became an actor. I placed too much faith in the writer. I didn’t allow my ego to overcome the script; I wanted the script to overcome my ego.
I suppose becoming a writer was a natural extension of all this. In the back of my head, I had this idea that I could act and write. That I would become one of those people who has a finger in every pie. But the writing won out in the end because I had more control, or at least it seemed that way to me. I was not bound by a bad script or forced to read between the lines to understand a character. If I didn’t understand a character, then that was my fault and not some other guy’s (or some other gal’s). There was also the fact that as much as people seemed to appreciate my acting ability, my skill with the written word came easier and more obviously. I was at home with words. I could manipulate them easier than I could my own expression or tone.

I got the same kick out of it, too. When I’m writing, I become the characters I’m writing about. I see the world through their eyes. I gain a new perspective on things. Sometimes that perspective unnerves me. Sometimes it says as much about me as it does about the character. Sometimes it makes me rethink my own ideas about life.

Whatever, it’s the getting inside someone’s head that provides me with the thrill of writing. It’s getting to be someone else, even if only for a little while. That’s what I became addicted to.

That’s what makes me keep hammering out fiction, telling stories about people who I could
never be, or even who I would never want to be.

Would I ever want to try acting again? Sure, I think I would. I don’t know that I’d be anywhere as good as I am at writing. It’s one thing to communicate character through words, another to do it physically. You can be good at one and not necessarily the other. But I do think the disciplines can attract the same types of people. Certainly, I get the same thrill from one that I did from the other.

You can call me a frustrated actor if you like. In one sense I suppose it’s true.

In another sense, since I abandoned the spotlights and the greasepaint, you could say, in all honesty, that I have become a satisfied writer.

To Blurb Or Not To Blurb

2012-01-12T03:00:00.000-05:00

By Jay Stringer

Bit of a cheat this week. Normally if I'm using content for both DSD and my own site, I'll out it on DSD first. But this week I've done it the other way round. Really, just so that I can pimp my new website to you all. Check. Touch it. Love it. Ahem. The other other reason is that it gives me another chance to show off the work of one of the friends of DSD.

To Blurb Or Not To Blurb

Something that writers start to think about, when we get all writerly an' shite, is blurbing.

Bit of a silly word, right? I think it's Klingon for fake word. Or Welsh for the wind through the mountains and valleys on a spring day. Some say it was the pagan festival of writers, others that it was a creature that resembled a cross between a dragon and a pig. Whatever it's ancient meaning, today it means pimping ma book.

Here's the deal; You ask a bunch of your favourite writers to say nice things about you in small quotes. When they turn you down, you then ask some best sellers to do it. There's a bit of back and forth; which authors best suit the book? Which names will draw the right crowd? Who owes us a favour? How far will these illicit photographs get us?

But me? I'm ambitious. So I say, go right for the best. So I went and got a testimonial from the greatest crime writer of them all. Enjoy.

Having long since shuffled off my mortal coil and retired hence to my Elysian repose, I have been some amused at the evolution of my reputation since – some good fellows of my acquaintance making bother to assemble such works of mine as did survive, and those becoming, over the course of lengthy decades, a kind of bible for the tweedy types who camp in the dank rooms of university campuses and touch themselves in private during their special meditations on Ophelia. Why Ophelia, I cannot say, as I did pen many women more bawdy in their appetites, but I do suppose the scholarly, thinking themselves somehow elevated above their own natures, try to wrap their animal congress in some cloak of innocence and pretended feeling that they may call in themselves love what they damn in the unwashed as lust.
I say amused because I was the unwashed. I was not in life the ink-stained fetish I have late become but was instead a writer and actor both – and in such capacities not admitted to the more polite strata of society but instead relegated with my fellows to the rougher districts of Shoreditch and Bankside, the liberties outside the City proper’s Puritanical regulation where I did ply my trade in the company of the whores, the bear-baiters, the vendors of ales and sack, and of those rougher fellows who made prey of the fattened purses of the Lords and Ladies who would visit our district in search of such entertainments as they could later revile as unholy on their return to their safer and more sterile climes.
But such districts did feel home to me, as my first home was not London (though its foppish dons have since made great pains to claim me for its borders, ignoring that in life they banned my art from them), no, the home of my breeding and formation was Stratford, in the dark Kingdom of Mercia.
My father was a glover and a sometimes merchant in hides, so in my youth it was the skins of the dead that kept my company, not the moneychangers or nobles of the City, and I did oft scrape and tan hides, and cut them to shape and otherwise work my hands in fashions unknown to the scholarly who now make my worship. What sense of place and story I have comes as much from such rougher environs as it does from such finer places I did know in my later life, and what sense of truth comes from there more fully.
As in my own day, London does still seem think itself England entire, that the quaint or rougher districts elsewhere are backdrop only to its glories. And yet the lives there lived are as real; the pains there suffered hurt as deep; and the dreams there crushed oft make a bitter vintage as they die unripened and the product of a vineyard long ignored and left to life’s margins. I have watched proud Mercia rise and fall. The Midlands serving granary to my day’s appetites and later furnace to England’s empire in which were wrought those terrible engines that once did make it great, long since sore neglected, as the nation turned itself to trade in shares and bankings and the financial Leger de Main of this modern age by which the suited swells of London do greatly prosper as they, through their cheating magics, mint coin from the sweat of the Midland’s brow.
And so I recommend you to these tales, set in the Midlands most with kin streets of Glasgow and Manhattan twinned, of such desperate lives as are oft lived beyond your notice, but that are played for as equal mortal stakes as any and in such desperation that is drama’s true forge.
And to your scholars touching yourself to Hamlet’s soft muse I say take care with your emissions, for the pages of my works grow sticky, and I do take affront.
Wm. Shakespeare,
As related in liquored séance and fevered channeling to Daniel O’Shea

That O'Shea fella is a serious talent. I'm reading through his forthcoming collection, Old School, and it's a cracking read. Something I look for in a writer is someone who takes chances, someone who gets out of their comfort zone. To me, that's where the art of writing lies. Somewhere between what Dickens said, "the writer that is natural has fulfilled the rules of art," and what I say, "get your ass on a fucking high-wire and take a risk," is the key to writing something good. And O'Shea has written a crime novel narrated by William Shakespeare. How's that for getting up on the high-wire? It's called Rotten At The Heart, it's out for submission now and, if you're a publisher, you need to take a look.

Now, has anybody got Dickens's email address? Steinbeck's skype handle?

For your reading pleasure

2012-01-11T03:00:00.003-05:00

By Steve Weddle

Review of Owen Laukkanen's THE PROFESSIONALS

This book is one of those rare accomplishments -- a believable thriller.
Totally engaging. Fast-paced. Intimately focused with characters you care about.

Fantastic. Highly recommended. Owen Laukkanen is the real deal, folks.

At a bar with my agent and she wouldn't shut up about this book. Which made me unhappy. "Talk about my book, crazy lady," I thought. In fact, it's rather possible I mouthed that to her. But the more she talked about this book from Owen Laukkanen, the more I wanted to hear. The more I wanted to know. Then the more I wanted her to shut up and hand me the book. Finally, I got my hands on the book. The characters are drawn with such precision and depth that you can't help caring about them. The action gets moving and never lets up. A great read.

Now I kinda want to ask about his next book, but I don't want to sit around waiting for it. I want it now.

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A couple other books you need to check out:

SATAN IS REAL from Benjamin Whitmer and Charlie Louvin

Mr. Whitmer himself gives you the information on it here, but you need to be sure to order the hardcover. It's an absolutely lovely book on the outside and a helluva read on the inside. I'll have more when I finish.

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And I'm currently reading CITY OF THE LOST from Stephen Blackmoore. It's that crime/noir stuff we all love with a loving dose of the supernatural. Fantastic so far.

Of course, he was here last week talking about the book, but be sure to see what he says over at Mr. Scalzi's place.

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Also currently reading Dan O'Shea's unbelievably wonderful short story collection, OLD SCHOOL. More on that when I'm done.

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And the Sword and Laser gang prepare to read/chat up Adam Christopher's EMPIRE STATE.

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Feel free to share your current read here. Thanks

Jeff Shelby Talks to Jeffrey Allen... or Himself

2012-01-10T03:00:00.000-05:00

I've been a fan of Jeff Shelby for a long time. Not because he's a teacher AND knows college basketball, but because he's a damn good writer. In the span of 6 months, he's put out two books: Liquid Smoke, featuring Noah Braddock, PI, and an e-book standalone called Thread of Hope. Also, this guy Jeffrey Allen has written Stay At Home Dead. Here they are blabbing with each other. Sort of.

I’ve recently ventured off in some different writing directions, trying my hand at both a stand alone and a cozy series, after writing three books in a series. I thought this would be far more interesting if I interviewed…myself…because, a lot of days, this is really how I feel when I’m moving back and forth between different books that I’m working on…

Jeff Shelby: So, this is kinda weird.

Jeffrey Allen: Why?

JS: It’s like I’m talking to myself.

JA: You are.

JS: Oh, right. Anyway, why’d you write one of those cozy things? That isn’t very manly.

JA: Look, there are guns in it, okay? And toupees. Those are manly.

JS: If you say so.

JA: Whatever. I thought it would be fun to get away from all that serious crap you write and write something funny, something that might make people laugh. So I took my/our experience as a stay at home dad and turned into something Chevy Chase might star in. And there’s a midget.

JS: You know there aren’t many dudes writing cozies, right?

JA: That’s the point. I’m unique. And so is the character.

JS: Sure. Legend in your own mind.

JA: Yours too, then.

JS: Awkward. So what’s Stay At Home Dead (that’s so PUNNY!) about anyway?

JA: Stay at home dad Deuce Winters finds the body of his old high school rival in his minivan and is accused of murder. In order to clear his name, he must deal with: a pint-sized detective, some ferocious PTA moms, a toupee wearing Elvis lookalike who wants to build a shooting range for kids and a whole lot of other goofy things that might pop up in a small town in Texas.

JS: (silence)

JA: No, seriously. That’s the book.

JS: Wow. Someone’s publishing that?

JA: I know, right???

JS: Well, that’s impressive. What was wrong with using my/our real name?

JA: I thought you might be embarrassed, you being a serious crime writer and all. Those Noah Braddock books tend to be a little bit more thoughtful. I didn’t think you’d want anyone getting us confused.

JS: Good thinking.

JA: And I wanted people to know that I could come up with more than two words for a title.

JS: (silence)

JA: Killer Swell. Wicked Break. Liquid Smoke. Mix in an article once in awhile, why don’t you.

JS: My titles are fine.

JA: Says you.

JS: And, as a matter of fact, I DID just mix in an article.

JA: Oh, here we go. Yes. Your little ebook.

JS: It’s not little.

JA: What size is it then?

JS: It’s the size of a book.

JA: Clever.

JS: Thank you.

JA: I’ll begrudgingly admit, I like the title. Thread of Hope. It’s good.

JS: Thank you again.

JA: But it’s kinda serious.

JS: Well, while you were goofing off writing your midget book, I was trying to write about a former cop whose daughter was abducted and never found. Now he looks for other people’s kids.

JA: Dude. That’s…serious.

JS: And when his best friend is accused of a crime and the teenage accuser goes missing, it’s up to this guy to figure everything out. Even as he’s still dealing with his own daughter’s disappearance.

JA: OMG. Stop. I’m gonna cry or something. Tell me a joke or something.

JS: What do you do for a sick sheep?

JA: (silence)

JS: You give him SHEEP P R!!!!! HAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Get it???

JA: Um, yes. I get it. And I think you should stick with the serious stuff and I’ll stick with writing the funny stuff. That work for you?

JS: SHEEP P R??? IT’S HILARIOUS!!!!

JA: I can’t believe I’m you.

JS: Me either! You’re so lucky to be me!

Jeff Shelby is the author of the Noah Braddock PI series, the Deuce Winters stay at home dad series (under the name Jeffrey Allen) and the standalone Thread of Hope. He is a high school English teacher and basketball coach, but not the same caliber of coach as Mike Rice, head coach at Rutgers University. (Told you I’d work it in, Dave.) He lives in Dallas, TX with his daughter. You can find him talking with himself regularly at his websites, www.jeffshelby.com and www.jeffreyallenbooks.com.

Was 2011 the Year of the Novella, a new Spinetingler Award, and other stuff

2012-01-09T09:59:00.002-05:00

In 2011 it seemed like the novella really came out of the closet. This was largely due to epublishing. In the past publishers have looked at books below a certain word length as not being being publishable. This is a shame when you think of the length of some of our great novels. Take a look at poor James M Cain and try and imagine the conversations that he would have with a modern editor about beefing up and fleshing out The Postman Always Rings Twice. **shudders**

So why the closet imagery above? Because some novellas would still make it to the market in recent years but you would have to hunt them down. They would appear in some print magazines (Needle published The Hitter by Chris F Holm) and anthologies and collections.

Some UK publishers have been ahead of the curve with lines or entire press' dedicated to the novella. Two that come to mind are Pulp Press and the Crime Express line.

In the US Tom Piccirilli has been on the forefront of not being constrained by exterior pressures to makes works longer. Over the last couple of years he has been writing “noirellas” and finding small publishers to publish them.

Now with epublishing it is easier then ever for a writer to have an outlet for a novella. I would also argue that with busier lives readers appreciate the novella more because you get more depth then a short story and the satisfaction of finishing a longer work that explores more themes.

My original intent for Snubnose Press was to be an American equivalent of the UK novella presses. I wanted to publish crime novellas. But the realities of the submissions became apparent and we became open to longer works also.

I read 40+ mystery/crime novellas that were published in 2011. Far more then any other year. From thrillers to mysteries to crime to noir to literary there was a wide range of novellas published. Some were great and some weren't. Some I can't wait to read again and some I couldn't finish. One had the potential to be great but the editing was so terrible that I ultimately wished that it had been submitted to Snubnose instead of self-published because with a little polish it could have really shined.

Because there were so many strong novellas published in 2011 I would like to announce that Spinetingler will launch a Best Novella award on January 16th. There will be 10 nominees and a poll that will be open to the public. Voting will take place until the end of the month.

For now the award will be kept separate from the main awards because I don't know if the novella trend will continue. If it does (and I hope it does) then it will be folded into the the main awards.

-This great quote is for people who just can't find the time:

Once upon a time in the dead of winter in the Dakota Territory, Theodore Roosevelt took off in a makeshift boat down the Little Missouri River in pursuit of a couple of thieves who had stolen his prized rowboat. After several days on the river, he caught up and got the draw on them with his trusty Winchester, at which point they surrendered. Then Roosevelt set off in a borrowed wagon to haul the thieves cross-country to justice. They headed across the snow-covered wastes of the Badlands to the railhead at Dickinson, and Roosevelt walked the whole way, the entire 40 miles. It was an astonishing feat, what might be called a defining moment in Roosevelt’s eventful life. But what makes it especially memorable is that during that time, he managed to read all of Anna Karenina. I often think of that when I hear people say they haven’t time to read.

-Here is an interesting article about why does it cost the same to see a blockbuster film as an indy film (because the same isn't always true for books):

[T]he first instances of what film archeologists would actually call "movies" around 1910 featured different prices for different films. Movies were priced according to their length, stars, and popularity. For three decades until the 1940s, one theater would have the rights to each movie within a certain zone, and movies received grades (A, B, or C) that corresponded with ticket prices at those theaters. If the rules of the 1920s ruled today, Mission Impossible might be $15 and Young Adult might be $7. What changed?

Everything. For starters, the famous Paramount anti-trust case broke up monopolies between producers and distributors. Multiplexes replaced single-serving theaters. A recession after World War II coincided with the popularity of television to gut studio revenue, forcing them to rely on fewer, more expensive movies.

-Is reading anti-social?:

In our day-to-day lives, we are always trying to manipulate or otherwise act on our surroundings, whether it’s by turning a car’s steering wheel or frying an egg or clicking on a link at a website. But when we open a book, our expectations and our attitudes change drastically. Because we understand that "we cannot or will not change the work of art by our actions," we are relieved of our desire to exert an influence over objects and people and hence are able to "disengage our [cognitive] systems for initiating actions." ... It is only when we leave behind the incessant busyness of our lives in society that we open ourselves to literature’s transformative emotional power.

That doesn’t mean that reading is anti-social. The central subject of literature is society, and when we lose ourselves in a book we often receive an education in the subtleties and vagaries of human relations. Several studies have shown that reading tends to make us more empathetic, more alert to the inner lives of others. The reader withdraws in order to connect more deeply.

-Can literature replace God?:

Is it really a religious, polytheistic mindset that is required to live the good life? Or might an imaginative, literary mindset suffice? (And what is the difference between the two?) If the question is not metaphysical (does God or do the gods exist?) but phenomenological (how will we respond to the world?), why would we hold on to the experience of the sacred that the authors try to capture? Literature might, in the end, be enough.

Currently reading: Before I Go to Sleep by SJ Watson; Thirst by Thierry Jonquet

Currently Listening: Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir; William Elliot Whitmore; Eddie Veder's Ukulele Songs.

Working through the fear

2012-01-08T01:30:00.001-05:00

by: Joelle Charbonneau

A friend sent me a message the other day that expressed concern about the current project he was writing. He’d pitched the concept to his agent. Said agent was highly enthusiastic about the project so he immediately embarked upon writing. Now he is approaching the end of the book. With each day that passes he grows a little more concerned.

What if he didn’t do the concept justice?

What if only the concept was good?

What if his voice doesn’t match the story?

What if his agent is disappointed?

Wow—do I know those concerns. I’ve been struggling with them myself especially in recent days. I mean, I have been beyond fortunate in my recent submissions. If you missed the news—a young adult project I wrote last summer sold to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt last month. I loved writing that book and am truly excited to write the next two in the trilogy. But no matter how delighted I am with the sale (and trust me I did the girly squealy, excited thing!) there is fear. THE TESTING will be the lead title in the Spring of 2013. The whole concept of being a lead title is still hard for me to wrap my brain around. The expectations for a lead title are much higher than what I am used to. So I find myself asking, “What if the next two books aren’t as good as the first?” “What if I can’t live up to the expectations the editor has?” “What if I can’t live up to the concept of the next two books?”

Yeah—as happy as the deal made me, I have lost a great deal of sleep worrying about living up to, meeting and exceeding expectations. And that is totally pointless.

I mean, if I want to waste energy I can just run around after my toddler on one of his many circuits of the living room, dining room and kitchen. Which is why I keep reminding myself what I reminded my friend yesterday—worrying will do me no good. Sure, the concept is important, but it is what I bring to the concept that makes it truly unique. Only I can tell the story that will unfold as I type. It might not be the story the editor envisioned, but it is the story that needs to be told. And that is what is important. My voice. My story. My way. The rest is minutia. I love writing. I love storytelling. I just need to hang onto the passion for the story and the rest will take care of itself.

Does that mean the sleepless nights will go away? Ha! I doubt it. I’m a worrier by nature. But knowing that the editor wants MY story makes those 2 a.m. moments where doubt is the strongest easier to deal with.

Of course, that being said, I’d love to hear your stories about how you deal with doubt. Do you wake up in the night and worry that you won’t live up to expectations—writing or otherwise? How do you survive those moments? Trust me—I really want to know!

Back to School

2012-01-07T01:00:00.003-05:00

by
Scott D. Parker

With all the talk about New Year's resolutions, I've decided to go to school. I don't mean real school. Let's call it “Traditional Mystery School.” No matter what you want to do when you grow up, you have to have an education to do it. Writing and reading are no different. If you want to learn how to write, you could enroll a university course with a professor and a syllabus and spend a semester (or longer) learning the mechanics of how to write. If you want to understand reading, you can enroll in the course about any type of literature and spend a semester or more learning how to read better.

But the type of class I want to take is not necessarily offered in a university setting. You see, I want to learn about books and authors who wrote in the traditional mystery style. That is, the Agatha Christie School of Mystery. For the longest time, the types of books I tended to read were gritty, urban crime stories while the type of TV shows I watched tended to be of the traditional mystery variety: Monk, CSI: Miami, and just about everything that masterpiece mystery aired on PBS. Moreover, the types of stories I wrote followed the gritty crime style, and frankly, didn't really work. Which got me to thinking: why don't I have a go at writing a traditional mystery.

The only problem is how to do it. Sure, I can say that I enjoy things like Foyle's War or Collision, but that does not necessarily prepare me to be able to write something like that that will be consumed by folks reading words. The only option to correct that is obvious: read and study books written in the traditional style. And I'm not talking only about books written decades ago. I want to read and study modern books written in the traditional style.

Where to start? A reading list. And that's where y'all come in. I'd like your opinion on good examples of modern traditional mysteries. Let me start you out with 2 titles that are on my list.

Bury Your Dead by Louise Penny
The Private Patient by P. D. James

My former colleague, John McFetridge, recommended the books of Louise Penny a year or so ago, and then Bury Your Dead won a few awards. Usually, I like to begin a series with the first book. For this, I didn't care. I wanted to read the award-winning book. I am almost one third of the way into this book, and I am completely engrossed.

I've known about P. D. James for a long time, but didn't give her much thought. I received a review copy of The Private Patient, and for that reason alone, decided to read it as my first P. D. James novel. If there are other, better recommendations written by James, I'd love to hear it. Besides, she writes one killer of an opening sentence:

On November the twenty-first, the day of her forty-seventh birthday, and three weeks and two days before she was murdered, Rhoda Gradwyn went to Harley Street to keep a first appointment with her plastic surgeon, and there in a consulting room designed, so it appeared, to inspire confidence and allay apprehension, made the decision which would lead inexorably to her death.

Which brings me to a stopping point. Where to go from here? Here's one clue: I thoroughly enjoyed the television adaptation of Val McDermid's A Place of Execution on TV. I also really enjoyed Anthony Horowitz's Collision. Both are BBC imports broadcast on PBS.

I like to get a list of 4 to 6 books, create a “syllabus” complete with questions that I hope to answer, and an outline. This may seem weird to some of you, but, then again, I can be a little weird.

So, what books would you put on this list?

Album of the Week:

The Hayden Project by the Emerson Quartet, disc 3. This bonus disc is where I have spent most of this past week. Since I work from home most of the time, I let my iTunes library play at random. A few days ago, it played a movement from a Shostakovich string quartet. The music was so interesting that I stopped work and just listened. I turned off the random, and listened to the rest of the tracks including selected movements from quartets by Dvorak, Ives, Schubert, and Bartok. The Dvorak piece is especially beautiful, and I have put more than one album of string quartets on hold at the local library. For me, the string quartet as an ensemble goes well with this winter spirit of contemplation. There's a quiet, deepness to the sound of four stringed instruments that you can't replicate with any other ensemble.

Tweet of the week:

Writing is time-consuming. The act of writing, of sitting down to write, is easy. But if you think about how long it takes to fill a page, don't think about it. That's my advice. Just right. One word, one sentence, one page, at a time.

––A. Lee Martinez

We all have writing tricks that get us to do that very thing. When you've fallen off the wagon as I did last year, anything to get you to write is a good thing. I am using the Streaks app on my iPod and tracking the number of days––in a row––that I have been writing. As of yesterday, that number is at 29. That's no big deal for many of you, but it has put me back in the habit of simply writing some amount of prose each and every day. The more days I write, the more Xs I have on my calendar, and the less likely I am to want to break the string of red Xs. I'll be hitting a month today, and am charging into this new year with a new, consistent writing habit.

Wine of the Week:

Pianello Rosso, Rosso Veneto

I am not at all qualified to write in glowing detail about wine. It's a goal I'd like to achieve, but I'm only able to speak to the basic fact: did it taste good or not. Our party of four opened this Italian wine New Year's Eve and drank it over a meal of grilled quail, grilled pork, baked Cornish hens, mixed potatoes, and country French bread with olive oil. The bottle was nearly empty by the time the ball dropped. A clean red wine with no bitter aftertaste, I have found a new favorite to add to my small list. Do you have a favorite red wine?

Gun Nut

2012-01-06T03:00:00.001-05:00

By Russel D McLean

Photographs by Jeroen Ten Berge (jeroentenberge.com). Any mistakes in terminology by Russel D McLean who is writing this post a little late at night.

As crime writers, we live a vicarious life. We fool people into thinking we know about the darkness in life. We create ersatz darkness and employ tricks to transport people into situations they may not otherwise know.

In short, we don’t have to live the life to write it.

In THE GOOD SON, a huge part of the climax of the novel relies on a gunfight in an old graveyard. The graveyard is real. At a recent event, someone told me that they had lived in Dundee all their life and never thought to visit this place until they read about in the book. This was a huge compliment to me and made up for the fact that, yes, I did make a few geographical errors here and there in the novel.

But while I knew the geography I was writing about, the truth was that I had never fired or held a gun before writing that scene. I did my research, of course. I made sure that the character handling the gun was as much of a novice as I, and I wrote from having read up on the gun types and the effects of firing them. I knew about the difference between shotguns and ordinary handguns. I had an idea of how much accuracy a shooter would have using the weapons involved.

But all the same… I had never fired a gun.

At Bouchercon, in 2011, all of that would change.

Zoe Sharp – one of the finest thriller writers you should be reading – arranged to take a group of us to a gun range. We were a mixed bunch. Some of us – the Brits, naturally – had zero experience of firearms. Some of us (ie, me) were terrified of the idea and yet determined to experience something outside of their comfort range (no one had told me there would be a simulated shooting range available at the Bouchercon hotel).

What was reassuring was looking at the website of the shooting range we visited. The extensive safety procedures were enough to calm me a little, but all the same, I knew that I would be holding a lump of metal that had the potential to kill someone. And that idea is more than a little unnerving and something one should never lose sight of.

When we arrived at the range, we split into small groups with an experienced shooter at the head of each. Our experienced shooter chose an appropriate gun. One lot had a Glock. Another had a Sig Sauer… and what did your beardy hero wind up with? A .357 magnum. Yes, that’s right, punk. Russel could have blown your head clean off.

Just the mention of the handgun was enough to terrify me. I knew the gun’s reputation, and it was to the be the first weapon I ever fired? Colour me frightened.

Which is the best way to be. The thing to remember is that you need to have a healthy respect
for your weapon. You have to always be aware of what it can do. It’s when you get blasé that things can go very very wrong.

When you go into a range there’s a whole range of forms to fill out. And then you have your safety goggles and your ear-protectors. Because, goddamn, those things are LOUD. Like, really loud. Even with the earphones on, a shot echoes round your head like nobody’s business. And you can feel it, too. The sound of a shot makes your muscles shiver. Maybe that’s a reflex reaction. A kind of fear thing, because you know what that noise represents. But it’s something you don’t forget in a hurry.

Loading the Magnum was an odd experience. As was raising it to point and fire. I remember thinking it was heavy. And I was afraid to let my finger near the trigger. Andy – my experienced shooter, and Zoe's husband – was standing just behind me. Coaxing me to fire. Urging me to keep my arms steady. To squeeze – not pull – the trigger. And I did that.

And nearly dropped the bastard gun.

It wasn’t the recoil – that was less than I expected, but may have been down to the kind of ammunition were using – but the sheer explosive noise that somehow seems more intense when you’re holding the weapon. But at the same time, there was a thrill that went through me. A feeling of power and of controlling that power (albeit not brilliantly) that was reflect in the fact a hole appeared in the target before me.

I put the gun down after one shot. Feel a little dizzy. But loving the feeling. It was an odd mix of exhilaration and healthy fear. I still was fully aware of what that gun could do, but I understood why people got off on firing them.

It was something I hadn’t understood before writing THE GOOD SON, but something that I would bear in mind from that moment on. And it was a sensation that became more palpable when Andy urged me to squeeze off the rest of the shots in the gun. And showed me how to reload.

I moved on to the other weapons. Almost ripped apart the connecting skin between thumb and forefinger when I first used the Glock (lucky for me Zoe noticed how I was holding the weapon and urged me to place hand further down the grip unless I wanted to be injured when the cartridge ejected). These other handguns – semi-autos – were a very different experience. In truth, I felt more comfortable using the Magnum. Something about that weight made it feel more like I was in control.

As time went on in the range, I began to get used to the idea of handling the weapons. I enjoyed the experience of squeezing off a few shots and trying to get them to cluster round the same area of the target.

Others in the group did not find the same, of course. Chris Ewan – author of the brilliant Thieves Guide To… series – has talked on his blog about how he was unnerved by the experience. And I understand why. That burst of adrenaline is a fight or flight thing and you don’t know how you’re going to react. But he got off a few good shots and threw himself into the experience as much as he could, even if he did draw the line when the H&K automatic rifle came out.

Now that was an experience and a half. A range-authorised instructor took us through even stricter safety instructions with that one and had to stand behind us when we used the weapon. While many of the others went to full automatic, I stayed on single shot after I had a great deal of trouble comfortably gripping the weapon (one of the pains of being ambidextrous). But I was proud of my grouping. I remained pretty tight for a guy who had never fired a shot before. But I was truly glad of the instructor’s presence behind me.

Would I go again?

Oh, yes. I remain fully committed to the ideals of strong gun controls. I really do. But I also understand the appeal of firing a weapon and the surge of adrenaline that goes through you when you do so. Its an amazing experience, even if you do realise the whole time precisely the kind of damage you could do with the device in your hands.

And I know that next time I write about guns, I can do so with an air of emotional authority I could never have got from merely reading around the subject. And I can finally claim to be “writing what I know” (at least a little).

Podcasting? There's Probably A Cream For That.

2012-01-05T03:00:00.000-05:00

By Jay Stringer

If you checked in late yesterday you'll have seen we posted a new podcast. Well, sort of. We posted a bit of me talking.

We enjoyed doing the DSD podcast. It was fun, occasionally booze soaked, and more than a little ranty. Most of the DSD crew made some form of appearance, though there are a couple we still need to rope in, and we also had some great guests. Reed Farrel Coleman made Russel and I blush a couple of times, Tony Black talked to us from the bottom of a bucket, Chuck Wendig used some creative language, and we discussed crime comics for about six hours with two of my favourite podcasters. Oh, and Hilary Davidson came on and classed the joint up a bit.

Plus, let's not forget discussing Doctor Who, my obsession with getting a Watchmen reference into every show, and Dave's brilliant theme tune.

We had the idea of splitting the show into seasons. It seems to me a lot of podcasts out there either come out every single week and end up fading in and out of your ears, or have an erratic schedule that makes them easy to stop listening to. So we decided we'd do blocks, we had season 1, where we fudged the audio a bit, broke microphones, learned how to edit, and talked about pants. We had season 2, where we started inviting people into the play house and getting all chat show on your ass. Then we ended season two with the big Doctor Who special that made Dave jump up and down with joy.

And then...well.....there was.......

There was thing thing, see? The dog ate it. We ran out of gas. We had a flat tire. We didn't have enough money for cab fare. Our tux didn't come back from the cleaners. And old friend came in from out of town. Someone stole our car. There was an earthquake. A terrible flood. Locusts. It wasn't our fault, we swear to god.

(Just ask Babs, she'll tell ya)

We kept meaning to. John Hornor Jacobs released an awesome book, and we planned to talk to him. Joelle released, I think, another twelve, and we meant to bring her back in. I wanted to do a big RAIDERS 3oth anniversary special. But it's tough getting the band back together when we're all writers and living in different time zones. We're like the Beatles, only, you know, good.

And as I look around, there are a tonne of good podcasts out there. There's shows like The Deceptionists for writing chat. There's Fuzzy Typewriter that covers films, TV, books and comics. There's WTF, which covers....most of everything else. Around Comics returned from hiatus, because my time was full enough already. And our buddy Seth Harwood is king of the pile at crime podcasting.

So, tell us, what would you like to hear from season 3? Are you up for another 8-12 episodes of DSD? Do you want interviews? And if so, who? Or practical advice? Or some kind of group therapy session? Do you want to join in? Or fill in? Do we want guest hosts?

Chuck Wendig and I briefly kicked around a few ideas last year that would have lead to the two of us co-hosting a podcast dedicating to writing and the profanity of language. But he's taking over the world, and I'm basically lazy. But I wonder if there's something in that, do we do a spin-off show? Say, DSD PRESENTS; THE HACKS. A monthly(ish) show where we get a round table of three or four writers to just sit and shoot the shit about craft, and about whatever books they've got coming out, and how they wrote them, and who was on the grassy knoll?

I don't know, it's over to you, dear reader. What would you like to hear?

New Podcast

2012-01-04T14:07:00.001-05:00

Head here for the deets or click here to just listen to the mp3.

Stamps -- A Fiction Interlude

2012-01-04T03:00:00.006-05:00

By Steve Weddle

“Be sure to pack something nice, in case my mom wants to go out to dinner,” she said, loading deodorants, shampoos, nail clippers, toothbrushes into a bag.

He stood at the end of the bed, looking into the opened duffle bag, trying to decide what exactly “something nice” meant. “I have some brown pants and a white shirt. That all right?”

“Are they the tan pants or the khaki ones?”

“The light brown ones,” he said, pulling them out of the suitcase to show her when she stuck her head out of the bathroom door.

Robert Stokes zipped the duffle bag closed, dragged it to the other side of the house, to the front door. He took the stack of envelopes from the side table. The bills he’d worked on last night. He shuffled them into order, looking at the dates he’d written on the backs of the envelopes.

This one gets mailed the third. These two before the tenth. A clump that would wait. He turned around to the hallway. “We need to stop for stamps,” he said.

“What?” from the bedroom.

“Stamps. We need stamps.”

“We have stamps,” she said, coming down the hall to the bills. “In the basket.” She reached into the basket, pulled out three paper clips and a rubber band. “What happened to the stamps?”

“We need stamps.”

“I thought we had some.”

“We don’t. That’s why we need some.”

“Jesus, does everything have to be a fight with you?”

“What fight? I’m just saying we need stamps.”

“I know. You said that the first time.”

“And you said I was wrong.”

“I didn’t say you were wrong. Jesus Christ. I just thought we had some goddamn stamps. What is it with you?”

“With me? All I said was we need stamps and you have to come out and prove me wrong.”

“I was looking for the mother fucking stamps, Robert. Jesus.”

“We don’t have any.”

Guest Post: Stephen Blackmoore

2012-01-03T03:00:00.001-05:00

Mr. Blackmoore has been a friend of Do Some Damage for quite some time. His debut novel City of the Lost is out today. He has some words for you readers out there, so check this out:

My debut novel, CITY OF THE LOST drops today like a coked-up baby into a school prom trashcan.

For those of you who haven't been inundated with my incessant yammering about this book, CITY OF THE LOST is about an unrepentant thug, Joe Sunday, who gets murdered, brought back to life and finds himself in the middle of a whole bunch of Very Bad People who want the thing that raised him from the dead. Lots of violence, lots of blood. Lots and lots of swearing.

And I'm here today not only to ask you to shell out a few bucks to grab a copy, which I appreciate and know that it's a lot to ask, but to buy a copy from an independent bookstore.

Now I'm not the type of person who looks at some gargantuan retailer like Amazon, points and shrieks, "EVIL!" Questionable policies aside, they're businesses, like any other business and I'm not here to say one's better than another. I shop there. I even buy books there. I have a Kindle, after all. And my book's available on it. Nook, too.

But there are some things that a neighborhood bookstore can do that a place like Amazon can't.

Amazon doesn't have a face the way a bookstore does. There is no one there who you can walk up to and say, "What's good?" and have them shove a copy of something incredible into your hands.

It can't be a part of a local community. You can't browse the shelves, get lost in the smell of paper and glue, feel the rough pages between your fingers as you decide whether to pick up your latest passion.

You can't wander over to the Literature section, and try to nonchalantly impress that cute redhead in glasses thumbing a copy of Dostoyevsky only to realize later that the book you grabbed was TWILIGHT. And that you held it upside-down.

There are, after all, no cute redheads in glasses waiting for you between the pages at Amazon.

You will never have stories to tell about shopping at Amazon the way you will shopping at a bookstore. You'll never meet people, make friends and have coffee with someone as you both try clicking BUY NOW for the same book at the same time. They are not there to meet.

And so I'm asking you to get out of that comfy chair, go downtown to your local bookstore and buy a copy. And if they don't have it, ask them to order it. It will take about as long to get it as you would with Prime shipping and it'll help keep them in the black.

And, failing that, then click here and buy a copy from them on-line.

You see, Amazon's not the only on-line game in town. Indie-Bound gives you the chance to buy from and support independent bookstores.

And, because I love this place and these people, I'd really, really dig it if you'd buy a copy of CITY OF THE LOST from Mysterious Galaxy.

Indie bookstores are part of a community's fabric in a way that Amazon can't be. They hold us together as readers and writers and the only way we can keep them from going the way of the dinosaur is to shop with them.

So be a pal and shop with them, would ya? Thanks.

Crimes Condoned by Policy

2012-01-02T03:39:00.001-05:00

2011 was the year of protest. We at DSD must be doing something right because nobody tried to occupy us. Either that, or our brain-washing techniques are just more effective. ;)

I'm typing this as 2011 is winding down, and what I feel at the end of this year is exhaustion. I paid next to no attention to Occupy Wall Street and whoever the 97 or 99% are and never once felt inclined to pick up a sign, although the Mid East stuff I watched with great interest, particularly as someone who's been to Tunisia and loves the country. Strike a match, see how far the fire goes.

No, it isn't until now that I wish there was a protest to join, but not for any of those things you read about people protesting over in the news.

So maybe I'll just ask the question here.

I'd like to know where to get the proper form to report concerns over a nine-year-old at our kids' school allegedly having sex with a ten-year-old are, and her alleged pregnancy.

You see, recently, in Baltimore, a family sued the school board. The reason? Their special needs child was bullied so much that the child had to be hospitalized. "The young boy was admitted to the hospital for 15 days to deal with the alleged bullying, his family said.

The student also told jurors that while attending two different elementary schools, he was beaten and choked until he passed out. He also said he was called names that he was not allowed to repeat. The boy's father claimed that school administrators were aware of the abuse."

Would it bother you if your child was choked and beaten at school?

It happened at two schools.

The family lost the case. Simplest explanation?

Administrators "never received a bullying harassment form from the family -- something the district administrator said every parent received and was told how to use."

Ummm....

Let me see. My child's been beaten. Passed out. Is terrorized and traumatized and afraid to go to school.

Hang on a second. Now, where is the proper form to report that?

I have a problem with this. A seriously huge blankin' problem.

I spent two years in BCPS. In one of my positions I had to file a minimum of 40 forms a day. I'm pretty well acquainted with relevant paperwork.

And I'd never even heard of this bullying form.

Never seen it.

Never.

Not in training. Not in in-service days. Not ever.

And at least one school I was at in the city is a good school. A really good school.

So, the girl-child recently came home, with quite a story to tell, about a classmate who's allegedly pregnant. She cited the source as the girl herself, who told her who she was having sex with, where, and prior to this there had been a discussion when the girl-child heard classmates talking about this girl 'sucking boys' wieners'.

We actually have addressed it to the school. Twice. First over the oral sex. Then over the alleged intercourse.

We've also addressed the repeated bruises girl-child's been coming home with, that she says are happening in P.E. class.

We've addressed the reports from girl-child, that she's been shoved to the ground at recess, and that she's constantly teased at school.

School's response?

Nothing. Been several weeks now.

Big, fat, nothing.

The bruising issue is now complicated by the fact that the ex admitted in court to rubbing the kids to make them look like they'd been hurt. It's one of the most bizarre, disturbed admissions I've ever heard, and I'm seriously concerned that without adult male punching bags to hit, smaller targets are now the focus.

But it doesn't change the other concerns about the school. So I'd like to know where the right forms are. The form for the bullying. The form for the oral sex. The form for student intercourse. The form for a nine-year-old allegedly being pregnant... Because it suggests something seriously inappropriate to me to even hear this story. I mean, it's detailed. I'm not sharing all the information I have - I'm preserving privacy. This isn't about dishing dirt.

It is, in part, about being really frustrated with our nine-year-old learning things about sex through sexual acts allegedly happening with elementary school students, things she didn't know about prior to this. Not from this house.

Which is what gives the entire story a ring of truth. Clearly, girl-child has started learning about oral sex and intercourse elsewhere.

And the source she's citing is school. And if this nine-year-old classmate of hers knows this much about sex, I have to wonder how. And whether there's something seriously wrong somewhere. It's not uncommon for abuse victims to become promiscuous as a way of minimizing their abuse.

Nine years old.

But the school conveniently hides behind bullshit policies like using the right form, or not using the right form. With girl-child's bruises and reports of being shoved down to the floor in P.E. and to the ground at recess, school policy seems to be to insist if they have a zero tolerance for bullying policy it means the alleged bullying can't be happening.

And when we ask where the teachers are, the kids relay what we've seen ourselves when we've been there. The teachers are standing together, talking. Not walking around, not dispersing, not seeing what's going on.

Oh, and I love this one. When kids try to tell about something, they're told not to tattle. Girl-child spent 2/3 of grade 1 repeating that to me every time she came home upset about being shoved and pushed down until I'd had enough. I explained to her that there's a difference between tattling and getting help to keep yourself safe. Tattling is about trying to get the other person in trouble. Telling because you're being hurt is about finding a way to keep yourself safe.

And YES, our children have a RIGHT to be safe.

Since nobody's been able to direct us to the right forms, and since nobody seems to give a damn about answering our concerns at all, and since we've taken it to the school board and they've done nothing, we sent it over to social services. I don't give a crap if I am "just" a stepparent. I'd step up for ANY child with sufficient concern. I'm a mandated reporter, which I take seriously. We've tried chain of command through the school to ease our concerns and been ignored. I'm done with them, and their bullshit. Now I'll take anything I know straight to social services every single time. While I may think the alleged pregnancy is probably just a story for attention, I can't deny the sexual knowledge the girl has, that she's now spreading to other nine-year-old kids at school. I have to wonder where that knowledge comes from, since sex ed isn't covered at this age. And there are other kids involved. There's the boy who's allegedly involved. If you were his parent (we aren't, but still) wouldn't you be concerned about stories going around about him having sex? Wouldn't you want those stories stopped? Or, even at this tender age, is that just a notch in a boy's belt?

Not in this house.

The problem is, when we send our kids to school, we expect them to be safe, and we feel we should be able to trust the school environment to be appropriate. I'm not being deliberately daft. I know the kids will learn things at school from peers. I know they'll have exposure to ideas and beliefs and things they might not hear about in this house. That's not always a bad thing.

But kids nine and ten, having sex, and sexual acts occurring at school.

I'd like the form to request that the school try to ensure that our nine-year-old won't walk in on kids having oral sex next time she needs to use the bathroom. Can someone help me find the right form, please? Please?

Now we hear that the grade 5 boys go around calling themselves rapists and say to girls that they're rapists and the boys think that's cool.

That's as sick as it gets. Worse still that kids 9 and 10 now know what it is to rape someone before they've even had sex ed.

The bullying is something I can't ignore. In my own case, it was so severe that I was transferred to a different school in a different town because school administrators felt they couldn't keep me safe. I was being beaten up by students who'd been expelled, who weren't even supposed to be on school property, and who I personally didn't even know.

Oh - and a little side-note, about BCPS. Here's one thing I can tell you. School board policy is to restrict the number of suspensions. Not because the suspensions aren't deserved, but because they want the numbers to look good. I have personally seen middle school kids go AWOL for hours, smash windows in classroom doors, beat other students with objects including belts and chairs, and try to stab a teacher with scissors, just to list a few of the incidents I observed. And reported.

Want to guess how many suspensions?

Not even a suspension for the student who threatened to come back with his gun and kill me and another staff member. Not even a disciplinary chat, or a social worker coming down to assess the situation and see if it was a credible threat. Not school police, either. When one of our students struck school police, they got arrested. When two boys pinned me down and struck me repeatedly, they got.... Nothing.

When I was a kid being bullied, my parents got involved. Social services got involved. And all that happened was that I was sent away, and those same girls racked up arrest after arrest when they didn't stop their behavior, and just found another target. It didn't stop the problem. It stopped my problem, but they just found another person to assault.

In my experience, I died a little. There are times I think about how I used to be, and then I think about how my personality changed, because of bullying and assaults and living in fear.

It isn't hard for me to imagine how hard it is for kids at some schools. I've seen first-hand how bad it is at some schools.

Our recent issues with our kids' school aren't the only concerns we've had. A substitute teacher struck a student in girl-child's class, and the school blew it off as a joke.

FYI, Maryland does not permit corporal punishment in schools. You have to go to Idaho or Colorado, or one of the other 19 states that permit corporal punishment OR YOU CAN'T HIT KIDS AT SCHOOL. Not your kid, not another kid, not ANY kid. It wasn't our kid that was hit, but it was our kid who came home, scared a teacher might hit them one day, too.

And then there was the classmate who brought a knife to school. And we aren't talking inner city schools here. We live in the county people move to in order to get away from city school issues like guns and knives and sex in the bathrooms and drugs in the halls.

Big fat joke on all the parents who think it's going to be so much better when they move to this county.

I'm sorry, but I have no respect at all for administration that has people hide behind policy as a way of doing nothing when children are being threatened. Oh, wait. No. I'm not sorry. I have nothing to apologize for because protecting our children, and every child I'm aware is having their safety threatened, is my moral obligation. I don't know what kind of piece-of-shit person can just ignore a safety threat to a child.

But anyone who wants to work full-time with kids who then doesn't give a crap about protecting them? That's a worthless human being in my book.

I wonder how many times we have to read about some kid pushed to the edge, who can't take it anymore and commits suicide? Or goes to school with a gun?

Bullying is a serious problem in schools.

But what people don't even consider is that by hiding behind policy and ignoring concerns about the safety and well-being of students in their care, some administrators are creating an environment where bullying can thrive. I know I have no confidence whatsoever in the administration at our kids' school to do anything to protect students there.

Thing is, in our experience, nobody's going to do anything. Yes, when a kid gets killed, or raped, or assaulted, and it goes public, we'll tell the media everything. Hand over the emails about the student hit in class, the knife, the sex and oral sex. But it's sickening to come to terms with the fact that we can't do anything to prevent more assaults and more abuse.

"I guess it's hard for some people who are so used to things the way they are, even if they're bad, to change and they kind of give up.

"When they do everybody kinda... they kinda lose."

It's sickening to have to accept the fact that we can't do anything to prevent more assaults and more abuse. I think of Tunisia, and the Middle East, and how one person stood up against a government, and literally changed the world.

I so badly want to believe that I could at least stand up for our kids and make things better for them.

For now, I guess we'll be taking a photo of the girl-child every time she arrives and departs, so we can document the bruising. I guess if it continues to be a problem, the only place left for us to go now is the police.

A long time ago, I used to hear things, read things, and wonder where the parents were. Didn't we all ask that after Columbine? How could those parents not know?

Now, I wonder how many times the parents did know, and did say something, and the real reason the tragedy wasn't averted was because the schools ignored all their concerns and did what some of them appear to be best at doing.

Nothing at all.

Hello, 2012

2011-12-30T03:00:00.001-05:00

By Russel D McLean

Next week will be 2012. The year in which the Mayan Calendar states: "don't forget to buy more stone so that calendar can continue past 2013". The year in which great and terrible things may or may not happen.

So gazing into my crystal ball what do I see?*

I see Jay Stringer wowing the world with his debut novel OLD GOLD, which very few people know is written in the style of a Choose Your Own Adventure Book where every ending is a bad one.

I see a certain Scottish DSDer being published in a foreign language for the first time. That foreign language possibly but not neccesarily being Esperanto.

I see Dave White imploding from all the geeky and conflicting Doctor Who knowledge pumped into his brain by myself and Stringer.

I see DSD becoming single handedly saving the publishing industry with three little words: Keep. Entertaining. Readers.

I see Wee Jimmy Krankie replaced Mara Rooney as Salander in the second David Fincher adaptation of The Girl Who Played With Fire. And wowing critics in a career changing performance (and here, especially for friend of DSD, Christa Faust, is the Krankie's Chart-defying single).

In all, I see another unpredictable year with only one certainty - we'll be here at Do Some Damage, with all our foubles and jokes and issues and sheer panache, entertaining and enlightening you day by day throughout 2012. And don't worry, unlike the Mayan Calendar, our one definitely goes all the way through to 2013...

In the meantime, when it comes, happy New Year!

*and more importantly, how accurately do I see it?

We Are All Whiners

2011-12-28T10:34:00.005-05:00

This blog post does not represent the opinion of anyone else on Do Some Damage but Dave White.

Shut up.

We--the writers and fans of books--all need to shut up. Big time.

Lately, there's been discussion about self-promotion on Twitter, Amazon boards, Facebook. Basically it comes down to this. Book writers are promoting their books on Twitter. Posting "I have a book out. Buy it! Here's a link." Apparently, it's constant*. Look at me. Look at me. Look at me.

Then came the next wave. All the fans of writers have now revolted and started complaining about self-promotion. Immediate unfollowing of self-promoters. Creating arbitrary rules about promotion. "You can only do it once a week." "Five, ten, fifteen percent of time should be self-promotion." Wahh, wahhh, wahhh**.

Shut up.

First off, fans of writing... you have to understand something. Writers need to be noticed. There's a lot of noise out there and they want you to know the name of their book. Wouldn't you be upset if a writer you loved came out with a book and you never heard about it? All writers have fans. Some have a lot of fans. Some have 2 fans***. The only way their fans are going to notice them is if they mention their book. And you know what? Not everyone is always on Twitter at the same time. So sometimes these writers have to post about it more than once! So, if you're a fan of writer and of writers, give people a break okay. Especially if their book has only been out a month or two.

Okay, now writers. Yeah, you guys. Over here. Listen up. You need to chill out a little bit. Talk to people. Come up with conversation. And also, be creative. Let's not shout it all out all the time and then whine when people complain. You're a writer. Creativity is your life. You have to come up with a way to get noticed that's different from the ways everyone else gets noticed. And I'm not talking contests. Everyone does contests. No one who enters a contest ever buys the product their in the contest for. They want free stuff. If they don't get the free stuff, they'll go try to get other free stuff. I don't know what the real answer is. But you need to lay-off the shouting a little bit. I'm not going to come up with some random arbitrary rule for you****, you need to find your comfort zone. But maybe ease off the gas a little bit.

(Or, how about this. Everyone on Twitter picks a different author to promote. If we all promote each other, it's not self-promotion. Then what? Oh, snap!)

See the problem isn't self-promotion... or complaining about self-promotion. Not really. It's about society. The society we live in. The society of protests.

You see, in real life, protesters are doing something good. They're protesting BIG ISSUES. And they're trying to make real change. Look at the Wisconsin Unions, or Egypt, or the Tea Party, or Occupy Wall Street. They've all created real change over big issues.

Us?

We're complaining about .... commercials. Sorry, but commercials are a way of life. You're always going to have them. And some of them are pretty damn annoying. But we've always been able to ignore them. And then the people who make the commercials have to try a different tact. When all we do is complain... complain about the little things...it takes away the power of complaining about the big things. About fighting against something.

But we see all these protests, and we need something to whine about so we take up this issue. OOOHHHHH, there's too much on my Twitter feed. OOOHHHHHH, no one's buying my book.

Gimme a break. All of us. We all need to take a breather. We allllllll--even me--should shut up.

Everyone needs to take a deep breath and just chill out. Yes, I know Freedom of Speech is a right. But by both clogging up Twitter with self-promotional commercials**** and complaining about those commercials, you are trying to prohibit free speech. Complainers want to shut people up, self-promos want Twitter to be nothing more than a commercial.

So, let's ease off. Everyone. Be positive. Have fun. Because you know what? Discussion on Twitter never lead us to real change in publishing. Their circular conversations, ones that end up in the same place****** and never solve anything.

So, let's all take a deep breath and stop the freaking whining*******.

*My Twitter feed did have some advertising in it, but I wouldn't say it was constant. And I follow a lot writers.

**I actually saw a lot more of this than I did the actual self-promotion because it got retweeted a lot. And people didn't just post it, they went on ten tweet rants about it.

***Hi mom! Hi dad!

****Unlike those people on the Amazon message boards. Whoa are they crazy. Anyone tries to do something nice for a writer and they flip the f out. And then high five when the writer slinks away, trying to be nice.

*****Funny. When the promotion comes from a publisher, I NEVER see anyone complain about it. There are never "Boyyyy, Little Brown tweets about their books too much."

******Yes, I understand the irony of me posting about this. But I wanted to say it in more than 140 characters. Then I'll shut up. Plus, I like reading comments.

*******Look at all these footnotes. I hate footnotes. I should stop the footnotes. BLEEECCCHHH. I wrote a whole blog post complaining about footnotes once. Ask Russel. But now...it's a truce. I won't complain about them.

A Review: Empire State by Adam Christopher

2011-12-27T03:00:00.001-05:00

I hope you've all enjoyed your time off from DSD and time with families celebrating the holidays.

While you were doing that, I've been reading. So, I need to line-up a quick review for you all.

When I first picked up EMPIRE STATE by Adam Christopher, it struck me as nod to Brian Bendis's wonderful POWERS series of graphic novels. Cops and robbers in the time of the super heroes.

And while you get that, this book becomes so much more.

It's a mash-up, but not like those GLEE mash-ups where the two songs feel force-fed together. It's all your favorite genres mixed up into one. Love noir and hardboiled detective stories? You'll get that here. Love super hero tales? Check this book out. There's even a little bit of Doctor Who-esque time travel in this book.

I wish I could tell you more about the plot. About the cool character doubling that goes on here. About the fissure. I wish I could sit around and type 1000 words just explaining the plot to you. But if I did that, you wouldn't have anything to read, and you'd be totally missing out.

EMPIRE STATE is a big, blockbuster action book. It has images that will stick with you. Earlier in the week, I tweeted that I kept picturing an HBO TV series trailer as I read this book. That's what you're going to get. There are hints of the fantastic film DARK CITY.

I keep telling you what is used to put this book together. But it's so much more than that... because the mash-up is organic. It works. It's worth it. READ THIS BOOK.

Pick this book up. It's available today. You can get it here. I urge you to do so. If these wild ideas keep running through Christopher's head and he gets them down on paper...he's going to be a superstar.

Happy Holidays!

2011-12-25T05:44:00.007-05:00

By all of Do Some Damage

Christmas Morning, eh? We think that for people of all belief's, there is something to enjoy in taking a day to think of each other. We hope you're all having a good day, full of food and warmth and those really crappy jokes that you get in crackers.

DSD has grown to be a pretty cool extended family, so in addition to those of us on the current roster, we'd also like to mention those who've taken a step off, McFet, Bryon & Mike.

Let's all take some time to think of our loved ones, of those that we have around us today, those that are farther away, and those that are no longer with us. Think of those less fortunate, and those who maybe don't get to experience a day of love and togetherness.

Also, think of Doctor Who.

And mince pies.

And think of 2012. No matter what place you're in now, that's a whole new year, with new promises and new chances at world domination.

We're going to take a few days off, kick back, and spend some time with family and booze. One of the ideas we'd been kicking around here at DSD was to sign off earlier in the week, with a little christmas message from each of us. In the event that we did that, Joelle had sent me a message to include. I think we should sign off for the holidays with that, and we'll see you round the corner in January;

Joelle wishes everyone stockings filled with books, and lots of laughter and happy moments with family and friends. May everyone have a wonderful Christmas/Boxing Day/Hanukkah/fill in the blank and the brightest of New Years.

Somewhere in Our Memories

2011-12-24T01:00:00.002-05:00

by
Scott D. Parker

I had an interesting thing happened to me this week. The new movie trailer for the film “The Hobbit” debuted. Excitedly, I watched the preview, and, for some reason, I was underwhelmed. It got me to worrying. Have I reached a certain age in my life or my sense of wonder has left me?

Eleven years ago when the first trailer for Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings landed on the internet, I could not contain my excitement or enthusiasm. Then, in December of 2001,The Fellowship of the Ring debuted and was such a gorgeous adaptation that it, frankly, exceeded my expectations. Moreover, coming as it did a mere three months after September 11, the movie took on a sort of reverential place in my consciousness. At the time, I had been a new father for only two months, so this film hit me on multiple levels. Finally, that it came out during the Christmas season, this film felt a part of the season. For three wonderful Christmases, the three films fused with the holiday.

So what to make of my somewhat tepid reaction to the new trailer? It's going to be released Christmas time in 2012 and, thankfully, not a summer blockbuster. I polled the members of my science fiction book club. One of them was happy to see that basically nothing had changed, that the new film is going to look exactly like the first three films even if The Hobbit was a prequel. Another member of the club tried to quantify my thoughts. Here is an excerpt of what he had to say:

Maybe we're reaching a saturation point at which something has to be more extraordinary to fire our neurons and release those endorphins. Is that cynicism? Maybe.

Maybe it's the equivalent of a palate change, like when you switch from drinking sweet white wines to dark, tannic reds. When 60% cacao just isn't enough.

We're all at the age that, to me, signals both a refining of what we like as well as having enough life experience to know that trying new things won't hurt us. We're more picky, while in the same breath looking for something that broadens our experience and gives it fresh perspective.

Unfortunately, it may only get more difficult. But that's why I like our book club and that's why I'll risk a potential movie letdown now and then. I don't think there will be anything much better in the film than what I've cultivated from my dozen or more reads of The Hobbit. But I would love Jackson to prove me wrong!

How does this relate to Christmas, you ask? Well, even though I grow older, I am never as young as I am in December of each year, and Christmas is the one thing that never truly diminishes. I watch the same specials (and the new ones) and still laugh at the same things (the Peanuts gang dancing; the Grinch making his costume; Daniel Stern and Joe Pesci getting smacked around among others). When December rolls around, I roll back in years, but I am always aware of where I am.

I am an adult, obviously, so some of the magic of the time is gone (for I am one of the magicians). Yes, there are times in this past month (and just about every December) when melancholy seeps into me as I remember Christmases past. It's during these times when I break out "Where are you Christmas?" (Faith Hill), "River," (Robert Downey), "Somewhere in My Memory" (Home Alone soundtrack), and "2000 miles" (Coldplay). While it may be easy to slip into remorse and depression, I never do. Those past yuletide festivities are a part of me and have made me who I am.

In 1851, Charles Dickens wrote an essay titled "What Christmas Is As We Grow Older," and a favorite passage is this:

Therefore, as we grow older, let us be more thankful that the circle of our Christmas associations and of the lessons they bring, expands! Let us welcome everyone of them, and summoned them to take their places by the Christmas hearth.

All my life experiences, all my past Christmases, belong on the hearth of my memory. Too often, I think we adults try so hard to have or create the "perfect" Christmas that we forget to just live with the season. It only comes once a year and it's best--even when faced with mall crowds, traffic, sold out gifts, and parties that didn't go off exactly as we wanted them to--that there is still magic in the air. We just have to realize that, sometimes, that magic needs a little kindling to spark again. Once it does, even if it's for a brief time in a year, it's great to sit back, watch the fire in our own personal hearths, and just enjoy and be thankful for all that we have, including the memories of past Christmases.

I want thank all of y'all for another great year writing for Do Some Damage. I appreciate all my fellow writers and I am thankful for you, the readers of this blog. Without y'all, we're just spouting text into the ether. Without you, this little experiment would be a monologue (x8) rather than a dialogue. And it's in dialogue that we learn from each other.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all.

Remembering Joseph Blanco

2011-12-23T09:23:00.003-05:00

Losing a loved one is never easy, but it is especially horrific around the holidays.

As you may have heard, a member of our family lost a member of her family yesterday.

Please remember the family of Joelle Charbonneau and her husband, Andy Blanco, as they lost Andy's father, Joseph Blanco.

Along with many other folks, the ever-thoughtful Julie Summerell wanted to know how we could help.

I asked Joelle and this was her suggestion:

Since my father-in-law was in charge of PADS - a organization that helps feed and lend shelter to the homeless- we are having donations sent to the specific PADS group Joe worked with.

The church is the Unitarian Universalist Community of Woodstock PADS
ATTN: Dave Dreyer
129 North st.
Woodstock, IL 60098

In the name of Joseph Blanco.
----

I think she'd join me in adding this -- hug your loved ones a little extra this Christmas.

Godspeed, Mr. Blanco.

"Who's Got a Beard that's long and white?"

2011-12-23T03:00:00.001-05:00

By Russel D McLean

I don't know about you, but I'm having a busy week of it. Given the nature of my day job, I've been a little tired upon returning home at nights. But its almost over. Its a lot of work for one day a year, but for me its never been about the gifts so much as its been about the family. And the music.

Chritmas at Casa McLean isn't about the usual Chrimbo tunes. We like to find the odd and the unusual. From Dad's obsession with redneck Christmas music to the whole family's recently discovered adoration of Bob Dylan's unfairly maligned Christmas album - here's Bob with Santa Claus (which was apparently filmed at Casa McLean judging by that party):

And of course we also have to bring in the funk. And who says Christmas more than James Brown?

James Brown - Santa Claus, go Straight to the Ghetto

To bring it down, we recently discovered that Dave Brubeck has an amazing collection of Christmas tunes. Like this - -Dave Brubeck - Walking in a Winter Wonderland

And then there's these guys. We're not a particularly religious family. For us, this time of year is about spending time with each other. But if you're going to bring a bit of gospel to your Christmas, you really can't do any better than these guys: Blind Boys of Alabama fear Tom Waits - Go, Tell it on the Mountain

Yes, today's post was a little lazy; a bunch of videos with a vague theme. But I just wanted to wish you all on behalf of Do Some Damage a happy holiday season, whatever you're doing with yourselves and however you choose to spend it. Take care and I'll see you on the other side.

Russel

*Answer - not Russel. At least not for a few years.

Book Deal! Book Deal!

2011-12-22T04:42:00.004-05:00

By Jay Stringer

First off, I wouldn't be me if I didn't mention Joe Strummer. He passed away 9 years ago today, and I always take a little time on this day each year to play some of his music really loud. If you don't have his last two albums, then you're missing something special.

Secondly...Oh yeah, hey, I got a book deal.

Well, I say I got a book deal. What I actually did, see, is write a book. My agent got a book deal. It's a three book contract from the cool people over at Thomas & Mercer, and I'm really looking forward to working with them. The deal will see the publication of the first Eoin Miller novel, OLD GOLD, and it's two follow-ups.

Here's how my agent tells me to pitch the story in one line;

Half-gypsy ex-cop Eoin Miller is caught between two competing criminal families in Great Britain's Black Country when he's framed for the murder of a mysterious young woman he met only the night before.

I'm not very good at pitches, truth be told. If I could pitch a story that well in one line, I wouldn't have written it as a book.That's a skill I'll need to improve on. On my own neglected website I describe the story like this;

It’s pulp fiction, first and foremost, but it will sneak in some social fiction if you look the other way. It tells of a half-gypsy gangland detective. If you’re a businessman looking to find a statue of a falcon or a family looking for a missing toddler, you need not apply to Eoin Miller. If you’re a drug lord looking for a missing stash, or an illegal immigrant looking to stop a rapist, then he might be the man for you. He is very happy ignoring the world, his friends and his family. He’s doing a very nice job of learning to bury his conscience. He will take your money and find something you’ve lost, and then he will walk away. But when a woman is murdered in his house, he’s forced to make some big choices. He has to try and rediscover the difference between right and wrong, and he is badly out of practice.

I have some big plans for Miller over the course of his story arc, and I'm looking forward to getting back into his head and bringing the stories out to you.

One of the things we set out to do on DSD was to "pull back the curtain," and show you the other side of the publishing game. Joelle's been giving some interesting insights into her rise to world domination since she joined, (hey, you heard about her two new deals, right? FOUR BOOKS people, FOUR BOOKS.) I'm going to try and hold myself to showing things along the way about my own process.

First up, the deal and announcement. It's a strange process, and a stranger feeling. You know it's going on, of course. You talk to your agent as she talks to the folks making an offer. And you're sworn to not tell anyone, which means you only tell a few people. Then the deal is done, and you know it's done, and part of your brain is telling you, "Hey, it's cool. You're gonna be published. You're cool with this. Look how cool you are, not freaking out."

But then the deal get's announced. And for some reason, your agent telling the world about the deal makes it more real than when she told you, and you go a little mental. And so does twitter. And facebook. And your email inbox.

So thanks to everyone who sent me kind messages over the past few days. Thanks to the DSD crew for almost 3 years of alternating between, "hey, you'll get a deal, don't sweat," and "sit your ass back in that chair and write a better version." Thanks to my wife for keeping me sane thus far. And thanks to super agent Stacia Decker (and the DMLA) for getting my foot in the door.

The foot is in. The thing about the publishing industry, from my limited point of view so far, is that every step is the hardest step. Each corner you turn is "where the hard work really starts." The hardest part is writing the first story. Then it's getting an agent. Then it's getting a publisher. So now, once again, the hard work is about to start for me. I hope you guys will enjoy reading the occasional blog about how I work at getting through the next stage.

And, of course, tell everyone you've ever met to buy the book.

Happy holidays, folks!

Let Me Help You Shop

2011-12-21T03:00:00.008-05:00

By Steve Weddle

OK. Last week I pointed you to some good books from the year. In case you need some more shopping hints, here you go.

VOLT by Alan Heathcock

I really dug this one. The story "Lazarus" is my favorite, but they're all top-shelf pieces.

In VOLT, the work of a writer who’s hell-bent on wrenching out whatever beauty this savage world has to offer, Heathcock’s tales of lives set afire light up the sky like signal flares touched off in a moment of desperation. -- from Amazon.com

Buy VOLT

ONCE UPON A RIVER from Bonnie Jo Campbell

From the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist—an odyssey of a novel about a girl's search for love and identity.

Bonnie Jo Campbell has created an unforgettable heroine in sixteen-year-old Margo Crane, a beauty whose unflinching gaze and uncanny ability with a rifle have not made her life any easier. After the violent death of her father, in which she is complicit, Margo takes to the Stark River in her boat, with only a few supplies and a biography of Annie Oakley, in search of her vanished mother. But the river, Margo's childhood paradise, is a dangerous place for a young woman traveling alone, and she must be strong to survive, using her knowledge of the natural world and her ability to look unsparingly into the hearts of those around her. Her river odyssey through rural Michigan becomes a defining journey, one that leads her beyond self-preservation and to the decision of what price she is willing to pay for her choices. -- from Amazon.com

The first BJC I read was WOMEN AND OTHER ANIMALS, which opens with a great story about an escaped tiger at the circus. Heck, you can't go wrong with Bonnie Jo Campbell's work. Get the new one or get the old ones.

And if you haven't already, go get yourself some SOUTHERN GODS by John Hornor Jacobs. I had my say about it here.

We ended last year over at the DSD Book Club talking about Benjamin Whitmer's fantastic PIKE.

If you haven't read that, you need to get to it. Here

Whether you have or haven't, Whitmer has a new one coming out next year -- the story of Charlie Louvin. Pre-order that one here. More from Mr. Whitmer himself here.

Here's the chat I had with Mr. Whitmer about Pike.

And here's one more "rural noir" offering to get you going: CRIMES IN SOUTHERN INDIANA by Frank Bill. I talked to him about writing here.

Don't forget to pre-order Joelle's upcoming MURDER FOR CHOIR. And speaking of pre-orders: Holm, Davidson, Blackmoore, Christopher, Laukkanen, Wendig. Who else you got?

--

Speaking of books you should read/own/gift -- the Book Group, we also covered Lynn Kostoff's LATE RAIN, Duane Swierczynski's FUN AND GAMES, and Dennis Tafoya's WOLVES.

Oh, and I talked to Lynn Kostoff about LATE RAIN here.

If you'd like to see the podcasts continue next year, let us know.

If you'd like to see the Book Group continue, let us know.
--

PS Check out WILD BILL from Dana King.

Will Hickox is a decorated FBI veteran with a legendary ability to cultivate informants, much closer to retirement than to the days when he earned the nickname “Wild Bill.” Operation Fallout should cut the head off of the Chicago mob and provide a fitting capstone to his career. When Outfit boss Gianni Bevilacqua dies and the resulting war places Fallout in jeopardy, Hickox does what he can to save it, and his retirement plans with his lover, Madeline Kilmak.

Wild Bill examines the stresses of Operation Fallout from the law enforcement, criminal, and personal perspectives, as Will and his peers fight to keep the investigation afloat amid the power struggle between Gianni’s son and elder statesman Frank Ferraro. Torn between wanting closure to the investigation and starting his retirement, Hickox weighs the dangers of involving himself and Operation Fallout in the war, blurring the line he walks with his informants. Wild Bill

Best Books and Beers 2011

2011-12-20T03:00:00.000-05:00

Okay, just like everyone else, I have Christmas stuff I gotta do. So this is gonna be short and to the point. I'm picking the two best books I read this year and the two best beers.

Here we go:

BOOKS:

AMERICAN GODS by Neil Gaiman: Not published in 2011. In fact, it's the tenth anniversary. I stumbled upon this book because of Gaiman's brilliant episode of Doctor Who this year. But American Gods is more than a Doctor Who episode. It's one of the top 5 books I've ever read. A stunning, sprawling "realistic" fantasy novel (as if those two words make sense in conjunction with one another)... it is the story of American immigration... and what if those immigrants all brought their Gods with them. And those Gods wanted to start a war. Oh yes, it is awesome.

CHOKE ON YOUR LIES by Anthony Neil Smith: Quite simply the funniest, dirtiest, darkest, and most easily read book this year. A twist on the Nero Wolfe novels and also a scathing take on University life. Compelling and wonderful, it was the best book published this year. And only 99 cents. Please buy it, because I want a sequel. Now.

BEST BEERS 2011:

Schlafly AIPA: Bitter when it needs to be, smooth at the beginning and the best IPA I've ever had. A great summer beer... I tried tracking this beer down all year and was only able to find it in one restaurant. Just great tasting and fantastic. If you can find it, you're very, very lucky.

Keegan Ale's Mother's Milk: A stout so smooth and drinkable. Tastes like chocolate milk. If you don't like beer, this is a starter beer for you. And if you like stouts, but are looking for something to drink more than just one of... try this one out. Great stuff.

Now, I want your best books and BEST BEERS in the comments.

The Plumbing of Genre, RIP Russell Hoban and other miscellany

2011-12-19T10:30:00.005-05:00

My thoughts are all over the place this week so here are some things that have been on my mind. Maybe they will get expanded on later maybe not.

1) The Wire has ruined the police procedural on TV for me. Whether The Wire is realistic or not isn't the point but it achieved a level of verisimilitude that other cop shows don't. David Simon once said “fuck the average reader” and what The Wire demands of the viewer bears this philosophy out. That's because, if you look under the hood, these other cop shows, ostensibly set in the real world, are actually fantasies.

Some say that genre is an artificial construct created my marketing departments. Maybe.

Here's what I know. The surface genre of a story isn't always readily apparent.

I watch these other cop shows and gnash my teeth and rend my garments and laugh like they are sitcoms every time:

-they break a suspect in the box in like 30 seconds
-they are able to use a missing persons cell phone data to determine their location without having to get a warrant for that info
-they never show the process of getting a warrant before taking a door
-they make The Promise. You know, “I promise we'll get the guy who did this”, Horatio intoned gruffly while standing sideways before putting his sunglasses on and walking away. I hate The Promise. I'm thinking about editing an anthology called The Promise where every story has a cop making The Promise before it all goes horribly wrong.
-a suspect, especially affluent ones, never lawyer up

The Wire, at it's core, is a realistic show. The CSI's and other procedural are, at their cores, fantasies. It's not as outlandish a premise as you might initially think if you take the time to look under the hood of the story.

There's more to say so I'm going to leave two exhibits as food for thought.

Exhibit A: A paragraph that Chuck Klosterman wrote:

"Take, for example, Road House. This is a movie I love. But I don't love it because it's bad; I love it because it's interesting. Outside the genre of sci-fi, I can't think of any film less plausible than Road House. Every element of the story is wholly preposterous: the idea of Swayze being a nationally famous bouncer (with a degree in philosophy), the concept of such a superviolent bar having such an attractive clientele, the likelihood of a tiny Kansas town having such a sophisticated hospital, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Every single scene includes at least one detail that could never happen in real life. So does that make Road House bad? No. It makes Road House perfect. Because Road House exists in a parallel reality that is more fanciful (and more watchable) than The Lord of the Rings. The characters in Road House live within the mythology of rural legend while grappling with exaggerated moral dilemmas and neoclassical archetypes. I don't feel guilty for liking any of that. Road House also includes a monster truck. I don't feel guilty for liking that, either."

Exhibit B: a fascinating scan of an article from New Frontiers magazine from 1959 called "Can We Live Without Fantasy Fiction"? that illustrates that fantasy then is not the same as fantasy now.

2)It's been a hell of a week for deaths. Russell Hoban, one of my favorite writers, died at the age of 86. Hoban was the rare writer that you could grow with and read for your entire life. He was the author of the famous Francis the Badger children's books. He penned the classic book for older children (and adults) The Mouse and His Child, as moving and deep a book as has ever been written. He then went on to write novels for adults including Turtle Island and Riddly Walker. He stayed prolific, playful and imaginative until the end and we are now less for not having him with us.

3)I think this video is a great example of an unreliable narrator in a first person POV story

4)When we talk about book pricing and the changing landscape of of the publishing industry we often do so while in a bubble. We rarely take into account data and opinions from sources as far ranging as possible. With how inter-connected things are the conversation is lesser for not doing so. We should take into account things like this:

“It’s well established that when housing prices go up people feel richer and spend more: the rule of thumb is that they spend between five and seven per cent of the increase in housing wealth. But when housing prices go down people cut their spending by the same amount in response. Between 2006 and 2011, American homeowners saw the value of their homes drop by seven trillion dollars or so. That means that—even if consumers had no debt at all—we’d expect a dropoff in consumption of about four hundred billion dollars.”

That's a staggering figure that will and has affected discretionary spending.

5)And just because:

But though similar disasters, however little bruited ashore, were by no means unusual in the fishery; yet, in most instances, such seemed the White Whale's infernal aforethought of ferocity, that every dismembering or death that he caused, was not wholly regarded as having been inflicted by an unintelligent agent.

Currently reading: Already Gone by John Rector, Osama by Lavie Tidhar, Drawing Dead by JJ DeCeglie.

Currently listening: Amy Winehouse and Peter Tosh.

Write what you want to write

2011-12-18T02:00:00.003-05:00

by: Joelle Charbonneau

Well, this was kind of an exciting week. Minotaur Books offered me a contract on SKATING UNDER THE WIRE, book 4 of the Rebecca Robbins mystery series. YAY! I love writing Rebecca and I am excited to get to work on her newest adventure that will be published in the Fall of 2013.

I also had one other piece of good news. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has bought my 3 book GRADUATION DAY young adult series. The first book, THE TESTING, will be published in 2013 as the lead Fall (although they are now thinking it might be Spring) title with the other books to follow in 2014 and 2015. To say I’m stunned would be an understatement. My new editor and the entire Houghton Mifflin Harcourt team is incredibly excited about the series. Their enthusiasm is both thrilling and humbling.

The story is darker than my mysteries and while when I conceived the story I was fascinated by the concept, I admit that I wasn’t sure that A) I could effectively do the world building required for the story or B) my agent would like the story or the voice it was told in. But the decision to write or not write the story was tipped in one direction because of these words:

Write what you want to write.

Last May, I was having a phone chat with my agent. During the conversation, I asked her what project I should write next. I had two books to write on my contract for my new show choir series. The deadline for book 2 wasn’t for over a year, but I assumed that my agent would want me to write those books first before writing anything else. Still, I mentioned to her I had an idea for this Young Adult book…. I waited for her to tell me to keep focused or that she didn’t really rep YA. Instead, she said that sounds really cool. You should write that. I must have sounded surprised because her next response was – WRITE WHAT YOU WANT TO WRITE.

Those words had a profound impact on me and not just because I have received the kind of contract I never dared dream of. Those words themselves were freeing.

So often we hear that authors need to stick to their brand. That authors need to stick to the genre that is working for us. Stick to the voice and the stories we have an audience for. But instead, I was told to write the story in my head and see where that story would take me.

Now, I’m a pretty fast writer. I tend to write a mostly clean draft of a manuscript in about 3 months. Had it not been for that fact, my agent might have had different advice for me. She might have suggested that I write those next contracted novels and wait to write the other idea until after they were completed. Because this is a business and there are obligations I have promised to meet. But she knows me and thus told me to write the story I really wanted at that moment to tell. Let me tell you, I am beyond grateful I followed her advice.

So, I guess the point of this whole story is this—don’t let anyone tell you that you “the author” are locked into doing just one thing. Being a writer means day in and day out we get to create. There are no limits to the stories we can tell. The most important thing we can do as authors is write the story we are passionate about. That passion is why we do what we do. And we are lucky we get to follow that passion and see where it leads us.

In case you are curious - here is the PW copy about THE TESTING - 16-year-old Cia is chosen by her government to undergo The Testing, which determines whether she gets to proceed to The University. The University is for the country's best and brightest teens; during The Testing, extreme psychological and physical trials pit the teens against one another to determine who has what it takes to become a leader.

When Charles Dickens Met Batman

2011-12-17T01:00:00.002-05:00

by
Scott D. Parker

To me, there is freedom within a framework.

Of all the discussions about writing, the one that gets lots of attention is the outline vs. no outline debate. For those who writing without the safety of an outline love the freedom to go wherever. The Outliner group prefers the comfy confines of an outline, knowing exactly how the story will end before they start. As y'all know, I'm an outliner.

What does this have to do with Batman and Boz? Nothing less than the tale of Ebenezer Scrooge. Here in this Christmas season, all the numerous adaptations of Dickens' wonderful ghost story are presented in movie theaters, stages, and our televisions. We all have our favorites whether its with the Muppets, Bill Murray, the Grinch, Jim Carrey, Mickey Mouse, Patrick Stewart, or any of the others out there. The story is the same, no matter the version: Scrooge is visited by Christmas spirits and sees the true meaning of the holiday. From the outset, you know the story. Yet, like a romantic comedy, it's the journey that's the most fun part.

How does this relate to Batman? Well, this year, Lee Bermejo wrote and illustrated Batman: Noel, a take on the Dickens story with the trappings of the Dark Knight. Now, if you are like me, the first thing you do, upon hearing of the concept, is to start thinking about the characters and who would be cast as whom. It's giving nothing away to state that Batman himself is Scrooge. The fun is where the other characters from the DC Universe show up. And, I have to say, Bermejo must have had a lot of fun writing this tale. And have you see his gorgeous art and its hyper-stylized realism?

The thing is that when a writer crafts a new take on A Christmas Carol, that writer works within an outline. But just look at the freedom Bermejo had working with this outline. It's the same story, but a completely new take. Heck, I'm even using A Christmas Carol to frame and craft a new Calvin Carter mystery. But, then again, I'm an outline guy anyway.

So, what are you favorite versions of A Christmas Carol? Having seen the production--and additions--from Houston Alley Theater, it is now tops in my book. I also really enjoy Patrick Stewart's one-man version.

Tweet of the Week:

I don’t always drink flavored lattes, but when I do, they’re seasonal two-pump gingerbread lattes.

--Nathan Fillion

Ever since October started, I've been having numerous pumpkin spice lattes from Starbucks. Haven't given the g-bread a taste. Well, there's today....

Album of the Week: Quatuor Ebene's Fiction. After mentioning them a couple weeks back and then, having only heard one song and a few snippets at the time, I bought the album. Wow. This is a modern string quartet who realizes that good songs come not only from the masters but from Dick Dale, Charlie Chaplin, and Bruce Springsteen. Their gorgeous sound resonates in unique ways, both when they cover popular songs or less well-know pieces. Get this: they cover the Beatles' "Come Together" and, while its true you realize Mozart could not have written it, you also realize how good the song is in a completely different format. Give it a listen and you'll likely be surprised.

Yes, its the Obligatory top 10 of the year post...

2011-12-16T03:00:00.002-05:00

By Russel D McLean

Still time to enter Russel’s competition – and did you know that for the rest of this month his short story e-collection THE DEATH OF RONNIE SWEETS (and other stories) is only 99c US and 86p UK? Available for Kindle (US and UK) and for other e-readers. He also asks that you please forgive this moment of blatant self-promotion.

And so Christmas time approaches. One more week to go. Whaddaya mean you ain’t gone Christmas shopping? What, you were waiting for my recommendations of books to go buy? Apart from my own? (available from all good booksellers both physical and digital, you know - - and every copy sold helps me keep The Literary Critic in the style to which she is accustomed). But of course, I’m not the only starving author out there and the following is a list of ten books from the last year I think you really need to buy. Either for yourself, or as a gift for someone you know who’s really going to appreciate a damn good read; especially one with the McLean seal of approval.

1) The End of Everything by Megan Abbott – My vote for book of the year, in part because it hit me completely from left field. I was already in love with Abbott’s work, but what she does here is incredible. The book is told entirely from the perspective of a thirteen year old girl, and it pulls no punches in its depiction of a world that is all appearance and snakes beneath the skin. The prose unfolds in a dream-like fashion, and the soft-focus of a character looking back on themselves and their lives hides ugly, unsettling truths. The cover – on both sides of the Atlantic – makes the book look like literary women’s fiction, which in a sense it is. But it is also one of the purest, most captivating and most disturbing books you’ll have read this year regardless of your genre. Abbott has excelled herself and set a high bar for other authors to reach.

2) A Drop of the Hard Stuff by Lawrence Block – Block’s back, baby. And so is Matt Scudder. This one rewinds to the eighties where Matt was first coming to terms with being an alcoholic. As such, it is stepped in atmosphere and a sense of moving forward. Matt is at his most interesting when he teeters on the edge, and here we find him a fascinating and volatile version of the man we’ve come to know. The book is as much about addiction as it is about murder, and a hell of a reminder as to why Matt Scudder is one of the most interesting and fascinating of the post-Archer PIs.

3) Fun and Games & Hell and Gone by Duane Swierczynksi – Okay, so its two books in this entry, but they are so closely connected I count them as one. Swierczynski is the king of the action novel. His plots are preposterous, his body count high and his adrenaline mainlined. He’s a pulp prince for the new millennium and one of the very few writers who can pace his action in prose to the point where you’re literally sweating with exertion along with his characters. Charlie Hardie is the kind of action hero who’s going to be mentioned in the same breath as John McLean.

4) Already Gone by John Rector – Rector follows up his brilliant THE COLD KISS with an equally terrifying slice of mystery, as we follow one man trying to atone for who he used to be as he becomes convinced that the past is finally catching up. But nothing is as it seems and this is one of a very few twist-thrillers where you really find yourself blindsided by the revelations.

5) Southern Gods by John Hornor Jacobs – I love a good horror novel, but I’m not a big Lovecraft fan. However, Jacobs takes some of Lovecraft’s legacy and makes it his own in this sprawling, brilliant and unsettlingly fun novel set in the deep south during the 1950’s. A great feel for the period and some brilliantly realised moments of supernatural terror make this one a winner.

6) Choke Hold by Christa Faust – Hands down the most fun I’ve had a (former) porn star this year. Angel Dare is back in this sequel to Money Shot, and somehow she’s even more kick-ass than before. The writing is lean and mean and there’s a hell of a lot more going on beneath the surface than you might realise at first. Also, it’s a slam-bang adventure with some real standout set pieces. Just… perfection.

7) Dove Season by Johnny Shaw – Kinda controversial debut given it came from Amazon’s publishing arm (at least one bookstore refused to stock it) but whatever your feelings about the giant retailer and their reach, there’s no denying that this is one hell of a debut – great sense of location and a lot of ambition. It’s a game of two halves, with the second finding the action in an unstoppable freefall that’s removed from the sedate pace that came before, but Shaw earns every moment and shows a real promise for the future.

8) Truth Lies Bleeding by Tony Black – Great start to a new series by Black. Its got more mainstream appeal than the Dury novels, considering the lead’s a copper, but of course Black’s got far more than yer standard procedural here. It’s a novel that revels in the shadows, leavened by a profound sense of dark humour that runs softly through the narrative. It’s the novel that should start to bring Black to the attention of a wider audience. And on top of that, it’s a natural progression to everything he’s done so far. Bravo, Black. Bravo.

9) Moriarty: The Hound of the D’ubervilles by Kim Newman – It’s not perfect (a little overlong in places, but then that might be part of the joke) but Newman’s tongue in cheek chronicling of the adventures of Sherlock Holmes’s nemesis hits all the right spots with some great gags and very nice appropriating of contemporary literature that make for a very fun read.

10) FIFTH VICTIM by Zoe Sharp – My impatience with the action novel is often quite severe, so its unusual that two should appear on my top ten list. Fifth Victim is more serious in its approach to action than Swierczynski’s homage to insanity mentioned earlier, but it is also one of the most successful and engaging thrillers I’ve read all year. Charlie Fox is – dare I say it – so much more interesting and developed than Lee Child’s Jack Reacher, and while a lesser writer might have made her a typical action hero in drag, Sharp manages to make Fox into a fascinating and fully rounded character. In other words, this is a woman who can truly kick ass. But it’s the emotional development that really marks out Sharp and Fox, and make FIFTH VICTIM a truly brilliant action novel.

So there we are. My top 10 reads of the year. Sure, they’re mostly crime novels, but they’re also a rich and varied representation of the talent available within the genre. So my advice to you is to hurry out to your preferred retailer and stock up. After all, if you do get snowed in this Christmas you’re going to want some damn good reads to keep you occupied…

Same Bat Time, Same Bat Channel

2011-12-15T05:57:00.006-05:00

By Jay Stringer

If this has been the year of anything, it's been the year of Mr Dave White discovering Doctor Who. In many ways, I think that's also led to a new level of enjoyment for Mr Russel D McLean and my own self. It's been an added dimension, not only do we get to look forward to the episodes, to have our own theories, but we also discuss them in some pretty epic chain emails with Dave. The show sometimes ends on cliffhangers, that can last for months, and the three of us get to fill that gap with wild guesses. Increasingly over the last year, there have been 'canon' (a useless term in Who, but bear with me) clips cropping up in other media; Comic Relief, viral marketing, the Who website. The show has been doing what a show of it's kind would appear to need to, it's been throwing a lot of sci fi plates in the air.

Dave sent me an interesting link yesterday. It showed quotes from Moffat, originally from an interview in Doctor Who Magazine, that he's not planning any two-parters next year. Here's one bit; "I want to be able to say, every week, we’ve got a big standalone blockbuster, and then a trailer that makes it look like nothing compared to what’s going to happen next week! That’s the form for next year."

Now, look, I'm not going to get into second guessing Mr Moffat. He's a witty and inventive (if sometimes overly clever and emotionally shallow) writer, and most of the high points of modern who have come from his pen. Fingers. Keyboard. Whatever.

(I should have just gone with 'brain', right?)

He's also known to lie from time to time. In a good way. He lies in a way that sets up the audience for a pleasant surprise. So I'm translating "no two parters next year," into, "let's wait and see how many times he breaks that rule." No big deal.

He's also a bit of a master (heehee) at writing stand alone episodes that feel like two-parters. The Eleventh Hour and The Beast Below were two separate stories, but, connected by the larger story and coming one after the other, they worked very well as a subtle two-parter. So again, no big deal. Chances are he'll come up with something fun.

But it did get my brain whirring about cliffhangers and serialised stories. My first reaction was to think he was off the money. After all, so many of the TV shows we rave about in the staff room here at DSD towers are extremely long form storytelling. Whole seasons that are one long story.

I wonder if genre plays a part in this. For crime, horror or straight up drama, maybe our brains will be patient. For Who -which covers a lot of ground but really belongs in it;s own genre marked 'fun.'- is there a bit of the brain than loses track if it has to wait? I don't know. For me, growing up with old Who and then enjoying some of the modern stuff, the show needs cliffhangers. And more than that, I like stories that have them. I try and throw them in at the end of chapters, whether it's a physical beat or an emotional one.

But sometimes the cliff hanger can get in the way. Think of the old Batman TV show. The fun was in seeing what silly trap he could get into, then tuning in to the next episode to see how he got out of it. The 20-or-so minutes between those sometimes fade into bland memories.

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK is a love letter to an era of cliff-hangers, yet the film doesn't end on one. The story never leaves you guessing for two long about how Indy gets out of the scrape, because there's not week's wait. And that film doesn't exactly suffer for it. And I find that if comic-book writers use the cliff-hanger technique too often, I start to lose interest in the book, it becomes formulaic.

Moffat states that the second instalments present modern problems; the viewing figures go down, the press attention goes down, the 'coming next' trailers are harder to do. I wonder if there's something in that, I wonder if, as with the old Batman show, cliff-hangers create a novelty, but that novelty then gets in the way of story? Shows like THE WIRE were long form story telling, but they actually very rarely used cliff-hangers. Each episode, for the most part, was a self contained chapter in a larger story, with a beginning, middle and end.

So, colour me confused. I'm not too worried about WHO. It's a show that needs to take a look at itself every year and figure out something new, that's how it keeps afloat. But overall I'm wondering about some of these things. I'd been taking it for granted that the jump into new media would create a new golden age of cliff-hangers. But maybe not. Maybe all it means is that people will want more sophisticated self contained stories, bite sized chunks that can either stand alone or work as part of a larger story.

This is exactly the kind of thing that John Mcfet used to speculate about. So he's probably sat somewhere, in his hollowed out Canadian volcano, stroking a white cat and laughing. Maybe you should tune in next week to see if it's true.

The Return of Oscar Martello

2011-12-14T03:00:00.019-05:00

By Steve Weddle

First, here are some Christmas present ideas for that reader you know:

THE CHAOS WE KNOW by Keith Rawson

"These aren't stories (The Chaos We Know), these are slivers of a blasted world which Rawson gleefully embeds in your mind, and which won’t be dislodged by bourbon, ritual scarification, or even the police procedural -- thank God. And thank God, too, for Rawson, who has the kind of talent to leave you mutilated and breathless." -- Benjamin Whitmer, author of Pike

“The Chaos We Know is a pulp-fueled debut w/ dopers, cops, husbands and wives. boyfriends & girlfriends, psychos & sadists, sand-storming through the potholes & shithouses of Arizona, leaving barnacles of the self centered, the down trodden’ & the surviving. Keith Rawson is the new garbage-tongued satirist of filth, deviance & violence for the new underclass.” -- Frank Bill, author of Crimes in Southern Indiana and Donnybrook

MONKEY JUSTICE by Patti Abbott

"Patricia Abbott proves that there are many shades of noir as she expertly layers her stories with melancholy, loss and the frailness of the human psyche" – Dave Zeltserman, author of Pariah

“Patti Abbott is a master when it comes to short stories.” -- Anne Frasier, author of Pale Immortal and The Orchard (as Theresa Weir)

“In this collection of short contemporary noir fiction, Patti Abbott distinguishes herself as an extraordinary storyteller of the dark recesses of the human heart. Abbott’s characters hit hard, fight dirty, and seek a brand of hardscrabble justice that will leave you both wincing and wishing for more.” – Sophie Littlefield, author of a Bad Day for Sorry

OFF THE RECORD edited by Luca Veste

‘Hitmen, cons, winos, bag snatchers, killers and psychos, the wronged, the vengeful and the damned, all darken the pages off this superior crime anthology. Off The Record is seriously cool.’ - Howard Linskey, Author of The Drop, named in The Times best reads of 2011

37 talented writers plus Steve Weddle, 38 short stories based on classic song titles...

The best writers from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, come together to produce an anthology of short stories, with all proceeds being donated to two Children's Literacy charities. In the UK, National Literacy Trust. In the US, Children's Literacy Initiative.

SKATING OVER THE LINE by our own Joelle Charbonneau

"Light and breezy, Charbonneau’s sophomore entry holds up. Her humor mixed with an eccentric cast keeps the mystery rolling at a steady clip. With this title’s romantic triangle not unlike Janet Evanovich’s trio of Stephanie Plum, Ranger, and Joe Morelli, and relatives reminiscent of those in books by Rita Lakin or Deborah Sharp, you’ve got another humorous series at the ready."--Library Journal

"Charbonneau's sequel to 2010's Skating Around the Law offers just the right mix of skullduggery, humor, mystery, and romance....Readers will enjoy the ride, and they'll really love Elwood, Lionel's retired circus camel."--Publishers Weekly

-------------------

Also, you know, this.

-------------------

OK. As many of you know, I've been finishing up my COUNTRY HARDBALL collection, which has nothing to do with Oscar Martello in tone, subject, or style.

Still, we have plenty of Oscar in the tank and on the horizon (don't ask), so here you go -- the return of Oscar Martello. This is a section from the Oscar story I've been working on. Maybe it's rough, but I hear that's how you folks like Oscar. I'll put it through the polishing machine later. By the way, if you need to catch up on Oscar, you'll find some help here.

->

The Return of Oscar Martello

I’d been driving for an hour or two looking for something that would lead me to the next thing. I’d gotten some information from what was left of the priest, but I didn’t expect to find out what happened to my brother and his wife. Don’t know what I was expecting. Guys handing off cash and crack under a big sign that says “Drug Deal Here.” I hadn’t bothered with dealers in 20 years, not since a guy we called Ugarte needed some help cleaning up an area over in Bossier.
If the answer to the problem is to stop the oxygen from going to someone’s brain, then I’m the guy. If the answer is to separate a person into parts in order to find out another answer, they call me. But when no one even knows what the question is, no one gets called. Which is why I was driving around Weatherby Estates. The neighborhood, maybe the kids called it a territory, was jammed between Youree Drive and some of nicer neighborhoods. And the place was falling apart, like big hunks all over Shreveport. Meaning that the kids were like hawks in the winter, needing to expand their hunting grounds to find food. But they weren’t hawks. They were bees. The Killer Bs. They had been the Weatherby Killer Bees, tagging “23-11-2” all over because “W” was the twenty-third letter of the alphabet and so forth. After a couple of years, they just called themselves the Killer Bees and adopted jerseys from the Houston Astros because a couple of their players, Biggio and Bagwell, were called the “Killer B’s.” Really cute. I had the history explained to me by a guy I had tied up watching me peel the skin off one of his gang-mates in order to keep the conversation moving. I’m the curious sort.
Now I was pulling around their territory, looking for them. And looking for a place to dump a plastic bag of crapped pants. My friend Lucy had called me thirty minutes after I’d left her place because my nephew Zach had crapped his pants. So I swung by Sears, grabbed him some replacement clothes, and stopped by her place where we swapped plastic bags.
He was sitting on the couch watching cartoons, just as I’d left him. Except for the change of clothes.
“Why is he in that t-shirt?” I asked her.
Lucy looked at me, then back at the t-shirt, then at me. “You don’t like Jeff Gordon?”
“Don’t care. Just asking.”
“I had him in a Dale Junior one after I cleaned him up, but then I thought he might have another accident. So I put him in that one instead.”
“OK.”
“You brought him undies?” she asked.
“I brought socks, underwear, pants, shirts. Kid can move in now.”
“The hell he can,” she said, then scrunched up her face, said “sorry” to Zach and leaned in to me. “The hell he can. I got clients coming.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. Tonight. They called as soon as you left. You gotta do something with him by dinner.”
“Tell ya what. I’ll grab some pizzas when I come back to get him. That help?”
“Just be here. He ain’t gonna spend the night.”
Exactly what I needed. Taking care of my four-year-old nephew while I figure out what the bad guys did to his perfect mommy and daddy. His daddy. My brother. What he’d told them. Whether he’d told them anything he shouldn’t have. Anything besides where I was. Anything, such as what was in the Richardson file.

***

Having a little brother never helped me when I was growing up. He was staying with my mother’s side of the family. The ones with college degrees and paychecks. I was staying with my father’s side of the family. The ones who weren’t familiar with taxable income.
That’s why he’d become an accountant, and I’d become something else. That’s why he was the person to go to when I realized what was in the envelopes I’d taken from Richardson’s safe. That was why I had to find out what he’d told them. What he told his wife. Johnny Quinn was gone. But if Vitus wanted the information, then I had to act quickly.

***

So there I was, driving around the outer edge of the Killer Bees’ area when I stopped to finally drop the bag of crap into a trash can. I should have stopped the first chance after leaving Lucy’s, but I just wanted to find out what was going on. Get out and clean up his dad’s mess. Then get the kid back with whatever family he still had at that point. Then move on with my life. And by then I was smelling wet crap all over the inside of a plastic Brookshire’s bag.
I pulled up in front of a strip mall and was stepping out to the edge of the sidewalk for the trashcan when I saw two tough guys in Astros jerseys and crooked caps slinking around the corner.
I locked the car and followed them down the side of the building. Beige cinderblocks and weed-tall grass. Across a concrete creek, some overflow reservoir, to a chainlink fence.
I looked around and noticed an opening that had been torn on the bottom part of the fence. Probably so that they didn’t have to jump over. Or so that they could stay hidden longer. I saw one of the guys coming out from behind a bush, and when I stepped towards him, a building of some sort hit the back of my head and I went down.
The guy behind got my gun as I struggled to keep my eyes open. The guy who’d been in front was holding something solid in his fist and taking a whack at my chin. I couldn’t stay up, couldn’t stay steady. Even though I had to move my car. Even though I had to stay awake. Even though I had to get Zach from Lucy’s by six. Even. Though.

***

I woke up with my hands tied behind me. Cuffs. I blinked awake to high windows. Concrete floor I was sitting on. Basement. Hands cuffed together behind me, around the bottom of a column.
The two Killer Bees who’d dragged me here were sitting at a card table waiting for me to wake up.
The little one saw me, then he put his cards down. “He’s awake.”
The big one pushed his chair away from the table. He kneeled in front of me. “You’re the one who messed up Father Michael.”
I looked up at him. “Yeah.”
He kneeled down again and backhanded me across the face. “I wasn’t asking a question, you friggin’ puke.”
When I leaned back to avoid some of the slap, I felt the column behind me shift a little. He walked back to the card table and I felt around the floor where the column settled. Raised cement, but the wooden column hadn’t been secured. I didn’t know too much about lag screws. I didn’t understand all the details about how to frame walls, how to finish a basement.
I did know how to finish other things. And I knew that putting your hands on me is a bad idea.
The little one, Biggio, came at me from the table. He stood right in front of me, swaying from side to side in his work boots. I was guessing size 8. “See, Mr. Tough Guy. We don’t like people asking questions about us. We got serious business to take care of and we don’t need no weasels like you coming around trying to scare us with your guns.”
Behind him, Bagwell chambered a round in my Glock 25. I kept it handy because it was easy to carry, easy to hide, and didn’t ruin the line of my jacket. My jacket that they’d wadded up on the floor next to the table.
I crossed my legs, put by feet under me. Biggio was standing between me and Bagwell, so when I slid my hands out from under the column, I had an extra second or two. I popped up with my head into Biggio’s chin, sending him up and back. Bagwell reacted better than I’d thought he would and the little guy caught a couple rounds in the back as he fell into Bagwell. The big guy reached out for his buddy and dropped the gun, which I kicked to my left, towards the door.
Had I been 20 years younger, I would have jumped and pulled my legs through my arms, putting my cuffed hands in front of me. As it was, I dropped to my side, trying to wiggle around like a dying fish flopping around a boat.
Bagwell recovered enough to kick me in the back, but not before I’d gotten my hands in front of me. As I stood up, I caught another one of his kicks in my hands and pushed him back into the wall. I didn’t know where the key to the cuffs was and I didn’t have time to find it before he was coming back. I turned away as he came at me and sent a knee into his gut, then raised my arms and brought both fists down into his upper spine. He stayed there on his knees for a second before I put my fists together again and slammed him against his temple. I saw the key on the table and uncuffed. I walked over towards the door where the pistol and my jacket were. As I tried to shake the wrinkles out of my jacket, Zach’s bag fell out.

***

Bagwell was barely awake, but opened his eyes with a start as I put the first nail through his hand. He tried to shake me off, but I had my weight on his back, my knees pressing into his shoulders as I drove in the other nail. That’s the good thing about basements. Tools. 2x4s.
I’d secured him around a post I knew wouldn’t move -- him spread face down and arms out, the post in front and his hands nailed to a 2x4 on the other side. I hadn’t tried this before and was curious about how it would turn out. That should have gotten him talking, but I was in a hurry and didn’t want to waste any time.
So I opened the bag of Zach’s soiled clothes.

***

After two minutes, I pulled the streak-filled Transformer underwear from his mouth and he gave me the name I needed.

Best TV of 2011

2011-12-13T03:00:00.000-05:00

Last week I talked about HOMELAND, which was one of my favorite TV shows of the new season. That goes along with 3 other shows that either tugged at my heart, tickled my brain or kept me on the edge of my seat:

Doctor Who: I first caught up with this show last April and, yes, got obsessed. Steven Moffat is telling a modern day fairy tale, complete with monsters, humor, emotion and plenty of mind bending twists. Though his endings don't always live up to his set-ups, they always fit together nicely. And the season finale of series 5 is amazing TV, and the opening minute of series 6 are mind-blowing. If you like funny, twisty sci-fi, check out this series.

Terriers: A modern day PI novel set-up for TV. This show gets into the lives two down-on-their-luck PIs who take a case and get... you guessed it... caught up in something much, much bigger. And while the case isn't exactly breaking new ground, the banter between the two PIs and the events they go through in their personal lives make the show compelling as hell. The show only lasted a season, but you got about as good a conclusion as you're going to get. Check it out on Netflix now.

Breaking Bad: What else can be said about this TV show? Simply the best drama on TV today. This is a show that needs patience from its viewers, but pays off in spades if you keep up with it. The latest season was no different. I'm staying away from spoilers, so I can't tell you much more... but know this... the show will ring your bell.

Next week... books.

An Education in Discrimination

2011-12-12T03:57:00.000-05:00

The girl-child, at the tender age of 9, recently had a powerful lesson.

No, people are not all equal. Some are a little less equal. They might be - shudder with horror - men.

See, she had her dress rehearsal for her dance recital. And since the boy-child was sick, it meant we had to split up. Brian took her to the rehearsal...

And was shown the door.

Not allowed to stay and watch. Only female companions were allowed to stay and watch.

You see, allegedly, there were going to be costume changes. Out on the stage. So no boys allowed.

Except... the men operating the sound equipment and lights and the stage hands and the men old enough to be my parent who were in the productions and the boy dancers...

So, wait? The girls were just going to strip down and change in front of all of them, some of whom worked for the auditorium and weren't known to the dance school? Complete strangers?

The thing is, girl-child emerged from rehearsal with the news that no costume changes occurred.

They just didn't want fathers or grandfathers to watch the rehearsals, and they made up an excuse that sounds good on the surface but is pure crap.

And girl-child came home offended on behalf of her dad.

Brian? He's experienced it so many times, he's just gotten used to it. As a single father for many years, he'd go to the store and someone would say, "Oh, it's Dad's day out."

When you're juggling two toddlers it makes it hard to say, "Every single day is Dad's day out."

People are prejudiced. They presume. They don't always do it with malicious intent. More often, it's probably a case of not thinking.

But all that willingness to not think contributes to generations of sexist behavior. Maryland State legally does not discriminate based on gender and is supposed to consider both parents equal parents, yet in the majority of cases, mothers get custody.

If there was real equality, the default position of the courts would be shared legal and physical custody, with a 50-50 split that's only adjusted based on individual needs in the situation.

But it isn't.

The other day, Steve Mosby posted a link on Facebook, about sexual harassment. The author talks about just wanting to be able to go out and not have to worry about being hit on.

Somewhere in our lives, we've all experienced it. Judgment, conclusions without facts, based on nothing more than our gender, appearance, skin color, ethnicity or religion. I personally think Brian caught the edge of something far worse recently, when someone said to him that there are so many dads who just aren't involved in their kids lives.

Of course, that was right after we were told even though Brian has shared legal and physical custody of his kids, that he doesn't have any say in educational decisions.

I walked away wondering if the reason so many kids are growing up without dads involved in their education is because of administrators shoving them out the doors.

That may frustrate me to no end. But I have to say that there's nothing sadder than seeing it - really seeing it - for the first time through your child's eyes, and seeing that they are beginning to understand that the world will prejudge them, too.

It's all in the timing

2011-12-11T01:30:00.002-05:00

by: Joelle Charbonneau

Recently, I’ve done a lot of thinking about how and why things happen. I tend to be a believer that all things happen for a reason. Sometimes I can’t even begin to imagine what the reason could possibly be, but all things that happen in our lives impact who we are and how we see the world.

For writers, how we see the world changes how we write. The book I am writing now would read completely different if I’d written it five years ago. The plot might have been similar, but the characters, their emotional development and the feel of the story would have been different. Because I’m different.

And not only does timing impact the telling of the story it also changes how the story will be received when the story is submitted to an editor or agent. They might have just signed a similar kind of story and while yours is great – they can’t justify taking yours on. Or the opposite could be true. They have been looking for something specific to fill a hole in their list and your book fits the bill. Timing matters.

Timing has been a big factor in my writing career. I started writing about 8 years ago. When I started querying agents, I researched their client lists, found agents with clients who wrote in the same genre I did. That was smart, right? I got no after no after no. A few of those were closer to HELL NOs, but you get the point. I took a break from the querying and rejection merry-go-round when my son was born and my father was diagnosed once again with cancer. The break lasted months after my father’s death. When I finally started querying again, I did my research and learned a former mystery editor had just become a literary agent. Since she was brand new at the agenting gig, she didn’t have a client list for me to look at. The idea of having a skilled editor as my agent was appealing so I sent a query and the specified number of sample pages. Two days later she asked for the full manuscript. Nineteen days after that she offered me representation.

Holy crap!

At the time, I was over the moon delighted. I’m still happy with that decision because Stacia Decker is the best agent ever, but I realize the timing in that query worked in my favor. Had she been established, as she is now, and had a client list for me to look at I never would have queried her. Her list is heavy with noir, literary fiction, horror, thrillers and some science fiction thrown in for good measure. Totally not me. Had I waited another two or three months to start querying agents, I would have done my research and passed right by querying Stacia. And that would have been the worst mistake of my life.

So, I guess what I am saying is that there are rules in this business that I believe in. You finish a manuscript and edit it to the best of your ability before you start to submit it. You do your research on editors and agents and try to match your work to the appropriate ones. Those things are important. But equally important is timing and dumb luck. My luck was pretty amazing the day I researched Stacia and decided to send an e-mail that changed my life. I don’t think that having an agent is the right choice for everyone, but I do say that if you are looking for one, keep at it and I’ll be hoping that the timing becomes right for you.

What Would Watson Do?

2011-12-10T01:00:00.001-05:00

by
Scott D. Parker

Just last month, I read and enjoyed Anthony Horowitz's Sherlock Holmes novel, The House of Silk. As is my usual practice, I read no reviews prior to finishing the novel. When I did read the reviews, I was struck with the preponderance of a single word: pastiche. Interestingly, that word didn't enter my brain during my own reading (actually listening) of the book, but, perhaps, it should have.

In my own review of the book, I commented on how well Horowitz did in capturing the spirit, vocabulary, and feel of John Watson's writing. As I read the book, I ceased thinking it was Horowitz writing the book, but that it was Watson's (nee Doyle) pen that wrote the words.

Isn't that the definition of pastiche? That you forget the original author as you read the newer book? That the modern author has so completely assumed the style of the former that you think it's the former's own words? My next question was this: is this style of writing relegated only to Holmes stories?

This past summer, I read the newest James Bond novel by Jeffrey Deaver. I don't remember seeing reviewers commenting that it was a pastiche of Ian Fleming. Carte Blanche was a Deaver novel written about Fleming's creation, but with a modern sensibility, a complete reboot, to be honest. If you want a Bond-novel pastiche, that's more along the lines of 2008's Devil May Care by Sebastian Faulks, which was written to be a pseudo-sequel to the last Fleming novel.

While I haven't read but the first in the series, the late Robert B. Parker's main detective, Spencer, will live on in future novels written by future authors. This was the announcement by the publisher and I can't help but wonder if the authors selected will be instructed to maintain the Robert Parker style versus their own idiosyncratic stylings.

Why do we do this? Why do we pigeon-hole authors, their characters, and their writing styles to a certain, compartmentalized segment of the literary world? Is it, for example, that we prefer Holmes to live in Victorian times and sound like Victorian English because "that's just the way it's supposed to be"? When you start to think along these lines, a certain amount of imaginary pairings start to form in your heads. What would a Holmes novel sound like if Hammett was the author? How about a Spencer novel written by P. D. James? A Perry Mason book written by Michael Chabon? Heck, what if Doyle himself wrote a Continental Op tale?

In music, these kinds of pairings spark one-off, crossover experiments. Metallica integrated an orchestra with their songs and, arguably, are better for it. Brian Setzer rearranged classical standards to be performed by his big band and the results are fantastic. Just this year, the Ebene String Quartet issued "Fiction", their album of jazz and rock songs reconceived as a string quartet. If you listen to the Turtle Island String Quartet's version of John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, you will find a wonderfully new appreciation of the sax man's work. To me, these kinds of albums spark new interests in both the original version and the new.

So why are experiments like this not the norm in literature? Are we so conditioned to having Holmes and Watson always live in 189- that we don't want them to sound like the pulp heroes of the 1930s? Are we so worried that if Spencer starred in a story that "sounded like" Agatha Christie wrote it that we'd throw the book across the room?

What do you think?

Song of the Week:

Brian Setzer Orchestra's "The Nutcracker Suite" Well, since I mentioned it, here it is, in all of its jazzy glory.

Tweet of the Week:

That ABC edits Charlie Brown Christmas to make room for commercials basically proves the point of the show.

--Scott D. Parker

Yes, I'm quoting myself. Every year, I look forward to watching the Charlie Brown Christmas special. I'm old fashioned enough to prefer watching it on TV--commercials and all; remember when Dolly Madison did the ads?--to make it more of an event rather than something you can watch any time (or dozens of times) on a DVD. I know it so well that, each year, I get chagrined at the edits and cuts ABC makes in favor of (a) more commercials and (b) to account for the original 32-minute running time. That basically defeats the point of the entire message, right? It's ironic that Charlie Brown (in 1965) and the Grinch (in 1966) basically said all that needs be said about this most wonderful time of the year...over forty years ago.

Oh the weather outside is frightful...

2011-12-09T03:00:00.000-05:00

By Russel D McLean

Hey - wanna win some signed stuff from Russel? Go here and for a little bit of work you could get his lovely scrawl on some printed paper.

Someone asked me recently what my favourite Christmas movie was. I think they expected me to say “It’s A Wonderful Life,” and yes, I think that’s a great movie, but there’s one film that’s become very much a part of the festive season for me…

Last year, I got very excited when the DCA (Dundee Contemporary Arts) decided to make its special Christmas screening DIE HARD. Yes, the Bruce Willis film. The one with the sequels that got progressively worse until finally we had an incomprehensible showdown between a jet plane and a truck (seriously) at the climax of an already incomprehensible mess of sound and fury (but bonus points for using The Creedence on the soundtrack).

But the original DIE HARD remains one of my go-to Christmas movies.

Christmas movie?

Oh, yes.

See, DIE HARD may have guns and explosions and that really painful moment with Bruce Willis stepping barefoot on its glass, but at its heart it’s a hopeful and optimistic movie. After all, John MacLane is just a guy who wants to get his family back together at Christmas. He wants to make up with his wife and see his kids. He’s not looking for trouble and even when he does find it, the thing at the forefront of his mind is keeping his family safe.

And that’s why he’s such a great character. He’s no real superhero. He’s just a guy in the wrong place at the wrong time trying to do what he thinks is the right thing.

And there’s something kind of nice about that.

Of course, it helps that McClane is a New York Cop and a proficient shot. It helps that he’s tougher than the average guy. And it really helps that he’s pretty inventive (in the first film, some improvising with explosives and an office chair creates some real fireworks).

The film is just great fun from the go. The humour is spot on (if sometimes a little obvious), and the bad guys’ motivations are pretty clear (Even with the misdirection – they’re thieves and not terrorists – we are clear at all times as to their goals and methods) and of course there’s Alan Rickman as Hans Gruber, possibly the suavest bad guy of all time. With his sarcastic smile and his clipped accent, Gruber is the ultimate in cool bad guys. Not too far over the top, but just nicely pantomimeish – so evil he’s fun.

By the end of the film, we find ourselves rooting for John to get his wife back, defeat the bad guys and ride off into the sunset. And its spoiling very little to say that’s exactly what happens. Those final few moments, as “Let It Snow” swells on the sountrack and the camera pans over the carnage that has ensued are somehow among the most enjoyable moments in cinema. Die Hard isn’t just a great action movie. It’s a feel good movie with blood and swearing. It’s a life-affirming flick where quite a few people die.

And its just great fun.

And no Christmas is complete without it.

Yippee-kay-aye!

Books Of The Year

2011-12-08T03:00:00.001-05:00

By Jay Stringer

Hey hey.

I wanted to keep this simple this week. There's a lot of negative news stories out there about the publishing industry at the moment; bookstores going under, plagiarism, the never ending debate over pricing, the lovely kindle fire, the terrible kindle fire.

We're into the second week of December. I know, scary, right? Buy someone a book for the holidays. Buy several people a book for the holidays. Honestly? I don't care what format, for what device or at what price. Just buy people books, written by authors, and make that the centre of the debate.

So, with that in mind, I'm throwing it over to you guys. Let's out together a reading list in the comments. What have been the best books of 2011? What authors do you want others to read? What books should we be talking about here at DSD?

Just before you get to posting, here's a bit of house cleaning. I guested again on the Fuzzy Typewriter podcast, this time to discuss When The Sacred Ginmill Closes, by (and we can say this now) friend of DSD, Mr Lawrence Block. It was great to chat about one of my favourite crime novels, and to hear what Paul, Caroline and Dave had to say about it.

Investigating a Decent Price for eBooks: Guest Post

2011-12-07T03:00:00.000-05:00

So last week Monica Valentinelli mentioned my e-book pricing/reading post. Turns out, she's given this topic a good deal of thought, based on this wacky notiong of "experience." So I thought it would be nice for her to swing by and share her genius and experience with us. She's an author and game designer whose work can be found here.

In addition to her own writing, she's edited HAUNTED, a book you'll want to check out.

--

By Monica Valentinelli

There are three types of e-book pricing discussions you'll often encounter on the web. The first is from the reader's perspective and deals with what someone is willing to pay for versus what a particular item is worth. In other words, statements that say eBook prices should *all* be can be translated to I would like to be priced at X amount because that's what I think it should be. Nathan Bransford has taken some reader polls about e-book pricing; you can read the shifting changes here.

The second strain is from hands-on experience, usually from authors and small press publishers who are dealing with small business concerns. Pricing is an experiment, and rightly so, for many of these folks are venturing into eCommerce territory above and beyond crafting a good tale. Three articles that come to mind are from Tobias Buckell, who wrote about selling Tides from the New World, Jim Hines, who blogged about selling Goldfish Dreams, and my own when I talked about The Queen of Crows: a One Year Retrospective. (Although I'm an author and game designer, I've been in eCommerce and online marketing for several years for my day job.)

The third discussion is nebulous at best and can often be described as economic theory infused with concerns about piracy. For the sake of streamlining this discussion, I'm not going to dive into the differences between a textbook and practical experience.

Now that you have some background, I'm going to briefly touch on why current e-book pricing is akin to walking into an M.C. Escher painting.

Unlike the products you buy in a physical store, with eCommerce you can change the price on-the-fly, discuss it, and watch its immediate effect on traffic and sales. You can, as an eCommerce retailer, get up-to-the-minute stats on who visited your website and improve the customer's experience. That's the Amazon, DriveThruFiction.com, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble side of the story. Publishers (Yes, authors who self-publish are included in this) are at the mercy of whatever those retailers do. Some, like Amazon, are more aggressive than others. DriveThruFiction.com (Disclaimer: I'm currently doing some eCommerce consulting for the site) is almost the opposite and offers tools for direct e-mail marketing to customers. Each retailer takes a portion of the sale and has specific requirements for formatting; Smashwords is different from Amazon, for example.

In addition to the fees taken, there are other things that happen outside of the author or publisher's control like market share, on-site promotions, internal ranking algorithms for sales, etc.

All of these things combined affect how an e-book is presented to a potential customer influenced by the age of the release and demand. New books typically sell better than old books. You may have seen authors who publish through traditional houses request that their readers buy a new book from the same store in the same week. This is part of the reason why. Improved sales rankings directly affect a book's visibility in a retail store, whether it's online or not.

Price is only one consideration when offering a product online. There are other factors including: popularity of genre, visibility of name/platform, cover art, description, and presentation. Nascent authors typically (unless you're lightning in a bottle) don't sell as well as established authors because they don't have the existing readership to support their sales. Even then, established authors now-a-days would have to throw some marketing behind their other books to ensure that their readers know they exist in the first place.

I feel getting readers is, more than anything, where introductory pricing discussions come into play. Pricing a book at ninety-nine cents is a way to encourage new readers to buy into a series or an author's work, provided a) there's more work to buy and b) the reader reads the story and c) reviews or talks about it. By its nature, ninety-nine cent pricing demands a high volume of sales to be profitable.

Rounding up to a dollar, let's say you need/want to make a hundred dollars on your twenty-thousand word e-book. (Ignoring cover art, time to write, formatting, etc.) To make a hundred dollars, you have to look at your margin. With most sites, you'll make seventy cents a copy. Wow, sounds like a lot, right? Okay, well you'd need to sell approximately 143 copies to make that profit. Now price your e-book at $2. Your margin is $1.40. So now you need to sell significantly less copies to make the same amount of money. What's the benefit of pricing your e-book at a dollar more? You can always lower the price to be on sale at ninety-nine cents.

Is a hundred dollars a reasonable profit for a novella? Well, if we calculate the value of your book using five cent a pro word rates, then your 20K novella is $1,000. Suddenly, you need to sell significantly more copies of your e-book to hit $1,000. Mind you, that does not include cover art, editing, marketing, formatting, etc. When all is said and done, I suggest running a cost analysis on what you put into a book versus how much you're making. Then take a look at indirect impacts to determine whether or not it was worth it. Having that information can help influence your decisions about pricing, too.

Books still have a high production value in the sense that authors don't wake up and puke out a polished 100,000 word novel in a day (or even a 20,000 word novella). The challenge, of course, is that the reader doesn't see the effort that goes into it. They see the file size (considerably less than a photo or a movie), the cover, or the hook. They buy based on an emotion. What you're selling the reader, in my opinion, is a mini-vacation. If they prefer Neil Gaiman's vacation to the one you're offering, then guess what? They'll not only buy his vacation instead of yours, chances are they'll pay more for it, too.

Right now, traditional publishers may skew pricing in favor of more popular authors primarily because readers will pay more to get their stories. In other words: projected volume comes into play. When you think about the number of copies you can sell versus what you will sell, then the conversation changes. Some authors are totally fine selling less copies but making more money. Others are going for the numbers and the introductory prices hoping that'll boost their other book sales.

In the end, pricing discussions comes down to what you want to get out of your particular book and why you're offering it for sale in the first place. Readers will have a tough time navigating the exponentially greater number of books being sold every year. Authors who foray into self-publishing will experiment as new formats, e-readers, and eCommerce sites become available.

Even then, even with all these discussions, e-books are still very new. On the big publishing side? Check out this article where e-books account for less than twenty-five percent of an individual publisher's sales. It will take at least five to ten years for the market to sort itself out. The trick will be to figure out how you, as a reader or as an author, will find your niche while the eCommerce sites try to figure out theirs.

About Monica Valentinelli

Monica is an author and game designer who lurks in the dark. By day, she's the Marketing Director for Steve Jackson Games and John Kovalic's business manager. By night, she pens short stories, novellas, and hobby games. For more about Monica and her published works, visit http://www.mlwrites.com.

Homeland

2011-12-06T03:00:00.000-05:00

Homeland is a TV Drama on Showtime--probably fall/winter's best new show. It follows two main characters.... Claire Danes plays a troubled CIA agent who believes and American soldier has been turned by Al Qaeda and will soon attack the States.

Damian Lewis plays that soldier. The early episodes really play the is he or isn't he a terrorist angle, but then bears down into a dark character study about what it's like to return to the United States after being a POW for 8 years. Lewis' character really brings the twists and turns to the show and seeing what he's going to do week in and week out keep dragging me back in.

The action scenes are brief and tense, and this week's climax had me sitting up, trying to get a closer shot of what was going to happen. The show is rarely predictable, and even when it looked like it was about to take a disappointing turn toward the every day TV drama, the show managed to right itself in the next episode.

The scene-stealer for me, however, is Mandy Patankin, who plays a Dane's curmudgeon mentor. His dry deliver and serious manner are a pleasure to watch.

If you have Showtime, but aren't watching this show, you need to track it down.

Anyone else seen it? Thoughts?

In Praise of the Short Story

2011-12-05T03:00:00.001-05:00

Did you know that May is national Short Story month. I didn't. In 2007 Dan Wickett, drafting off of the idea of National Poetry Month, decided that the short story should have one. Neither did I. But I'm confused. The crime fiction community has always been an early adopter and started using online zines as a means to publish fiction damn near 15 years ago. In my opinion the crime short fiction continues to be one of the, if not the most, vibrant of all the other online fiction communities, even as other have been finally catching up with the idea of online publications. So *if* crime fiction has the most vibrant online short fiction scene and *if* there is a short story month then how come our community (and the zines we publish) aren't included in this endeavor? I don't know, but we should be.

So why do I love (and sometimes hate) the short story?

One of the most daring acts of reading is found in reading the short story. As readers (and consumers) we have some built in motions that we go through before making a purchase. Sometimes we aren't even aware of them. A cover caches your eye; the author's bio is read, blurbs can even be read or glanced at. Perhaps most important of all is the synopsis. The reader of long fiction constructs a safety net under their reading experience the moment they read the synopsis because at that moment they have some idea of what they are getting into.

A lot of these subconscious trappings of the reading experience are so ingrained they aren't even noticed. But the short story, and by extension the single author short story collection, strips a lot of these trappings away leaving only the title, author's name and the story itself. In many respects it's the purest form of reading. Even with an author you've read before or at a publication you've read before there are few expectations brought to the reading experience. It's a bit like stepping off the ledge, you simply begin the story and that's it. There are very few guideposts as to what you'll be reading. It may be one of the greatest acts of literary trust out there.

Which, to me, is part of the reason short story collections aren't read as widely as they should be. It's hard to to get a reader to close their eyes and make that leap.

So, should we make a concerted, community wide effort to participate in Short Story Month next year? Why do *you* like the short story? And, what/who are some of your favorite stories and authors?

I've started a new blog that will begin posting new content in 2012 that will promote the short story all year. It's called Short Story 365. Check it out and consider participating.

Also, Spinetingler will now be publishing weekly flash fiction.

Currently reading: REAMDE by Neal Stephenson; Hill Country by R Thomas Brown; Trigger Man by Jim Ray Daniels

Currently Listening: J Roddy Walston & The Business

Life intrusions

2011-12-04T01:30:00.000-05:00

by: Joelle Charbonneau

Writing takes discipline. You have to put your butt in the seat and fill the pages with words. If you don’t do it, no one else will. And since more often than not a writer is self-employed, there isn’t a boss looking over your shoulder threatening to make you work late if you don’t get that day’s job done. Writing requires a personality that can sit down, self-motivate and type day after day until the story is done.

When I’m writing, I always set a daily goal. Sometimes I hit the goal. Some days I miss it. But regardless of whether I hit the goal or not, I make sure that each and every day I write.

Unfortunately, sometimes no matter how disciplined the writer or how dedicated one is to the project at hand life intrudes. This week life intruded for me. Monday night, I got a call from my mother telling me that a man who watched me grow from my childhood self into an adult woman died unexpectedly. Not that death is ever expected, but still. This man wasn’t sick. He showed no signs of being anything other than vital and healthy and strong. One minute he was laughing with his family. The next he was gone leaving a whole in our hearts that can never be filled.

So this week, despite the desire to sit down and write I found myself unable to put words on the page. I cried with his family. I looked through pictures. I attended his wake and his funeral and shared the memory and impact of his life with those who loved him.

Some times life intrudes on our desire to be productive. We might not like it, but it is important for us to recognize when we can and cannot write. This week, life kicked me and this man’s friends and family in the ass. We all fell down, got up and did what we had to do to get through. The road in front of his family is long and hard. I know what they feel and will take as much time as needed away from my own work to make sure they have the support they need to survive. And tomorrow I will start writing again because it is what I do—what I have to do—what he was so proud of me for. And while the holidays will take time away from the work we all want to do, I cannot stress enough that we should all give life permission to intrude. Our families, our friends and the memories we make every day are the reasons we all can do what we do.

Let It Snow

2011-12-03T01:00:00.001-05:00

by
Scott D. Parker

I don't know about you but sometimes when I hear the term "writer's block," I literally picture a large cube made out of stone, usually granite. The sides are smooth and shiny, machined to perfection. When you get up close, you can almost hear the solidness of it, a mute amount of laughter. And, in your had, is a small chisel.

"Now," says the message, "create something."

There are times in my writing life when the feat is so daunting that I don't even start. I think some folks consider writer's block to be the absence of ideas. What about the plethora of ideas, but that they are so many and varied that you get nothing accomplished?

A problem I deal with is one of starting. I know plenty of folks who start books and get a third of the way in and then lay it aside. The block I sometimes face is the one that prevents me from even starting. I have ideas and I germinate them in my brain. I'm working on a new Calvin Carter story and it's exciting. But I haven't put pen to paper. Why? The fear of starting.

Weird, huh?

We just finished November and the NaNoWriMo challenge. I did not participate but now, I'm wondering if I should have. The biggest benefit of doing NaNoWroMo is the exercise the writing muscle gets. With 50,000 words to create in 30 days, that works out to 1,667 words a day. And therein lies that giant stone cube, aka the oppressive Word Count.

Word count can, in my mind, act as a kind of writer's block. If you were to sit down at your computer each day during November and you *have* to write 1,667 words, it can be daunting. And, frankly, you will probably end up writing crap to to get to the word count. On the other hand, you're exercising the writing muscle.

Still, the word count can be like that great granite cube. It's just sitting there, staring at you. But you have that chisel and you take a whack at it. And, lo and behold, a sliver of granite flies off the cube. It's a first step to breaking down that granite cube.

That's why I tend to like the snowflake method of writing. It's not that website that has you start with a main idea and the expand on it. I'm talking about snowflake in terms of word count. I would like to be able to bust out 1,667 words a day or more, but sometimes, I can only manage 500. But I've written 500 new words and I'm moving forward.

Yes, I know this isn't rocket science and y'all've heard this kind of thing a thousand times, but it's hit home with me in recent days. I get so fixated on writing a thousand words a day or some such random number when what I should actually be focused on isn't the word count but the tale. I've come to realize that if I just work on the story, the word count will take care of itself. I want the blizzard to whoosh down and dump two feet of snow on me (or thousands of word). Maybe, perhaps, I'm the gentle snowfall kind of guy. Five hundred words here, 200 there, a 1,000 somewhere down the line. All these numbers add up, I need to keep reminding myself. The end will come when it's there. Just keep the snow falling. Or that chisel in your hand.

Song of the Week: "River" by Robert Downey, Jr. Now that Thanksgiving is over, the Christmas music is out at our house. I have a set routine: I always listen to Chicago's 2003 What's It Going To Be Santa CD first, from front to back. After that, everything can come out of the box. I love spinning my Brian Setzer CDs and chilling to Chris Botti's holiday CD. But one song I always long to hear is this Joni Mitchell-penned tune as sung by Downey when he was on the TV show "Ally McBeal." That season was the best and it was the first time I truly saw how gifted Downey was as an actor. This tune has a special, melancholic vibe to it that is perfect for the adult that I am in this time of year. While I can grin from ear to ear while listening to Chicago or Setzer, it's "River" that tugs the heartstrings. And not just one in particular. The longing expressed in these lyrics is for Christmases past. I don't pine for them and wish I were young. I'm an eternal optimist and I see each day and each year as the best one I've ever lived. But a loving tenderness for all that I've seen and experienced seeps through me as I listen to this song. Another one that speaks directly to this longing is Faith Hill's "Where Are You Christmas?" Is there a song like that for you?

Tweet of the Week I:

Sometimes, as men, it's nice to just sit around and talk about our hair.

-- Nathan Fillion

Tweet of the Week II:

You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.

-- C. S. Lewis

Sick Transit Gloria

2011-12-02T03:00:00.001-05:00

By Russel D McLean

“I think crime writers are very sick people.”

Thus spake a commenter on this article on Patricia Cornwell. Let’s leave aside whether one likes or dislikes Cornwell’s works* and think about this commenter.

“…very sick people.”

Why?

“Once one has had even a glimpse of a wicked deed as words on a page, it stays put in the imagination- the torment is transmitted by a third party, crime writers spread about their material- it is the canker (sic) of warped minds.”

Which sounds like a bad thing. And maybe it is to a degree. In reality no one wants to confront the worst that humanity has to offer. Yet myself and other crime writers (or worse, horror writers) do so all the time. We distill terrible acts and place them on the page in the name of entertainment.

What the bloody hell is wrong with us?

Well, let’s leave aside the fact that our readers are clearly worse because they want more of the same and right now, please. And let’s think about entertainment.

The Greeks were clearly as sick – maybe more so – as any modern crime writer. Their tragedies were built on buckets of gore. Oedipus Rex is clearly the work of a screwed up mind. Yet it is a classic of literature. Even Shakespeare - - he wrote Titus Andronicus, where incest, cannibalism and a thousand other atrocities are depicted, and of course Hamlet where just about everybody dies**

Drama – at its heart – is conflict. And conflict is not pretty. It never has been. It never will be. I can accept that certain people don’t want to be reminded of ugly truths in this world – and in fact, at times, even I can’t take it and want to escape from such things – but the principle of entertainment is not merely diversion. Fiction and drama are our ways of coping with the world. By dealing with something in a fictional narrative we are excising it, in a sense. By confronting darkness on some level we process our reaction to it in a safe environment.

Fiction without conflict, without some essential darkness, is worthless. Even in the lightest of comedies, there is conflict and loss and struggle, even if it is over seemingly inane stakes. The fact is, however, that crime fiction and other dark forms of writing allow the reader and the writer to make sense of those things in the world that may otherwise be senseless. A person cannot cope with life by running away from that which makes them uncomfortable.
Good fiction – whether we see it as harmless “entertainment” or not – is always about making some sense of life. To be effective in doing this, sometimes that means going to places that we may find unsettling, confronting parts of ourselves and others we might otherwise run away from. There is no sickness or “canker” in admitting that people do bad things. There is more sickness in denying this, perhaps, in pretending that the world is all sweetness and life.

Not that I propose for an instant all fiction should be a bleak and soul-destroying gaze into the absolute depths of human suffering.

Far from it.

As in all things, I believe in balance. Sometimes I’ll want to be reassured and reminded that things can work out for the best, that there is good in people. Sometimes I’ll want to try and work out why people behave in the terrible ways they sometimes do.

Fiction can and should tackle both these extremes and everything in between.

Fiction should – no matter if it does it by subtext, by text, even by accident – make us think. Even if that thought is merely, “This is/isn’t how I want to live my life”

If it doesn’t do that and if it doesn’t strike a balance, then I wonder, what the point would be of it at all.

*For what its worth I think her first four or five books utterly revolutionised the crime fiction scene and were in and of themselves very good examples of the new genre. After that, well, I found the series lost its rhythms. But clearly hundreds of thousands of readers disagree. And mu opinion's just one drop in the ocean.
**There was originally a joke here that was based on the fact my brain was tired and utterly misremembered the plot of Hamlet. Which just goes to show that even your beardy hero slips up every once in a while***
***There was also a third foot note which is the one Ray Banks refers to.

French Twist

2011-12-01T03:00:00.000-05:00

I've written a few stories featuring Joe Pepper and Cal Gibson. The first was The Goldfish Heist, which was originally published by the Scotsman but can also be found in an old DSD post. The second story was The Tin Foil Heist, which is collected in Discount Noir, available through Untreed Reads. After a month of us talking craft here at DSD, I was toying with the idea of writing one more craft post. I asked for a few suggestions on twitter but, as is often the case with craft talk, I didn't really feel I was the guy qualified to be taking on some of the suggestions. So I thought I'd go to the other end of the tunnel, and give out some free fiction. So here's another short tale starring the Abbot and Costello of Glasgow crime.

French Twist

“I think I’m gonna move to Paris.”

“Paris?”

“Yeah, you know how you wanna move to New York? Well I want Paris.”

“When did this happen?”

“Last night. I was watching TV? I thought, hey, that looks nice.”

“What were you watching?”

“Emmanuelle.”

“Right. You’ve never even been to Paris. You don’t know anything about France.”

“I like Garlic Bread.”

“Garlic bread? You’re talking about moving to Paris, not to Pizza Hut. What will you do over there?”

“My Da’ knows this guy over there, Claude or Pierre, something French-”

“-Good to see you’re picking up the lingo-”

“-Shut it. Anyway. Da’ knows this guy, he’ll sort me out a job as a cleaner.”

“You’re moving to Paris to be a cleaner?”

“Not like mops and dishes and shite, it’s like a code, a hitman, see? Like what Baz does for Da’ except, you know, in French.”

“I know what a cleaner is, bawbag, I hired Baz, remember? But nobody actually calls them cleaners.”

“Right? What do they call them?”

“Hitmen.”

“Oh, right, yeah. But they probably have a different name for them in France, right?”

“Yes, they’ll call them something French.”

“Do you speak any? French, I mean?”

“No, see, that’s my plan. If I don’t speak the language, then if the Polis lift me, they can’t interrogate me.”

“Right.”

“But I need to learn a little, I guess. Stuff like toilet and sex, aye? And, hey, I want a catchphrase too, like that guy in Pulp Fiction. Something cool to say just before I do it, something to remember me by.”

“They’ll be dead, Cal. They won’t be remembering you to their pals.”

“Oh yeah. Baws. I’d got that one worked out an’ everything.”

“Okay, hit me with it, go on. What’s your French hitman catchphrase?”

“Je’Mapelle Vengeance.”

Ebooks bought, never read

2011-11-30T03:00:00.007-05:00

By Steve Weddle

I tend to disagree with Dave White out of sheer reflex. I find it saves times if I’m not certain of my position on a given topic. So when Dave started arguing last week that 99-cent ebooks are great because they provide many new readers, my immediate response was to argue with him. Which turned out to be the right decision.

A few months ago, on Twitter, a few of us were trying to figure out what the ratio is for ebooks bought to ebooks read and how that ratio varies depending on price. (I dislike the term “price point” because I think the word “point” in that usage is unnecessary.)

I have, as of this writing, 482 file in my Kindle archive. That does not count the books that people have sent me – ARCs, drafts, etc.

From discussing this with folks, the answer seems to be that the ratio of ebooks bought to ebooks bought and then read is much higher as the price of the book increases.

If you want to make your own graphs and charts, I’ll wait.

Let’s take the example of the couch on the curb.

My friends Alice and Jake were trying to get rid of a couch. They put it on the curb for the trash folks to pick up, but it was too big. After a week or so, Jake put a sign on the couch that said “For Sale: $50.” The couch was gone by morning. Here endeth the anecdote.

You put a price on something, you create perceived value.

I’ve been in sales and I can tell you, buyers want value more than they want cheap. Do you ever wonder why the TV commercials for mail-order junk finish by telling you to order now and you’ll get an extra set of Super Sonic Ear Pokers for just a dollar more? Because they’ve already shown you the value of the Ear Pokers. They’re $19.99. Heck, maybe the second set is free. (Just pay separate shipping and handling.)

They’ve created the perceived value.

If you saw Super Sonic Ear Pokers in a box outside the grocery story with a sign that said “Free,” how inclined would you be to try out a pair?

Let’s take a look at the argument Dave was making yesterday: “If a book is priced inexpensively, more people are going to buy it.”

Say we’re able to sell books in two parallel universes. Everything is equal, except on Earth One the debut novel Building Romance by Ima Noob is $14 on Kindle, while on Earth Two the same novel is 99 cents.

Will more people purchase the book on Earth One or Earth Two? My guess is that more people would purchase the book for 99 cents than for $14. Where I disagree with Dave’s argument is here: I think the percentage of people who bought the book and read the book will be greater on Earth One.

In the past month or two, I’ve purchased a couple dozen ebooks for 99 cents or free. I’ve purchased two ebooks for $14. I’ve read both of the $14 ebooks. I have read seven of the others.

For me, a 99-cent ebook is usually a purchase of impulse or support. Hey, my pal Ima Noob has a new book out. It’s 99 cents. One-click that sucker. I’ll read it when I get around to it.

Of course, this isn’t how I purchase all the 99-centers. For example, Chris F. Holm’s 8 Pounds was a 99-cent purchase. As a new author on the Kindle, his idea was to grab new readers. And that’s exactly what happened. Soon enough, he inked a deal with Angry Robot for his next two novels.

And there are bytes and bytes of 99-centers I’ve bought and read right away—just not most of them.
The argument for the 99-cent price of an ebook is that an author is likely to attract more “casual readers” than if the book were priced at, say, $5.99.

If you want a casual reader, then maybe this is the way to go.

But go to WalMart tonight. Look at the big cardboard box of $4.99 DVDs in the middle of the aisle. People dig through there looking for a bargain, not a good movie.

Read the Amazon reviews of 99-cent books. “This one was only 99 cents, so I thought I’d try it. Totally worth it.”

As Dave said yesterday: “I know this because people who don't worry about following writers and just bought a Kindle come to me asking for suggestions for 99 cent authors.”

They’re looking for a bargain. They care about the purchase, not the read.

For many – not all, but many -- as soon as that click is done, so is their interest. What they wanted was a cheap book. They’ve gotten it.

Many of them won’t read it.

But let’s consider those who do read it – who picked up the book because it was cheap.

The addition question to ask is “What does that reader do next?”

Does that reader hunt down your $12.99 ebook and purchase it, sending you $10 in the process? Or does the reader who found your bargain book scroll through the “Customers who bought this item also bought this item” section for another “good deal”?

Let’s be clear here: I’ve read many, many fantastic authors through free or 99-cent ebooks. Edward Grainger. Chris Holm. Neil Smith. Al Guthrie. Dani Amore. Malachi Stone. Victor Gischler. Nigel Bird. Josh Stallings. Ray Banks. On and on and on. Even our own Dave White and Sandra Ruttan. John McFetridge. Far too many to name.

You want to sell your book for 99 cents or $14.99, what the hell do I care?

If you have six books in a series and want to price the first one at 99 cents to get folks interested, more power to you.

When you offer folks a bargain price for your ebook, you’ll get folks who are looking for bargains. Not all of these folks care about a good book.

But maybe some of them will find a 99-cent bargain, read it, fall in love, and buy up everything that author has.

And I understand the thought that giving away your work or charging an “impulse-buy” price for it means more people will download your book. I’m just not convinced that most of those people will then read it.

You want people to download your book, charge 99 cents.

If you want people to value your book, then write something amazing.

Young Writers and Price Points

2011-11-29T03:00:00.000-05:00

I annoyed Steve Weddle over the weekend saying that the idea that a reader is more likely to buy and not read a .99 cent book is false. I have bought plenty of books that were higher priced and never read them. It's the luck of the draw, I said.

And I stand by that.

People buy books for a bunch of reasons: the cover looks cool, the plot sounds great, someone recommended an author to them. After they buy that book, it's up to them whether or not they read it and when they decide to read it. I don't think price point plays into that as much as other reasons.

But I will say this... a cheaper price point helps a new writer. If a book is priced inexpensively, more people are going to buy it. If more people buy it, the odds are better that more people are going to read that book. If a book is priced at 17.99 on the Kindle for a first time author, fewer people are going to be willing to try out that book and that new author. Therefore, more readers.

As far as the 99 cent price point, writers like to complain that's lowering the price of art... or something to that effect. Readers don't care. Honestly, put yourself in a reader's point of view. A casual reader. Not someone who combs the blogs and Twitter follow their favorite writers. Just someone who picks up a few books a month on a whim.

Do you think they consider that the price of "art" is being degenegrated (or whatever the argument is)?

No.

They care they get a good yarn. A good read.

I know this because people who don't worry about following writers and just bought a Kindle come to me asking for suggestions for 99 cent authors. They love trying someone new, because it's affordable.

Cheaper sells more. And if more people buy your book, the odds are more people will read your book.

Indie booksellers are starting to adopt to this too. They are selling ebooks at inexpensive prices... the e-pub generation--it's going to help a lot of writers get a bigger audience..

Voice vs Tone

2011-11-28T03:03:00.000-05:00

During the discussion on tone last week, I read posts and kept quiet. I didn't always agree, but what I was looking for was the right way to illustrate the distinction between voice and tone.

I think Joelle summed it up brilliantly yesterday, and that means I don't have much to add. However, I did find something that illustrated the difference between voice and tone, to me, that I think may help some who are undecided about the distinction.

As I discussed last week, I was raised on country music. I still listen to a fair bit of country, and I like a lot of country songs.

I'm also aware that in order to succeed in country music - like almost anything - there's a need for a certain image. My awareness of this doesn't change the fact that it's taken me a long time to warm up to the band Sugarland.

The reason? Jennifer Nettles.

I don't want it to sound personal, but the reason had to do with feeling conflicted about the emphasized twang in her singing.

My first exposure to Jennifer Nettles that I recall was her duet with Bon Jovi.

I've heard her in interviews as well, and again, the southern twang is barely noticeable.

But with Sugarland? It's pretty obvious, and seems to be emphasized.

Don't get me wrong - there are some Sugarland songs I do like. But the inflection in her voice, as well as the overall emphasis of her songs with Sugarland vs other work emphasis the difference between voice and tone. Her voice is her voice. Tone is what she emphasizes with her voice depending on the type of work she's doing, or who's interviewing her.

I don't see tone and voice as the same thing. As Joelle, and Steve said: Voice is the writing style unique to the author. Tone is the color and attitude of those words.

I couldn't say it any better than that.

A Fine Whine

2011-11-27T01:30:00.005-05:00

by: Joelle Charbonneau

Ha! Okay, I technically don’t mean that kind of whine, but since I am the cleanup hitter on the tone discussion, the tone of this post might very well sound like I am whining. I mean you’ve already heard 6 incredibly articulate writers discuss their thoughts on tone. They’ve talked about attitude and about not being tone deaf. (Heck, Russell’s post even had footnotes!) How is a girl supposed to compete with that kind of brilliance? (See, I’m whining!)

I’ve only been writing for a short number of years, but in that time I’ve found that a lot of writers confuse voice and tone. Voice is the writing style unique to the author. Tone is the color and attitude of those words. (Yeah, I’m stealing Steve’s word. Sue me!) Think of it this way – tone is like wine. (The drinking stuff, not the petulant stomping around that I might have to do if this post doesn’t work out the way I intended.) You can pick up five different bottles of Pino Grigio at the store. They are all made with the same types of grapes. Kind of like noir mysteries are all part of the same genre. They have all been fermented in a similar manner just as all stories in the same genre have a formula that works best for the story telling. And yet they are have subtle (or sometimes not so subtle) differences. The tone is unique to each vintage just as the tone to each story is unique and appropriate for that story.

One wine might have a slightly more oak flavor. Another might have a tinge of sweetness. Another might have undertones of apple or pear. The tone changes the flavor of the wine. It changes the way the person drinking the wine enjoys it. Just as the tone of a story changes the way the reader feels about the characters and the story.

Here is an example of similar scenarios (discovering a dead body) that have two different tones even though they are written in the exact same voice–mine.

Everything was quiet as I walked through the door that led to the back of the theater. The houselights were dark, but the work lights illuminated the grand piano on the stage. The lid was up on the piano, making it hard to tell if someone was seated behind it.

I walked down the steps toward the stage. Sure enough. I could see feet. Someone was sitting at the piano. I climbed up the escape stairs, walked around the piano, and felt the world tilt on its axis.

A backstage door slammed and echoed in the theater. On a normal day, the sound might have made me jump. Only, my feet were rooted to the floor. Slouched over the piano, head resting on the keys, was North Shore High’s choir director, Greg Lucas. A microphone sat on the piano keys a few inches from Greg’s mouth. I doubted he’d be speaking into the microphone any time soon seeing as how the microphone’s cord was wrapped tightly around his throat. (From MURDER FOR CHOIR to be released July 3rd from Berkley Prime Crime)

And now for something completely different….

Michelle led Ricco down the hall to the stairway. There was a small elevator next to the stairwell, but Michelle started climbing steps instead of pushing the call button. Emily had no problem with it, but Michelle hated using the thing. It creaked and moaned as it inched along at an incredibly slow pace. Thank God Emily lived on the third floor. Three flights of stairs she could handle.

She saw Ricco eye the elevator, but he didn’t complain as he silently climbed the flights of stairs next to her. When they reached the third floor, she hurried down the dingy maroon carpeted hallway to Emily’s apartment, the last one on the left.
Five steps from the door, she gasped and her heart kicked hard against her chest. Years of working in the ER had honed her senses to recognize certain sounds and smells. This smell was the most familiar of all of them.

Blood.

“Emily’s hurt.” Michelle raced to the door and turned the handle again and again. Locked. Every time but still she kept turning it. The smell of blood was stronger here. Tears burned the back of her eyes and her throat. She had to get to Emily. “Can you get us inside?”

Ricco shook his head. “Mrs. O’Donnell said she was getting her keys. We gotta wait for her. The cops wouldn’t want us to screw with the door or the lock. They’ll be evidence.”

She wanted to scream. He was so calm, so cool and unfeeling behind his sunglasses. He should know that evidence and pissing off the police were the last things she cared about. She was about to tell him that when she heard a ding down at the end of the hall. The elevator had arrived and with it a limping Mrs. O’Donnell and her keys.

“Sorry it took me a couple of minutes to get up here. Chester darted under my feet and I stubbed my toe on the end table. Hurts like hell, but I don’t think I broke anything. Emily isn’t answering the door?”

The last was more of a statement than a question, but Michelle shook her head anyway. “Something’s wrong inside. I...” How to explain that she could smell the blood before she saw it? That she knew there had to be a lot of it. She couldn’t and she prayed to God she was wrong. “Can you open the door so I can make sure she isn’t hurt? If she’s not home I can leave a note telling her to call me.”
Mrs. O’Donnell hurried over to the door while fumbling for her keys. “Make sure you tell her to stop by my place and so I can see her for myself. After what Mark did...” The door swung open and Mrs. O’Donnell gave a shriek before sagging against the doorframe.

The smell of blood hit Michelle square in the face as she ran through the doorway, through the tiny foyer, and into the living room where Emily lay sprawled on the floor. “Call 911,” she yelled as she knelt down on the sticky wet floor. Somewhere she must have registered seeing the streaks on the light blue walls, the beige Berber carpet and the white couches, but none of that seemed as important as helping Emily – although deep in her heart she knew there would be no help. There were knife wounds on her arms and chest along with dozens of abrasions and contusions. Her left leg was bent at an unnatural angle and her face… Michelle swallowed hard. Emily’s face was almost unrecognizable. Someone had beat her – badly. Nurses see the signs of death all the time, but sometimes there was a miracle. Not often, but sometimes. Michelle was desperate that this be one of those times. (From Inadvertent Witness which is waiting to be read by my fabulous agent who has received way too many books from me in the last year.)

The tone of the first is lighter. Kind of a sweet, almost bubbly flavor. The other is darker. Perhaps has more woodsy vibe. Both are the same type of grape. The same wine. And yet…because of the tone there is a world of difference.

Tone: You Know It When You See It

2011-11-26T01:00:00.000-05:00

by
Scott D. Parker

Like Russel yesterday, when tone came down as the subject of the week, I groaned inwardly. How the heck do you talk about tone? Remember that saying a congressman or judge once said about porn: that he'd know porn when he saw it but couldn't quite put forward a definition? That's how I see tone.

Tone is also a bit like your life's journey: you can only see the signposts from the perspective of age and wisdom. When you break-up with your first love, at the time, it's like the world is crashing down and everything else is meaningless. With time, you can see that the new trajectory your life took was infinitely better.

The same goes with tone. Like Jay and Russel wrote, one of the mechanical things you can do to evoke a particular tone is choosing certain words to fill your sentences and paragraphs. Certain authors have a particular tone. You can read one paragraph of Charles Dickens and you know the author's tone. The same is true for Chandler, Hammett, Burroughs, Chabon, or dozens of other writers. Some authors can even mimic a certain tone. In the afterward to his new Sherlock Holmes novel, The House of Silk, Anthony Horowitz mentioned that he kept a list of certain words that he used over and over again. He did such a good job with capturing the tone and feel of Doyle's language that I sometimes forgot that Doyle wasn't the author.

Yes, you can set out to create a certain tone and wordsmith your way to that desired end. Take, for example, most network TV crime dramas. Because of the structure and the language choice, many have a similar tone. Does that make them bad? No, but if you don't like that particular tone, you probably won't like the shows.

Word choice alone is only a means to an end. In some ways, it's something that' too mechanical. An author's tone emerges over time, over the thousands of words written. Tone might be the thing only readers can discover. Yes, it's true that tone can materialize in prose, but if you want to get a good sense of your own, personal tone, read your own non-fiction, including blogs entries and emails. I have speech-to-text software on my computers and one of the things the program does during setup is to analyze your writing. If only there was an option for tone I'd have the answer to what mine is.

I'll admit that I'm not too seasoned a writer of prose to know if I have a prose tone or not, but I can easily recognize my tone in emails, especially professional ones.

Can you recognize your own tone in your prose or non-fiction?

Tones of Fun*

2011-11-25T03:00:00.000-05:00

By Russel D McLean

I’m not sure how happy I am talking about this weeks subject.

Tone.

I really don’t know what to say about it. I don’t have much in the way of practical advice and in a sense, I think tone is often a matter of instinct and something you can only see as part of a far larger picture.

Tone is a funny thing. It’s one of those almost instinctual tools in a writer’s box. But despite it seemed like a vague, woolly-thinking kind of idea, its an essential thing to have.

Without having control of your tone, you’re screwed.

But what is tone?

And how can your control it?

Tone is what conveys the mood of your work. Tone is omnipresent in your writing. Tone comes from your word choice, your sentence structure, your point of view. It is the result of all those tiny little choices you make by writing.

Put one thing wrong and tone can go out of the window.

Tone is of course the great problem of the internet generation. We communicate by text almost all the time these days. I have friends whom I know more by their tone in emails than I do by their tone in conversations** And it’s amazing how many times tone can be misinterpreted. Sometimes you just accept that a person has a certain tone, but if you don’t know them then you cannot forgive them seeming rude because you don’t know that they aren’t. It’s the frightening thing about reading a text – all we have to go on are the words in front of us. And if they are mis-used, then often the tone can be misinterpreted and the intent of a communication ruined.

Tone is reliant on being in control of everything else you are doing in a piece of work. Tone comes at the end. tone is the result of all your hard work. My fellow DSDers have said that tone is attitude, that tone is atmosphere, that tone is voice and so much more. It is indeed all of these. And more.

If your tone is wrong, you fix it by working at the meta-level, by fixing some smaller, more intricate process such as your word choice, your structure, your point of view, whatever. All of these other things working in unison are what produce tone. Inconsistencies in tone come from elements of your work not working in harmony, like gears of the wrong size grinding together. On their own these elements may be brilliant, but together they produce something atonal and unsettling.

In the end, what I’m saying is that tone is not something you look at initially. Tone is something you allow to emerge from your work. Writing is like putting together a jigsaw in some ways. You are working with all these disparate and apparently unconnected pieces but when you find the right way to put them together, you can produce something quite unexpected and often entirely beautiful.

*You may groan, but I worked for ages to find a pun title for this entry…
**Not because we’re shut ins but often because we live in different countries. As Tony Hancock said when he took up the Ham Radio, “I’ve got friends all over the world. All over the world! None in this country, but all over the world…”

Tone Deaf

2011-11-24T03:00:00.002-05:00

By Jay Stringer

After the news cycle we've had in the writing community of the past few weeks, writing about tone seems to fit. Tone and voice are two of the hardest things to quantify. You know it when you see it, but getting it right? Therein lies the trick.

Tone isn't something that you can get from cobbling together other people's words. It also changes with the times, so it's not really something you're going to be able to lift out of a 1950's novel and pull off perfectly as a modern book.

Now, let's go with the normal idea that "tone" in writing is about attitude. In a Parker novel, you're going to get some fisticuffs and some heist plans and guys with broken noses as dames with backstories.

"When the woman screamed, Parker awoke and rolled off the bed."

That's the first line Richard Stark's THE OUTFIT, a serious, no nonsense, masterpiece of crime fiction. So the writing that follows the woman screaming in bed and the guy waking up and falling to the floor would be different than they would in many other novels. A woman screaming in bed? The guy asleep when she starts? You could go for the cheap, sexxxy slapstick pretty easily with that -- depending on the tone of your book.

Tone, as I mentioned, is all about attitude -- the writer's attitude to the book and to the audience. Heck, it's also about the audience's attitude to the story.

And, just like voice, just like attitude, it has to be your own. Sure when you first start writing, you're cribbing a lot of voice from your favourite writers. When you first start writings songs, really all you're doing is finding the simplest songs in the back catalogue of your idol, and reshuffling the deck a little.

I've written two full novels, and a couple of half finished ones, and I'm probably still trying to out walk the shadow that White Jazz cast on my impressionable little brain. It takes time.

But whereas voice is something that carries over from book to book, something that keeps drawing a reader to a particular writer, tone is specific to that story. One of the best examples of both tone and voice is When The Sacred Ginmill Closes by Lawrence Block. I swear, every time I pick that book up to idly scan the first page, I then go ahead and read the first dozen chapters. There's something specific in those first two chapters that draws you in. Two things, actually. Tone and Voice.

Those first two chapters are filled with things that we're told not to do as received wisdom. It's a murder mystery that doesn't drop a body straight away. The first chapter is filled with some fairly unsympathetic characters, and the narrator himself is a drunk, which makes us question how reliable he is. The second chapter is one long example of info dump. It's page after page of back story, set up and context. And yet, because Block is in total control of his words, it all works.

The information we're being given isn't all needed for the plot. A lot of it may have been cut by an editor working on a first time author. But it's setting the tone. It's an album track. In this instance, it's filling us with a doomed form of nostalgia, one that knows the past wasn't a better place, but makes us yearn for it anyway. It talks of people and relationships long gone, and failures long buried. And, on it's way, it sets up the whole book.

Tone and voice are the things that can hold together a story. See in Elmore Leonard's rules of writing? See hoe he keeps pointing out that the rules can be broken? It's having control over those two elements that lets you break the rules.

Now I wouldn't necessarily agree that tone needs to be consistent throughout the book. I'd say what it needs to be is effective. It needs to hold you. A great writer, once again, can break the rules and mess around with tone. It can be consistent as long as it matches the story at each emotional beat, and those inconsistencies can be used to pack a real punch, like the flip your stomach does as you go over the tip of a roller-coaster.

But if, like me, you're still finding your voice, and still learning to control tone, I'd say it's safer to make it consistent. Learn what you're doing before you start showing off. I don't really have practical tips on this one as I had in previous weeks, because it's something I'm still working on. But maybe try creating a soundtrack album to your story, thinking which songs would play in each chapter if this were a film, and then write with that soundtrack in mind.

Bit above all, always make it your own.

Tone: All About Attitude

2011-11-23T03:00:00.011-05:00

By Steve Weddle

"When the woman screamed, Parker awoke and rolled off the bed."

That's the first line Richard Stark's THE OUTFIT, a serious, no nonsense, masterpiece of crime fiction.

Now, let's go with the normal idea that "tone" in writing is about attitude. In a Parker novel, you're going to get some fisticuffs and some heist plans and guys with broken noses as dames with backstories.

So the writing that follows the woman screaming in bed and the guy waking up and falling to the floor would be different than they would in many other novels.

A woman screaming in bed? The guy asleep when she starts? You could go for the cheap, sexxxy slapstick pretty easily with that -- depending on the tone of your book.

Tone, as I mentioned, is all about attitude -- the writer's attitude to the book and to the audience. Heck, it's also about the audience's attitude to the story.

The first novel I wrote, LOST AND FOUND, had some tone trouble in an early draft. I pulled this out as an example of how things can go horribly wrong.

Ryan, Amy, and the narrator are on the run. There's been some violence. Some deaths at a distance. The narrator and Amy just finished talking to John David Curtis and found out that stuff you find out just before the TV show goes to commercial. That twisty thing. This Twisty Thing let them know they should probably hop in the van and proceed with the hauling of the ass toot frackin sweet.

Now we join our story, already in progress:

Ryan turned on the radio, then found a local station.
“Look,” he said. “It’s noon. We calm down. Chill out. Listen to some tunes and relax.”
Whatever crappy music was finishing up. Strings. A violin or something. Applause. Then the bum-de-dum of station identification. Top of the hour. Whup-dee-doo.
I wasn’t paying attention until Amy said, “Turn it up. Listen.”
Something about their top story. Repeating the top story, which I thought was odd because it had just turned noon, so how they be repeating it. Anyway, the woman on the radio was talking about a brazen Sunday morning robbery at a convenience store. The clerk was shot and killed. The shooter is on the loose. Good, I thought. Look for him, not us. A customer at the store had been killed too, apparently trying to prevent the burglary, she said. I hated it when they got that wrong. Burglary is when someone breaks into your house and steals stuff. Robbery is when someone takes money from you. Idiots. “Breaking news,” the radio woman said, as if the robbery weren’t already breaking news. Though the family had not been notified and police were not releasing the identities of the dead clerk and the dead customer, she said, “the customer has been identified as former LSU football star and convicted felon John David Curtis.”
The three of us stopped breathing.

CHAPTER 42
“Ryan, you got a phone in your bag?” Amy asked.
“Yeah, take a grey one,” he said, reaching into his duffle and tossing her a cell phone.
She dialed a seven-digit number, then hung up after the first ring. She waited a few seconds and did the same thing again.
“Where can we go?” Ryan asked.
“I don’t know. You guys live here,” I said.
“You can’t go home, again,” Amy said.
“Look homeward, angel. The hills beyond,” I said.
“Novels of Thomas Wolfe,” Ryan said, both of us falling back into our schtick of that pyramid game that was on television when we were kids.
Amy tightened her eyeballs our way. “Let’s focus on this. It’s serious.”

Well, it is serious, but I was letting my "look at how funny I am" nonsense get in the way. I was screwing up the tone something awful. I was going to the laugh instead of playing out the story. I was just reaching for whatever tool was the closest. (Haha. He said 'tool.')

Tone is also the attitude of the characters. Are they taking this seriously. Should the reader take it seriously? Tone is like mortar -- you don't pay that much attention to it when it's done well, but it's the thingy that holds the important thingies together.

When done well, of course, a change in tone can be instrumental in a successful scene. I wasn't doing it well. There's that line attributed to George Lucas about how easy it is to make the audience cry: First you show them a puppy. Then you kill the puppy.

Stephen King said something like that, too. First he makes you care about the characters. Then he sets loose the monsters.

That's the way tone can work.

I could have done something like that in the scene I mentioned. I could have had the group doing their game show schtick and everyone laughing and having a good time and then they get the news of their dead friend. The old "first you're laughing/then you're crying" idea.

Tone is so important, so instrumental, that just by varying it at the right places, you can provide an entire layer to your book, your story.

See, tone doesn't have to be consistent. It just has to be perfect.

And speaking of tone, here's a song about clowns to cheer you up (thanks @laurabenedict):

Tone Deaf

2011-11-22T03:00:00.000-05:00

Tone and voice go hand in hand in my mind.

The way a book sounds, its rhythm and vibe as the reader turns the pages and reads each sentence. A great voice is smooth like jazz, pushing the reader ahead more than even the action.

Robert Parker is smooth jazz. He can say in 3 words what it might take someone else ten pages to say. He can zing you with a one liner, only to pull it back with a tight emotion in the span of two paragraphs.

Elmore Leonard is jazz as well. More rat-a-tat. Descriptions through dialogue, quick bursts of action, and a subtle characterization built with few powerful words.

I love voice. I love trying to make my work seem effortless and easy. Cutting, adding--a lot of that is plot stuff. But voice... voice has to be natural. You have to know the way you sound and keep it consistent. Whether it's funny, or hardboiled, or sappy... all of that is yours.

Be who you are.

Let your voice shine. The rest will follow.