A Writer's Life

History of the Planet of the Apes

The New York Times examines the Planet of the Apes franchise  on the eve of the new movie, "Rise of the Planet of the Apes." They say, in part:

Taken together the [original series of] movies constitute a cleverly worked out and (mostly) consistent mythology: an alternative, hairier, book of Genesis. The new “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” although it too features an überchimp named Caesar, consigns that bomb-based mythology to the dustbin of made-up history and instead attributes the origin of the super-species to genetic engineering: different anxieties for different times.

This reinvention of pop scripture is, of course, a risk: “Planet of the Apes” fundamentalists may reject it as heresy. But it’s probably inevitable. Show business, like evolution, is an inexorable and unforgiving process: those who fail to adapt are doomed to extinction. The real danger lies less in rethinking the story than in violating the basic nature of the original series’s kind of science fiction.

It's an interesting article and if it whets your appetite for more, check out Brian Pendreigh's excellent book Legend of the Planet of the Apes for a detailed history into the making of the original movies and the subsequent knock-offs.

Man Undercover

Jeroen Ten Berge is a terrific cover artist. He' s done the covers for my books WATCH ME DIE and THE JURY SERIES...as well as the books coming out of Top Suspense, to name a few. Author Joseph D'Agnese interviewed Jeroen on his blog. Here's an excerpt:

How do you describe the work you do? Are you a designer, an illustrator, or what? (It might help if you tell us what your training/background is.)

I consider myself a designer first. However, illustration is a skill I almost always use to assist me in creating the design I have in mind. In some cases an illustration becomes the key element of a design. The Scientist & The Sociopath is an example, but the Serial-series covers I created for Blake Crouch and Joe Konrath are also illustrations, as is Suzanne Tyrpak’s Vestal Virgin cover. I also use stock photography, sometimes my own. Several of the covers I designed for Marcus Sakey feature my photos, as do several of Blake’s covers. 

I guess I was fortunate to have studied graphic and typographic design at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague in the early- to mid-1980s. There was a strong focus on teaching the principles of design and typography, taught by people such as Gerrit Noordzij, one of the greatest type designers of his generation. There was, however, equal attention paid to illustration and photography. The philosophy was very much, "Why ask someone else to make an illustration or photograph for your design if you can do it yourself?"  In retrospect I can see that graduating the year before Apple MacIntosh was introduced to the Netherlands helped as well. Knowing how lead type works, and why there are certain rules of design helps me on a daily basis. That said—I have worked on an Apple for more than 20 years now, and would consider a career change if I had to go back designing old school.

 

Writing the MONK Books

Doug Lyle, my brother Tod, and I had very nice signing at Mysteries to Die For today, where we chatted a bit about our books, writing tie-ins, and the publishing industry. You can get a taste of what I had to say in this Q&A interview with me over at Kings River Life Magazine about the writing of the MONK books and MR. MONK ON THE COUCH in particular. Here's an excerpt:

Lorie: This one was a bit different, focusing more on Natalie—why did you decide to do this and what do you feel are the benefits?

 

Lee: My feeling is that characters become stale if they don’t grow and that readers will become as bored with them as the author is. Natalie is a smart woman and I didn’t think she could stick with Monk, and keep investigating murders, if she didn’t find it fascinating herself. And I doubted she could do it for so long without picking up some skills along the way. It’s an arc I have been developing with her since Mr. Monk and The Dirty Cop and that pays off in a big way in Mr. Monk On Patrol, which comes out in January. She’s not the only character who is changing…I’ve also been developing an arc with Ambrose since Mr. Monk In Outer Space that takes a big step forward (so to speak) in Mr. Monk On The Couch.

 

Lorie: Anything else you want to share specifically about this book?

 

Lee: I’ve been liberated, in a sense, by the finale of the Monk TV series, which really shook things up for the characters. I have built on that over the last few books, paying off some of the arcs that began early the novel series. Like the book Mr. Monk On The Road, the book that preceded this one, Couch is a story about change. The characters and their relationships are evolving in substantial ways that continue in the books to come.

 

Fall Season Promo of the Week: Lets All Be There

Scribe Awards Video

Here's an excerpt from the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers' Scribe Award ceremony in San Diego last week. Many thinks to Danny Barer for shooting this.

TV Main Title of the Week

Scribe Award Winners Announced

The winners of the Scribe Awards, honoring excellence in media tie-in writing, were awarded Friday at a ceremony at Comic-Con in San Diego by the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers   Author Peter David was honored as this year's Grandmaster, and engaged in a lively discussion about his career, and tie-in writing, at the ceremony, which was hosted by Max Allan Colins and drew a packed house.

Nancy Holder won the award for best original novel in the general fiction category for Saving Grace: Tough Love.  The honors for best original novel in speculative fiction went to Nathan Long for Warhammer: Bloodborn: Ulrika the Vampire. This is the second time Long has won a Scribe for his work in the Warhammer franchise.

The Wolfman by Jonathan Maberry snagged the Best Adaptation/Novelization award while  Nathan Meyer won for Best Novel, Original or Adapted, in the Young Adult category with Dungeons and Dragons: Aldwyns Academy. 

 

Adapting to Adaptations

Adapting a screenplay into a novel isn't easy. Author Jonathan Maberry, who has done it a few times himself, interviews the nominees for the Scribe Award for best adapted novel on his blog. Here's an excerpt:

BIG SCARY BLOG: What drew you to writing media tie-in books?

GREG COX: My not-so-guilty secret is that I would be watching these shows and movies, and reading the comics, even if it wasn’t my job. I grew up on sci-fi movies and comic books and such, and I still get a thrill out actually getting to write some of my favorite characters and series.

ROBERT VARDEMAN: I’ve done game tie-in novels in the Star Trek (TOS) universe and for such diverse games as Magic: The Gathering, MechWarrior:Dark Age and most recently, Pathfinder (a short story titled “Plow and Sword” is due to be posted on that website any time now). The pleasure of playing in someone else’s sandbox, maybe picking up a toy or two and examining it, then imagining something even more than already exists, is a wonderful challenge. As an author I have to play fair with the established material but find new ways to “make it my own” expanding what is there into a complete tapestry of a story. The challenge possibly generates the same feeling as a race driver surging around the course at high speeds. Adrenaline pumps, ideas flows and the actual writing is often done at close to the speed of that race driver–but without the catastrophic result if there’s a crash. Hopefully the checkered flag drops for both race and novel.

JONATHAN MABERRY: I got a call out of the blue. I was at home one Saturday night watching a monster flick (the outstanding Neil Marshall werewolf film, DOG SOLDIERS) when I get a call from a woman who says she’s a vice president with Universal, asking if I’d be interested in novelizing the remake of THE WOLFMAN. I had no idea I was on anyone’s radar for this and for a few seconds I thought I was being punked. When I realized that this was serious, I got very excited. I’ve always loved media tie-in novels. I had a shelf-full of them as a teenager –Murray Leinster (TIME TUNNEL, LAND OF THE GIANTS), Michael Avallone (THE MAN FROM .U.N.C.L.E., BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES) and others, and kept reading novelizations and books expanded-universe stuff. Among my favorites are the Buffy and Angel novels by Christopher Golden, Nancy Holder and John Passarella.

Since I did WOLFMAN, I’ve played with other tie-in stuff. I did a GI Joe novella (‘Flint and Steel’) for a collection called GI JOE: TALES FROM THE COBRA WARS edited by Max Brooks. And I do a lot of comic book work with Marvel, which involves writing characters and stories set in a well-established world not of my making. It’s all great fun.

Fall Season Promo of the Week: The Best is Right Here

Vote for Carleton Eastlake for WGA Board

My friend Carleton Eastlake is an incumbent running for re-election to the Writers Guild of America board of directors. He has done an exceptional job on behalf of writers and, if you are a WGA member, I hope you will not only vote for him, but will endorse him as well.  I have. You can read his compelling and thoughtful candidate's statement and endorse him by going here.

Bathroom Reading Roundup

I can't resist buying books about the making of TV shows, even series I never watched or don't care for much, because I always learn something from them. Bear Manor is a small, niche publisher that churns out a lot of these books. The quality of the writing and research on the books is very hit-and-miss, but Bear Manor deserves a lot of credit for even bothering to print them. They're just about the only publisher out there turning out books on obscure and vintage TV series at an affordable price (one piece of advice, though, never buy a book about a TV series by James Rosin, you can always count on them to be awful).  

I particularly enjoyed Riverboat: The Evolution of a Television Series 1959-1961 by S.L. Kotar and J.E. Gessler, which chronicles the development and very short life span of the western, which starred Darren McGavin (at the same time he was starring in Mike Hammer) and Burt Reynolds. McGavin played the captain of the Enterprise...no, not the starship, but the riverboat...and Reynolds was his pilot. The two characters didn't get along and, as it turned out, neither did the actors. Reynolds was forced out after the first season.

Most books of this sort are written by diehard fans and read like the slobbering labors of love that they are. But this one is different. The authors are diehard McGavin fans, and did all this research as part of their website devoted to the actor, and while they admire the him, they aren't so wild about the show.  They take a very, very critical eye.  The show never found its footing conceptually, and an unusually high turn-over of writer-producers seemed to doom it from the start...

The writing, too, was a mixed bag of (over)experienced and novice writers. Most of the episodes were little more than standard Wagon Train plots transported to a riverboat setting.  Few particularly stood out as rising above the rest, and as a whole, they failed miserably to create any significant characterization for [McGavin's character] or the crew. [...]nothing rose head-and-shoulders over routine TV fare. Considering the premise, and Darren McGavin, this was disappointing to say the least. 

And that's the nicest thing they have to say about the series. So you might be asking yourself -- if the show was so mediocre, why write a book about it? And why should I read it? Well, if you are a student of TV as I am (even after writing and producing many TV series myself), it's always fascinating to read about the development, production, and fate of a show. And the authors don't skimp on details. The episodes are analyzed in depth and the authors add interesting asides about production. The book is also chock full of rare, never-before-published production stills.  If you are a Riverboat or McGavin fan, you're going to love it.

On the other end of the spectrum is Henry Fonda and The Deputy by Glenn Mosley. The 1959 series starred Fonda, then a major movie star, as U.S. Marshal and was created by Norman Lear and Roland Kibbee, who would go on to great success themselves. But despite the hoopla surrounding Fonda's decision to do a TV series, it was something of a bait-and-switch.  He only appeared as the lead in six of the first season's 39 episodes and did cameos in the others. Most of the screen time was filled by Allen Case as his deputy. But viewers weren't tuning in to see Case and felt cheated...and rightly so.  Fonda upped his participation to twelve episodes in the second season, but it was too late (though the network was supposedly willing to go for one more season).

The book has some good information, but it's barely more than a magazine article padded out into book-length with actor biographies (which repeats lots of information already conveyed) and a very thin episode guide.   If you're a big fan of The Deputy,  you'll be disappointed by the lack of substance to this book. And if you've never heard of the show, there isn't anything here to really make it worthwhile to learn more. 

Finally, there's Rawhide: History of Television's Longest Cattle Drive by David R. Greenland. The book is loaded with details on the development and eight-season run of the classic western series, which was created by Charles Marquis Warren (who also brought Gunsmoke to TV from radio and produced the early seasons) and made a star out of Clint Eastwood, who was second-lead behind Eric Fleming.  

The author delves deeply into the professional and personal backgrounds of producer Warren and actor Fleming, so that you're able to put their creative clashes into a broader perspective. Naturally, that squabbling had an impact on the show in many ways, and Greenland explores them all.

After Warren left, the show changed hands several times. Greenland closely examines how the show changed creatively, and why, under the subsequent show runners.

 I found it fascinating reading, but once the author got into the obligatory actor bios and episode guide, I found myself skimming the rest. 

You don't have to be a fan of Rawhide to enjoy this book (I've only seen four or five episodes of the show in my life). It's worth reading to learn how this series was developed and produced and how it evolved...and it's fascinating to see just how little TV series production, at least behind-the-scenes, has changed in fifty years.

Call To Danger

The HMSS Blog has a terrific piece on the saga of  Call to Danger, a series concept that CBS kept trying to make work during the 60s and 70s.  The idea was that a spy would recruit an ordinary citizen to help him solve a crime.  I also wrote in detail about these pilots in my book, Unsold Television Pilots.

The network commissioned three pilots -- in 1961, 1967 and 1973 -- but none of them clicked.

Lloyd Nolan starred as treasury agent Robert Hale in the 1961 pilot, which was produced by Perry Lafferty, who later became a top CBS exec.

In the 1968 pilot, Peter Graves played Jim Kingsley, an agent for the Office of National Resources, who used a super computer to recruit citizens to help out...to a rousing Morton Stevens' theme.  James Gregory played his boss. The network liked Graves so much, they made him the star of Mission Impossible. And they liked Stevens'  Call to Danger  theme so much that they re-used it in the score to the Hawaii Five-O pilot and as the "CBS Specials" theme.  

In the 1973 pilot, written by MI producer Laurence Heath, Graves reluctantly signed on again. this time playing Treasury Agent Douglas Warfield, who also uses computers to recruit civilians to help him solve crimes...but with a different theme tune.

Here's the opening to the 1973 pilot

The Man From Atlantis Returns

No, it's not another rebooting of an old TV franchise by a desperate network... it's the release of the original series on DVD.  Television Obscurities reports that Warner Brothers is releasing the four Man From Atlantis TV movie/pilots as well as the TV series. The movies and the series have not aged well...and are unbelievably awful. The only thing of redeeming value about The Man From Atlantis is Fred Karlin's fantastic score...which I wish an enterprising company like Screen Archives would release on CD. 

Books Without Borders

The demise of Borders, though widely expected, is sending shockwaves through the publishing industry that authors will undoubtedly be feeling in their wallets, as the Wall Street Journal reports.

When you lose literally miles of bookshelves, it's going to have an impact," said David Young, chief executive ofLagardère SCA's Hachette Book Group, which Borders owed $36.9 million at the time of its bankruptcy filing. "I hope other retailers will now step up and make offers for what they consider to be the prime sites," Mr. Young said. "It's a tragedy Borders didn't make it through."

The loss of Borders may also make it more difficult for new writers to be discovered. "The liquidation of Borders is an irreplaceable loss of a big part of the book-discovery ecosystem," said Michael Norris, a senior analyst at Simba Information, a unit of MarketResearch.com "Thousands of people whose job consisted of talking up and selling books will eventually being doing something else, and that's bad for authors, agents, and everyone associated with the value chain in books."

Hardcover and paperback book sales are bound to take a huge hit...and publishers are going to pass on the pain by offering lower advances. This is bound to drive more authors, particularly those in the ever-widening mid-list, to self-publishing. It will also have, oddly enough, a negative impact on at least one e-reading platform -- the Kobo, which was Borders' answer to the Kindle and Nook (though the Kobo remains the device of choice for Canada's Chapters chain of book superstores).

The liquidation of the 400 remaining Borders stores could start as early as Friday.

TV Main Title of the Week

Naomi's Flawed Masterpiece

My friend Naomi Hirahara talks today about her affection for Summer of the Big Bachi, her widely acclaimed first novel and today's Top Suspense Sizzling Summer read. It took her fifteen years to write the novel, which she considers "a flawed book yet a very ambitious one" and yet her favorite among all the ones that she's written:  

Why do I describe my first novel as flawed? This is not a finely tuned mystery novel, as sits probably in the middle of being a traditional mystery and literary fiction. Mas is very broken in this novel and not that likable at times. And I use a lot of dialect.BACHI, for instance, means “what goes around, comes around.” 

I feel that SUMMER OF THE BIG BACHI captures a community of people that you probably never knew existed. They have survived and thrived through experiences you couldn’t imagine. This summer, spend a few days in Mas Arai’s world. It will be a fresh, and unique experience and probably one you won’t forget.

She's right. Discover for yourself why so many booksellers fell in love with this book and hand-sold it to big and lasting success.

Harlequin Screws Authors

Amazon gives authors a 70% royalty when they self-publish an ebook. On the other end of the spectrum, the standard ebook royalty set by most major publishers is 25%, one that the Authors Guild says massively screws authors.  

But Harlequin is setting a new low.

Harlequin is now in the process of digitizing their entire backlist and is giving those authors a pathetic 15%  royalty on those sales as if it's some kind of favor.   Here's the letter that they recently sent out to their authors:

Dear Author,

The landscape of digital publishing continues to evolve at a fast pace and Harlequin is at the forefront of this evolution. In 2007 Harlequin was the first publisher to simultaneously publish print and digital editions of our entire frontlist. Since then we have also digitized and brought to market our backlist and now have a current catalogue of over 11,000 ebooks!

The Harlequin brand has always offered an advantage other publishers don't have and this is especially true for ebooks. Our digital marketing efforts focus on building the Harlequin brand to drive the sales of your books through newsletter programs, advertising, search engine marketing, social media properties, the Harlequin website and leading ebook retailers. All this means better search and discoverability by online shoppers and an endorsement of the quality of the read, which is critical in the midst of the online clutter.

Harlequin has been closely monitoring developments in digital publishing, including author compensation. As you know, until now Harlequin's position has been that digital royalty rates as a percentage of cover price is a more transparent way to pay authors than as a percentage of net receipts: authors know exactly how many copies they sold at what price and their compensation is not affected by unspecified costs. Over the past several months we have worked to ensure a smooth transition from the current percentage of cover price calculation to a net receipts calculation while maintaining the same transparency. As such, Harlequin will be amending digital royalty rates.

Effective January 1, 2012, series authors who are actively writing for Harlequin will receive a digital royalty rate of 15% of net digital receipts for each digital unit sold in the English language, United States and Canada, frontlist and backlist. This will include books in Harlequin's digital backlist program, Harlequin Treasury.

Given that these are more favorable terms than those in your existing contract(s), this notification will be considered the amendment to those contract(s). If you wish to maintain the existing terms of the contract(s), please let us know by Friday, July 15th, 2011.

Naturally, authors are outraged about this and fighting it as hard as they can. This royalty rape is especially hard for Harlequin authors to accept since the publisher is already notorious in romance circles for blithely releasing ebook versions of titles that have fallen out-of-print (and that they no longer have the rights to) and dragging their feet to correct the problem.

Harlequin's obvious contempt for authors, published and unpublished, while making as much money as possible off their backs (as shown by this outrageous royalty grab and their aborted, and loathsome, Harlequin Horizons vanity press scheme) is truly revolting.

Fall Season Promo of the Week: Still the One

The Mail I Get

I could write a book on how to communicate ineffectively just by sharing the emails that I get. Here's one that I got today, with the subject "Books":

I run a book review blog. I was wondering if you would be willing to send me a copy of your latest Monk book in return for a review on my blog. Please contact me with your response. Thank you.

Sent from my iPhone

Hell of a pitch. Would have been even better if the dimwit thought to include the name, or perhaps even a link, to his blog.  I also got this email from someone named "E. Belmont" with the subject heading "New TV Show Idea."

I would like to speak to you asap feel free to email me back or call me at 917-XXX-XXXX or 913-XXX-XXXX ok...?

Sent from Yahoo! Mail on my Android

Wow, who wouldn't drop everything he was doing, pick up the phone right away and make a long-distance call to a complete stranger after such a compelling pitch like that? What are you smoking, E. Belmont?

Tied In to Writing

For the last few weeks, author Jonathan Maberry has been running a terrific series of lengthy, detailed interviews with Scribe nominated tie-in writers on his Big Scary Blog about the nuts-and-bolts of their craft. This week he focuses on the authors nominated for "Best Speculative Original." Here's an excerpt:

BIG SCARY BLOG: Talk about your process for creating a media tie-in book.

MATT FORBECK: If I’m not already familiar with the basis of the book, I immerse myself in it as best I can and become a fan of it too. As I do that, I look for story hooks, little “what about that?” or “wouldn’t that be cool?” bits. Those become the seeds of the novel. Once I have that, I write up an outline, get it approved, and dig in for real.

JEFF GRUBB: I think all media projects have a core ethos, an underlying truth about them. The original creators of the project may not know what it is, and in fact it may evolve over time. One of the goals I have when working on a media tie-in book is to dig down and find that piece, find that core ethos, and remain true to it in the story. Guild Wars 2 is very much about people coming together to fight a greater threat – that is one of Dougal Keane’s major conflicts in the book.

DAVID MACK: It’s a lot like most other writers’ processes, I imagine. Either I solicit an editor for a shot at writing for a particular license, or they approach me. Either way, if it’s a property I know well, I might already have ideas ready to pitch and develop.  If it’s one that I’m curious about but don’t know intimately, I’ll dig in and immerse myself in it until I start to get a feel for its big picture, its characters and its broader storytelling arcs.

Next, I’ll try to find a story that interests me and seems to offer some new angle that neither the show nor its existing tie-in titles have explored.  In some cases, such as a tie-in line that’s been running for a while, an editor might ask me to craft a story specifically to advance a part of an ongoing narrative.

Then I write a proposal, just a few pages, to see if my general idea is what the editor is looking for. Once we settle on an idea, I prepare a much longer and more detailed full outline that can be presented to the license-holder for approval. Once we get the green-light, I go to work on the manuscript.

To stay in the right mindset while working on a given franchise, I’ll try to listen to music soundtracks from it (if they’re available), and have DVDs ready for reference and quick refreshers on characters’ speech patterns, etc. Online references are also often invaluable tools, especially for a series that is still in production while one is working on it. Thank Heaven for the invention of wiki reference sites!

SEAN WILLIAMS: Well, firstly, I have to make sure I know the property sufficiently well to do it justice. With Star Wars or Doctor Who, say, that would be easy: I’ve been a fan of them for decades. Depending on the kind of project, the next step would be to get right down into the details of the story and character, since they’re the aspect of the tie-in most important to get right, at least in the early stages. This is always accomplished in collaboration with editors and other stakeholders in the project–the people who own the property, basically. I’m not just telling a story for me: in a real way I’m just channelling something for someone else. But that is a fun process, and a challenge, one I take very seriously. There are snafus sometimes, without a doubt, but whether I have one month or one year to write a tie-in, I give it the same energy and consideration I would give one of my own books. To do anything less would be to cheat everyone involved.

The entire series of interviews is well worth your time, regardless of whether you are into tie-ins. There's a lot of great insights into the craft and business of writing books shared by the authors, all of whom are experienced, hard-working pros.

Sizzling Summer Reads

It's going to be a long, hot Top Suspense Summer! Here 12 masters of the genre will keep you on the edge of your beach towel with 12 sizzling summer reads guaranteed to get your pulse pounding.

Join in the discussions this summer and win a free copy of our second anthology! With our second Top Suspense anthology we’ll each be contributing an award nominated, an award winning, or a personal favorite story.  It will be out in the Fall, and anyone who reads and joins in the discussion on our Facebook page of four of our summer books--or better yet, reviews the books on Amazon--will receive a free copy before we make it available to the general public.

Watch the Top Suspense blog over the next three weeks as each Top Suspense author will talk about their sizzling summer books.

Blood Dreams by Jack MacLane (Bill Crider)

Blood Moon by Ed Gorman

Dying Memories by Dave Zeltserman

Motion to Kill by Joel Goldman

No One Will Hear You by Max Allan Collins & Matthew Clemens

Riptide by Paul Levine

Running Cold by Harry Shannon

Set The Night On Fire by Libby Hellmann

Summer of the Big Bachi by Naomi Hirahara

Valley Of Lights by Stephen Gallagher

Voluntary Madness by Vicki Hendricks

And Watch Me Die by yours truly. And don't forget to join our Summer Sizzling Reads discussions all summer long at our Top Suspense Facebook Page!

TV Main Title of the Week

The secret shame I share with Jessica Alba. We both worked on this show (this is from the airings in France, where it was undoubtedly a cult hit).

 

Thriller Breasts

A few years back, I remember reading that Homeland Security was inviting thriller writers over to give them advice on what plots terrorists might be cooking up. The notion was widely lampooned but it was probably a very smart idea, because as author Lew Perdue points out, when it comes to terror plots, he's often been way ahead of the curve, especially when it comes to killer breasts: 

The Obama Administration’s recent warning about terrorists using breast implant bombsreminds me that over my 35 years of writing thrillers, I’ve frequently developed ideas — including explosive breast implants — that once seemed preposterous, outlandish or impossible — but which have either come true or entered the realm of the dangerously likely.

[...]About two year ago, I outlined a thriller around women who had implants filled with a liquid explosive that does not require a separate detonator to explode. Nitroglycerine is an example one of these, but is less stable and not as powerful as alternative formulations available. [...]I had stunningly attractive women with breasts surgically enhanced to Brobdingnagian proportions, which of course, require commensurate structural support including a substantial underwire superstructure.

 

The detonation mechanism consisted of two parts, both cleverly constructed to identically mimic bra underwiring. The actual detonator circuit was contained in side the implant was a simple variation on a spark gap. This was capacitance linked to external wiring in the bra.  The connection as I designed it in the outline was a bit like those capacitance switches that work when you touch them with your finger. No direct connection is needed.

 

Similarly, the electrical charge to initiate the detonation in the breast implant bomb doesn’t need a direct connection. Just the closeness through the skin between the detonator and the electrical charge to set off the explosive. The electrical charge in my thriller outline came from a small netbook which had been rewired to route the power leads of the USB port to the earplug port. Very large capacitance charges can be achieved by gradual charging. But the advantage of a capacitor is that t can discharge all its energy almost instantly.

 

By bringing the slightly modified earplug near the implanted detonator wire and pressing the “PLAY” button on the netbook’s music player would detonate the implants.

 

What Royalty Should Publishers Pay Authors For Ebooks?

Publishers maintain a 25% royalty on ebooks is generous but the Authors Guild thinks it should be 50%. Author Kelly McClymer's thoughtful husband has crunched the numbers and determined what he believes, based on industry figures, what he thinks the fair royalty should be. He goes into great detail about how he determined those numbers, and it's truly fascinating to read, but here's the bottom line:

25% net is much too low a royalty rate, a 50% net is too much as it assumes no cost to the publisher and is not realistic. [...] Ebook royalties should be between 31.4%and 45% of net. The lower royalty rate assumes publishers have the same cost to publish an ebook as a paperback while the 45% has a more reasonable cost.

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

I loved Tom Franklin's HELL AT THE BREECH...but couldn't get into his follow-up, SMONK. But I am glad to report that CROOKED LETTER, CROOKED LETTER is terrific, well-deserving of all the acclaim and award nominations it has been receiving. I won't rehash the plot. Suffice it to say, it's about a long-ago incident that involved two teenagers...and a missing girl...and how they are haunted by the consequences well into adulthood. There lots of references to Stephen King in this book, and for good reason. The story is more than a little reminiscent of STAND BY ME...crossed with shades of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD (not so much in plot, but in the racial themes and the depiction of a rural community). It is a powerful, entertaining, and thought-provoking book.

View all my reviews

Lawrence Block: A Passport to Yesterday

Today I'm honored (and thrilled) to feature a guest-post by author Lawrence Block...discussing, among other things, the perils of time on a series character like Matthew Scudder and how he approached writing his brilliant new novel A Drop of the Hard Stuff.

"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." That’s the sentence Leslie Poles Hartley chose for the opening of his novel, The Go-Between, and if those eleven words were all he ever wrote, he’d still deserve a spot in any proper collection of quotations.

Isn’t it a gorgeous line? And it has the added advantage of being true.

My wife and I are fairly intrepid globetrotters, and members in good standing of the Travelers Century Club. We’ve crossed borders on ships and planes, buses and trains, and a few more on foot, but we haven’t yet tried a time machine.

As a fictioneer, I’ve kept myself rooted in the present. I love period fiction when it’s done right (Thomas Flanagan, Jeff and Michael Shaara, Max Byrd) but have never felt inclined to get into the game. I have my work cut out for me trying to make sense of the world around me, right here and right now.

On May 12, Mulholland Books published A Drop of the Hard Stuff, my 17th novel featuring Matthew Scudder. I’ve been writing about the man since the early seventies, and he’s now in his early seventies, and no longer able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Which is my own damn fault, because I decided early on to have Scudder age in real time. I’ve never regretted it, because it’s made him more real for me and for readers as well, but this added realism brings with it an added sell-by date.

Now I may have to keep on working but why should he? The man’s got a rich wife and a pension from the city. And, considering all he’s been through, hasn’t he earned a comfortable retirement?
My wife’s bright and beautiful, but she never had Elaine’s opportunity to amass wealth. And all I get from the City of New York is a reduced-rate card for the subways and buses. I’m not complaining, mind you. . .

Still, the fact that I have to go on writing doesn’t mean I have to go on writing about Matt Scudder. But I was out for a walk one day, and it struck me that there was a gap of some seven years in Scudder’s story. (His fictional autobiography, you could call it, which I’ve been ghosting for him for the past quarter-century.) In Eight Million Ways to Die (1982), he leave a drink on the bar, goes to an AA meeting, and cops to his alcoholism. In Out on the Cutting Edge (1989) he’s seven years sober and living his life.

I didn’t skip this stretch of Scudder’s life because I figured it was uneventful. From what I’ve observed, early sobriety tends to be anything but. Thing is, I’d figured the series was done when he got sober, and it took me seven years to realize Matt and I weren’t through with each other.
Matter of fact, the book that followed Eight Million Ways to Die was a sort of prequel. When the Sacred Ginmill Closes (1986) recounts events ten years earlier, when Scudder’s world centered upon saloons and hotel rooms and after-hours joints. When it was published, it got an enthusiastic review from Richard F. Snow, the longtime editor of American Heritage; he justified it by proclaiming the book an historical novel, and the 1970s thus a part of the past.

I thought of that when I returned to Scudder’s past in A Drop of the Hard Stuff. I’d had a couple of other dips into past time in three Scudder short stories, “Looking for David,” “Let’s Get Lost,” and “A Moment of Wrong Thinking,” each consisting of today’s Scudder recounting events from his NYPD days. But this would be different. This would be total immersion, a full descent into that foreign country of past time. And, while it would be bookended by a late-night conversation between Matt and Mick Ballou, and would take place in 1982-3, it would reach back even further into the past—to his years on the police force, and his boyhood in the Bronx. 

Well, you know, I make this stuff up, so it wasn’t as though I had to go interview people to find out what Scudder was up to back in the day. But I had to return in my own mind and memory to a very different world, a world without cell phones and personal computers, a world in which we somehow actually managed to find things out without Google or Wikipedia, and even managed to hook up without match.com or JDate.

If the past is a foreign country, its New York was certainly a very different city. Neighborhoods, now all squeaky-clean with gentrification, were mean streets indeed. You couldn’t walk a block without encountering a pay phone, but you might have to walk half a mile to find one in working order.

I didn’t get a computer myself until the early 90s, so in the interest of verisimilitude I suppose I could have forced myself to bang out A Drop of the Hard Stuff with a typewriter. But why? Did Jean Auel write Clan of the Cave Bear by scratching in the dirt with a sharpened stick?

I wrote the book my Mac, but the apartment I squatted in to write the book didn’t have wi-fi, so I was without Internet access during my working hours. While that didn’t exactly catapult me into the past, it made me realize just how much I rely on Google and Wikipedia (though not, I assure you, on match.com or JDate).

I didn’t do anything you could call research, having always been too lazy for that sort of thing, nor did I make a colossal effort to recall specifics. It seemed more natural simply to let myself slip into an earlier time when I was writing, rather as I slip into another voice or another state of mind or way of seeing the world. That, I suppose, is how fiction flows out of the imagination.

But I came away from the book with the perhaps obvious realization that the world has changed rather a lot in the years since Matt Scudder uncharacteristically left a drink unfinished and walked off to start a new life.

Barry Malzberg, my good friend and contemporary, had this to say about the book’s time period: “Completely different. 1982 is to the young Yuppie crowd today what 1900 was to us in the early sixties. Utterly historic. The Web and the social networks have not only changed, they have reformulated everything. We have survived to this world and it is a privilege and we can in fact handle it pretty well but I don't kid myself: it might look like a bear and sound like a bear and shuffle like a bear but it isn't.”

I think he’s got the proportions right: a 25-year descent into the past now, is the equivalent of a 60- or 70-year trip when we were young. The world moves faster, and the past recedes more rapidly with every passing year.

I can’t help thinking of “The Lightoliers,” a story of Stephen King’s. The eponymous entities were monsters, always at our heels, devouring the past. I don’t remember a thing about the story itself, but that one image lingers, perversely gaining in strength as the past falls away. The Lightoliers, forever chomping away, stealing all past time away from us.

Well now, isn’t that heavy baggage for a novel just designed to get you through a plane ride or a lonely night? But I won’t apologize. It’s the risk you run when you let a writer natter on about his work.

A very different place, the past. It’s hard to know what to pack, and you’d best have your passport in order. But a quick visit is not without its rewards.

And who’s to say? I might go back again. I can’t rule it out.

You can keep up with Lawrence Block and his musings on his blog, his Facebook page,  his website, and on his Twitter feed: @LawrenceBlock

Fall Season Promo of the Week: Get Ready

The Interrogator Is Interrogated

Brian Drake conducts an indepth interview with my buddy Paul Bishop, who has just reissued all of his terrific crime novels as ebooks (some under new titles). Paul is a veteran LAPD detective and an interrogation expert (also the star of ABC's upcoming reality show Take the Money and Run) who brings that experience to his books. But, like Joseph Wambaugh before him, he writes more than simple police procedurals.  In the interview, he talks in detail about how the characters in his books are shaped, in particular his series heroine Fey Croaker. 

BD: Fey Croaker is a great character in her Detective Fey Croaker L.A.P.D. Novels. Was there anyone in particular who inspired her?

PB: All of my long-term partners on the job have been female.  I learned a ton from all of them.  In my opinion, the average woman in law enforcement is much better than the average man – and yes, I know saying that is sacrilege to many.  Women on the job are natural problem solvers and can instinctively deescalate potentially violent situations far quicker and easier than their male counterparts because they are not hung up on their own machismo.

Working for so many years with female partners, I saw firsthand how they were mistreated by bureaucracy, how every time they turned around they were being hit on sexually.  It got to the point where I’d heard every pick-up line in the book a hundred times used on my partners.  I got really tired of it, so I had some inkling of how they felt. 

I also came to understand why female cops have a very hard time sustaining personal relationships outside of the job.  And through investigating sexually related crimes for thirty plus years, I came to believe the majority of females have some kind of sexual abuse – almost always unreported – in their background.  This was inside knowledge, and I wanted to bring it to the character of Fey Croaker. 

Before I had even started writing the first book, I had plotted out a four book story arc for Fey’s personal life.  I knew each book would contain a standalone plot, but would also be designed to isolate Fey more and more personally, before forcing her to deal with her demons in the fourth novel.

So, Fey is a combination of many of the great female detectives with whom I’ve had the honor of working.  And the best feeling was when I would be approached by female law enforcement officers who had read the book and demanded to be told how I knew this stuff – it meant I’d gotten it right.

That's not all he gets right. If you're looking for great summer reading, do yourself a big favor and pick up a Paul Bishop novel.

Reasoners' Reasonings

Wag the Fox has a great interview with  James Reasoner, author of THE DEAD MAN #5: THE BLOOD MESA and about 10,000 other books, today on their blog. Here's an excerpt:

Gef: You had mentioned that The Blood Mesa marks one of your most brutal works, a purposeful attempt on your part to cut loose. Was this something that you had been looking to do in your writing for a while, or just something you tackled when it came to you?

James: I’ve always included a lot of action in my work, and I’ve never been shy about going over the top when it felt right.  It’s never been quite as graphic as in my Dead Man story, though.  I think I saw this opportunity when I was reading the previous books in the series, and when I actually started writing, I knew that was the way I wanted to go.Gef: What were your initial thoughts when you were approached to contribute to The Dead Man series? With multiple authors each writing about the Matt Cahill character, did you have concerns of "too many cooks spoil the broth" or saw a unique opportunity to, in a way, become part of a writing team on a series?

James: I’ve written for a number of different multiple-author series, so this was just business as usual for me, with a slight difference.  Most of those other series I’ve worked on didn’t have much, if any, book-to-book continuity, so I had to be more concerned with this book fitting into the flow of the rest of the series.  Luckily, with Lee Goldberg and Bill Rabkin supervising everything, that wasn’t a problem. [...]I’m writing a Western series for Berkley called REDEMPTION, KANSAS, with one book out so far and at least two more to come.  I’m also doing a Western e-book series called RANCHO DIABLO with my friends Mel Odom and Bill Crider, with three books out so far under the house-name Colby Jackson, and many more to come, we hope.

Tod Gives Burn Notice the Burn Notice

After writing five BURN NOTICE  books, my brother Tod has called it quits, turning down a contract for more. Remarkably, the publisher has decided to retire the series as a result. Now that THE BAD BEAT,   his final book in the series is coming out, Tod reflects on his blog today on what he's learned from the experience. Here's an excerpt:

...writing Michael Westen taught me how to write series fiction and, beyond that, how to pace commercial crime fiction. See, previously, the crime fiction I wrote was decidedly not series and decidedly not commercial, really. (And I would argue that I never really set out to write crime, specifically, even if Living Dead Girl and Fake Liar Cheat and a bunch of my short stories are, you know, stories about crimes.) At any rate, writing the books required a completely different skill set -- the deadlines alone required that they be almost completely plot and voice driven, which is somewhat different than my other work which tends to be character and setting driven. Writing Burn Notice has changed the way I approach crime fiction, which is good since the novel I'm writing now -- more on that in a moment -- is a pretty straight crime novel. 

[...] because the deadlines were so close, I also had to learn to not be an obsessive rewriter, which meant I had to keep a pretty tight plot, which meant I did more outlining than usual...and by that I mean I outlined anything at all, which I typically don't do. I also ended up trusting myself more. Usually when I'm working on something new, I show drafts to my wife or to my agent or trusted friends to get some feedback, but I just didn't have the time to do that with these books and the result is that I ended up needing to be honest with myself. Not an easy thing for any writer.

Now I don't feel so guilty about getting him the gig.

TV Main Title of the Week

THE DEAD MAN #5: THE BLOOD MESA

THE DEAD MAN #5: THE BLOOD MESA by James Reasoner, the laziest writer on the friggin' planet, is out today in ebook and paperback editions...and it's perhaps the bloodiest tale yet in the series. Matt Cahill finds himself trapped atop a blood-red mesa in the desolate American Southwest when an archeological dig goes terribly, dangerously wrong, awakening an ancient evil with an insatiable hunger. Now Matt, armed only with his trusty ax, must somehow escape...rescue a handful of terrified innocents... and prevent a slaughter of epic proportions.

He talks on the Dead Man Blog about his experience writing it. He says: 

it has strong elements of horror and the supernatural, and for the most part this is unexplored territory for me in my work.  True, I’ve done a few Westerns that had mild supernatural elements (often of the Scooby-Doo variety!), but THE BLOOD MESA is the first real horror novel I’ve written, even though I’ve been a reader and fan of horror for many, many years. But most important of all for me, writing THE BLOOD MESA was fun, just as I thought it would be.  I had an absolutely great time with it,

And you're going to have a blast reading the book, which is already getting some great reviews. Like these:

If you like horror with a dash of suspense then you should read the DEAD MAN series. They are not only fun but addictive [...] All of the books in the series are great and THE BLOOD MESA is no exception. On a scale of 1 to 5, I give it a 5! -- Futures Mystery Anthology Magazine

I dare say Reasoner also offers up the most gruesome iteration in The Dead Man so far, as some of the deaths in this one are nothing less than brutal.  - Wag the Fox 

This story is the literary equivalent to a drag strip race [...] the story keeps accelerating until its brutal climax. That truly is its strength - it's rapid fire pace and its unflinching brutality (which you've got to expect from a series featuring an axe wielding hero). --Permission to Kill 

The story riffs off of some creepy western themes, with a hefty dose of cannibalism, whacko/zombie-movie mania, and did I mention there's a few sticks of dynamite thrown in for good measure? [...]It is highly recommended. -- Post Modern Pulps

If you like this book, you're going to want to grab the previous books in the DEAD MAN series:

FACE OF EVIL by Lee Goldberg & William Rabkin
RING OF KNIVES by James Daniels
HELL IN HEAVEN by Lee Goldberg & William Rabkin
THE DEAD WOMAN by David McAfee

Coming in August... KILL THEM ALL by Harry Shannon.

Here Comes the Slush

The ease of self-publishing has been great for mid-list authors and authors with big, out-of-print backlists. But it also means that anybody with a mouse and an Internet account can be "published."
Naturally, aspiring authors love this...now there are no gatekeepers keeping their masterpieces from the hands of the reading public. But, as it turns out, readers aren't so thrilled that the slush pile has spilled over onto their Kindles, as Eric Felton writes in a piece today for the Wall Street Journal.

It isn't just the elusive prospect of riches that excites the untold thousands of hopefuls crowding into the new self-publishing space. They are buoyed by escaping the grim frustrations of trying to get published the old-fashioned way. No more form-letter rejections from know-nothing agents and can't-be-bothered editors.

It's only natural for those locked out to despise the gatekeepers, but what about those of us in the reading public? Shouldn't we be grateful that it's someone else's job to weed out the inane, the insipid, the incompetent? Not that they always do such a great job of it, given some of the books that do get published by actual publishers. But at least they provide some buffer between us and the many aspiring authors who are like the wannabe pop stars in the opening weeks of each "American Idol" season: How many instant novelists are as deluded as the singers who make with the strangled-cat noises believing they have Arethaen pipes?

[...]The stodgy old gatekeepers are to be replaced with "social media." But self-publishers are finding that getting the attention of the crowd once their e-books are out there isn't easy. Which leads to efforts to game the judgment of the new and amorphous network of influence.

Look in the forums Amazon hosts for its Kindle "direct publishers" and you won't find many posts asking how to do the basics of traditional book production—copy editing, anyone? But there are plenty of threads with titles like "Promote your book" and "review swapping?"—orgies of desperate back-scratching that make old-school literary logrolling seem downright genteel.

He is so right. In their eagerness to be the next Amanda Hocking, hordes of self-published authors are forgetting the most important elements for success: genuine talent, a fresh voice, a great story and strong writing skills. 

Michael Silverblatt Has Become David Caruso

..and by that I mean he has become a outrageous spoof of himself, as my brother Tod so deftly illustrates on his blog with an excerpt from this week's Bookworm on NPR.

Silverblatt: I am speaking with Geoff Dyer, who I consider to be possibly the best writer of...I won't say of novels and I won't say of essays, but of the strange inter-ground between them and because he, in a sense, unbuttons and allows the informality of the dissatisfied self to take the place of that vastly seniorial literary critic type who could only recite his dissatisfaction because this or that strayed from the tradition. With you it's very different.

Dyer:...yeah...I think this is one of those classic Silverblatt questions in that I'm not sure I have a response to it, other than to say thank you and yes, I agree. That is...there is...that is...there is...that's what's going on.

You've got to hand it to Dyer...he's one of the few authors who has actually responded to one of Silverblatt's bloated, nonsensical ramblings by basically saying: "I have no idea what the fuck you just said, you pompous windbag." 

Tod does a hilarious, pitch-perfect imitation of Silverblatt (and, in fact, once regaled his friends with it in the green room at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books without realizing the windbag was sitting behind him). Here's an example:

Silverblatt: Today I'm pleased to welcome Mark Danielewski author of Only Revolutions, a novel which reminds me of another book, another word, another river of time that winds through a cloud of violence, which, like time, reminds me of Bonnie & Clyde and, more specifically, Badlands, and by "remind" I mean, within my own mind, and by mind, I mean the long rush of space where man is an incarnation of disconnection, and in disconnection, as e.e. cummings once said, and which I paraphrase here, as a highway paraphrases a road, or a road paraphrases a worm hole through space, if space is narrative and e.e. cummings is symbol that really means Mike Tyson, everyone has a plan until they get hit in the face, which, truly, Mark, this novel feels like...a punch in the face of time, and by time, I mean violence, and by violence, I mean fisting, and by fisting I mean, and here I'd like your thoughts, the way your book can be read backwards like the Torah, or upside down like a man wearing moon boots, or side to side like a roller derby fight. Yes?

Danielewski: Yes, yes, absolutely. Whatever. Can someone get my publicist on the phone? Her name is Kim Dower. Someone get me Kim fucking Dower!

 

I Hate William Rabkin

William Rabkin has a new screenwriting book out on the Kindle -- Writing The Pilot -- and I hate him for it.

I hate him because I only meant to browse the book the other day...but I ended up getting sucked in by his engaging, smart, and entertaining voice and spent all !@#$% night reading it.

I hate him because it would be the perfect update for our long-in-print screenwriting book Successful Television Writing....and now it won't be, the greedy bastard.

And I hate him because I actually learned some things about a subject I thought I knew at least as well as Bill, my best & oldest friend and my long time writing partner...who also happens to be Adjunct Professor of creative writing in the University of California, Riverside's MFA Program, Palm Desert Graduate Center, and also teaches television writing at the UCLA Extension.

But even through my blinding hate, I have to admit he's a terrific and justifiably beloved teacher and that Writing the Pilot is both extremely entertaining and jam-packed with useful information.
His analysis of what makes a great pilot...vs what makes a great opening episode for a series...is simply brilliant.

His indepth analysis of the pilots for Fast Forward, Life on Mars  and Fringe were particularly smart and insightful. He also deftly uses examples from our own career, in particular our unproduced CBS pilots Ella Clah and Silhouette, to illustrate the thought-process behind developing and writing pilots (and candidly discusses some of mistakes along the way and what we learned from them).

Spec TV pilots are all the rage right now, contrary to what we said years ago in the last chapter of our Successful Television Writing, and his book couldn't be more timely. If you want to get into the TV biz, or if you are a veteran TV pro struggling with pilot-writing issues, Writing the Pilot is a must-read.

The book will soon be available in trade paperback and Nook versions as well.

(Pictured: Tod Goldberg, me, and Bill Rabkin signing at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books in 2010)

UPDATED 8/19/2011 to add new cover.

Fall Season Promo of the Week: The Address is CBS