My e publishing decision

by Alexandra Sokoloff

Sometimes synchronicity just hits us here at Murderati – I’m so glad for P.D.’s post yesterday because I’m able to provide the flip side view today! Almost as if we planned it…

I’m sure everyone here at Murderati has noticed more and more e book posts creeping in alongside the craft ones. Personally I’m thrilled to see it; I’m always very much about being practical about craft. I think writing is a marvelous hobby, everyone can benefit from doing it, and I strongly believe just writing is just fine. But if you are going to go through the agony of writing an entire book, a real, finished book, don’t you want at least the possibility of getting it out there in the market, for others to read and experience and for you to make money for your labor?

I myself plan to get much more hardcore about about publishing and e book issues. Partly because it’s astonishing to me how many writers and aspiring writers still have so many misconceptions about e publishing – and there is a LOT of misinformation out there. (As my last workshop class knows, I was outraged enough about this to teach an impromptu e publishing seminar in the middle of our writing intensive last week!)

The fact is, a very large number of the authors I know who started out in publishing at about the same time I did (2007) have made the leap and are now e publishing directly – either exclusively so or in conjuction with traditional publishing contracts. My friends and wonderful authors Blake Crouch, Ann Voss Peterson, CJ Lyons, Elle Lothlorien, not to mention present and former ‘Rati Zoe Sharp, Brett Battles, Rob Gregory Browne, and JD Rhoades are just a few who are doing VERY well with e publishing. Friends who started even earlier are doing even better (Scott Nicholson, Diane Chamberlain, Sarah Shaber and of course Joe Konrath, whose Newbie’s Guide to Publishing is a must-read.). In a few short years, e publishing has filled retirement funds for older writers and elevated midlist authors to bestselling – or rock star! – status.

And now that I have several of my traditionally published backlist titles up as e books and the sales numbers are coming in, it’s clear to me that at least THIS YEAR, e publishing is the right choice for me.

How do I know this? Well, one of the amazing things about e publishing, for those of us who are used to the cryptic and essentially useless sales reports that we get quarterly – maybe – from our traditional publishers – is that now we can see exactly how many copies of each book we’re selling and exactly how much money we’re making per month. This is a VASTLY easier way to ensure that you’re making a real living, and it takes huge amounts of anxiety out of the process. Plus you get paid every month, instead of when your publisher gets around to it, which is a vastly easier way to keep up with the bills, if you see what I’m saying.

E publishing has made making a practical living a much more realistic proposition for authors who are not (yet) bestsellers in traditional publishing. I don’t know how long that will realistically last, whether it will get better or worse, but by now, for now, it’s unignorable.

So this month I will publish my new thriller, HUNTRESS MOON, directly as an e book.

(This great cover is by our own megatalented Rob Gregory Browne!)

Lots of thought and agonizing went into this decision.

First, I know that some people who have not yet succumbed to the rapture of e readers still want to hold and touch and smell their print books and get peanut butter on them and all that. I feel you. I have a real pang about this as well. But it’s not a very realistic pang.

The book is the book, whether there’s a paper cover on it or not. And I can publish it this month and get it into the hands of thirty thousand readers in a week (Based on my numbers for Book of Shadows, The Harrowing, and The Price.) Even if I never sold ONE book after that, that exposure alone would be worth it. Because exposure sells my other books.

But based on the numbers I’ve compiled with my other books, I will sell thousands, and very quickly.

If I went through traditional channels, the book wouldn’t even hit the shelves until a year and a half from now. How can I possibly think of giving up the tens of thousands of readers I will be able to reach with this book starting NOW?

Plus, I’m already almost halfway through my first draft of the sequel to HUNTRESS MOON (this is a series, my first-ever!). I’ll be able to publish that one in the fall. No longer do authors have to hold to the glacial timetables of their publishers, or worry about the possibility of the publisher deciding not to publish at all (which has happened to several of my friends, recently).

I can have two books out this year, with a guaranteed income. What that income will ultimately be, well, I don’t know, but traditional advances are way down and, much worse than that, most publishers are demanding e rights in perpetuity in traditional contracts, which seems to me an insane thing for authors to give up in the current climate. That alone pushed me in the e publishing direction.

Please hear me. I am NOT saying this is the way to go for a never-been-published author. Be warned: it is not the Gold Rush that it was back in, oh, January – there’s a lot of competition out there. I – and the other authors I listed above – know the benefits and drawbacks of traditional publishing because we’ve lived it; there’s no Holy Grail mystique about it. To me the choice between the (waning) prestige of having a print book in stores and having an army of dedicated readers is a no-brainer. Someone who doesn’t have several years of actual sales numbers to compare and crunch is not going to be able to make the same kind of decision that I am doing, it would be much more of a leap of faith. That doesn’t mean don’t do it, it just means it’s riskier.

Also, going through the gauntlet of traditional publishing prepares an author to e publish like bootcamp prepares a soldier for war. I KNOW how much editing it takes to come up with a clean and readable book. I KNOW how much time I’ll be spending marketing, and I have some idea of how and where to do that.

But even if you haven’t had the benefit of that kind of trial by fire, you do need to know that there is an opportunity here that was never available to an author before, and that – is nothing but good news.

Now is the time. Things may change within months. But I’m not excessively worried about the current system collapsing, because no matter what happens out there, I can still write books. Or scripts. I’ve always figured out how to make a living with writing. And I’ve been doing the figuring once again, and this is how I can do it right, right now.

So first, I want to hear e publishing stories, and of course questions. Are you doing it? Thinking about it? If you’re not, what’s holding you back?

And second – I’m giving away 50 copies of HUNTRESS MOON for potential reviews (Amazon reviews are what I need the most, but am glad for any, anywhere!). You DO NOT have to review the book – I just ask that you be open to posting a short review if you are inspired to do so.

e mail me at alex AT alexandrasokoloff DOT com for a copy in whatever format.

Here’s the story!

HUNTRESS MOON

FBI Special Agent Matthew Roarke is closing in on a bust of a major criminal organization in San Francisco when he witnesses an undercover member of his team killed right in front of him on a busy street, an accident Roarke can’t believe is coincidental. His suspicions put him on the trail of a mysterious young woman he glimpsed on the sidewalk behind his agent, who appears to have been present at each scene of a years-long string of “accidents” and murders, and who may well be that most rare of killers: a female serial.

Roarke’s hunt for her takes him across three states… while in a small coastal town, a young father and his five-year old son, both wounded from a recent divorce, encounter a lost and compelling young woman on the beach and strike up an unlikely friendship without realizing how deadly she may be.

As Roarke uncovers the shocking truth of her background, he realizes she is on a mission of her own, and must race to capture her before more blood is shed.

——————————————————————————

I am not launching the book officially until July 11, but it’s up in online stores starting today so that I can collect some reviews.

E mail me at alex AT alexandrasokoloff DOT com for a copy in whatever format.

But if you just feel like reading, or want to support me and this site, of course you can buy a copy! $3.99 on Amazon, $2.99 on Nook

Nook

A note to Nook readers – Huntress Moon will only be available for Nook for the next two weeks, after which it will be exclusive on Amazon for the next three months at least. I’m truly sorry to have to do it that way, but it’s unavoidable (read more on that here.) Also, if you’ve been waiting to grab The Harrowing, The Unseen, or The Space Between for Nook, they are up now for $2.99, again, only for a few weeks.

Thanks for reading!

– Alex

Back on the rollercoaster

And so, the rollercoaster begins…again. This week I finally finished my mainstream drama/fiction project. Hooray! It’s been a long time in the making, mostly because I had to come off it several times last year to take paid freelance jobs (ghost writing, corporate stuff, etc.) and this year I’ve been focusing on my ebook strategy. However, I launched myself into the re-write in mid-May and now it’s done. It’s a wonderful feeling to be finished the novel and to be happy with it (for the most part).

The bad news is, I’m on the rollercoaster again. Sigh. I really don’t know if I’m mentally prepared for the lows as well as the highs. Sigh. You see, while I’m committed to the ebook path for some of my books (some genres), I feel that I’d like to give traditional publishing a go with my mainstream drama. Which means finding an agent. <Insert a million sighs>

Yup, THAT rollercoaster. Picking a shortlist of agents based on their recent sales and the authors they represent, then querying one to three at a time. And that’s a whole other thing—so many agents don’t like or insist on not being part of multiple submissions. But if you do one agent at a time, it could take you a year or more to get through your top 10! Of course, any author hopes that their first or maybe second pick will leap at the opportunity to represent them. But it’s getting harder and harder, even for authors with a publishing record (like me) to get an agent to take the plunge. I’m in a time warp, back in 1998-2004, when I was an aspiring author, looking for an agent or publisher. Looking for my first break. And in some ways, it feels like I’m back at square one. Sigh.

This week I start querying, and I’m both excited and petrified. I know I need to tighten the query letter and synopsis, so that’s my next focus. Although the timing truly sucks. This week and next week is school holidays in Victoria, Australia so I’m a full-time mum for the next two weeks. Not that I can complain—I’m also going skiing. In fact, when this post goes live I’ll be at Mt Buller, skiing for the first time in 10 years. And it will be my daughter’s first time ever. Exciting!!! Can’t wait. Although it does also mean I might not be able to respond to comments until the weekend (or perhaps I’ll be very brief from my Smartphone). Anyway…

Being an author truly is a rollercoaster—or more accurately several rollercoasters, sometimes happening simultaneously.

First, there’s the creative process itself, the creative rollercoaster. One minute you think that sentence, paragraph, chapter or book is brilliant; the next, you think it’s crap. And those highs and lows just seem to be part of the creative process. I’m still really on this rollercoaster for Cross Roads and Dead Ends (working title). I said above that I’m happy with it (for the most part), but like many authors I question whether you can ever be truly 100% happy with a book. I could edit and tweak for eternity, I think.

Then there’s the agent rollercoaster. The rollercoaster I’m currently on. Once you get an agent, there’s the publisher rollercoaster. Will your agent’s first round of publishers be interested? Will they all be so interested that it goes to auction (best-case scenario) or will they all pass (obviously worst-case scenario)?

Then there’s the rollercoaster once your book is published, the marketplace rollercoaster. Will the reviewers like it? Will the readers like it? And even if both reviewers and readers rave about it, will it actually make a dent in terms of sales? The making-a-living-as-an-author rollercoaster. See? Lots of rollercoasters!

Ultimately, my aim as an author is to take my readers on a rollercoaster, but with very different highs and lows. In the case of Cross Roads and Dead Ends, I want my readers to experience the characters’ pain, their loss, and feel that sense of resonance. I want to take my readers to soaring heights, but also sometimes the depth of despair. But that means I have to go on all the other rollercoasters first. So here I go. Ready for the adrenaline high and the possible motion sickness.

So, authors, which rollercoaster are you on at the moment? Readers, how do you feel about the author rollercoaster?

BLOGGED ON THE FOURTH OF JULY

by Gar Anthony Haywood

As today is American Independence Day (and because, quite frankly, having just blogged here yesterday, I don’t have a clue what else to do), I thought I’d model today’s post after those gigantic assortment packs of fireworks your neighbors like to buy in order to celebrate the holiday like the Allies attacking the beach on D-Day. You know, assortment packs like this one:

None of the following subjects of conversation, in my estimation, are weighty enough to build an entire post around, but in combination they just might make for a decent read. (Hope springs eternal.) So without further ado, I hereby offer this hodgepodge of ruminations, some only tenuously related to the writing life, each representing an individual item commonly found in said fireworks assortment . . .

(Oh, and BTW – If these amateur munitions are illegal to set off within Los Angeles city limits, why does my South Pasadena neighborhood already sound like a Battle at Gettysburg reenactment every night after 6 PM? Can somebody please tell me?)

Firecrackers – Long-Overdue Responses to Recent Murderati Posts

Maybe some of you have noticed that I’ve been conspicuously quiet lately regarding the posts of my fellow Murderati authors. It’s not that they haven’t moved me to think, I promise you. It’s just that I’ve been busy as hell and haven’t been able to find the time to offer my reactions. Alex’s recent post about how much output is too little for an author trying to make a living in today’s e-book dominated marketplace, and David’s ensuing response to it, have been particularly deserving of my attention.

So I’ll offer my thoughts on the subject now.

David wrote: “. . . with each book, I’ve tried to write, if not a masterpiece, a book that at least tries to measure up to the greatest books about crime that I’ve read: The Long Goodbye, Cutter & Bone, Bellman & True, Nightmare Alley, Dog Soldiers, God’s Pocket, Clockers, The Long Firm, to name a scant few.”

I can so relate to this. I think I do the same thing — but not all the time. Sometimes, I know damn good and well that my WIP at the moment is something well short of a masterpiece, and that’s perfectly fine, because all I’m really aiming for is a small gem. Small gems are masterpieces in their own right, relative to their most applicable genre or sub-genre.

I don’t think every author should be expected to set the bar at “masterpiece,” each and every time out. But he should settle for nothing less than his best work, within the parameters of the kind of book he’s attempting to write. That is what I’m always committed to doing, and like David, I obsess endlessly over every word in the pursuit of that goal.

Could I write faster than I do at present? Oh, yes. Faster and better? Uh, no.

If I thought I could afford to publish (or contract to have published) anything that didn’t represent the absolute best writing I’m capable of producing, I might be willing to speed things up a little and take my chances with the resulting work. But that’s a risk I’m just not prepared to take. You only get one chance to impress with most readers; blow that chance by giving them something to read that was rushed into print simply to meet a determined annual rate of output and you’re screwed. One book a year or five, mediocrity is not going to buy you the loyal readership you seek.

Roman Candles – A Personal Summer Reading List, Pretense-Free Edition

The following are five books I hope to read this summer, simply because I think I might enjoy them, and not because any are likely to make me a better person, or give me a greater appreciation for the use of florid language in stories altogether lacking a plot.

THE SISTERS BROTHERS – Patrick DeWitt
This just sounds like too much fun not to read.

THE END OF EVERYTHING – Megan Abbott
I’d read this one for the title and cover art alone.

DIAMOND RUBY – Joseph Wallace
Baseball and a smart, headstrong young woman who knows how to play it, both in a YA novel suitable for adults. What’s not to love?

CLAIRE DEWITT AND THE CITY OF THE DEAD – Sara Gran
Sara Gran will be reading from this at the NOIR AT THE BAR party in Los Angeles later this month. I hope to have the book read in time for her to sign my copy.

IN THE GARDEN OF BEASTS – Erik Larson
I read Larson’s THUNDERSTRUCK and couldn’t put it down. This book sounds even better.

Missiles – Books I Know I Should Read, But Will Probably Never Get Around To Cracking

I’d be a smarter, wiser, more culturally informed person if I read these “must reads,” I’m sure. But I fear time’s running out.

1984 – George Orwell

To answer your question, yes. I am ashamed.

ON THE ROAD – Jack Kerouak

Please don’t hate me, Stephen. But poetry has always given me the hives.

KINDRED – Octavia Butler

The late author was a good if distant friend before her passing, but I never read her, acclaimed as her speculative fiction was.

HARRY POTTER AND THE (Fill in the Blank) – J.K. Rowling

Yes, this is absurd. My wife and children live and breathe these books, I can’t take three steps in our house without tripping over a hardcopy of one of them, and yet I’ve never gotten more than a third of the way into the first installment. Am I nuts?

THE GREAT GATSBY – F. Scott Fitzgerald

If I could get the image of Mia Farrow (whom I’ve never cared for) as Daisy Buchanan out of my head, I might find the will to give this classic a try. But I can’t. I just can’t.

Sparklers – Reading Just for Fun – What a Concept!

It’s been a long time since I’ve tried any form of fantasy fiction, but the HBO series GAME OF THRONES got me to thinking about reading at least one of the books by George R. R. Martin on which the show is based.

So I bought myself a copy of the first, aptly titled A GAME OF THRONES, and I haven’t put the damn thing down since. Epic tomes of this dimension usually intimidate me all to hell, but I’m racing through this book like my life depends on it. Martin can flat out write: you name it — memorable characters, crisp prose, smart and funny dialogue that rings true — it’s all here. Reading for pleasure has never been so . . . well, pleasurable!

Questions for the Class: What would your own literary Fourth of July “fireworks assortment” look like?

GET ME REWRITE!

by Gar Anthony Haywood

Actually, it’s way too late for a rewrite. Prometheus is in the can and already raking in millions at theaters across the globe (though nowhere near as many millions as its producers had no doubt hoped, for some of the reasons I’m about to go into below).

I know, I know: We don’t normally do movie reviews here at Murderati. And technically, I’m not about to post one now. But this is Wildcard Tuesday, damnit — the day we ‘Ratis on the masthead get to do pretty much anything we damn well please — so what I am going to do is offer a broad-strokes, spoiler-free outline of all the missteps I think screenwriter Damon Lindelof — with the ostensible blessings of director Ridley Scott — made on his way to producing the final draft of the film’s script.

Understand that this is all coming from a huge fan of the first two films in 20th Century Fox’s Alien franchise (1979’s Alien and its 1986 sequel, Aliens). In fact, I think James Cameron’s Aliens is one of the greatest action films ever made, and its precursor, Scott’s Alien, is a horror movie masterpiece that, when I first saw it, had me seriously considering fleeing the theater only halfway through its full running time, or to be precise about it, right after this now classic scene:

The Alien sequels that followed Cameron’s were all shoddy disappointments that just seemed to get worse and worse, and the ensuing Fox films that paired the eponymous Alien creature with the extraterrestrial bounty hunter first seen in the Arnold Schwarzenegger sci-fi thriller Predator (Alien vs. Predator [2004], Alien vs. Predator: Requiem [2007]) were a travesty made strictly to suck the last drop of box-office from both franchises. So reasons for me to be encouraged earlier this year by the news that Prometheus was yet another film based on the Alien legend were few and far between.

Still, Prometheus was reportedly a prequel to Alien, and the director behind it was the man who’d gotten the franchise off to such a fantastic start: Ridley Scott. So how bad could Prometheus possibly be?

Well, let me just put it this way: There’s no such thing as a rule book for screenwriters and directors to go by in making sci-fi blockbuster sequels/prequels like Prometheus, but if there were, the following are all the rules in it Damon Lindelof and Ridley Scott would have blatantly broken:

1. Don’t commit to doing a sequel if you don’t really want to do a sequel.

It’s been reported that Scott didn’t sign up to do Prometheus with the idea of making just another entry in the Alien film franchise, and if this is true, boy, does that reluctance ever show in the final product. Everything in Prometheus that’s reminiscent of Scott’s Alien seems completely out of place, and that’s because Scott (and screenwriter Lindelof) clearly intended for Prometheus to be a much loftier, more thought-provoking film. Which is unfortunate, because the only thought Alien provoked in most viewers was “That’s it — I’m closing my eyes until the lights come back up!” Alien was a horror film, as I mentioned earlier, and there’s nothing organic to Prometheus‘s basic storyline to suggest that Scott had any interest this time around in scaring anybody. My opinion?

What Scott and Lindelof were hoping to make instead of a horror film, under the guise of an Alien “prequel,” was their own answer to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. In other words, a deep, complex science fiction classic that would force viewers to ask serious questions about life, death, and mankind’s place in the universe.

Does that sound like an ideal foundation for an Alien prequel to you?

2. Pay attention to the science in science fiction.

My friend Doselle Young, who writes science fiction and horror with equal aplomb, is something of a science geek, and the list of factual absurdities he found in Prometheus is longer than the guest list to a Kardashian wedding. Most of the things he mentioned when he and I compared notes on the film were just beyond the intellectual grasp of this former C+ high school science student, but many were basic enough that, once they were pointed out to me, even I understood how ridiculous they were. For example, consider this question: Over a span of millions of years, would you expect a life form — any life form — to physically evolve in some noticeable way, or remain completely unchanged?

Apparently, Lindelof and Scott think it’s the latter.

Also, timing is a critical element in any piece of fiction — making things happen in a way that is compatible with both logic and what is possible — and Prometheus fails this test over and over again. Hint to Lindelof: The next time you take on a project of this kind, study up on the exact distance of a light year, and how long it would probably take a man-made spacecraft, no matter how technologically advanced, to cover one.

3. Give all your characters an actual reason to be in your script.

I won’t say much about this one except: Idris Elba, whom I greatly admire, is a member of the Prometheus cast, but I’ll be damned if I know why, other than so that his character — and I use the word “character” here loosely — can occasionally strike a dynamic pose at the ship’s helm. Who was this person and what was the point of his existence? The role he played in terms of the plot’s development was . . . what, exactly?

I don’t have a clue, and I doubt Lindelof does, either.

4. Give your characters a reason to do the things they do.

As opposed to just having them do things because, well, wouldn’t it be cool if they did? Who cares why?

In the film’s most egregious example of random-shit-happening-for-no-good-reason, Lindelof has one character deliberately screw over another simply because he and Scott needed the resultant horrific death to occur, come hell or high water. Nevermind that the offending character had no discernible motive for the act.

Why did Lindelof and Scott “need” this pointless death to be in the script so desperately, you ask? Please see Rule #5 below.

5. Don’t populate your sequel with scenes you’ve literally cut-and-pasted from the original.

Remember that, according to my theory, Scott and Lindelof were secretly trying to make a film altogether different from the one Fox was paying them to make. Doing Alien 5 was not in their plans. Unfortunately, it was in their contracts, so the dynamic duo behind Prometheus took care to sprinkle their script with just enough blatantly obvious connections to Alien to keep the Fox execs dumb and happy.

Malevolent android possibly working for the Company?

Check. Snarling Alien embryo emerging from a live human’s bloody abdominal cavity?

Check. Overly-curious crew member gets a space-helmet facial from an Alien in a chamber full of creepy egg pods?

Check. And so it goes. Watching Prometheus, you can actually see where these scenes were artificially grafted on, square pegs jammed into round holes that bring the film to a screeching halt every time they crop up, so incongruent are they to what happens before and after. This is screenwriting-by-checklist, and I’m sorry, but it blows.

6. Don’t give your character a brain in one scene only to have him behave like a blithering idiot in another.

When a character exhibits the common sense of most mature adults by fleeing from a dangerous situation, that’s good.

When that same character turns around fifteen minutes later and rushes headlong toward the identical dangerous situation — not because they’ve found the courage to do so, but simply because they’ve apparently lost their fucking minds — that’s bad.

In fiction, when a character behaves with such dumb disregard for his/her own safety that readers are forced to conclude they deserve to die, we call them TSTL: Too Stupid To Live. With Prometheus, Lindelof and Scott have created a brand new, and far more maddening malady for fictional characters to suffer from: SOOTSTLS.

Sudden Onset Of TSTL Syndrome.

SOOTSTLS can strike any character at any time, no matter how rational and intelligent they may have appeared to be previously. This is especially true when a screenwriter needs something to happen that shouldn’t really be in the script he’s writing at all (see Rule #5 above).

7. Avoid assigning the task of explaining something to your audience to a character who has no reason to understand things any better than your audience does.

When I said earlier that I had no idea what role Idris Elba’s character was supposed to play in Prometheus (Rule #3 above), that wasn’t exactly true. Because near the end of the film, this character answers a Key Question the female lead — and every member of the audience — has been wondering about for almost two hours. Or, I should say, he tries to answer it. What he says doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

It’s not the substance of his answer that’s the problem, however. The problem is that it’s coming from a character who a) should be as ignorant of the subject in conversation as everyone else; and b) has demonstrated, prior to this moment, absolutely no curiosity whatsoever regarding the deep, philosophical mysteries our female protag has been struggling with since Fade In. This is the guy who understands it all? The one who’s done little more than exude soul brother cool, scene after scene, while everyone else around him has been ripping their hair out, trying to comprehend what the hell is going on here?

Gimme a break.

Well, I could go on and on. But I won’t. You get the idea. Prometheus sucked, and it didn’t have to. Given a script equal to its mouthwatering CGI, it could have been terrific. But its script, instead, was a slapdash affair full of holes and jaw-dropping miscues. For fans of Alien and Aliens like me, Prometheus represents a missed opportunity of monumental proportions.

That and, on a more personal level, fifteen dollars down the drain.

The First Lady Of Noir

By Tania Carver

Firstly, a bit of explanation.

Last Tuesday’s Wildcard piece was supposed to be this interview with Cathi Unsworth about her upcoming novel, Weirdo. Unfortunately time and scheduling pressures stopped it coming together in time so the post that was meant to be in today’s slot got bumped up. However, the interview is now complete and I thought it would be a shame not to run it.

If you’ve read Cathi Unsworth, you’ll know she’s Britain’s Queen of Noir. If you haven’t, then here’s the primer. Her first novel, The Not Knowing, was published in 2005. She followed it by editing the award-winning short story collection, London Noir in 2006 then the punk noir novel The Singer in 2007. Her most recent novel, Bad Penny Blues, was published in 2009 and was one of that year’s best novels.

She started out as a music journalist at the age of 19, working on the legendary British music weekly Sounds and has worked as a writer and editor for many publications including Melody Maker, Mojo, Uncut, Volume, Deadline and Bizarre. She’s also produced a crime fiction radio series for London’s Resonance FM, has contributed essays to the British Film Institute’s new Flipside DVD series and is currently paperback crime fiction reviewer for The Guardian newspaper.

Weirdo‘s your new novel, coming out next month. It seems to be something of a departure for you – the first novel not to have an urban setting. How did that come about?

The idea came a long time ago, reading one too many accounts on teen-on-teen murders that shocked me with their savagery and the remorselessness of the killers. There was that awful torture, rape and killing of Mary Ann Leneghan in 2005, at the hands of six young men in a hotel room in Reading, then there was Sophie Lancaster, kicked to death by a bunch of boys in 2007 because of what she looked like… And that was pretty much how I looked like at her age. At around the time of Sophie’s murder I got given a book to review that I can only describe as gothsploitation, written by someone who had no idea, casting goths as murders and Satanists, whereas I and every other goth I knew were basically shy, bookish teenagers who used the way they looked not only as an attempt to look aesthetically beautiful in the Oscar Wilde definition of the word, but as a shield against the violence of our peers. And in smalltown England in the Eighties as you know, youth cultures were pretty set against each other and pretty violent too – although nothing like the level of Mary Ann or Sophie’s killers.

So I thought I would have a go at exploring this world, setting it in a time and a place I knew and could evoke very well – my Norfolk teenage years. I happened to turn 16 in 1984, the year of the Miner’s Strike and the most recent Civil War in Britain, the workers versus Margaret Thatcher. Although the landscape I lived in was very different to the besieged North – all around the coast, like the flickering candles of a black mass were the flames of the oil rigs drilling North Sea Oil, which enabled the Witch Queen to keep herself in power. Because of the echoes of the past Civil War of 1642-1651 – when Norfolk was staunchly Parliamentarian, and riding on the coattails of Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army came the Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins, who was said to have tortured and murdered 300 women in the Eastern Counties, including many in my hometown Gt Yarmouth – the year of 1984 had that resonance. In that year, one of my favourite records was Vengeance by New Model Army, which still seems to cast the clearest and most prophetic eye over what was happening then and what would come next…

I started to write it, but it wouldn’t come. Then I got waylaid by a serial killer and was compelled to write Bad Penny Blues as a response to a nightmarish book about Jack the Stripper, involving the unsolved deaths of eight women who all lived and worked in my neighbourhood back in the Fifties and Early Sixties. That was a two-year séance, but when it was over, the experience made me ready to write Weirdo.

In the meantime, my Dad had given me an excellent book called Unquiet County: Voices of the Rural Poor by Robert Lee, which explored a rural uprising in Norfolk in the 1830s, led by a mysterious figure called Captain Swing – another phantom, but on the opposite side of the moral divide to Jack the Stripper, he was the 19^th century equivalent of Anonymous. Captivated by him, that added another dimension to the story I had originally thought of.

So did an excellent and very disturbing Channel 4 documentary called Being Maxine Carr – it was about 12 single women who moved to new parts of the country at around the time Maxine Carr was released from jail under a new identity – and how they were hounded out of their homes and attacked by lynch mobs, led by whispering gossips, who accused them against all evidence of being Carr herself. Because Carr was released almost exactly at the same time Myra Hindley died, it seemed to me that we needed another Transgressive Woman Hate Figure, and, helped by the tabloids, Carr conveniently fitted that slot. Something we have both explored in our work of course is how women transgressors are vastly more villified than men; there is something viscerally cathartic in the public hatred for them that links back to witch hunts and Matthew Hopkins… So all these elements stirred inside me and out it just flowed…

In your previous books, you’ve captured a couple of areas of London (Camden Town and Ladbroke Grove) and really made them your own. Did you choose those places or did they choose you?

Good question. When I started The Not Knowing, I just wrote about the places I knew and loved and a lot of the motivation for that was to capture people and places that were important to me as they had been, before they disappeared forever into the ether. Working at Gerry’s Club for a number of years was the impetus for that, I met so many brilliant people down there of older generations who are now dead. And Camden had changed so much from the happy times I’d spent there in the early Nineties, I wanted people to know there were much more interesting things going on there before Britpop!

When I wrote The Singer, that was partly an elegy for how much Ladbroke Grove had changed since Richard Curtis opened his blue door. Then Bad Penny unlocked the green door back to the world that it had been, and I discovered so many coincidences that linked what I had written in The Not Knowing, of events happening in the same places that I had previously had no idea about… And the stories I had heard from the Gerry’s Departed.

I didn’t set them out to be, but they are a kind of trilogy of those places, travelling through from the Fifties to the 2000s. I think, on reflection, those places chose me.

How important is location in your novels? Could they be set anywhere else?

Very important. I have to know a place fairly well to write about it – for instance in The Singer, I also write about Hull, where I have family and know what it looks and feels like and how people speak; and also two of my favourite cities, Paris and Lisbon, that are captivating for the similarity in vibe that certain parts of them – Montmatre and the Barrio Alto – share with Ladbroke Grove. Norfolk is a location that still stokes fear in me, so it’s perfect for Weirdo.

In your previous book, the brilliant BAD PENNY BLUES, you had fictional people intermingling with real ones. Or at least your interpretation of real ones. Was this something you found easy to do and have you continued that in WEIRDO?

It was very interesting to do that in Bad Penny because some of them, like Jenny Minton, I thought I was inventing, until my friend Dave Knight gave me a book about Pauline Boty and I found that someone very similar had really existed; and others, like the character of Jenny’s boyfriend Dave Dilworth I had started off modelling on Mick Farren, a character I admire very much, but then he shapeshifted into Screaming Lord Sutch, another fascinating person from that era who doesn’t really get the credit for all the radical things he actually did. So you can’t really contain these people once you start conjuring them, they all do their own things.

Weirdo doesn’t really deal with anyone real like that, although various people have inspired characters in it. DCI Len Rivett is partly a homage to Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford in Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me, he has that holky charm that I loved about him – and also, the book does have certain echoes of a Western, Norfolk being very much the Wild East and Rivett definitely being the Sheriff of his town. The Norfolk accent is brilliant to use, as a Norfolk person saying: ‘You in’t from round here are ya?’ has a very similar resonance to the voices in Deliverance. Rivett’s strange adversary Noj started off as a suggestion from a friend and, like Donna in The Singer, just formed his/her own character completely through the act of me writing her/him, just as if I was channelling. Noj and Donna would be great friends, actually.

You often take chances with your books. BAD PENNY BLUES even involved Spiritualism. Not fond of playing it safe or just following your own muse?

Totally following my own muse. I realised when I started writing Bad Penny that I couldn’t do it any other way, because it was so important to me that the dead girls got to speak, and the reader got to feel their lives and their fear as their lives ended – they were the most important people in the book. I took a massive chance with that and expected I would get ridiculed, but that would be a price worth paying to convey those women’s voices in the most powerful way I knew how. Though I did get a few snidey reviews, they were very much in the minority, so I think it did work for readers as I hoped it would.

Every time I write a book someone will tell me I have done something within it that you are not supposed to do. But I have never taken a creative writing class nor read a ‘How To…’ book, so I am blissfully ignorant of all that. But it has massively helped me that I had John Williams as an editor. He understood me better than I understand myself and would never have let me do something that felt stupid or wrong.

You’ve got a background in music journalism and music is a strong element in all of the novels. How difficult is it being a woman writing about something that’s traditionally such a male-dominated area? And have you had any comeback on that?

Well I think there is a reflection of that in all my books, being as they all heavily feature women in men’s worlds and how difficult it is to be taken seriously by the men who guard these kingdoms so jealously… The old cliché of having to be twice as good and work twice as hard is only too true. Girls like me always have more gay male friends, another something that is reflected in my work…

The Singer was reviewed brilliantly by the crime press, but the music press wouldn’t touch it, apart from my dear ex-Sounds comrade Keith Cameron at Mojo. I think, because every male music journalist thinks he is going to be the one write ‘the Great Punk Rock Novel’ but strangely, none of them have yet got round to it. There is a big difference in being a successful music writer and a successful novelist, because the novelist has to have a real empathy for people to make characters come alive, and that I am afraid to say, is a quality quite hard to find in that world. However, one of the best reviews I have ever had in my life came from Griel Marcus, who reviewed Bad Penny in a lengthy essay on the Barnes & Noble website, and who is the absolute hero of all the male muso journalists I ever knew – so, to quote Dudley Smith, that was my valediction, laddie.

I know you’re not one for modern technology but you do have a website and have recently set up a Facebook page. What next? Your own blog? Twitter?

If I could clone myself, I could do that. At the moment, I work a rather demanding day job four days a week, and have not had a proper holiday in over ten years! So I am paddling as hard as I can to keep my head above the water of Matthew Hopkins’ ducking stool at the moment… I would love to do more if I could. But I can’t even do Facebook friends right now because there just aren’t enough hours in the day…

However, I do think that my website, designed and maintained by the brilliant Pete Woodhead, is a pretty very good one that can provide you with everything you could want to know, plus some great free music downloads, of which there are two new ones up as we speak, a collaboration I have done with Pete and with a brilliant composer-musician friend of mine called Paul A Murphy, who has composed me a Norfolk Sinfonia in honour of Captain Swing.

And anyway, surely it’s nice to keep a little air of mystery…?

I think your books would be naturals for TV and film. What’s happening with that?

I have a project on the go for a film of The Singer with a very stylish young French director called Nicolas Pier Moran… But more than that I can’t really say at the moment, as Nicolas is a rather mysterious chap himself…

And what next for you? I hope it’s another novel.

I have the ingredients of another novel swirling around in my head right now, but have been too busy to do anything about it for the past six months. Hopefully I will have time to work on it soon, meanwhile I will just read everything I can that connects with it. What I would like to do is a four-book series that moves from the Blitz to the Leveson Enquiry, which will be well in the distant past by the time I ever get round to it. The secret history of women in London is the general theme I think I am finding. I would like to go back to sifting real events like I did in Bad Penny as there are not just so many mysterious villains out there, but so many unsung heroes and heroines. If I could spend a year in the Bishopsgate Institute’s archives I would be very happy indeed!

POINT OF VIEW

By Stephen Jay Schwartz

BOULEVARD was the first novel I’d ever written or even tried to write and after it sold and the hoopla died down I got a call from my editor who said, “Okay, now we have to figure out your story’s point of view.”

“Umm…point of view?” I said.

“Yeah, you’ve got third person close, third person omniscient and first person. It’s a bit messy. I think it wants to be third person close.”

I didn’t want to embarrass myself by saying I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. Third person close…to what? Omniscient sounded like something I understood – a narrator, like God, who knows everybody’s thoughts. And first person I knew, but didn’t really care for. But third person close?

After my hemming and hawing he figured I needed an education. He explained that third person close meant the story is written in third person, but it feels like first person. The narrator doesn’t know any more than the protagonist. Therefore, I can’t cut away to another character’s perspective, and I certainly can’t cut away to scenes that don’t include my protagonist. Unless, of course, I choose, stylistically, to incorporate chapters of third person close with alternating chapters of third person omniscient. But that has to be a conscious decision; I can’t just throw point of view around willy nilly.

My editor’s instincts were right. The story wanted to be third person close. It felt good to me. I like to keep the reader a bit in the dark, not knowing what’s coming around the corner. As my protagonist is surprised, so is the reader. So I had to go through the entire book and take out the handful of scenes that didn’t include Hayden Glass and find ways to incorporate that information into scenes that included Hayden Glass. It was difficult at first, but soon my brain eased into the process. By the time I jumped into my second novel, BEAT, I had it down. Third person close became the way to tell Hayden’s story.

And now I sit with my third novel in various stages of development. It’s a standalone, with all new characters. Its history is odd.

It began with my agent saying, “Okay, your two-book deal is over so you have to write a proposal. Why don’t you do another Hayden Glass book, but bigger. International. Like maybe he ends up in Bangkok and his addiction really gets tested.”

Bangkok? How does my LAPD detective end up in Bangkok? Well, he does go to San Francisco in BEAT. So, maybe he gets called for a special assignment, or he is required to bring back a perp who fled L.A. after committing a crime. I can work with this.

“Okay,” I said. “I can see him going international. But not Bangkok. Everyone I know is doing Bangkok. Besides, Hayden likes the blondes. I see him in Amsterdam. That’s where I’d be tested.”

“Yeah, Amsterdam! Great idea! But you should probably also have something ready in case the publisher doesn’t want to move forward with Hayden Glass.”

“Wait,” I said, “that could happen?”

“That could happen.”

So, I went to work on two book proposals. They were two very similar stories – one was a Hayden Glass novel and the other was about a young FBI agent who was made to bring back a fugitive that fled to Amsterdam. I liked both stories, but I was partial to the new one, with the FBI agent. It was a bit like The Spy Who Came in from the Cold meets 3:10 to Yuma. That became my pitch line.

I finished the proposals and handed them to my agent. He loved them both and sent the Hayden Glass one to my editor. My editor loved it and pitched his boss and…it happened. The publisher decided not to do another Hayden Glass novel.

“Okay,” I said to my agent, my voice weighted with disappointment. “Now we send him the other one, right?”

“No,” he said. “I think you should just write the other one. Write me a best-seller and I’ll take it out for bid!”

Write it? Without a contract? A spec novel, again?

I eventually got behind the idea and started doing my research. I spent a week in Amsterdam, met and interviewed lots of interesting Dutch folk, met and interviewed many interesting FBI folk, read tons of books, did interviews, etc. As I sat down to write I considered what my point of view would be for this story. I wanted to capture that same feeling of tension that existed in my other books, that sense of surprise, but I also wanted to introduce an antagonist in omniscient, in alternating chapters. I was considering going close third with these chapters, but opted against it because my protagonist assumes certain things about the antagonist and they may or may not be true. If I wrote the antagonist in close third I couldn’t avoid getting into his thought process, which would give away the truth about his character. I want this truth to be a surprise to my protagonist and to the reader.

And so I wrote the damn thing in third person close. At least the first draft. When I was done it seemed flat. I realized that, while I can write the perspective of an American lost in Amsterdam (I was that American, for a week), I had trouble writing all the other Dutch characters. They all read like American characters with Dutch names. And just about every other character in the piece had to be Dutch. I felt like I needed to spend six months getting to know the city before I could write it with any sense of authority.

So, I dropped the project and began writing a crime thriller set in L.A. and the Central Coast of California. I got a few chapters in when my wife told me I had to go back to the Amsterdam piece. She suggested I change the venue from Amsterdam to Las Vegas, which would allow me to write American characters in a town I know well (some would say too well). I returned to the Amsterdam piece, which was called TRIPLE X (the Amsterdam flag is three X’s – I’ve since changed the title, but will have to sit with it for a while to see if it works.)

Now I’m re-developing the story and rewriting it. Las Vegas serves the story just as well as Amsterdam. The venue has to be a place without rules where my protagonist feels like an outsider. While the change complicates some of the plot ideas, it also solves some of the problems I had writing an FBI agent working on his own in a foreign country. Even my FBI contacts thought it was better to keep him in America.

I rewrote the first fifty pages or so and then last week I was writing a sentence and it came out in FIRST PERSON, PRESENT TENSE.

I stared at it for a moment and thought, “Oh, shit. This feels right. Dammit.”

Now I’m back at the beginning, rewriting it in first person, present tense.

And I like the immediacy of the thing.

I mean, look at one of the lines and see if you feel the difference:

“He opened his eyes and stepped away. He kept to the balls of his feet, avoiding the things that might be collected as evidence.”

Versus:

“I open my eyes and step away. Keeping to the balls of my feet, avoiding the things that might be collected as evidence.”

Or –

“Bill caught his attention from the door. He seemed disappointed, as if Hoffman’s presence in the crime scene reflected poorly on his judgement.”

Versus:

“Bill catches my attention from the door. He seems disappointed, as if my presence in the crime scene reflects poorly on his judgement.”

I feel like I’m right with the character, walking in his footsteps.

Present tense basically tells the reader that things aren’t necessarily going to be okay in the end. I mean, we don’t know how this is going to end, do we? It’s happening right now. Past tense tends to infer that things turned out well – after all, I’m telling you what happened, aren’t I? So, if it’s in the past then my character must have made it out alive.

Past tense seems so 2008.

It might seem strange for some to write in present tense, but it doesn’t feel odd to me. Screenplays are written in present tense, and I’ve written more screenplays than novels. It’s the first person thing that I need to get used to. Now I’m really in my character’s head. And all the things that go on are subject to the mental state he’s in. To me, that’s interesting. I don’t know why I’ve always preferred reading third person to first person – maybe being in a character’s head seemed too daunting. What if the character is crazy? How do I deal with this as a reader? Exactly.

And some of my favorite books are written in first person – John Fowles’ The Collector, Nabokov’s Lolita, Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me. All deal with the paranoia of unreliable narrators. I kinda dig that. I like presenting my protagonist’s tweaked view of the world as truth, then forcing him (and the reader) to witness the real truth as the world unravels around him. To see and feel it as he sees and feels it. That excites me.

We’ll see if it sticks. I might get two hundred pages in and realize I have to experiment with yet another point of view to make it work. Who knows? It’s a journey, right?

Now I know why people write sequels. A lot of the hard stuff has already been done. I’m looking forward to writing the next Hayden Glass novel, which I’ll jump into as soon as I finish this standalone. I’ll probably publish it as an ebook, the way Brett Battles now does with his Jonathan Quinn series. That way it will publish quickly. Hell, that way it will publish at all.

So Hayden might still end up in Amsterdam. I’ll tell you what I know – when he gets there, he’ll be in third person close.

A Box of Memories

Zoë Sharp

Where do you keep your memories? How do you anchor them to the framework of your life?

Those questions have been very much on my mind this last week. I’ve been away in Somerset, helping an old friend pack up his house in preparation to moving into a single-storey home. He’s now in his late seventies, no longer entirely steady on his feet, and with a tremor in his hands that makes labelling boxes a tiresome task, never mind actually putting stuff into them.

Andrew is a retired pilot. He’s flown just about everything—either fixed or rotary wing—in all conditions, all over the world. The stories he tells of hairy landings in Africa at night, or airborne rescues in South America, would fill several books. I’ve been trying to persuade him to set some of it down for years.

When I needed authentic information about crashing a helicopter for the new Charlie Fox book, DIE EASY, who else would I turn to but Andrew? After all, he’s actually crashed them and lived to tell the tale. So, as a thank you I made him into the laidback ex-military pilot in the book.

A secondary reason for my visit was to coincide with the Air Day at the Royal Naval Air Station at Yeovilton. This year’s event had some fabulous flying displays, from the Red Arrows to a massive Russian Antonov heavy transport plane, aerobatics aircraft, and classics like the Swordfish, the Meteor, and the Spitfire. There were also numerous helicopters flying manoeuvres that I really didn’t think it was possible—never mind advisable—to perform in rotary-wing machines. And being able to get up close and personal to a wide variety of different aircraft is invaluable research, of course.

All in all, a very memorable day.

But five years down the line—or ten years—how will I remember it? I don’t mean my impressions, which were of stunning skill and a boundless enthusiasm, of power and speed and a kind of lethal excitement.

I mean where will I place it against events of my life that came before and after? Unless something dramatic happens in a certain year—and unfortunately dramatic often also equals traumatic—the order of things very quickly begins to blur.

I don’t know if everyone does this, but I have always had a mental image of the days of the week. They are laid out like a letter ‘D’, with the weekend stacked at the left-hand side and the rest bowing out at the right. Whenever I have appointments or it’s my blog day, or whatever, this is the mental image I pin those facts to.

With years, it’s different. I have never pictured a year like the calendars you get in the front of a diary, with each month laid out in a box of days and dates. To me, each year snakes backwards in single file, a day at a time, tilting as it goes like one of those optical illusion paintings, so that it’s always downhill towards winter. I’ve just booked my flights for this year’s Bouchercon mystery convention in Cleveland OH in October. In my mind, October is over the crest of the light summer months and heading downhill into the darker end of the year.

But when they asked me the security questions of where I flew to in the States last March, I struggled to remember my exact itinerary. And the only reason I would have a note of it is because I usually create a document for each trip with a list of addresses and confirmation numbers, and probably I have yet to delete that from my computer.

Am I missing out on something?

After all, I have no children who might be interested in what I did with my life, so I do not feel the need to preserve a little personal history for future generations. And having been a photographer for years I now take very few pictures that are not work-related, although since I got my new cellphone with a decent camera on it, I confess to being a little more snap-happy.

And yet I am fascinated by other people’s history. Leafing through Andrew’s albums of family photos going back before the First World War, I am enthralled by the clothing, the stern faces, the little glimpses into character that people unknowingly show when faced with a camera.

One of the boxes I labelled for him was simply called ‘Dates and Memories’. Into it went all kinds of tickets, letters and cards. The anchor points of his life.

I am also faced with the prospect of moving house at some point, and it would have been my instinct to use it as an excuse to de-clutter. When the time comes I may well still do just that. But this experience has certainly made me pause and reflect. Do I really want to get rid of all those little aide-mémoire items. The ones that give structure to the good times, and put the bad times into perspective?

So, ‘Rati, my question is, how do you remember your memories? And where do you keep them? And if you only had space left in your box of memories for one more item, what would it be?

This week’s Word of the Week is anchorite, or anchoret, which means a man or woman who has withdrawn from the world especially for religious reasons; a recluse, from which we get anchorage, a recluse’s cell or a place to withdraw from the world.

The Pace of Prose

By David Corbett

Last Friday, Alexandra posted a call to the barricades titled Two Books a Year, in which she referenced a recent and already infamous New York Times article noting that, in the era of ebooks, anything less than two books a year is slacking. (Note: The Times article singled out genre fiction for this rate of productivity.)

I decided to spare my response for today’s post, because I think it’s a very important topic, and one that deserves real consideration by everyone who writes.

I agree with Alex that to write well one must write often. Daily’s not a bad regimen — some might say it’s de rigueur. An ambitious word count is great if you can manage it: say, 1,000 words.

I don’t agree, however, that: “Successful writers write a LOT of books. Tons. Staggering numbers.”

This is no doubt true of many authors, but I know a great number of superb writers for whom this simply isn’t the case. Junot Diaz is one. It took him ten years to write The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I think it was time well spent, and do not mourn the nineteen other books that were hypothetically aborted by his not keeping up a two-book-per-year pace.

I tend to shy away from the phrase “successful writer” because I consider the term loaded. In a letter to H.G. Wells, William James famously remarked:

The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That — with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success — is our national disease.

I could write a great deal more efficiently, and part of my modest output is due no doubt to an obsession with revision that is perhaps, well, obsessive. Charlie Stella, in our recent dialog here, referred to me as a “stone polisher.”

It may well be that this obsession with rewriting speaks not to artisitic excellence but a neurotic fear of being found imperfect. Shame has paralyzed artists far greater than me. On some level, however, I’ve accepted my imperfections and released my ambitious failures into the world. They’ve been four in number, fewer than I perhaps should have written in the same time period.

Am I therefore something less than a success?

I’m sure there are many who think so. And on some days, I’m one of them. Fortunately, those are just the bad days. (Or, as some folks call them: weekdays.)

There are writers who can crank out voluminous material without becoming stale, formulaic, or unintentional self-parodies. I marvel at Ed McBain’s output, for example, to name just one.

But there are others who focus not on overall output but on making each book a great book.

I was perhaps cursed early on in this regard by working with Tom Jenks, who among other notable accomplishments edited the unfinished Hemingway manuscript that became Garden of Eden, and who runs the online literary zine Narrative with his wife, the novelist Carol Edgarian (only two novels, both brilliant).

Tom asked a simple question: “If you’re going to write a book, why not make it a masterpiece?”

This question paralyzed another of Tom’s students, the thriller writer Andrew Gross, and it was only by putting this daunting measure aside that Andrew could write the books he knew he could write. And he is, by many measures, a success.

For whatever reason, I bought in to Tom’s point. And with each book, I’ve tried to write, if not a masterpiece, a book that at least tries to measure up to the greatest books about crime that I’ve read: The Long Goodbye, Cutter & Bone, Bellman & True, Nightmare Alley, Dog Soldiers, God’s Pocket, Clockers, The Long Firm, to name a scant few.

George Pelecanos, after reading The Devil’s Redhead, wrote: “Is this a classic? Maybe not, but I bet Corbett has one in him.”

I’ve tried to live up to that challenge with every book. Perhaps I’ve failed. It may well be that I cannot write a classic, and never will, and trying has simply slowed down my output to the point I’ve crippled my own chances for—pause for emphasis—success.

But I’ve put my heart and soul into each effort in a way I never could have if I were cranking them out at two per year. I simply don’t and can’t write well at that pace. I have and will continue to suffer the consequences.

I need time to sink into my material, to discover, as filmmaker Leslie Schwerin puts it, “The thing beneath the thing.” I need time to catch the clichés in what I at first blush thought was a stellar idea, whether it was a bit of dialog, a description, a premise, a plot turn, whatever.

Writers who do work at the faster clip are often known more for their entire output than a single book, though often a handful of books stand out among the others. (Dennis Lehane, when responding to questions about why he didn’t take the Kenzie-Gennaro series any further than he did, routinely said: “Have you every heard anyone say ‘The seventeenth book in the series was my favorite’?”)

In a recent Jonathan Franzen appearance I attended (you can find his remarks online here), he talked about how much Kafka influenced him, and why.

Basically, especially in The Trial (one of those non-genre crime books that has inspired not a few of us), Franzen admired Kafka’s commitment to teaching us “how to love ourselves even as we’re being merciless toward ourselves; how to remain humane in the face of the most awful truths about ourselves.” For Franzen, this engagement with the paradoxes of our existence, especially through examination of character, is what made the novel the great—and unique—art form it is.

Or, in Kafka’s own words:

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

To anyone who can write two such books a year, more power to them. I can’t.

I think pushing yourself to do more, to do better, is seldom if ever misbegotten. But each of us has to choose the path of our work as we see fit and as our talent provides, whether we embrace the cold hard truth of market forces or dismiss them as anti-art. (My guess is, most of us fall somewhere in the middle of that spectrum.)

Being creative requires a great deal of resilience, persevering in the face of considerable resistance, frustration, negativity, and criticism—some necessary, some inevitable, some even useful. How you withstand those countering forces while remaining true to the inspirational spark that guides you will, to my mind, go a long way toward defining your capacity for success—no matter how high or low your productivity.

* * * * *

How do you see yourself and your career—as a producer of a steady output of solid work, or someone striving for that touchstone effort that simply requires more time?

Which prolific writer astonishes you with the consistency of his or her greatness?

Which author with only a few books to his or her name do you admire?

What is more important to you, the writer’s complete oeuvre or the individual book?

* * * * *

Jukebox Hero of the Week: Linda Thompson’s production has been limited by stage fright so severe it actually paralyzes her vocal chords. But she’s an artist I cherish, and I particularly love this song, “Katy Cruel” (also a favorite of our former comrade Cornelia Read):

(Making A) Killing

by Tania Carver

A few days ago, Linda and I came to the end of the second series of The Killing. Not the American version that’s attracted so much opprobrium, but the original Danish one, Forbrydelsen. With subtitles, you understand. Neither of us speak Danish. (Which actually is quite a shameful admission to make because the Danes, like so many Europeans, speak perfect English.) To say we loved it is a bit of an understatement. We watched the box set on DVD, trying to ration the episodes over two weeks. It was half the length of the first series but just about as good. It’s one of the few TV shows (possibly the only one) that we both not just watch but become active participants in. When we’re not watching it we’re thinking about or discussing it. Before each episode we put forward theories about who’s done what. Who the villain is, what this character’s real motives are, the significance of what that character did or this one said. Etcetera. And that just adds to the fun.

If you haven’t seen the original then I thoroughly recommend it. Both seasons. And there’s a third to follow. Sophie Grabol who plays the lead detective Sarah Lund is fantastic. The writing is near-perfect, same with the direction and the actors have become household names in our house. It’s one of the most satisfying things I’ve ever seen on TV. I even want to go to Copenhagen for my holidays. (I don’t think Linda’s with me on that one – too cold.)

Coming to the end of the series coincided with the Hay Festival. I’m sure you’ve heard of that – the biggest literary festival in Britain. ‘Glastonbury for the mind’, as Bill Clinton famously called it. I’ve never been, either as punter or participant, but it’s hugely successful. This year Ian Rankin was one of the guests. I’m sure you’ve heard of him too. And, in a well-reported session, he chatted about many things, including the return of Rebus. He was, from all accounts, on top form. But on the subject of TV adaptations he was more disgruntled. He did complain (and I’m paraphrasing slightly here) about his own work on TV saying that Scandanavian crime shows get twenty weeks and the adaptations of his novels get forty five minutes. They take the title and change everything else, he said.

Now I think there are at least two ways to look at this. The first is to ignore it. He’s a very successful writer carping on about something that most writers would give their right arm to be in the position as. Or so received wisdom goes – I’ve had interest in both my own books and the Tania novels. I’ve still got a TV production company handling the rights to the Joe Donovan series. They did a stunning job of Val McDermid’s Wire in the Blood. And if it ever gets made I’d like it to be them that do it. But that’s slightly beside the point.

I’d only be happy if it was a good production. I remember a few years back (quite a few years back now) Reginald Hill’s Dalziel and Pascoe novels were optioned by ITV. They filmed one of them, A Pinch Of Snuff, starring a British comedy double act, Hale and Pace. Now if you haven’t seen these two, all you need to know is that they were unique in the history of comedy double acts by having two straight men. They filmed it, it was shown and it was universally hated. A couple of years after that, the BBC optioned them again. Having had his fingers burnt, Reg was adamant he didn’t want the same thing to happen again. The BBC cast Warren Clarke and Colin Buchanan, the series ran for twelve years, was a huge international success, critically acclaimed and award winning. So that’s what happens if it’s done right.

I must admit, the Rebus TV series doesn’t really work for me. And it’s for the reasons Ian said: they have the same title as his books and nothing else. Ken Stott is a fantastic Rebus but everything else around him doesn’t work for me. Because it’s not the book. The earlier version with John Hannah was better in many respects because it was an excellent attempt to translate Rebus’s milieu to TV. Unfortunately, John Hannah wasn’t, and never will be, right for Rebus. So if they could have had the actor from the second version in the production of the first one it would have been perfect. In my opinion. As I said.

But getting back to what Ian said, I do think he has a point. And it leads on to a larger one about Scandanavian crime fiction. Crime fiction is the largest selling genre in the UK. The US too, I believe. And of course there is pressure to turn those successful crime novels into TV and movie fodder. (I’m still not sure why – I think a book works best as a book and a movie as a movie. Why take one medium and try to turn it into another? But that’s a discussion for another time.) So they do. And crime series are some of the most consistently high rated shows on TV. So what’s gone wrong with our TV? I don’t know. In the Seventies and Eighties British TV drama was fantastic. But it’s now, for the most part, suffering death by focus group. Death by committee. The creative have been strangled by the suits. There are exceptions such as Doctor Who, thank God, in which a showrunner is entrusted to bring his vision to the screen, but most drama seems to be going the other way while other countries, including the US, have overtaken us.

So to go back to Ian’s point – why will we sit through a twenty episode series examining the criminal and political system in Denmark – with subtitles – and love it? Why won’t we do this with our own TV? Well, I try. But to be honest, it’s just not as good. It’s timid where it should be brave, formulaic where it should be different. There are, as I said, exceptions. But they’re exactly that. Exceptions. A few years ago when The Wire was at its peak, a lot of British writers were asking why there couldn’t be a UK equivalent. A TV series that unfolded over five seasons, each episode like the chapter of a novel, that made no concessions to the casual viewer and that drafted in some of the best US crime novelists around to write it. Why couldn’t we have that over here? Because we couldn’t, that’s what we were told. That’s not how things are done over here. You want to do that, move to America. In the meantime, here’s some more Midsommer Murders. No wonder Ian Rankin is disgruntled.

So the talent’s there, but the will isn’t. And this leads on to a larger discussion about Scandanavian crime fiction. I’m getting really sick of reading pieces by literary editors in broadsheet newspapers who’ve discovered Jo Nesbo or Henning Mankell asking where their British equivalents are? Why can’t British crime fiction have the same sense of contemporary social engagement that the Scandanavians have? Why do we just produce Agatha Christie style whodunnits in this country?

Well, here’s some news. British crime fiction does have that same sense of social engagement. Or at least the best ones do, just like the best Scandanavian ones, the best American ones, the best Italian ones . . . The only difference is it’s not in translation and therefore there’s less snob value to be seen reading it in public. And we don’t produce Agatha Christie style whodunnits. Haven’t done for years. As any crime fiction reader will tell you. After all, crime fiction is the bestselling genre in this country so we must be doing something right.

And there’s an appetite for longer, more complex adaptations of our own crime novels in this country too. That’s why viewers are resorting to watching US or European drama instead.

Linda and I have the first season of The Bridge to watch next, a Swedish/Danish co-production. I’m really looking forward to it. Rationing the episodes, discussing and theorising what’s going on when we’re not watching . . . all of that. And then we’ve got Braquo, a French crime drama with Jean-Hughes Anglade. Really looking forward to that one. So yes, I’ll be watching. But I’ll be wishing we could do something as good here.

The power of understatement

by Pari

With the heat rising and the rain a distant memory, I’ve been spending my non-work, non-parent hours thinking about understatement . . . subtlety. The subject came up the other day when I was taking one of my long weekend walks. There’s a house in a neighborhood near mine that has the most marvelous garden. Whenever I can, I try to walk by to see what’s blooming. The place is magical, glorious, especially in our drought-ridden, high-desert city.

That’s me in the corner taking the photoLast Sunday when I passed the house, I finally spied an elderly gentleman bent over a rose bush and inspecting a perfect lavender bud.

“Excuse me, Sir,” I said, not wanting to startle him.

“Yes?”

When he stood, the man towered over me. A white shirt and khaki pants hung loosely over loose, wrinkled flesh. He used a crinkled handkerchief to wipe the sweat from his flushed, sun-spotted face and looked at me with filmy blue-green eyes that still managed to show curiosity.

“I just wanted to thank you,” I said, suddenly self-conscious. “This garden is a work of art.”

“It’s her garden,” he said, pointing to a wrought iron sign at the top of a trellis covered in climbing pink and yellow roses. The sign had the words Peggy’s Garden on it. “She died two years ago.” The man stared at the sign for a moment before speaking again, his voice soft. “She loved this place.”

His attention returned to our conversation. “That’s why I promised myself I’d take care of it for as long as I’m able.”

The way he said that last sentence really got to me. The man was already old, tired. He seemed so sad, as if the pain of his wife’s death hadn’t diminished from the day she’d left him. The fact that he had decided to dedicate himself to a garden that had brought her so much joy, as a quiet tribute, moved me tremendously.

Often acts of love — or of other strong emotions — are portrayed in literature, movies and television with garish brushstrokes. They demand attention!!!

In the case of the gentleman I met, I didn’t get the sense that his was a loud action at all. He goes into that garden daily to honor his wife and to be near her, near to something that made her happy. And in doing so, he finds meaning and satisfaction.

So my question today is:

Can you share with us an example of a whispered action — real or fictional — that moves you more than a shouted one ever could?

Thanks.
I’m looking forward to a fascinating conversation.