Two books a year

by Alexandra Sokoloff

Okay, I’m sure a lot of you have read this NYT article by now (or at least heard it mentioned here on Murderati) which tells us that the minimum output of books per year for a professional author is now two. Per year. Double what people are used to thinking.

In the E Reader Age, a Book a Year is Slacking

And the article links this new phenomenon to the e book revolution.

Well, I would strongly disagree. MOST of the authors I know who make a good living at just writing books have been writing AT LEAST, at the VERY least, two books a year for longer than I’ve been in the author business. There are very few I know who can afford the leisurely pace of a book per year. (I dream of being able to afford that luxury…)

It was one of the first things I noticed when I moved from screenwriting to the author business in 2006. Successful writers write a LOT of books. Tons. Staggering numbers. Plus stories and any number of other things. (I felt like a total slacker until I realized if I had been writing books instead of screenplays for the last 11 years I would have those kinds of numbers, too.)

Of course, there’s a catch that we all have to be wary of. How long does it take to write a GOOD book? When are you starting to risk, well, dreck?

I wanted to think and talk about that today.

From the beginning of my (still quite short, really) author career, one of the questions I have gotten most often at book signings and panels is, “How long does it take you to write a book?”

My feeling is what’s always being asked is not how long it takes me to write a book, but how long it would take the person asking to write a book. Which of course, I have no way of answering, unless it’s to cut to the chase and shout, “Save yourself! Don’t do it!” But that’s never the question, so I don’t say it.

What I started out answering instead was, “About nine months.” Which, from Chapter One to copyedits, used to be true enough. But I’m getting faster. And the paranormals I write take more like two months. And of course with e publishing, the whole process of publishing has changed, and the time frame has changed, too.

I wrote three and a half books last year. One YA thriller, THE SPACE BETWEEN, one non-fiction writing workbook, WRITING LOVE, one paranormal, TWIST OF FATE (coming out in 2013), and half of my latest crime thriller, HUNTRESS MOON, which will be out next month. (And technically I also outlined another paranormal, KEEPER OF THE SHADOWS, which will also be out in 2013. Outlining is writing, too!).

This year I will have written another four or possibly four and a half. Two paranormals, another thriler and a half, and – either a half or whole other SOMETHING yet to be determined.

So that’s a lot of books. How long did it take me to write any one of those? It’s really hard to say when those projects are constantly overlapping.

But the fact is, in almost every case, the real answer to the question of “How long?” is almost always: “Decades.”

Because honestly, where do you even start? I’m quite convinced I’m a professional writer today because my mother made me write a page a day from the time I could actually hold a pencil. At first a page was a sentence, and then a paragraph, and then a real page, but it was writing. Every day. It was an incredibly valuable lesson, which taught me a fundamental truth about writing: it didn’t have to be good, it just had to get written. Now I make myself write however many pages every day. And now, like then, it doesn’t have to be good, it just has to get written. Some days it’s good, some days it’s crap, but if you write every day, there are eventually enough good days to make a book.

Then there were all those years of theater, from writing and performing plays in my best friend’s garage, to school and community theater, to majoring in theater in college, to performing with an ensemble company after college. Acting, dancing, choreography, directing – that was all essential training for writing.

And then the reading. Again, like probably every writer on the planet, from the time I could hold a book. The constant, constant reading. Book after book – and film after film, too, and play after play – until the fundamentals of storytelling were permanently engraved in some template in my head.

Hey, you may be saying, that’s TRAINING. That wasn’t the question. How long does it take to WRITE A BOOK?

I still maintain, it takes decades. I think books emerge in layers. The process is a lot like a grain of sand slipping inside a clamshell that creates an irritation that causes the clam to secrete that substance, nacre, that covers the grain, one layer at a time, until eventually a pearl forms. (Actually it’s far more common that some parasite or organic substance, even tissue of the clam’s own body, is the irritant, which is an even better analogy if you ask me, ideas as parasites…)

Let’s take a look at Book of Shadows, the thriller I’ve just gotten back from my publisher and put out myself as an e book last week.

When did I start Book of Shadows? Well, technically in the fall of 2008, I guess. But really, the seed was planted long ago, when I was a child growing up in Berkeley. (The Berkeley thing pretty much explains why I write supernatural to begin with, but that’s another post.) Those of you who have visited this town know that Telegraph Avenue, the famous drag ending at the U.C. campus, is a gauntlet of fortune tellers (as well as clothing and craft vendors and political activists and, well, drug dealers.).

Having daily exposure to Tarot readers and psychics and palm readers as one of my very first memories has been influential to my writing in ways I never realized until I started seeing similarities in Book of Shadows and my paranormal The Shifters, and discovered I could trace the visuals and some of those scenes back to those walks on Telegraph Ave.

Without mentioning an actual number, I can tell you, that’s a lot of years for a book to be in the making.

Over the years, that initial grain of sand picked up more and more layers. Book of Shadows is about a Boston homicide detective who reluctantly teams up with a beautiful, enigmatic practicing witch from Salem to solve what looks like a Satanic murder. Well, back in sixth grade, like a lot of sixth graders I got hooked on the Salem witch trials, and that fascination extended to an interest in the real-life modern practice of witchcraft, which if you live in California – Berkeley, San Francisco, L.A. – is thriving, and has nothing at all to do with the devil or black magic. Hanging out at the Renaissance Pleasure Faire (more Tarot readers!), I became acquainted with a lot of practicing witches, and have been privileged to attend ceremonies. So basically I’ve been doing research for this book since before I was in high school.

And my early love of film noir, and the darkest thrillers of Hitchcock, especially Notorious, started a thirst in me for stories with dark romantic plots that pit the extremes of male and female behavior against each other; it’s one of my personal themes. Book of Shadows is not my first story to pit a very psychic, very irrational woman against a very rational, very logic-driven man; I love the dynamics – and explosive sexual chemistry – of that polarity.

So to completely switch analogies on everyone, this book has been on the back burner, picking up ingredients for a long, long time.

Now, what pulls all those ideas and layers and ingredients into a storyline that takes precedence over all the other random storylines cooking on all those hundreds of back burners in my head (because that’s about how many there are, at any given time), is a little more mysterious. Or maybe it’s not. Maybe storylines leap into the forefront of your imagination mostly because your agent or editor or a producer or executive or director comes up with an opportunity for a paycheck or a gentle reminder that you need to be thinking of the next book or script if you ever want a paycheck again. I know that’s a powerful motivator for me. So speed in writing comes partly out of practical necessity.

But the reason a professional writer is able to perform relatively on demand like that is that we have all those stories cooking on all those back burners. All the time. For years and years, or decades and decades. And if a book takes nine months, or six months, or a year to write, that’s only because a whole lot of stuff about it has been cooking for a very, very, very long time.

A long time.

And I’m wondering, lately, if one of the keys to writing faster without killng yourself doing it is to check those pots bubbling back there on the mental back burners more often. Taking the time every few months to just sit quietly and free-form brainstorm on paper or on the screen… and see what ideas might be more done than not. Sometimes random and seemingly separate ideas can suddenly combine to create a full story line. Because I’m quite sure that we ALL have books that have been cooking back there for decades now. Maybe it’s time to take them out.

So writers, how long does it take YOU to write a book? Or your latest? How many stories do you figure you have on the back burner at any one time?

And readers, do you ever notice certain themes – or recurring scenes or visuals – in your favorite authors’ books that make you suspect that story seed was planted long ago?

And here’s one worth discussing: is anything MORE than a book a year cheating the book?

– Alex

————————

All right, Nook people, you keep asking, and for a limited time I’m putting The Unseen, The Harrowing and The Price up at B&N.com for Nook: $2.99 each.

Where’s the sweet spot?

By PD Martin

Looks like we might be having an ebook week here at Murderati (well, two out of five posts)! I’d planned to look at ebook pricing for today’s post and while at first I thought I might scrap it, given the amazing blog of Brett’s on Tuesday, in the end I decided the two blogs would go hand in hand 🙂

I’m also coming at this from a different perspective to Brett—I’m a newbie. While his strategy started last year and, by the sounds of it, in earnest about 12 months ago, mine started this year. So I’m probably about 12 months behind Brett in terms of the learning curve (and sales). Fingers crossed my sales will look more like his in 12 months! I’d also like to say that Brett has been generously giving me some tips via email. Thanks, Brett! He’s a nice guy…you should go buy his books.

Anyway, ebook pricing. One of Brett’s tips was to experiment with pricing and that’s what I’m doing at the moment. There seems to be a few common price points for self-published ebooks, namely:

Free (ahhh!!!)
$0.99
$2.99
$3.99
$5.99

A friend recently forwarded me a great graph that was presented by Smashwords founder Mark Coker. I know we’ve talked about the fact that sales from Smashwords make up an incredibly small percentage compared to Amazon sales, but it’s still interesting to look at this data.

So it seems the sweet spots are hitting at $0.99, $2.99 and another small spike at $5.99. Interesting, huh?

I noticed from Brett’s post that my pricing points seem to be in sync with his for the most part, with shorts at $0.99, my one novella at $2.99 and my full thriller novel at $3.99. But, when I released my Pippa Dee books (YA and much shorter than my thriller novel at 50,000 words) I priced them at $2.99. I thought this seemed fair. Reasonable. Attractive but without de-valuing my work.

However, these books simply haven’t been moving. Was it the new name? Establishing a new brand? Possibly. Or the genre? While they’re books I believe most adults would read and enjoy (and they have), they have teen protagonists and so that ‘officially’ makes them targeted to the middle grade and YA market. Maybe not a good market for ebooks? So as part of my experimentation I’ve lowered the price to $0.99. I should say, this move to the $0.99 was partly because of the above graph, and partly because I have a friend who’s doing well in the ebook business and has priced ALL her books at $0.99. She felt that low price point was a key part of her strategy to build her brand and name. I only reduced the prices a few days ago so it’s too early to tell if this strategy will work or not. But it means I have been thinking of ebook pricing a lot recently and wanted to post about it here, too. Here are the two for $0.99, by the way.

The Wanderer on Amazon

Grounded Spirits on Amazon

So, Murderati, am I making these a great deal for adults and teens alike, or undervaluing my work? What do you like to pay for your ebooks? Maybe the graph above reflects your buying patterns too. Note: I actually asked what people like to pay for ebooks on Facebook and, incredibly, got answers around the $5-10 mark. Then again, I posted during Aussie daytime and so I think all the respondents were Aussies—who are used to paying a fortune for books!

LIES MY FATHER TOLD ME (THAT TURNED OUT TO BE TRUE)

by Gar Anthony Haywood

I know I’m off by a few days, but I thought I’d pretend it’s still Father’s Day and devote this blog post to my late, great old man, Jack Woodward Haywood:

He passed away fifteen years ago, but his impact on my life remains profound. Anyone who’s ever heard me relate my “writer’s story” — the blow-by-blow of how I came to be a professional author — knows that it all started with “Big Jack” (as his cousins liked to call him).

An architect by trade, Dad was a voracious reader of science fiction and fantasy, and you couldn’t take two steps in my parents’ bedroom without stumbling upon a mound of paperback novels by such authors as Isaac Asimov, Robert E. Howard, Harlan Ellison and Ray Bradbury. The covers of these novels always featured fantastic illustrations of spaceships and aliens, Martian landscapes and muscle-bound, loin-clothed giants locked in mortal combat with oversized serpents and spiders . . .

. . . and they were as great a siren call to a seven year old boy as hot dogs on the dinner table. Reading behind my father became my great obsession, and in that obsession I soon found my calling in life: writing.

It was an ambition my father encouraged with a very light hand. Secretly, I think, he wanted me to become an architect like him, but as he would never actually say so, he was content to let me pursue a career in letters instead. This is not to say, however, that he did much in the way of cheerleading. That wasn’t my Dad. His style of parenting demanded he leaven every word of positive reinforcement with three of constructive criticism, and sometimes the former was hard to make out in the forest of the latter, especially for a kid who really only wanted to hear how great his latest story was, not how much better it could have been had he only . . .

My father, in other words, was a difficult man to please. I like to say that had I one day rushed home from school to report I’d just won a Pulitzer prize, Dad’s response would have run somewhere along the lines of, “That’s fine, son, but if you’d really been trying, you would have won two.”

Eventually, I figured out that nothing I wrote or did was ever going to earn his unconditional approval, and so started tuning him out as a Nattering Nabob of Negativism (as Nixon Vice-President Spiro Agnew might have once called him). The old man would say something and I’d nod my head, as if in complete agreement, when in fact I’d be dismissing this latest lesson in life as simply more of his pessimistic nonsense.

Except that it wasn’t always nonsense, of course, and sometimes it took me years to separate the wheat from the chaff. Doing the math now, I’d have to say my father was right more often than he was wrong, and the things he was right about were generally those that really, truly matter. It was with this belated realization that I opened my first novel, FEAR OF THE DARK, with the following dedication:

For My Father
Jack W. Haywood
Whose wisdom I often mistook for raving lunacy.

(Hence the name for my personal blog, Wisdom Mistaken For Lunacy.)

I won’t even attempt a full list, because neither you nor I have the time for it, but here is a partial accounting, at least, of the many lies my father told me over the years that turned out to be not only true, but incredibly valuable for a writer to know:

You can scramble eggs in the frying pan.

Watching him do this for the first time (and probably last, now that I think about it — Dad wasn’t a big presence in the family kitchen), I was absolutely convinced he was nuts, skipping the whip-the-eggs-in-a-bowl step in making scrambled eggs entirely. But hell if the damn things didn’t look — and taste — exactly the same when they were done. Who knew?

The vast majority of published fiction is crap.

The year was 1977 (or thereabouts). He’d taken me to dinner and we were browsing a newsstand afterwards. I asked if he’d be willing to pick up the tab for a paperback and he said yes (miracle of miracles). I chose a Starsky and Hutch novelization:

Just like you are right now, no doubt, he laughed in my face and told me if I wanted him to plunk down his hard-earned cash for a book, I’d have to do better than that piece of crap.

I was appalled. “Piece of crap”? How did he know the novelization was a piece of crap? He’d barely glanced at it, let alone read it. He knew nothing about the author. How could he so casually dismiss a published novel — a book legitimized as genuine literature by its very existence on that newsstand — as crap?

“Because ninety percent of the fiction published in the world is crap,” he said matter-of-factly.

Naturally, this triggered a lengthy and rancorous debate that ended only when I’d capitulated and chosen another book for him to buy for me, which turned out to be THE AFRICAN by Harold Courlander. (Interesting aside: Courlander would later successfully sue author Alex Haley for plagiarism, claiming Haley had based much of his blockbuster novel ROOTS on scenes taken from THE AFRICAN.)

While I’ve since come around to my father’s way of thinking regarding the abysmal quality of most published fiction, give or take a few percentage points, all I could do that night was agree to disagree with him, chalking up his stance on the subject once again to the tunnel vision of negative nabobism.

Weeks later, having read THE AFRICAN, I would refrain from admitting to the old man that he’d been right: Courlander’s book was terrific, and was almost certainly a better read than that Starsky and Hutch novelization — crap or no — could have ever been.

Touch typing is not for sissies.

Boy, did we go around and around over this one. I wanted to take something useful like archery for my tenth-grade elective class, and Dad wanted me to take typing. Typing! What in the hell did the man think I wanted to be when I grew up, a writer or something?

He was relentless. I took the typing class.

I thank God every day of my life I did.

Pizza is to die for.

Another boys’ night out with the old man, and he decides we’re going to have pizza for dinner.

No way, says I, that stuff is nasty. The only pizza I’ve ever tried to this point is that cardboard cheesy crap my mother likes to order between movies at the drive-in . . .

. . . and one bite into such an affront to all that is edible should be enough to put any man off this so-called “Italian delicacy” for the rest of his life.

“Boy,” Dad says — “boy” being his favorite synonym for “you big knucklehead” — “that’s not pizza!” And the next thing I know, I’m at Miceli’s pizza parlor in Hollywood, where my father has to all but force a slice of meat lover’s pie down my throat.

My illumination is immediate.

WTF??? This is pizza?

I guess Jack W’s not such a dummy, after all.

Hyundai is a car company to watch.

It’s a good thing I didn’t have the power to have my father committed when he first suggested this, because he would have found himself strapped into a straight jacket within five minutes if I had. This was back in the Korean automobile manufacturer’s earliest days importing cars to America, and everything they built at the time made a Yugo look like a Rolls Royce by comparison. Hyundais were so bad and ugly, in fact, that I gave my fictional private investigator, Aaron Gunner, one to borrow from a cousin whenever he wants to be all but invisible during stakeouts and surveillance runs.

But look at Hyundai now. Kicking mucho Toyota ass and taking names. How Dad could lay eyes on this . . .

. . . and see this in Hyundai’s future . . .

. . . I’ll never know. Maybe he was just lucky?

It’s for sure I was. He wasn’t the perfect father, by any means, but he got enough right as a parent and mentor to earn my enduring love and respect.

Thanks for the education, Big Jack. We miss you.

Questions for the Class: What “lies” steeped in truth did your parents teach you?

BATTLES REPORTS FROM THE FRONT LINES

A Stephen Jay Schwartz Exclusive

Many authors kvetch and scream and cry about the changing world of publishing. They worry about the shrinking market for hardcover and paperback releases, the reduction in the number of publishing deals, the reluctance for publishers to support an author’s desire to deviate from the strict guidelines of their genre, the shrinking size of their advances. Many authors, myself included, seem stuck in a quagmire between old world tradition and new world opportunity.

There are also a number of authors who push forward, paving the way for the rest of us to proceed. They put in the hard, hard work necessary to take control of their careers, freeing themselves from the rules and restrictions placed on authors since the first days of publishing.

Brett Battles is one of these authors. What Brett has been able to accomplish in just a year’s time has given hope to all of us. In my opinion, Brett is one of the leaders of the new age of self-publishing, and he comes to it after a successful (and frustrating) career as a traditionally published author. Brett speaks from experience and he speaks from the heart.

I am honored to reintroduce my good friend and fellow Murderati, Brett Battles…

Hello Murderati! Nice to pop back for a visit.

It’s been an interesting year since I was last here. I call it my Wild eBook Adventure, and Steve thought you might like to hear about it and what I’ve learned along the way.

Twelve months ago, I had one simple goal: To continue to be able to write full time.

Looking at the publishing landscape, it was clear that if I was going to accomplish that, it wouldn’t be by the same means I’d used in the past, i.e. via a traditional deal. The dollars were getting smaller, and who knew how long it might take to hook up with a new publisher (assuming I could.) As I saw it, ebooks could provide me the opportunity I was looking for. No, I didn’t think it was guaranteed, but I felt it was well worth the try.

When I left Murderati last June, I had just released my first three self-published titles: LITTLE GIRL GONE, SICK, and HERE COMES MR. TROUBLE. Thankfully, they began selling right away, and I was actually making some decent money. It wasn’t enough to live on though. To do that, I needed to have more titles for sale, and I don’t mean just one or two.

Putting the old nose to the grindstone, I set a schedule that has seen me release six more novels between last June and today (my latest, PALE HORSE, came out over the weekend). Yes, that’s a lot, but it plays directly to what I’ve learned about the ebook world.

And what would that be you ask? Here you go, the top six in no particular order:

• Nothing is more important that writing a good book. That sounds obvious, but it needs to be said.

• Editing, especially copy editing, is not a step to ever be taken lightly. Pay the money. It’s worth the cost

• Covers are incredibly important. A cover should look like it could be on a book out of one of the Big 6. Pay the money. It’s worth the cost.

• Your virtual bookshelf is forever. The more (quality) work you get up there, the better you’re going to do. A book in a brick and mortar store is lucky to stay on a shelf for more than a month. In cyberspace, it never goes away, so if someone stumbles upon one of your books, likes it, then wants to buy more, they can do it immediately. AND they do.

• Your virtual bookshelf mean your books have the ability to sell month after month after month. My books that have been out over a year still sell at a steady monthly rate.

• Experiment: with promo opportunities, with pricing, with covers, with product descriptions. A tweak to a book not selling this month, might help it sell well next.

For the rest of last year, as I worked to build up my virtual shelf, I struggled financially month-to-month. I mean really struggled. The ebook money was coming in at a nice rate, and was even increasing each month, but it was not enough yet to make my monthly nut, so I was using what savings I had to cover the difference. There was one month in the fall that was I down to less than I would need for rent, but the ebook month came in at the end of month and I squeezed by.

But then last November, I actually made more than I needed for the first time. I was numb when I realized this. Maybe, just maybe, this was going to work, and I would be able to keep doing what I loved full time.

December was down just a bit, but not much. Then came 2012.

To say this has been a better year than 2011 would be a massive understatement. I attributed that to a few things. The first and foremost: having more books up that people can purchase. This way no one title has to carry the load. Think of it as a small snowball rolling down the hill that is slowly growing and growing. The father it goes, the more formidable it becomes, taking on a life of its own. Second: changing my novel prices from $2.99 to $3.99. Both are low prices and there has been absolutely no fall off from the increase. Third: giving books away through the Kindle Select Program. This method has become a little more iffy lately, but what basically has happened in the past is that once you put your book in the program (giving Amazon a 90 day exclusive), two important things happen: one, Kindle Prime members can now borrow your book for free while Amazon will pay you an amount that is usually somewhere between $2.15 to 2.50 per book; and two, you can give your book away for free to anyone for up to 5 days during the 90 day period. If you’re able to give away a ton of copies (I’m talking 30 grand or more), and you can get in the top ten or so on the free list, there’s a good chance your book will go pretty high when it goes back on sale.

Sample: BECOMING QUINN. I gave it away for three days in early March, ending up with about 32,000 takers. By the end of the month I had sold over 6,000 copies, for which I make a little more than $2 a copy. You can do the math. Also note that my other titles continued to sell.

March was a very good month for me. As was April. As was May.

I mentioned that the giveaway seems a bit iffy now. In the last month or two, the giving away option isn’t always seeing quite the success on the selling front as it had before. Two exceptions to this are our own Rob Browne’s first self-published title TRIAL JUNKIES, and Ann Voss Peterson’s PUSHED TOO FAR. They’ve both done very well.

Because of this, I’ve decided to try it again. Blatant self promo part here: I’m giving away the Kindle version of my novel SICK, the first of my Project Eden Books, today through Thursday. You can click on this link and download it for free, no strings. I would actually appreciate it if you would. Every free download helps, and—BONUS—you’re going to get a book I think is one of the most suspenseful I’ve ever written.

I’m sure a lot of you are saying “I can’t write six books in a year.”

Don’t worry, we all write at our own pace (a pace that should not sacrifice quality). Just write at the pace you can and see if you can pick it up a bit. Instead of one book a year, try one and half or two.

Others might be saying, “But you already had a following, so you had a leg up. Didn’t you read that article where a majority of self-published authors aren’t even making $500 a year?”

Let’s talk about a following first. Yes, I do believe mine has helped, but I also know I have gained a ton of new readers I never had before who knew nothing about me. Also there are plenty of examples of authors who had no following and are now doing well. And I did see that article, and it didn’t surprise me. It depends on the genre someone’s writing (thrillers and romances do better than a lot of other areas), the quality of the work (refer back to the what I’ve learned list above), and how many titles they have available (same note).

“What about luck?”

Yeah, there’s probably some involved. But I believe we make our own luck. You’ve got to keep plugging away even if it’s not working right now, because I can guarantee one thing, if you don’t work hard at it (or whatever it is you want to do) you WILL fail.

Me, I’m still plugging away. Yes, I’ve had a few very good months, but I can’t just sit back and expect that to happen all the time. I need to continue to expand my virtual bookshelf. To that end, I’m in the middle of a personal three year plan where I’m trying to release at least four books a year. At some point in 2013 I’ll assess where I’m at and see if that pace needs to continue, but, no matter what, I still plan on putting out at least two or three a year for the rest of my life.

It’s kind of weird to just discuss this in financial terms, because I’m not doing it just for the money. I’d write whether I was getting paid or not. I can’t not write. Of all my (limited) skills, writing is what I do best. I’m not trying to claim I’m the best writer, just that when measuring my strengths, it’s at the top.

Okay, here are a few things I love about self-publishing in the new e-reality:

• Writing what I want to write. No one is telling me my idea won’t sell, or isn’t big enough, or anything like that. If I want to write a story that I know will have a limited audience? So what? I will. If I want to write a book in a different genre? Same answer.

– A series never has to end until the AUTHOR wants it to. In the past my popular Quinn series would prbably have died after I parted ways with my old publisher. Now I can continue writing it as long as I want. Case in point: I’ve released BECOMING QUINN and just this last spring THE DESTROYED myself.

• The ability to release a book as soon as it’s ready. My books usually come out a day or two after the copy edit is done, and within a few months of when I actually started writing it in the first place. I love that.

• The ability to release as many books as I want in a given year. The only limitation is my own abilities.

• Controlling all the creative aspects of my book. Cover, editing, formatting, print versions, I either hire the people to help me or do the items I’m capable of myself (specifically formatting for ebook and print).

• Getting paid every month. Amazon and Barnes & Noble pay every month with a two month delay, meaning at the end of June I’ll receive the money I made in April, end of July the money from May, and so on.

Here’s the bottom line. I am the small business owner of a small creative business. I work everyday like all small business owners—even on weekends and vacations. But, my God, I’m writing. Nothing else makes me as happy.

Let me be clear. I don’t think everyone will be able to write full time, but I think this new world means that there will be more of us who can. And even those who aren’t able to achieve full-time status, a writer who puts out a good book or two a year could still make a nice extra income. Will some succeed and others fail? Yes. But, let’s be honest, that’s the same in traditional publishing.

eRead on everyone! And don’t forget to download SICK, it’s free! Who doesn’t like free?

To Hull And Back

by Tania Carver

The title says it all, really. This week I went to Hull. And came back again. The end. Well no, not quite. Obviously it wouldn’t be much of a blog post if that was all I was going to write so there’s more to it than that.

I was there to chair an event called Crime On Tour, on offspring of the Harrogate Festival, in which a more established writer would introduce a couple of newer writers, chat, hopefully be entertaining and then hopefully sell books which we would then happily deface. That was the idea. My event was the fourth out of five, the others being chaired by Steve Mosby, Peter Robinson, Chris Simms and Ann Cleeves. The two writers I chatted to were David Mark and Steve Dunne. And I thoroughly recommend the pair of them. OK, it wasn’t a hugely attended event but it was an enjoyable one. I hope the audience liked it too. And then it was home again on the train the next morning, job done.

Now, originally, this blog post was going to be about writers having to make personal appearances. You know, even though an event is only for an hour or two it might take a day to get there and a day to get home again, and there might only be two people who turn up. That kind of thing. But I’m not. Because while I was travelling backwards and forwards I realised that there was something more interesting to talk about instead of writer who’s lucky enough to be able to write full time whingeing about what a hard life he’s got. ‘I had to leave the house and no one turned up and I lost two days work and they may have been two brilliant days and I’ll never get them back again . . .’ Yeah, whatever. Let’s talk about Hull instead.

Oh God, do we have to? says anyone who’s ever been to Hull. Well yes. But let’s look at Hull in metaphysical terms, as what it represented to me. Or used to. You see, one of the main selling points of Crime on Tour was the fact that it would be someone with a connection to the area it was taking place in, introducing two new writers who also wrote about that area. Handing on the baton, in a way. Except I’m not from Hull. Nowhere near it. The other writers are all either living in the place where the event took place or they base their work there. I do neither. But I did used to live in Hull. And that was the connection.

As I’ve mentioned before, I used to be an actor. I trained at the Birmingham School Of Speech and Drama. Now for those of you unfamiliar with British geography, that’s right in the middle of the country. The most inland part of the UK. And miles away from where I was born, in the North East of England. Most of the drama schools are in London but I decided not to go there. However, when my year all graduated, most of them headed off down to London to take the West End by storm, star in a BBC series, use it as a stepping stone to Hollywood, etc., etc. I didn’t. I went in the opposite direction. I went to Hull.

My first acting job was with a company called Remould Theatre Company and it was a play called Steeltown, an oral history play, a semi-devised piece based on the lives of the people who worked at the nearby steelworks. With music. Folk music. Oh yes, I play a mean bodhran. And consequently Hull became my home for a while. While I was there, I thought Hull was the most exciting place on Earth. Now, obviously I was younger and could be forgiven for being a bit naïve but I was being paid to do what I loved, working on a show that I really enjoyed and getting to tour it round the region then the country. It was what we’d all dreamed of doing in drama school and for me it was a reality. So consequently everything about it was great. The pubs were fantastic. The restaurants too. I lived in a great area. Hull’s one bookshop was brilliant. Likewise its comic shop. The people were wonderful, especially the ones I was working with. Wow. I couldn’t have been happier.

So that was why, when I was asked if I had any connection with Hull and would I present the Crime On Tour event I jumped at the chance. I had nothing but positive memories of the place and was looking forward to renewing them. Obviously, it didn’t turn out that way.

Everything was where it used to be, by and large. But things had changed. I walked down streets expecting the present to fall away and the past to reveal itself once more: There was the café I sat and read the new JG Ballard novel in, there was the pub the cast used to drink in, there was the restaurant we would treat ourselves to dinner in on payday. There was our old rehearsal room. And yes, they were all still there. But they were all out of step with my memories. The café had been renovated. The pub still looked the same but I doubted it would be from the inside. The restaurant was being pulled apart. The rehearsal rooms were there but were now a marketing company and looked decidedly the worst for wear. Wherever I went, the city refused to allow its present to fall away for me. It refused to let me see its past. It had changed. And I expected it to – the last time I was there Sylvester McCoy was Doctor Who. But I also expected to see what used to be there as well as what was there now. And I found it difficult. Because it had gone on without me, and I without it. I saw it as it is now. And it didn’t mean anything to me any more.

It’s always strange to go somewhere that was once familiar but you’ve put distance between for a few years. It’s like meeting an old girlfriend who you were once intensely involved with and finding out they got old. And in their eyes you can see them thinking the same thing about you too: ‘Do I look like that? Really? And Have I always looked that? What was there that I liked about this person in the first place?’

And the answer is obvious. I was in my twenties, I was immortal. The films were brilliant, the music was brilliant, whatever I was doing and wherever I was doing it was brilliant. Truly, it was the best time to be alive. And it was. For me, at that time. Because, and I truly hate this phrase, it was my era. Why do I hate that phrase? It’s what people use when a certain piece of music comes on the bar juke box and sends them back over the years. Like looking into an old lover’s eyes. Like a trip to Hull. That was from my era. What they really mean is this is something from when my self-defining memories were being formed. From our mid-teens to our mid to late twenties, we’re physiologically and psychologically programmed to experience things with some kind of intensity. We can’t help it, it’s the way our bodies are. We experience what makes us. And we carry that with us through the rest of our lives. Love punk rock but hate prog rock? That was your era. Love David Lynch movies but not Wes Anderson? That was your era. You get the idea. But I do hate the phrase because it assumes your experiences are more valid than other peoples and also precludes anything that came before or after having as profound an effect on you.

Which brings us – or at least me – back to Hull. I went round all my old haunts, or at least what was left of them. But nothing took me back to the past. Nothing physical, anyway. I didn’t gain anything by walking the streets because I carry it with me anyway. My memories, my feelings, my experiences. We all do. We’re all the sum of our memories. And it made me think that this is what we do as writers. We can honour the past,recreate it, make it live again. Just as we do the present. How? Through ourselves, our experiences, by invoking and evoking them. By putting them down on the page we work out what those experiences mean to us, good and bad, and we hope by doing so to share them with readers, to experience some kind of commonality. To share some kind of truth about who and what we are as people. It sounds pretentious but really, what else are we doing but telling others what defines us and hoping we strike a chord with them?

So you can never go home again. But that’s OK. Because I am home. Here. Now. And you can bring the past to life again if you want to. But only in your own head. You don’t actually need to revisit the physical locations to do so, you carry it with you, always. But the one thing that you mustn’t do when referring to the past is call it your era. Because it isn’t. It wasn’t. This is our era. Here. Now. This is all of our eras. By all means look backwards. But don’t get stuck there. Get stuck here. And now. Because as that great philosopher Elvis Costello once said, ‘We’re only living this instant.’

How true.

BEAUTIFUL CORPSE

by Stephen Jay Schwartz

I’ve passed another birthday and there are lyrics in my head:

“…another day older and deeper in debt…” Tennessee Ernie Ford

“What a drag it is getting old” – Rolling Stones

“Old man, look at my life, I’m a lot like you were…” – Neil Young

“Hope I die before I get old” – The Who

“Too old to rock n’ roll, too young to die” – Jethro Tull

And don’t those artists just scream AARP?

I’ve decided it’s my last chance to put a choke-hold on youth. I’ve got a bit of a paunch and some high blood pressure and a cholesterol issue and why the fuck does it take so long to pee and I’m certainly not the guy I thought I’d be when I was looking forward at age sixteen. In high school I lifted weights. I did a few body-building competitions, but was never serious enough to shave my chest and arms. Or work my legs, for that matter. Too much effort. I looked great down to the hips and then you saw a pair of Big Bird legs. That hasn’t changed. Fortunately, sweats cost about $14.99.

Our author brother Brett Battles proved it could be done. He lost all his weight in just a few months and now he’s the Marlboro Man. Thank you, Brett, for the inspiration.

It helps that I just got a gym membership for the entire family. Now I don’t have to choose between spending time with the wife and kids and spending time alone with the dumbbells. I’ve worked out twice now, with my older son, Ben. It’s a bonding experience, like what I had with my dad when we went to the racquetball courts when I was twelve. He was a pediatrician and a kind and gentle soul until he lifted that racquet and I witnessed the kind of competitive nature that gets a guy through medical school.

I didn’t realize how my body has been starved for pumping iron. Last night I found that familiar rack of pulleys and push-yous that form the lat and triceps arena. Lats and triceps – two of my favorite muscle groups. You work the lats and you get that nice “V” shape and since the triceps are a large muscle they grow fast and make the arms look twice their size in a very short time. I need visual incentive – I don’t really get hooked until about eight work-outs in, when my body begins to show me the money.

It was great walking my son through the exercises, teaching him how to isolate the muscle using lighter weights, focusing on form and technique, seeing him “get it.” So many lifters go for the heavy weights because they look good, then end up hurting themselves from trying to heft all the weight using the wrong sets of muscles.

Mind you, I haven’t worked out seriously for over twenty years. I’ve been going to pot daily, one Kit-Kat at a time.

But God, it feels good. That ripping sensation in the back of the arms, that tearing of the pecs. I look from one machine to the next – “Oh, I remember that! I gotta get over to that machine NOW!” I have to be careful to pace myself or I’ll find my next set of machines in the ER.

It ain’t easy, this path I’m taking. The belly’s a real challenge. I’ve grown accustomed to my diet of daily pasta. And desserts are a magnificent invention. I’m their greatest admirer.

I’ve been blessed with youthful hair and the ability to stand erect. It seems a shame not to give it a go, to try to capture my youth in a bottle, if only for a moment, before the thyroid and ulcers and enlarging prostate have their way with me. When I go I want to go like Jack Lalanne, pulling twenty boats across the English Channel with my teeth. Or maybe it’s the River Styx I’ll be crossing.

I was actually rather relieved when I stopped the body-building some many years ago. In case you haven’t heard, I’ve got a bit of an addictive personality, and weightlifting can get addictive. It ruled my life for a time and it felt nice to finally break free. Now that I’ve had a chance to let other addictions rule my life I don’t mind turning things over to a little obsessive exercise again.

You know, we writers sit on our cans a lot. We give ourselves the big guilt trip about what it takes to be a professional. Our communal motto is “Put Butt in Chair.” In other words, no excuses, sit down and write. I’ve taken that to heart, and my heart just won’t take it anymore.

The truth is I’m starting to resent the writing. Just a bit. You see, I gave up so much to get those books written. Every day after the day job, I’d arrive at the cafe at 6:00 pm, stay until it closed at 10:00. Or I’d go to the all-night cafes and push on. Every weekend, another ten, twelve hours a day. Every sick day. Every holiday. All my vacation time. I did this for years. Disconnected from the family. Drifted away from my friends. Writing was all-consuming, there wasn’t room for anything else.

I pushed hard and produced two novels, all while I had the day job. So I took a year off just to write. I wrote a screenplay on assignment and most of novel number three. More time sitting on my butt. Watching that waist-line expand. And the money didn’t come and I’m back to having a day job while I write.

I don’t want to be a slave to my writing. I want to spend my vacation time doing vacation things. I want to go dancing with the wife. I want to help educate my kids. I don’t want to be remembered as the dad with his nose in the laptop, seen only in the moments before he goes to work and when he returns late at night. Unfortunately, my writing often takes me away from the OTHER things I love.

It’s odd when people ask me about my hobbies and all I can say is “writing.” I write, I read. I write more. I’m compulsive about writing. Most authors are. We are fanatic in our discipline. We write eight thousand words a day and raise our fists to the Gods.

I’m tired of sprinting. I’ll do the long-distance marathon for a while. So, I won’t be a one book-a-year kind-of guy. The books will come when I finish them.

I’m seeking balance.

I’ll start the normal lifestyle by getting back in shape.

I remember this kid in high school. A power-lifter and body-builder. He had an incredible body. He died suddenly our junior year. I heard he had some kind of condition, a ticking bomb in his head and he knew it. I remember the rest of us saying he’d left a beautiful corpse behind.

We admired what he’d accomplished.

I hope this doesn’t come off as a vapid, superficial post about physical beauty trumping the virtuous human mind. Then again, I am the guy who turned an alter-ego sex-addict into a franchise hero. Can’t do that without objectifying the mortal coil.

And that ends the thought of the day.

Never give up! Never surrender!

Zoë Sharp

Rejection is a constant part of life. And we writers have to face more of it than most. In fact, I read somewhere recently that authors take more criticism in a year than do most ‘normal’ people in a lifetime. And while that may be an exaggeration, so often it doesn’t feel like it.

As Bruce DeSilva pointed out in his Wildcard interview on Tuesday: “The great James Lee Burke’s first novel, THE LOST GET-BACK BOOGIE, was rejected 111 times before it was finally published—and then went on to be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Rejections have more to do with whether agents and publishers think a book will sell than about whether they think it is good.”

I came across a recent article in the Huffington Post about famous rejections—or rejections of the famous. Because it’s not enough to be simply turned down, but sometimes an author receives such a damning comment about their work that they could be forgiven for throwing in the towel.

It’s only later, after their books have become prize-winning bestsellers, that these rejections stop stinging and become rather funny. So, here’s some of the best of the bunch:

Anne Frank’s THE DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL

Anne Frank’s diary only found a publisher successfully after being featured in a newspaper article. Before this, the famous memoir was rejected repeatedly, with one publisher saying, “The girl doesn’t, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the ‘curiosity’ level.”

William Golding’s LORD OF THE FLIES

Presumably not foreseeing Golding’s classic novel becoming a schoolroom staple, 20 publishers rejected it. One with the damning comment, “an absurd and uninteresting fantasy which was rubbish and dull.” Try writing that on a GCSE English paper.

Vladimir Nabokov’s LOLITA

Eventually published in Paris (where else?), LOLITA was rejected by Viking, Simon & Schuster, New Directions, Farrar, Straus, and Doubleday. Originally cast away as, “overwhelmingly nauseating, even to an enlightened Freudian … the whole thing is an unsure cross between hideous reality and improbable fantasy. It often becomes a wild neurotic daydream … I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years.” The American version of the novel went on to be a bestseller, selling 100,000 copies in the first three weeks.

John le Carré’s THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD

It’s not unusual for first novels to be rejected, but John le Carré’s went on to make TIME Magazine’s All-Time 100 Novels list. The publisher who passed on the author with the comment, “You’re welcome to le Carré – he hasn’t got any future,” presumably didn’t imagine this.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s THE GREAT GATSBY

Fitzgerald’s principal character is arguably as famous as the novel he appears in, yet one publisher advised the author in a rejection letter, “You’d have a decent book if you’d get rid of that Gatsby character.”

For myself, I had the usual run of rejections for the first novel in my series. One publisher told me that although they very much liked Charlie Fox, they “didn’t see where you can take this character to get more than one book out of her.” Book ten, DIE EASY, comes out in October (UK—Jan 2013 US).

And when I was contemplating bringing out my backlist last year in e-book format, I was strongly advised by one publisher against going the indie route. “She will sell 17 copies to friends, and that will be it.” The books sell more than that every hour of every day since.

So ‘Rati, want to share your best/worse pieces of criticism or rejection with us? And all the sweeter if they’ve subsequently been proved wrong!

This week’s Word of the Week is elocution, which when coupled with lessons is often taken to mean to learn to speak without an accent, or to mask one’s original accent, but it actually means the art of effective speaking, especially public speaking, in terms of enunciation and delivery; eloquence.

Oh, and if anybody is near The Gallery at Bank Quay, Warrington on Friday evening (7-9pm) I shall be giving a talk hosted by Wire Writers and the Warrington Writers’ Group. Hope to see you there!

Where’s the Joystick on This Novel?

By David Corbett

I’ve been thinking a lot about games lately.

First, they fascinate me, even though I consider most of them pretty disappointing. The potential is mind-blowing, if potentially Orwellian.

Second, I’m realizing I’ve got a lot to learn from the world of games, as writers play a bigger part in game design.

In particular, game designers are learning they neglect story at their peril, just as many writers are learning it’s almost career suicide to ignore the vast appeal of games.

The success of both the Harry Potter and Hunger Games franchises point to J.K. Rowling’s and Suzanne Collins’s ingenious blending of mythic storytelling with video game techniques: specifically, the creation of an elaborate story world much like what you find in games, and a kind of score-keeping element. (Obviously, these aren’t the only two films that use game techniques as essential story elements. Remember Sucker Punch?)

Now, it’s no big secret that I have misgivings about the “mythic” slant on storytelling. I stand much more in the realm of Hemingway and the realist tradition, and I find a lot of so-called “mythic” storytelling with its insistence on “ancient archetypes” to be hokey, unconvincing, and cartoonish. It seems we’re now creating stories based on stories, and that’s never — never — a good sign.

That said: I’m not so dense I can’t tell which way the cultural wind is blowing. And as I said, the Harry Potter and Hunger Games series both employ conspicuously mythic elements: call it the world of sorcery in Harry Potter and the battles to the death of heroic saga in Hunger Games.

These series overcame the limitations of mimicry by translating these mythic stories into new, uniquely imagined places and times: a somewhat undefined present, as with Harry Potter, or the near future, as with Hunger Games. And it was by redefining the mythic contexts in modern terms that the writers did the psychological and emotional reimagining that brought these stories to life.

But it isn’t just the mythic storytelling that made these blockbusters unique. As I said, it was their use of video game elements as well. Specifically, they used the elaborate story worlds that games are known for – what used to be prosaically called setting – and they both employed elements of score-keeping.

First: an elaborate story world. Both the Harry Potter and Hunger Games series create unique and fascinating worlds. Those worlds were created lovingly and in painstaking detail. But they were also established over multiple books. Not every novel can do that. Remember, attention spans are diminishing down to an eye blink. You have to make your point powerfully and make it quick or your audience will click on the next distraction.

Get too caught up in establishing your story world and you risk bogging your story down in minutiae at the expense of dramatic movement. Thinking in terms of a multi-book series can help you plan out what elements of the story world get provided to the reader when.

Obviously, this can also be done in a single-volume novel, but the point is: if the story world is elaborate, you have to plan out how you reveal it, and not just provide it in an information dump.

But however you get it out, if there’s one thing the recent blockbusters tell us, it’s that people have not lost their hunger for fully realized and lovingly imagined fictive worlds. The more richly you can imagine the world of your story, the better. If you end up having to insert it with almost surgical precision rather than slather it on like whitewash — that’s writing.

The other game element you find in both stories is score-keeping. Games are built around this, and it’s often a core experience of gameplay: Who wins?

The score-keeping element in Hunger Games is pretty obvious: only one of the contestants survives. The question is: Will it be the protagonist?

In Harry Potter, the score-keeping resides in the fact that, as Harry becomes increasingly adept at wizardry, he rises to successively higher levels of knowledge but also conflict — the more he learns, the more profoundly he’s tested. Just as in a game.

But with Harry we don’t just see a number tallying upward. We see his gravitas increasing as his concern for the world, his embrace of his role not just as wizard but as leader, becomes more profound, responsible, mature. In this regard, novels still provide a more meaningful and emotional richer experience. But clearly the various media are cross-pollinating.

It can be incredibly useful to take your storytelling skills and adapt them to other media. Each one has certain strengths, each has limitations, and solving story problems across different media automatically enhances your ability to look at your story more objectively, so that you can analyze it more critically.

There’s one last element of storytelling in games I’d like to address, because it points to a kind of frontier in narrative, and should provide a brand new world of storytelling opportunities for writers.

As I mentioned up top, designers are learning that players more and more frequently admit that the games they prefer have a distinct story element, and that without this element the game reduces to a mere sequence of challenges and decisions — which in narrative terms, amount to a series of disjointed scenes. There’s no rising action or dramatic tension. There’s just, to use Toynbee’s phrase, “One damn thing after another.”

Writing for games requires the writer, or “narrative designer” as some call themselves, to try as best she can to match up the gameplay (or ludic narrative) with the story narrative. The what and how — with the why.

This problem is easier to state than to solve. Even the best games suffer from what Clint Hocking has called ludonarrative dissonance — the inability of many games to match the playing experience with the narrative one.

The game he used as an example was Bioshock, which takes place in an underwater city designed as a kind of 1950s Ayn Rand objectivist utopia. Visually, the game is stunning.

Now, the writers hoped to have the game serve as both an example and a critique of the advantages and the limitations of Rand’s objectivist philosophy, which relies solely on rational self-interest. In particular, the designers hoped to demonstrate that the power achieved through rational self-interest is a trap, because power corrupts.

One problem: on the level of the game-playing, rational self-interest was exactly what the player normally needs in order to succeed — indeed, isn’t that what all single-player games are really about, the power gained from focused self-interest?

If the designers wanted to show how this self-involvement corrupts, they’d have to somehow show that by succeeding, you lose.

Not impossible, but a challenge. They didn’t do that, however. Instead, they required the player to go against his own game playing instincts — you could only succeed by helping another character named Atlas who’s goals are opposed to the game’s hero. You can only advance by undermining yourself. That wasn’t what the game’s theme was trying to establish, and so the narrative of the game and the mechanics of the gameplay were at odds.

This is now one of the major narrative problems facing game writers, and it’s an interesting one. They’re being encouraged and invited, finally, to make the writing an integral part of the design and not just something tacked on, like one more effect.

Up to now, reactions — that is, emotions — were often seen as just another bit of flash you built into the story world. More and more games are now trying to shape the story world so that the risks involved in decision-making have an emotional consequence, either through allegiances with other characters or by defining the stakes in some other dramatically significant way — not just in terms of score-keeping.

One great example is Marvel’s CIVIL WAR by Vicarious Visions.

Evan Skolnick, the writer, noted that most games don’t have a first act, or they don’t have a representation of the world as it exists before the events of the story begin. The game begins with the inciting incident — the entrance of the first monster you’re obliged to kill, for example.

But with CIVIL WAR they decided to lay out the full stories of the two warring camps. Rather than have a player decide, “Okay, I’ll be the good guys this time, the bad guys next time,” he instead had to choose sides in a war in which each side had a perfectly logical and defensible reason for its cause. The game required the player to deal with the consequences of choosing which side he wanted to be on.

More and more, we’re going to see games with this kind of thematic and character complexity, and a need to make sure it doesn’t conflict with the gameplay experience. What that means is that there will be work for writers in the video game industry.

The bay area is a major hub of this effort, as are Seattle, Austin, Los Angeles, and Montreal. It’s a very tight-knit world, jobs are often acquired on the basis of personal connections, and so networking is crucial. But if any of this interests you, you owe it to yourself to explore the matter a little further, and see if game design isn’t a place where your storytelling skills might not just be welcome, but necessary.

* * * * *

So, Murderateros — do you have a favorite video game? Does it have a truly unique story world? Does it have a narrative element that appeals to your desire for story?

Can you see yourself perhaps turning to game design as away to explore your storytelling skills?

* * * * *

Jukebox Heroes of the Week: I can’t Listen to Massive Attack and not envision an alternative world — a story world for a novel or game not yet created — and not just because of how visually voluptuous their live shows are. And what better way to describe the gaming experience than with the title to this song —Bulletproof Love:

Please welcome Edgar and Macavity Award-winning Bruce DeSilva!

Zoë Sharp

I’m honoured and delighted to welcome Edgar and Macavity Award-winning author Bruce DeSilva to Murderati for today’s Wildcard.

Bruce DeSilva worked as a journalist for 40 years before retiring to write crime novels full time. At the Associated Press, he served as the writing coach, responsible for training the news service’s reporters and editors worldwide. Previously, he directed an elite AP department devoted to investigative reporting and other special projects. Earlier in his career, he worked as an investigative reporter and an editor at The Hartford Courant and The Providence Journal.

Stories edited by DeSilva have won virtually every major journalism prize including the Polk Award (twice), the Livingston (twice), the ASNE, and the Batten Medal. He also edited two Pulitzer finalists and helped edit a Pulitzer winner. His crime fiction has won the prestigious Edgar and Macavity Awards and has been a finalist for the Shamus, Barry, and Anthony Awards.

He has worked as a consultant on writing and editing at more than 50 newspapers including The New York Times and The Dallas Morning News, and he has been a sought-after speaker at professional gatherings including the National Writers Workshops, the Nieman Foundation, Thrillerfest, and Bouchercon. His reviews of crime novels have appeared in The New York Times book review section and continue to be published occasionally by The Associated Press.

He is currently a masters’ thesis adviser at The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Bruce and his wife Patricia Smith, an award-winning poet, live in Howell, NJ, with their granddaughter Mikaila and two enormous canines, a Bernese Mountain Dog named Brady and a mutt named Rondo.

Zoë Sharp: Bruce, welcome to Murderati! You won the Edgar and the Macavity Award for ROGUE ISLAND, your first crime novel about old-school investigative journalist, Liam Mulligan. Did you fear a sophomore slump—‘Jaws 2’ after ‘Jaws’, or ‘Scarlett’ after ‘Gone With The Wind’? Just how daunting was it to write the sequel, CLIFF WALK, with that kind of expectation hanging over you?

Bruce DeSilva: When my first novel was published, I had no expectations one way or another about how it would be received. Then the professional reviews poured in, and they were all raves. I was gratified that so many people who know the crime fiction genre loved the book, but some of the reviews were so over the top that they were a bit embarrassing. The Dallas Morning News, for example, declared that “ROGUE ISLAND raises the bar for all books of its kind.” Hey, I thought it was pretty good too, but I didn’t think I’d done THAT. If I had, Dennis Lehane might never forgive me.

I’d already finished writing CLIFF WALK by the time the ROGUE ISLAND reviews appeared, and the awards weren’t announced until months later; so the acclaim for the first book had no affect on me as I wrote the second. But with many reviewers calling CLIFF WALK even better than ROGUE ISLAND, I feel a touch of pressure these days as I work on the final revisions for the third Mulligan novel, PROVIDENCE RAG. I’ve got some loyal readers now, and they’ll take me to task if I let them down.

Still, there’s nothing like being married to a woman who writes better than you to keep things in perspective. My wife, Patricia Smith, is one of our finest living poets. I won the Edgar and the Macavity? SHE’s won two Pushcart Prizes, the Paterson Poetry Prize, Rattle Poetry Prize, the National Poetry Series Award, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. I was a finalist for the Shamus, Anthony and Barry Awards? SHE was a finalist for the National Book Award, which is a much bigger deal. I get invited to speak at Thrillerfest? SHE gets invited to read at the Sorbonne. And now she’s even invaded my turf, editing the forthcoming STATEN ISLAND NOIR for Akashic Press.

Lucky for me, my genius-in-residence edits every line that I write. Having her at my side keeps the pressure at bay.

ZS: In his review of CLIFF WALK, prominent writing coach Don Fry said, “One of the reasons to write a novel is to attack all the things that drive you crazy. … He attacks child molesters, pornographers, sex peddlers, corrupt politicians, drug dealers, prostitution, and the stupid owners of newspapers who are destroying journalism.” Did you set out with an agenda before you wrote this book?

BD: Fry also said that another reason to write a novel is “to celebrate the things you love”―and I did that in CLIFF WALK, too. I don’t want people thinking that it’s just an angry book.

I began CLIFF WALK with two notions in mind. The story would contrast and compare the extremes of Rhode Island’s culture—its thriving sex trade and Newport high society. And Mulligan would try to figure out why Rhode Island politicians kept screeching about the shame of the state’s prostitution business while doing nothing to close the loophole that made brothels legal. (As I wrote the book, prostitution had, in fact, been legal in the state for more than a decade.) With nothing more than that in mind, I set my characters in motion to see what would happen. A lot did.

However, I believe that the best crime novels are always about more than a detective pounding the pavement in search of clues. Writers such as James Lee Burke, Laura Lippman and George Pelecanos, to name a few, use the popular vehicle of the crime novel to examine the social and moral issues that keep us up at night. Pelecanos’s novels, for example, are great crime stories; but they’re also serious explorations of the urban landscape, and they deal unflinchingly with the volatile issues of race and ethnicity.

To make this kind of thing work, the writer mustn’t preach; a crime novel’s serious intent should go down so easily that the reader barely notices—until he finds himself pondering the weight of it all after closing the book.

I want my novels to be a blast to read, but I also want them to be ABOUT something. In ROGUE ISLAND, Mulligan tracked down a serial arsonist who was torching the working class neighborhood where he grew up. But the novel also took a hard look at the high price the American democracy is paying for the decline of its great metropolitan newspapers. As readers saw the skill and determination with which Mulligan pursued his investigation, I hope that they acquired a greater appreciation for what we are losing as newspapers fade into history.

In CLIFF WALK, Mulligan journeys through the underbelly of the state’s sex trade. What he finds there takes a toll on him, challenging his whatever-gets-you-through-the-night attitude about sexual morality and shattering his already tenuous religious faith. The novel is both a riveting slice of hardboiled fiction and a sober exploration of sex and religion in a society in which pornography is ubiquitous and anyone can log on to a website, punch in a Visa number, and order up an underage hooker.

(Lawrence Block stunned by CLIFF WALK)

ZS: Aren’t you worried you’re going to run out of things that really piss you off?

BD: Not gonna happen. There’s no shortage of things that gnaw at my innards. I’m angry about the know-nothing strain in American culture that devalues science and education. I’m angry about the persistence of racism in our society. I’m angry at the way cable news networks have deteriorated into lying propaganda tools of the left and right. At the moment, I’m also angry about a loophole in Rhode Island law that could force the state to release a convicted serial killer—a fact at the heart of the next Mulligan novel, PROVIDENCE RAG. I’ve also worked up a serious dislike for the arrogant Miami Heat, who just knocked the noble Boston Celtics out of the NBA playoffs. I hope the Oklahoma City Thunder rips their hearts out.

Of course, I’m not going to run out of things that I love, either.

ZS: You were a journalist for many years before turning to fiction—something I believe is a great training ground for the novelist as it teaches you to write to topic, to length, deadline, and forces you not to be too precious about your work as the subs are likely to hack it to pieces anyway.

BD: I’m not as sanguine as you are about the value of journalism as a training ground for novelists. Daily journalism is peopled by stick figures instead of flesh-and-blood characters. It is filled with quotes (words sources say to journalists) instead of dialogue (words people say to each other.) Too often, it uses street addresses in lieu of creating a sense of place. And it is filled with turgid “articles” and “reports” instead of stories with beginnings, middles, and ends. Only the rarest of journalists rise above that, writing real stories that bring people, places, and action to life on the page.

The main thing journalism does teach a future journalist is that writing is a job―something you do every day whether you feel like it or not. You do not wait to be inspired. You do not search for your muse. You are not allowed to have writer’s block. Journalists know that writer’s block is for sissies. You put your butt in the chair and write.

ZS: Had you always wanted to write novels? What prompted the career change?

BD: For most of my journalism career, writing a novel never occurred to me. I did start playing around with one in the 1990s, but soon abandoned it―a story I’ll expand on later in response to another of your questions. But by 2009, after 40 years in journalism, I’d grown disillusioned with the profession I’d always loved. Newspapers were circling the drain. The quality of local and national TV news was in sharp decline. And online news organizations were doing little original reporting of their own, getting most of their news from dying newspapers. I deplored the trivialization of news and the way it had become more of a commodity than a public trust. Even my venerable employer, the Associated Press, was devoting more resources to entertainment news than to investigative reporting.

The way I feel about it now is that I wasn’t leaving journalism; journalism was leaving me. It was time for a second act.

ZS: CLIFF WALK is a wonderfully intertwined and complex story. How did you go about constructing it?

BD: I don’t outline. I begin with a general idea of what a book will be about and then turn my characters loose to see what they will do and say. I enjoy discovering the story as I write. And I believe that if I don’t know what’s going to happen next, my readers probably won’t either. Half-way through CLIFF WALK, I wrote Mulligan into a corner and had a heck of a time figuring out how to get him out of it. So I got up from the keyboard and spent a couple of weeks thinking about it before the answer came to me. Thinking about who my characters are and what they will do next is the essence of my writing process.

ZS: Mulligan and his supporting cast of characters, from neurotic ex-wife Dorcas, to the newspaper owner’s son who bears the terrific nickname of ‘Thanks-Dad’, and even Mulligan’s (t)rusty old Bronco ‘Secretariat’, are beautifully observed. I was kind of rooting for the thing with Yolanda to work out, but somehow I knew it wasn’t going to. Is Mulligan ever going to catch a break?

BD: Thanks for the compliment. I do love my supporting characters, including Mulligan’s mobbed-up bookie, Domenic “Woosh” Zerilli; Fire Chief Rosella Morelli, the real hero of ROGUE ISLAND; and Rhode Island Attorney General Fiona McNerney, a.k.a. Attilla the Nun, who plays a pivotal role in CLIFF WALK. I spend a lot of time getting to know them, and it pained me deeply when I had to kill one of them off. You’re quite right that Mulligan gets his heart broken in the first two books. As the next one, PROVIDENCE RAG, begins, he’s contemplating getting a dog—a big one that would jump all over him when he comes home from work, curl up beside him when he roots for the Red Sox on TV, and snore contentedly every night at the foot of his bed. As the novel puts it: “After several recent disappointments, he’d come to believe that the love of a dog was preferable to the love of a woman. Dogs were unwaveringly faithful, and not a one had ever lied to him.” Will he ever find a soul mate? I don’t know. Will the soul mate have fur and fleas? That’s something he and I will have to discover as we continue on our journey together.

ZS: What’s next for you—and Mulligan? Do you plan to write more in the series next, or try a standalone?

(Newark Mayor Corey Booker engrossed by Bruce’s prose)

BD: PROVIDENCE RAG, the third Mulligan novel, will be published sometime next year. This summer, I’m helping my wife with her next project, a biography of Harriet Tubman. When that’s done, we hope write a crime novel together. It will be based in her native Chicago around the time of the 1968 riots and will have two alternating narrators, a white Chicago cop and a black hairdresser from the city’s tough West Side. After that, Mulligan will be back again.

ZS: I’m a sucker for a good opening line or good opening paragraph. CLIFF WALK’s is a doozy:

‘Cosmo Scalici hollered over the grunts and squeals of three thousand hogs rooting in his muddy outdoor pens. “Right here’s where I found it, poking outta this pile of garbage. Gave me the creeps, the way the fingers curled like it wanted me to come closer.”

(I mean, how can you not read on after that?) For me finding the right entry-point in the story is one of the hardest parts of writing. What are your own personal Room 101 elements of writing?

BD: Whenever I pick up a crime novel by an author I’ve never read before, I give it the first paragraph test. If I don’t see something that grabs me, I toss it and try another author.

The first time I picked up a book by Andrew Vachss, for example, I found this opening line:

“The sun dropped on the far side of the Hudson River like it knew what was coming.”

I knew immediately that this was a writer I wanted to read.

So, yeah, I pay a lot of attention to opening lines when I write. When I started CLIFF WALK, the first words that spilled from my keyboard were these:

“Attilla the Nun thunked her can of Bud on the cracked Formica tabletop, stuck a Marlboro in her mouth, sucked in a lungful, and said: “Fuck this shit.”

I knew immediately that I would be able to write this novel. As it happened, those lines became the opening for Chapter 5, but writing them first established the hardboiled tone I was looking for.

ZS: I’ve been researching recently about the rejection letters famous writers received for what would go on to become their best work. How was your own path to publication?

BD: First of all, let me urge aspiring authors not to take rejections personally. The great James Lee Burke’s first novel, THE LOST GET-BACK BOOGIE, was rejected 111 times before it was finally published—and then went on to be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Rejections have more to do with whether agents and publishers think a book will sell than about whether they think it is good. You don’t really think anyone believed that Snooki from Jersey Shore could write, do you?

As for me, the path to publication was greased by good luck and connections. Here’s what happened:

Way back in 1994, when I was working for a Connecticut newspaper, I received a note from a reader praising “a nice little story” I’d written. “It could serve as the outline for a novel,” the note said. “Have you considered this?” The note was from Evan Hunter, who wrote literary novels under his own name and the brilliant 87^th Precinct police procedurals under the penname Ed McBain. I sealed the note in plastic, taped it to my home computer, and started writing. I was only a couple of chapters into the novel when my life turned upside down. In my busy new life as a husband, father, and senior Associated Press editor, there was no time to finish a novel.

Years streaked by. Each time I bought a new computer, I taped that note from Hunter to it, telling myself I would get back to the book someday. But I didn’t. Finally, a few years ago, I found myself dining with Otto Penzler, the dean of American’s crime fiction editors, and happened to mention that long-ago note from Hunter.

“Evan Hunter was a good friend of mine,” Penzler said. “In all the years I knew him, he never had a good thing to say about anything anyone else wrote. He REALLY sent you that note?”

“He really did,” I said. “I still have it.”

“Well then you’ve got to finish that novel,” Otto said, “and when you do, you have to let me read it.”

So I went home and started writing again. I wrote at night after work and all day every Saturday; and six months later, ROGUE ISLAND was finished. Otto read the novel and loved it.

“Do you have an agent?” he asked.

No, I told him. I didn’t even know any.

“Then let me make a call for you,” he said.

The next thing I knew, I was represented by Susanna Einstein, one of the best in the business. As she pitched the book to publishers, I was befriended by Jon Land, a crime novelist who lives in Rhode Island, where my books are set. Jon urged his editor at Forge to dig ROGUE ISLAND out of the big stack of submissions on his desk. He did, and promptly bought it.

ZS: And finally, do you have anything to say in your own defense?

BD: I adore my dogs, I’m a long-suffering Red Sox fan, I smoke cigars, and my wife says I clean up pretty well. What’s not to love?

The gen:

CLIFF WALK, the sequel to the award-winning ROGUE ISLAND, once again revolves around the tumultuous life of Liam Mulligan, a wise-cracking investigative reporter for a dying Providence, RI newspaper. As the tale opens, prostitution is legal in the state (which it really was until two years ago). Politicians are making a lot of speeches about the shame of it, but they aren’t doing anything about it. Mulligan suspects somebody is being paid off.

As he investigates, a child’s severed arm is discovered in a pile of garbage at a local pig farm. Then the body of an internet pornographer turns up at the bottom of the famous Cliff Walk in nearby Newport. At first the killings seem random, but as Mulligan keeps digging, strange connections begin to emerge.

Promised free sex with hookers if he minds his own business—and a savage beating if he doesn’t—Mulligan enlists the help of Thanks-Dad, the newspaper publisher’s son, and Attila the Nun, the state’s colourful attorney general, in his quest for the truth. What he learns will lead him to question his long-held beliefs about sexual morality, shake his tenuous religious faith, and leave him wondering who his real friends are. CLIFF WALK is at once a hardboiled mystery and a serious exploration of sex and religion in the age of pornography.

Publishers Weekly gave it a coveted starred review, saying, “Look for this one to garner more award nominations.” Booklist also gave it a starred review, calling the plot “exquisite” and saying it is “terrific on every level.”

So, ‘Rati, now’s your chance to ask questions of Bruce. Treat him kindly―or at least buy him a cigar. He likes El Ray Del Mundo maduro’s 🙂

This week’s Word of the Week is vibrissa, meaning a tactile bristle, such as a cat’s whisker; a vaneless rictal feather, or a hair as in the nostril.

Calling All Comments

by Hoke Smart on behalf of Murderati

Hello everyone. For those of you expecting another fantastic insight into the life of Pari Noskin Taichert, I am sorry to disappoint. However, today’s post is a pressing matter that means a great deal to the Murderati family.

My name is Hoke Smart, and I am the support guy behind Murderati. I’ve been working with the group for almost a year now keeping things running smoothly on this site and through our social media outlets. As many of you are currently aware, there have been a litany of issues related to posting comments in response to the threads published by your ‘Rati Authors.

First, I want to apologize for the troubles many of you have had making comments. I know I speak for the entire group when I say that we enjoy reading the variety of comments and feedback each of you makes on a post. It livens the discussion and helps promote future ideas for posts. As a group, we have discussed at length the recent issues and I’ve been charged with trying to resolve this once and for all.

Second, I want to discuss the moderation mechanism for comments. Most blog engines, including the one that is used by Murderati, employ some sort of moderation script. This is to prevent an overdose of SPAM comments on blog entries by and large but these scripts sometimes filter out proper comments that are relative to the topic. In our case, these comments get put in a hold state until I approve them from the backend of the site. I am working on a better way for this moderation structure to work, but we need your help.

The point of today’s post is rather simple. If you read this post, leave a comment, please. The subject matter of your comment doesn’t really matter for this purpose. Post a link to a favorite author’s site. Provide a new home cooking recipe for us to attempt. Offer a good wine selection for your favorite meal. Today, the comments are the star of this post.

If you receive a notification that your comment is being held for approval, then I should find it when I access the backend of the site. My goal is to collaborate with our blog engine provider to identify exactly why certain comments are moderated. If your comment does not post for some reason or you receive any sort of error message, I would like to ask you to take an additional step. Please send me an e-mail explaining what your comment was and what time you attempted to post. Our provider can better assist us with this if they know when these issues occur and can review the logs to figure out what prevented a comment from publishing.

My e-mail address is smartacusLLc at gmail dot com and I’ll reply to let you know that I received the notice.

Once again, I apologize on behalf of Murderati for the recent issues and I encourage you to post whatever comment comes to mind so that we can hopefully remedy this problem on a more permanent basis.

Comments will remain open on this post through Sunday, June 17th. Thanks in advance for participating and we appreciate you visiting Murderati.

Hoke Smart