Month: September 2005

Monday Chuckles II

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17813888_1Over at Lipstick Chronicles, Harley Jane Kozak talks about her efforts to sell her award winning novel DATING DEAD MEN as a TV series:

Being
clueless, we did what any pair of neophytes would do: we bought a book.
“Writing Treatments That Sell, or, How to Create and Market Your
Story Ideas to the Motion Picture and TV Industry” is written by
Kenneth Atchity and Chi-Li Wong, who assure us that “success comes
through individual effort combined with access and luck . . . . ” Well,
hey. That’s got Wendy and Harley written all over it.

So flash forward a year. Yes, it took Wendy and me a year to write
the treatment—or bible, as Kenneth and Chi-Li tell us it’s called in
television. Put that way, it doesn’t sound so bad. How long do you
suppose King James spent on his bible? Anyhow, that brings us to this
week, the week that we began to Take Meetings.

Her first meeting ended up being with two producers she’d slept with. More than once. But not together. I hate it when that happens.

And over at my brother Tod’s blog, he patiently explains to one of Walter Scott’s readers why Tom Cruise dates Catholic girls.

Catholicism is the second most popular religion in America, with over
63 million guilty fuckers claiming to believe in that particular story
of God. 63 million people, E.B. Do you know what that means? That means
unless you live in Utah, you probably have just as close a connection
to that religion as Tom Cruise does, though you’re not terribly likely
to end up with your face buried in the cross that dangles in Penelope
Cruz’s cleavage, nor will you find yourself running your fingers
through Nicole Kidman’s hair in search of tangled rosaries nor can you
expect to find yourself sailing along Katie Holmes’ Dawson Creek. Why?
Because the connection Tom Cruise has to those women is that THEY ARE
BIG TIME FAMOUS ACTRESSES THAT, IN ADDITION, HAPPEN TO BE INCREDIBLY
HOT WHICH, BY NO COINCIDENCE, MR. CRUISE HAPPENS TO BE AS WELL.

Monday Chuckles

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Sarah and Candy, The Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Novels, are at it again with another hilarious look at romance book covers. Here’s my favorite from today’s round-up, with Sarah’s comments.

Topazdreams

Sarah: “Your face. I want your face.”


“Oh, Brett ba-Havar-nir-Tamir, I want you, too.”


“No, your face. I want your face. Give it to me.”


“My face? But it doesn’t come off!”


“Sure it does. Hold still.”

“Excuse me, Do You Mind if I Puke in Your Book Bag?”

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Author Charlie Huston says there’s no polite way to decline a drink if you want to remain welcome among professional writers at Bouchercon.

Worse fates there
are than to be asked repeatedly, “What are you drinking?” Indeed, for
that first day it was something of a fantasy come to life. Not only
were drinks being purchased for me, but they were being purchased by
people who had read my books, people who had read them and took
occasion from time to time to mumble a word of praise. As I drank deep,
my ego drank deeper.

The only fault with the scenario being on the second day when I
realized I was supposed to repeat my performance as
sloshed-youngish-writer-with-an-attitude, found that I was in far over
my head, and tried to cry uncle.

You’d think I had squatted in the middle of the carpet and shat upon it.

There is, I promise you, no gracious way to bow out of a round that
has been offered by a far more experienced writer than yourself who has
just told you he likes your work. If you ever have the good fortune to
stumble into this situation, humbly nod your head and repeat after me,
“Hell, yeah, I’ll have another fuckin’ Bud, just let me take a quick
puke in this potted palm here, HHrrrruuuuPPP, whew that’s better, now
where was I? Cheers!”

No offense to Charlie, but while that  might be true with a certain clique,  it’s certainly not true of mystery writers, or Bouchercon, as a whole. I’ve been going to Boucheron for years. I don’t drink. But that hasn’t stopped me from being welcomed  in the bar or restaurant to hang out with "big name" authors more experienced and vastly more successful than I am (I don’t say that to brag, but to make a point).  If I am offered a drink, I take a Diet Coke. No one has ever made me feel like a pariah.

I would hate for Bouchercon to be painted as a convention of puking-on-themselves drunks…though drinking certainly seems to be the big issue coming out of the Chicago fest.

As soon as author J.A. Konrath got back from Bouchercon, he began wondering if he drank too much and behaved like a jerk.

But I also heard many negative things about me, some of them from good friends.
Those include drinking too much and acting inappropriately, showing off, being
loud and obnoxious, trying too hard to be funny, and crossing the lines of good
taste.

His post brought him a lot of comments, prompting him to later write:

Why is it when I act like a loudmouth on a panel and drink too much that’s
grounds for excommunication from the mystery world, but when I work my butt off
and do some good, no one cares? Rhetorical question.

I think that is all
that needs to be said.

Not me. I think too many writers drink at these events as much for pleasure as for a ridiculous desire to live up to an  image. Some writers think that drinking to the edge of alcohol poisoning is what hard-ass mystery writers are supposed to do…and if you don’t, or can’t, you’re a fake.

That’s bullshit. It’s trying to live up to a cliche.

Writing is an art, but it’s also a profession. When you’re at Bouchercon, you’re there as an artist and a professional, mingling with authors, fans, publishers, editors and agents.  Is it any wonder you’re judged by how you behave?  Writing is a solitary profession. Most of the time, people can only judge you by your books. On those rare occasions when they can see you in person, you will be making a far bigger impact than you would if they saw you on a regular basis.  If you’re an obnoxious drunk, that’s what people will remember about you.

I’m not saying Joe Konrath was obnoxious or a drunk — I wasn’t there. But I can understand why people are judging him on how he behaved (besides, in his post he invited them to).

I’m sure there was a lot more going on at Bouchercon than writers drinking and puking into their book bags. Besides, is that really the professional image we want to project to the public about mystery writers?

Gloriously Bad Writing

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140004471501_sclzzzzzzz_V-life, the glossy magazine produced by Variety, recently published an excerpt of FAN-TAN, the posthumous pirate novel written two decades ago by Marlon Brando and Donald Cammell.  It’s about an obese, gluttonous pirate named Anatole "Annie" Doultry, a thinly-veiled version of Brando himself . Here’s an example of the gloriously bad writing:

Whether stuffed to the brim or an aching pit of nothingness, this man’s stomach was the mother of most of his behavior and his genitalia the father of the rest in Yummee’s opinion. Remember that his was a behavior that almost everyone exposed to it considered entirely predictable and you may appreciate how shrewd she was.

Here’s another example:

She looked like she would hit him again, but she was satisfied with Annie’s flinch and redirected her violence into words. They came squirting out of that angelic mouth, their brakes shot to shit and screeching in protest, flecks of pearly saliva speckling his face like sulphurous dew.

The words squirted out of her angel’s mouth like a car with bad brakes and landed like dew on his face?  Yeah, I can see that.

He took the opportunity now to ooze past her  — his belly caressing her bounteous breasts — into the room, the familiar room.

Why is it in bad novels, breasts are always bounteous or pendulous or hefty? 

A large, languorous finger landed like a butterfly on the peachy thigh in the cleft of her cheongsam.

"Keep yo dirty hands off me," she whispered.

"My little Princess." The fingers, scrupulously scrubbed for the occasion, each nail honed and polished, did their dirty work.

"My little Yummee. I missed you. I missed you a lot. I missed the way you smell. Y’know, I never met a girl that smelled as nice as you. When I was down there in Java, I looked all over for that perfume. I couldn’t find it. I realized it wasn’t perfume. It was just you. Yummee, tell me something nice. I just sailed two thousand miles to hear it and I’m a tired man."

(Pause here: the heavy butterflies grown heavier but still softer, the
plump little woman standing motionless with his hand invisible, buried
to the elbow’s crotch in the cheongsam’s cleft, expressly invented in
H0ng Kong for these purposes)

Pause here: If the heavy butterflies of Brando’s languorous fingers weren’t all over this manuscript, it would never have been published except, perhaps, by PublishAmerica, expressly invented in hell for these purposes.

Hallmark Mysteries Are a Crime

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TV Columnist Diane Werts tuned into Hallmark’s Mystery Movie wheel and wasn’t wowed by McBRIDE, JANE DOE and MYSTERY WOMAN:

Suspending disbelief and sometimes logic is required to get through either this
or a "McBride" case without throwing things at the
TV set.

Hallmark’s mysteries try hard, but feel perfunctory. Instead of tight plotting,
we get sluggish implausibilities. You can sense the writers shrugging their
shoulders and saying "close enough." There’s just a basic-cable minor-league
feel.

Even the key characterizations fall flat, which is itself a crime
when it comes to John Larroquette. This Emmy collector has proven from "Night
Court" to "The Practice" that he’s got high-test fuel in the tank. "McBride"
gives him a dog and sports trivia expertise, and that’s pretty much the
personality picture. Is it the genre that’s tired or just these cut-rate
interpretations? I’d hope the latter. But it’s still a mystery to me.

I felt the same frustration when I tuned into the shows. They are so flat, they make MATLOCK seem cutting-edge. There’s no reason the mysteries can’t be better. A lot better. It’s not the genre that’s tired, it’s the writers.

Fifty Years of GUNSMOKE

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Gunsmoke67New York Daily News columnist David Bianculli celebrates 50 years of GUNSMOKE, which was the best western and the  longest-running primetime episodic drama in TV history. LAW & ORDER is catching up to GUNSMOKE’s 20-year run, but it doesn’t really count. The cast of LAW & ORDER has turned over many times, but three of the four stars of GUNSMOKE stuck with it for 19 years (Dennis Weaver  left in the mid-60s and Amanda Blake skipped the 20th season).  James Arness as Matt Dillon became a television icon. But what really made the show work, from day one, was the writing.

"Gunsmoke" premiered Sept. 10, 1955, and began with a shocker. A
quick-draw gunfighter comes to town, resists arrest by a pursuing
lawman who has traced him to Dodge City, and guns him down.

Marshal Dillon, upholding the law, accepts the gunman’s challenge of a
daytime duel. Saloon girl Miss Kitty (Amanda Blake), deputy Chester
(Dennis Weaver) and town physician Doc (Milburn Stone) watch as their
friend takes aim – and is outgunned and shot down. Cut to commercial.

This was five years before Alfred Hitchcock stunned moviegoers by
killing off the heroine in "Psycho." (Retroactive, 45-year-old spoiler
alert!) Matt Dillon didn’t die, but he did have to recuperate slowly,
nursed back to health by his loyal buddies before facing the villain
again.

It was a stunning, mature approach to the Western, showing right from
the start that the good guys didn’t always win, that violence had
consequences and that the badge often carried a crushing weight.

Unlike some shows, which get worse with age, GUNSMOKE was actually at its best in its last few years, using the age and bitter experience of the characters as poignant and powerfulJames_arness_1 undercurrents in the sharp, surprisingly edgy and violent stories.  That’s not to say GUNSMOKE didn’t sink into a rut (the mid-60s especially), but even the black-and-white, half-hour episodes from the 50s still pack a surprising punch. Suzanne Barabas, author of "GUNSMOKE: A Complete History" notes in an interview:

When John Meston and Norman MacDonnell created "Gunsmoke," they wrote
down every single cowboy cliche they could think of, and decided to
break every single one, Barabas said. The irony, she said, was
"Gunsmoke" itself became a cliche.

Speaking of GUNSMOKE, I finally got around to reading Ben Costello’s "GUNSMOKE: An American Institution." It’s a handsome hardcover packed with photos and interviews. Is it worth $75? No.  It’s a breezy, enjoyable book with lots of interesting anecdotes but it doesn’t compare to Suzanna & Gabor Barabas’ monumental  "GUNSMOKE: A Complete History," one of the best books ever written about a TV show (and also one of the most expensive at $85).

If you’re going to buy one of the books, I’d spend the extra ten bucks and go for the Barabas book.  Of the two, the Barabas book is also far more scholarly and informative, Costello’s is more fannish and superficial (though he does offer many more pictures and some  intriguing details about the subsequent GUNSMOKE movies, which aren’t covered in the Barabas book).

Other articles celebrating the show and marking its anniversary are here, here and here.

045121633401_sclzzzzzzz_UPDATE (9-10-05) I almost forgot…my friend Joseph West’s latest original GUNSMOKE novel, BLIZZARD OF LEAD,  just came out. I haven’t read it yet, but if it’s anything like the first one, BLOOD BULLETS AND BUCKSKIN,  it’s a great read that’s also true to the spirit of the show and perfectly captures the voices of the beloved characters.

How Bookstores Work

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Authors Tess Gerritsen and Lynn Viehl both take us behind-the-scenes at bookstores today and tell us a little bit about how they work.  It’s fascinating stuff and, as I can attest from personal experience, painfully accurate. Here’s a taste, first from Tess:

For those of you who aren’t in the pub business, you may not realize that the
front octagonal table in B&N is actually PAID display space. (Otherwise
known as paying for "co-op".) Publishers pay for that bit of real estate so that
their new titles can be seen. I don’t know how much it costs them. (If anyone
happens to know the answer to that, I’d love to hear from you privately!)
Ballantine paid for, and expected, VANISH to be displayed on B&N’s front
tables for its first week of sale, yet in up to 40% of B&N stores, my
readers found that the books were shelved at the back of the stores, with no
discount stickers.

Lynn knows why that happens. She’s been a bookseller and says that the "co-op books" are too much work.

From a bookseller’s perspective, shelving is always easier than displaying or
tabling. You can shove books on the store shelves aside to make room for new
arrivals. This opposed to removing last week’s books from the front table,
carting them, and reshelving or store-rooming them before you can haul out and
table the new books. Purchased-space books are double the work.

If a purchased-space book shipment is late? Those books never touch a tabletop.
If the book is overshipped, a manager might get creative with stacking, but
generally they shove the excess copies back in the store room. Jackie Collins
does not want to know how many times a hundred copies of her novel sat showing
their pretty leopard-skin patterned book jackets to nothing more than the
employee coffee maker and concrete walls.

For an author, understanding the business of writing — publishing, promotion and sales — is as important as writing a good book if you want to succeed. Like Lynn, I also worked in a bookstore for a few years and the things I learned are still serving me well today.

Erik Estrada’s Cachet

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A 27-yearold social climber named Danny Estrada is riding the cachet of being Erik Estrada’s son.

Until recently, the aspiring “It” boy was
cutting a smooth path toward the upper reaches of Manhattan’s junior
class hierarchy. The Long Island native—who, by his own account, “looks
exactly like” Erik Estrada—had made a name for himself as a club
promoter. He regularly played host at nightclubs like Marquee, Butter,
Suede and Gypsy Tea.
 
The snag in his celebrity pantyhose was revealed, however, when the New York Daily News
was forced to publish a retraction to a syrupy gossip item which had
ran June 19 under the headline “‘ChiPs’ Off the Old Block.” It featured
Mr. Estrada ostensibly sharing a page from the family scrapbook.
 
“‘My
earliest memory of my father, [‘CHiPs’ star] Erik Estrada,’” the
original item read, “‘is being in the family car with him, stuck in
endless L.A. highway traffic and then suddenly being escorted by two
California Highway Patrolmen on motorcycles,’ recalls TV actor Danny
Estrada …. ‘I asked Dad why the patrolmen were out in front, and he
said he had been a patrolman once himself. For years, I thought Dad was
a cop.’”

The most incredible thing about the story isn’t that Danny Estrada isn’t really Erik Estrada’s son, it’s that Erik Estrada still has any cachet. We’re talking about a has-been actor who hosts infomercials for desolate home sites in Arkanasas…what possible social cachet could he have? If Erik Estrada’s name still has juice, just think how far you’d get saying you’re Greg Evigan’s son. Or the Bear’s.

Frankencop2I can’t be too hard on Erik Estrada, though. He doesn’t take himself too seriously.  He spoofed himself in a cameo on an episode DIAGNOSIS MURDER that Bill Rabkin and I wrote. We had him starring in  a new Stephen J. Cannell series called "Frankencop." We put a scar on his head, bolts on his neck, and stuck him on a Highway Patrol motorcycle.

Speaking of Estrada, I heard a story from a former junior NBC exec who was assigned to make sure Erik Estrada, at the height of his CHIPS stardom, didn’t succeed in seducing a senior NBC exec’s mistress at various industry/network parties. The junior exec always failed, at one point catching the mistress giving Estrada a handjob under the table at some affiliates party. But the junior exec wisely always told the senior exec that, thanks to his vigilance, the mistress and Estrada never were able to hook up.  I don’t know if the anecdote is true, but this former junior NBC exec had a lot of fun telling us  stories about this futile assignment.

Does Book Blog Buzz Sell Books?

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…that’s the question posed by an article in the Christian Science Monitor, which focuses a lot of its attention on Mark Sarvas’ blog The Elegant Variation.

Although no one’s exactly sure how influential they are, bloggers like Sarvas
have become the new darlings of the publishing industry. They’re getting free
review copies, landing interviews with prestigious authors, and trying to boost
obscure writers – especially writers in the literary fiction world where John
Irving is a bigger name than John Grisham. Still, plenty of sophisticated readers don’t know a blog from a podcast…

…In years past, literary discussions were largely limited to academia and the
occasional book club, says Sarvas of The Elegant Variation. "What the blogs have
really done is encourage inclusion, encourage people from all walks of life to
join the conversation."

But is anyone listening? Many book bloggers seem to be talking only to
themselves, judging by the dearth of postings by outsiders on their sites. And
it’s hard to tell if bloggers’ mash notes translate into sales at Barnes &
Noble.

What do you think? Are blogs changing the way you pick the books you’re going to buy?