Month: June 2005

What The Homeless Are Reading

by

Publishers Weekly asked a homeless man ("homeless by choice," he says)  in San Francisco about the books he reads.  David Cook, aka Alley Cat, 52, is currently reading CRADLE OF SATURN by James Hogan ("I like the descriptions and the political critiques"). The last book he read was A PUZZLE IN A PEAR TREE by Parnell Hall.  The magazine asked him what he plans to read next.

"The next book I get. I receive donations by the crateful."

Now, after this tidbit in PW, he’ll probably start getting ARCs, too… and blurb requests from  PublishAmerica authors.

“What’s Stupid About It?”

by

I got this email today:

"Fan fic writers have no deadlines, networks/producers/actors to please,
and often have a better grasp on the characters and their history than
the tv writers usually because We Are more Emotionally attached."

You said that comment is stupid. I don’t get it.  What’s stupid about it?

Okay, the email is probably a fake, but I’ll treat it like it’s not.  I create the characters and the world they live in. I figure out the relationships, what they do, and why they do it. And then I come up with every single thing that happens next.  I also hire the actors,  the directors, the writers,  the set designers, the costume designers, the composer etc. etc…. and they all are charged with interpreting my vision of the  show as I see it. We all spend every waking hour making the show (and even non-waking hours…my dreams are often filled with scenes and characters from the show I’ve spent all day working on).

And somebody who merely watches the show says he has a better grasp on the characters and their history than I do? That he’s  more emotionally involved in the series than I am? The guy who created the characters, who came up with every single thing they have ever said or done or experienced?

Okay, let’s say I’m not the creator. I’m a hired gun, one of the writer/producers. I am working hand-in-hand with the showrunner to articulate his or her creative vision of their show. All I do every day is live with those characters, whether I’m writing a script of my own, rewriting someone else’s script, plotting a story, editing an episode, prepping an episode with a director, or discussing character with one of the actors. I am as emotionally involved as it’s possible to be. The show is all that I do and all I am thinking about for most of the working day…and, because I am a writer, I can’t stop thinking about it once I go home, either (even if I don’t have a script or story to write/work on every night).

And somebody who watches the show thinks he’s more involved than that? Knows more about the  characters than I do?

That’s why it’s a stupid comment.

…but I can see how the fanficcer’s emotional involvement with a show is very different than the one that I have as a TV writer/producer. A TV show is something I write, something I do, it’s not my world, it’s not my religion, it’s not who I am and my reason for breathing. It’s not my obsession.  I don’t dress like the characters, wallpaper my house with their pictures, or fantasize about having sex with them.  Whe the show is cancelled (or I leave it for whatever reason), I stop thinking about the characters and their "lives." I move on creatively and emotionally to something else. There are viewers who are incapable of doing that…who become so emotionally attached to fictional characters and an imaginary world that they can’t ever let go. And in that sense, yeah, a fanficcer is more emotionally attached than I am.  Frighteningly so.

“We Are More Emotionally Attached”

by

Fan fic writers have no deadlines, networks/producers/actors to please,
and often have a better grasp on the characters and their history than
the tv writers usually because We Are more Emotionally attached.

The incredible stupidity of that blog comment tells you all you need to know about fanfic writers…and the tenor of the "discussion" on NPR’s OPEN SOURCE (the comment above comes from their blog). The radio show did a terrible job yesterday exploring fanfic —  and I’m not
just saying that because it was 45 minutes into a one-hour show before
the bewildered host remembered I was there. 

I think that the guests and listeners on both sides of the fanfic debate would agree that the host was woefully unprepared for the discussion.  He didn’t have a grasp of what fanfic is and seemed to be stumbling around blindly in search of a point or an angle (something his producers should have prepped him on more thoroughly beforehand). He was unfocused and, therefore, so was the discussion, which is why I’m not at all surprised by his baffling "post-game analysis" of the show on the OPEN SOURCE blog:

The poverty of fanfic is its confinement by television and what seem
the limited stock of Star Trek characters—and the bodies of Charley’s
Angels. But the courage of readers who, all along, have been
reimagining outcomes and dialogue and motives is awe-inspiring. I guess
it is just as well that we waltzed right past all those confounding
lit-crit riddles of post-modern textuality. Naomi Novick tried to tempt
us with a sweeping dismissal of authorial intent, and I cheerfully let
it go.

What is he babbling about? I was on the show and I can’t make sense out of it. By the way, I was the only fanfic naysayer invited to participate (and then only included in the discussion as a brief after-thought).  He spent the bulk of the show talking to the two dimwits who felt there’s no difference between a modern retelling of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE and STAR TREK mpreg fic (for one thing, the authors the fanficcers are ripping off are still alive)  So it’s no surprise the host ultimately comes out in favor of fanfic…or at least his blurry notion of it.

Common sense about music makes me wonder why any of it should be
copyrighted. Music is not something human beings own; it something
people love, make and do every hour of the day, socially and alone. So
much of the music I love is recreated: like Brahms’ transcription of
Bach’s Chaconne for left-hand-only at the piano, or Chucho Valdes’
reconception of Chopin’s Preludes as jazz. Up with imitation, then, and
the geniuses who can make it original.

Your Little Boys Are Safe

by

From the Associated Press:

Basking in the jurors’ decision to acquit his client of all counts, Michael
Jackson’s lawyer said Tuesday the singer will no longer share his bed with young
boys.

”He’s not going to do that anymore,” attorney Thomas
Mesereau Jr. told NBC’s ”Today.” ”He’s not going to make himself vulnerable
to this anymore.”

Himself vulnerable? What about the young boys? I still wonder what kind of parent would let their little children spend the night in bed with Michael Jackson. Bizarro.

Help!

by

This is driving me NUTS…

Sometime in the last four or five days, I clicked on a link in a blog post that led to an article about a guy who’d graduated from a two-day seminar on how to seduce women and who’d gone to a club to try out what he’d learned. The article was written in first-person by a reporter who accompanied the guy and talked about the techniques, the "pros" who teach the course, etc. 

It was a very funny article and included a sure-fire story you could tell that was guaranteed to make any woman who heard it uncontrollably horny (something to do with how thrilling rollercoasters are and how they make your heart race).  Of course, I  immediately tried the story on my wife to see if she’d start foaming at the mouth, tackle me to the floor, and ravage me to satisfy her hot, savage lust.

She didn’t. 

But that’s not the point. Here’s the thing: I’d like to use my own variation of that sure-fire seduction story for a character in my MONK book and I can’t remember it…and I can’t find the article. I’ve tried plugging in key words  like "pick up lines" and "rollercoaster" and "arouse" and "seduction course" into various seach engines and have gotten nowhere.

Did anybody else read that article? If so, please tell me where to find it!

James Reasoner in the Flesh

by

JamesreasonerbillcavalierBill Crider pointed me to this newspaper photo of novelist James Reasoner (left) and Bill Cavalier (right) participating on a panel at Robert E. Howard Days, a salute to the CONAN author hosted by his hometown of Cross Plains, TX:

Fans and experts alike agreed Saturday that Robert E. Howard, the Cross Plains
fantasy writer who took his own life at the age of 30, would have become a giant
in his field if he had lived. The question, though, is exactly what field that
might have been.

I saw something in that photo I’ve never seen on a panel dias before. A can of OFF. Now that’s class. At least it wasn’t RAID.  (Click on the photo for a larger image).

“A Heavily Subsidized Hobby”

by

Think of this as a companion piece to the "Day in the Life" post here a few days back. Author Harley Jane Kozak talks today about money,  contracts, and the work-a-day life of  a writer.

I was offered a contract this week. Actually, I was offered two. After a year of writing “on spec” as we say in Hollywood, that was pretty exciting news. It’s not that I made no money this past year; there were  those first two books, and I still get residuals for the acting work I did in my previous life (another six  bucks for that 1986 Highway to Heaven episode) but it’s safe to assume that I spent a lot more than I  took in. Would that I could say the same about calories.

So, when I sold a short story to Ms. Magazine, and was offered a two-book deal from Doubleday on the  same day, I called my husband at work to tell him the good news.

“Great!” he said. “How much?”

I told him.

Silence on the other end of the phone.

I could hear him mentally dividing the book advance by two (two books in two years), then subtract taxes and agent’s fee, then add up babysitting costs, marketing and promotion . . .

“Can you ask for more?” he asks.