Books

The post yesterday about the Dark & Stormy Nights contest reminded me of one of my favorite bad opening lines — it’s from a self-published novel by R.J. Carrie-Reddington entitled "Six Days of the Pigs."

Midway between dawn and sunrise the Tuesday morning air, heavy with
nature’s fog, reeked with the acrid odor of pig feces as the skinny white man
stood at the edge of the front porch, listening to Addie cry.

There’s a good reason why this book was self-published. 

My "hot button" post yesterday has generated a lot of comments… but I didn’t want two interesting responses to get lost amidst all the discussion about fanfic.

Here’s an excerpt of what  PK the Bookeemonster had to say about the influence of crime fiction blogs:

But if blogs went away, I would continue to enjoy books without the
"insider knowledge." And that is a part of it, the insiders versus the
outsiders, and as you stated, there is another dark side to blogging
which is the power the more popular ones have similar to the cliques in
high school all over again: if you’re not in, you’re out. Ken Bruen is
an excellent example. I’ve tried his books and they don’t click with
me; that’s just me and my taste but they’re equally valid as those who
do like his stuff. There is a strong undercurrent in the mystery world
promoting the "coolness" of noir, dark novels which is great but it
shouldn’t come at the expense of any other subgenre. The phenomenon of
blogging is bringing mystery lovers together but also separating us
into niches of us and them.

Author/editor Michael Bracken discussed, among other things,  the unfairness of lumping all POD publishers as vanity presses, particularly as it applies to the issue of the MWA restricting active membership to"published authors. Here’s an excerpt:

There must also be an effort to make clear distinctions between
legitimate small presses and self-publishing operations. Unfortunately,
this is difficult to do. For quite some time–and still in the minds of
some–any book printed using print-on-demand technology was
automatically presumed to be less than legitimate. The growing number
of legitimate publishers using PoD technology is changing that
perception.

A similar situation applies to on-line and electronic publishers.
The low cost of becoming an electronic publisher means every Joe,
Frank, and Reynolds can be a publisher without any knowledge of
publishing. The few legitimate and legitimately "professional"
electronic markets are difficult to separate from the non-professional.

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In my chats with mystery writers this weekend at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, a few "hot button" topics came up…mainly because I was tackling them on my blog and they wanted to thank me for bringing them into the open. I asked them why, if they share my views, they don’t say so publicly. The answer across the board was the same: fear. They’re afraid of getting lots of angry emails, losing sales, and awkward encounters with fans at signings and conventions.

Anyway, here are some of the hot-button topics that emerged in our conversations:

1) Self-Published Authors: There seems to be a strong consensus among published mystery writers that the MWA has gone astray and that  serious efforts should be made to restrict membership to published authors only. "We’re Turning into the ‘Mystery People of America,’" lamented one novelist. Another said "Being a member of the MWA used to mean something…now it doesn’t." Still another feared the MWA was becoming a clone of Sisters in Crime, which she said "should be called ‘PublishAmerica in Crime.’" Many of the authors were hesitant about publicly expressing their view that MWA should become a strictly professional organization because , as one said, "I don’t want to deal with all of the controversy it’s going to create. I don’t want people hating me." But that same person would gladly, and quickly, vote yes for such reforms.

I agree with the view that the MWA should restrict its membership to published authors and produced screenwriters only. That said, I think the view of Sisters in Crime that one author expressed is unfair and way, way too harsh. I think SiC is a fine organization that does a great job, offering tremendous support to aspiring writers and hosting interesting seminars and conferences (as well as producing  an informative newsletter that, in many ways, is better than the MWA’s). The success of SiC, in my mind, is evidence that there’s really no need for  no need for MWA to expand to include self-published and aspiring authors among their ranks.

2) The LA Times Book Review: Most agreed it’s a snooze that doesn’t do a very good job covering crime fiction in a city that’s so associated culturally with the genre in both literature and film.  When I brought up Eugen Weber, the most frequent response was "who is that?" Which tells you all you need to know about how relevant his views are in the field.

3)  Fanfiction:   It creeps out most of the authors I spoke to (a few, it should be noted, have no problem with it and knew of several novelists who got their start writing fanfiction). They’re all struck by the double standard — it’s okay for fanfic writers to steal your work, but if they see something similar to one of their stories in your book they’ll threaten to sue (or write very nasty letters). They said if the fans truly respected the author and his work, they should ask for permission before disseminating fanfiction (it’s not the writing that bothered them, it was the "publishing" of it on the Internet). The authors I spoke to said they don’t complain about fanfic or publicly forbid it because they are terrified of the blacklash, of getting deluged with hate mail. Instead, they close their eyes and pretend it doesn’t exist.

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I love going to used book stores and just browsing around. And, like the folks at Pod-dy Mouth, I also look for my own books.

I always make sure I check out the section where my book would be, sometimes finding a copy. I am the first to admit it is sad to see it there, buried, ignored, gathering
dust. Sadder still was the copy I found in Arlington, Virginia, where I looked at the binding and it clearly had not been read past page 75. I lost that reader, and with it a sense of accomplishment.

I don’t feel bad when I see my books in a used bookstore. In fact, I like it. What does piss me off is when I find a signed-and-inscribed copy… particularly if the person I signed-and-inscribed it to is also one of the people who blurbed the damn book! Okay, this has only happened to me once, and it was years ago when I was browsing at Mystery Pier in West Hollywood, but I’ve never forgotten it.

The guy liked the book enough to blurb it, but he gave away the signed copy I sent him when the book came out? What gives?

Book Critic Matt Taibbi of the NY Press has great fun trashing Thomas Friedman’s new book  THE WORLD IS FLAT. I’ve never read Friedman, and never will, but I thought the review was hilarious. Here’s an excerpt:

Friedman is such a genius of literary incompetence that even his most innocent  passages invite feature-length essays. I’ll give you an example, drawn at random
from The World Is Flat. On page 174, Friedman is describing a flight he took on Southwest Airlines from Baltimore to Hartford, Connecticut. (Friedman never forgets to name the company or the brand name; if he had written The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa would have awoken from uneasy dreams in a Sealy Posturepedic.) Here’s what he says:

I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins.

Forget the Cinnabon. Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one.
This would be a small thing were it not for the overall pattern. Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It’s not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It’s that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it’s
absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius. The difference between Friedman and an ordinary bad writer is that an ordinary bad writer will, say, call some businessman a shark and have him say some tired, uninspired piece of
dialogue: Friedman will have him spout it. And that’s guaranteed, every
single time. He never misses.

Taibbi doesn’t just take potshots at Friedman — he also analyzes the substance of Friedman’s thesis, such as it is. But for me, this review will always hold a special place in my heart for this observation:

Friedman is a person who not only speaks in malapropisms, he also hears
malapropisms. Told level; heard flat. This is the intellectual version of Far Out Space Nuts, when NASA repairman Bob Denver sets a whole sitcom in motion by pressing "launch" instead of "lunch" in a space capsule. And once he hits that button, the rocket takes off.

Surely, this is the first time Bob Denver and FAR OUT SPACE NUTS have ever been referred to in literary criticism…and I, for one, hope it’s not the last.

A writer-friend of mine was lamenting the fact that, in this
ever-more-competitive publishing world, tie-ins are crowding out
paperback original fiction off the shelves (particularly sf/fantasy novels) in three
ways:

1)publishers are buying less material that doesn’t have a
"pre-sold" audience
2)books that ARE published are being pushed off the
shelf very quickly to make room for new tie-in work that comes out in regular
cycles.
3)backlists of original fiction are crowded out by the back-list of
tie-in work, which are re-issue and re-stocked every time a new tie-in in a series comes out, which can be often as monthly. She cited the hundreds of STAR TREK titles and twenty-five MURDER SHE WROTE
books as examples.

It’s probably true that, in today’s tough market, a publisher is more likely to take a risk on a tie-in — which comes with a pre-sold audience and a ready market — than with an original novel by an unknown author. But I don’t know that its any different than movie makers being more likely to greenlight a sequel to a hit than an original film…or for a network to prefer CSI:SEATTLE to just another cop show. Sure, corporations are risk-adverse and prefer going with proven commodities… but original movies are still getting made, original shows are still getting produced, and original novels are still being published.

That said, I stopped by a Barnes & Noble today and couldn’t help noticing that 75% of the paperbacks on the "New Science Fiction" table were STAR TREK, STAR WARS or other tie-in/licensed books. The LA Times reports today that Pocket Books now puts out 20 books a year in their various STAR TREK lines…and plans to do so through at least 2007.

Since Pocket Books began issuing "Trek" novels in the late ’70s, for example
(Bantam and Ballantine published a handful of originals and adaptations earlier
in the decade), more than 500 "Star Trek" titles have hit the nation’s
bookshelves, selling tens of millions of copies.

Your thoughts?

Authors don’t win much respect, at least not from critics, when they write a book-a- year…or more. Words like "hack" begin to get bandied about whenever the author’s name comes up. If a book is written quickly, does that automatically mean it’s bad? Is less creativity, emotion, and care invested in a book that’s written in three months instead of three years? Apparently, the assumption is yes. A book that’s written quickly must not be as good as one that’s written slowly…or that something isn’t quite right with the author. For instance, the folks over at Booksquare recently said:

Prolific writers are viewed with distrust. Nobody should be able to produce so
many words in so short a time. It isn’t seemly. It probably isn’t healthy. It
surely isn’t literary. It’s like a Tom Waits song. “What’s he building in
there?”

My  sister-in-law Wendy pondered on her blog:

I often wonder about writers who crank out book after book and speculate as to
how they do it. The quality of books written in warp drive aside,
I’m curious if authors like Nora Roberts sleep and eat as the rest of the
population? Do they ever go back and rewrite, rework,
retool? I can’t imagine that they do, there doesn’t seem to be
time. Do they have moments of self doubt? Do they
ever question or second guess? Are there ever moments when a
character’s motivation, a plot point, or the perfect bit of dialog is just
out of reach, tormenting them with its nearness? Don’t they
have moments when the only answer is to walk away from a story and let the
pieces drift back in, falling into the perfect places?

In the book world, writers who are fast and prolific are suspect…but this wasn’t always the case. In the heyday of pulp novels, guys like Harry Whittington wrote several books a year. And they were great.  In fact, his speedily-written paperbacks are better than many of the hardcover thrillers out today…thrillers that took some of the authors a year or more to write.

When I buy a book, I don’t care how fast it was written or how many more books the author has coming this year… as long as the books are good. That should be the measure.

But it’s not.

In the TV business,  it’s different. Writers who are fast and prolific are admired, celebrated and sought-after.  It’s not uncommon for episodes of TV shows, including the most highly regarded series on TV, to be written in a week or less. Yet, nobody assumes the episodes are badly written simply because they were written fast. The audience expects a new episode every week, 22 weeks or more a year, and they don’t give any thought to the time it takes to write them… all they want is a good show. In fact, networks expect writers to be fast and prolific…those who aren’t soon find it very difficult to get staff jobs.

I’ve got my feet in both the book and TV worlds. I’m primarily a TV writer…but lately I have been writing paperbacks originals, too. I’ve been trained by my years in TV to write fast, to deliver well-crafted stories on a tight deadline.  So I didn’t think twice about signing a deal that will require me to write four books — two DIAGNOSIS MURDERs and two MONKS — in the next 12-14 months.  Sure, I thought about how I was going to manage my time, and balance my TV and book committments, but I didn’t give any thought to how writing a book every three-to-four months would reflect on  me as an author  (then again, since the books are TV tie-ins, I know the assumption in the book community is that they are hack work anyway).

Why are speedily-written books suspect… but speedily-written screenplays are not?