Books

Adult Material

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The recent discussion here about "adult material" in my DIAGNOSIS MURDER books reminded me of a book signing I did a while ago.  I spoke to an audience of retirees in the auditorium at a retirement home. When I was done with my presentation, an elderly man raised his hand.

"Yes, sir, do you have a question?" I said.

"Who are you?" he asked.

At that point, I had just finished speaking about myself, and the books that I write, for about 15 minutes. 

"I’m Lee Goldberg," I said. "I’m an author."

I quickly turned my attention to a woman raising her hand. "Yes, ma’am."

She smiled sweetly. "You are such a nice young man. I’m so glad you came today. Have you written anything I might have read?"

I motioned to the books next to me. "These. The Diagnosis Murder books. The ones I was just talking about."

"Oh," she said. "I’m not familiar with those."

I turned to someone else with a raised hand. "Yes, ma’am, do you have a question?"

She looked at me sternly. "Is there any explicit sex in your books?"

"No," I said. "They are squeaky clean."

She shook her head, a frown on her face. "Then I’m not reading them."

Don’t Pay Them, They Pay You

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Prolific author Lynn Viehl (well, that’s one of her pen-names, anyway) remembers the temptation, back when she was an aspiring author (or is it authors in her case?),  to sign with one of those agents who tried to steer her into a book doctor scam.  the book doctor said her manuscript needed work… and it would cost $1300 to fix it up. She almost wrote the check…but thought better of it, despite his dire warnings that she was making a grave mistake. A few years later, the "agent" and the "book doctor" got nailed by the law for defrauding 3600 people with their phony literary agency and publishing house.  As she says, "aspiring writers, make it your mantra:  you don’t pay them, they pay you."

Not Enough Hurtin’

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A DM fan clued me in to this amusing post about my book "The Waking Nightmare"  from the Diagnosis Murder message board on PAX, which I no longer frequent.  I think after reading this you’ll understand why.

I’ve come across others who feel that
the reason Lee Goldberg portrays Steve so horribly is a personal attack
on Barry Van Dyke.

A
friend of mine bought the Waking Nightmare. I don’t know if she plans
on buying another one. Lee Goldberg has Mark performing a feat that
would be impossible at Mark Sloan’s age. Steve could have probably done
it with his training.

What also gets me mad is that Lee Goldberg
has no problem having Mark get hurt numerous times, Jack and Jesse
once, but when I asked him to hurt Steve. He said that was stupid!

I
heard Steve gets slightly hurt in this one. But the damage is done.
More and more I’m finding people who are fed up with the way Steve is
treated in Lee Goldberg’s DM books.
From,
Betty
Barrionette
Steve Hurt/Comfort Fan
Steve Angst Fan
Steve and Mark Relationship Fan
Steve and Ellen Fan

In deference to Betty, I’m going to hurt Steve in the next book. Any suggestions, folks,  on how he should be injured or maimed? 
   
   
   
   
 
 

Two Great Reads

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While I was in El Paso, I read two books… Richard Vaughan’s  HAWKE and Dominic Stansberry’s THE CONFESSION. I like them both…they were throwbacks, in a good way, to books of another era.

HAWKE is a formula western with a decidedly unformulatic hero… a world-class concert pianist and a veteran Confederate soldier who now roams aimlessly, a haunted lost soul, scraping together money here and there playing piano in saloons.  He’s quick with a gun and often finds himself in middle of trouble.  It was the perfect airplane read… I didn’t even notice the terrible turbulence that kept the waitresses buckled into their seats and the passengers parched from lack of beverage service. Vaughan has won the Spur Award before… I can see him snagging another one for this fine example of the modern western.

THE CONFESSION is a dark, tawdry, noir tale that harkens back… intentionally so… to the great Gold Medal paperbacks of the 50s and 60s. Stansberry perfectly captures the forboding, the sensuality, the violence, and the wickedness of the best of those tales… and yet, it feels contemporary and hip at the same time. The story is told from the first-person point-of-view of Jake Danser, a forensic psychologist who might be a sexual predator and a serial killer… or not. Even he’s not entirely sure. Stansberry’s prose is confident and slick, his eye for detail sharp and surprising. The book has been nominated for an Edgar and I can see why. It’s a damn good book. I’m eager now to read Stansberry’s new one, CHASING THE DRAGON.

Diagnosis Murder: The Past Tense

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Dm5I just got my first peek at the cover of my fifth "Diagnosis Murder" novel. It’s called THE PAST TENSE and may be my favorite book in the series.  It comes out in August. Here’s what some nice folks are saying about the book…

"What a great book! I enjoyed it tremendously. It’s a clever, twisting
tale that leaves you guessing right up to the heart-stopping ending."
Lisa Gardner, bestselling author of Alone.

"Just what the doctor ordered, a sure cure after a rash  of blah mysteries.  Diagnosis Murder: The Past Tense has more plot twists than a strand of DNA." Elaine Viets, author of
Dying to Call You

"With a devilish plot sense, sophisticated humor, and smooth writing style, Lee Goldberg’s DIAGNOSIS MURDER series never fails to please. He’s as good as anyone writing in the genre today." Donald Bain, co-author of the Murder She Wrote novels

"Diagnosis Murder: The Past Tense.  Seldom has a title been more appropriate. Lee Goldberg takes the utterly familiar Dr. Mark Sloan and surprises us with heartbreaking glimpses of the past that allow the  good doctor to step off the television screen and into a flesh-and-blood  reality. Well-plotted and beautifully rendered." — Margaret Maron, Edgar,
Agatha, and Macavity Award-winning author of the Deborah Knott mysteries.

"Lee Goldberg takes you on a streamlined ride
through 40 years of LA history with a busload of suspicious characters. The
Past Tense will quicken the pulses of longtime Diagnosis Murder fans and newcomers alike while Dr.
Mark Sloan’s quest for justice is sure to
warm hearts."
– Denise Hamilton, author of the Eve Diamond crime novels,
including Last Lullaby, an L.A. Times "Best Book of 2004"

"Lee Goldberg’s DIAGNOSIS MURDER books are
fast-paced, tightly constructed mysteries that are even better than the TV show.
You’ll read them in great big gulps!" Gregg Hurwitz, author of The
Program.

 

Blubbering About Blurbs

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I got back from El Paso to find three emails from authors asking me if I would blurb their books. I’m always astonished that anyone want a blurb from me.  I mean c’mon, who is going to buy a book because Lee Goldberg says he likes it?  Who the hell is Lee Goldberg?

(Uh-oh, there I go talking about myself in the third person. Who do I think I am? A professional athlete?)

I’ve only blurbed a few over the years… Aimee & David Thurlo’s Ella Clah novels, Doug Lyle’s "Forensics for Dummies,"  Lono Waiwaiole’s "Wiley’s Shuffle," Paul Bishop’s "Tequila Mockingbird," Richard Yokley’s "TV Firefighters,"  Lewis Perdue’s upcoming novel, and a couple of others, and was flattered to be asked… though it puts me in an awkward position. What if I don’t like the books?   I have the same philosophy about blurbing that my friend, the much-better-looking-in-a t-shirt-than-me, author Gregg Hurwitz does:

No matter how much talent you have, to make it in publishing, you
always need the right help from the right people at the right time.
Call it luck, call it fate, call it whatever you please, but though
hard work and talent are a necessity (usually), few novelists I’ve met
have gotten by on these alone. I caught some breaks early in my career,
and I’m always grateful to those who read my work early and took a
gamble, putting in their time and making use of their contacts for me. Though writing is fiercely independent, I do see a responsibility to
give back to the community, to pass along the good karma that I’ve been
fortunate enough to receive. I don’t give back to the writing community
by telling author who need improvement that their books are fantastic,
and I don’t give back to the reading community by endorsing crap.

I’ve been able to politely decline the requests for blurbs over the last year because of my accident, the huge amount of writing I had to do, and the scary deadlines I had to meet.
This is the first time in months that my workload has eased up enough
for me to have the opportunity to read any manuscripts besides my own.

Over the years I have imposed on a lot of my friends (and authors I don’t know but whom I admire) for blurbs and many have been kind enough to come through for me. The least I can do is return
the favor… if not to the same authors, than to others. As it happens, these three authors are folks I’ve never asked for a blurb for my own work.

I only have a couple of caveats when it comes to blurbing:  I won’t blurb anything from the likes of PublishAmerica or other vanity presses and I won’t blurb anything I didn’t truly enjoy reading.  None of the three books I’m being asked to blurb are self-published and the authors say they won’t be hurt if, for whatever reason, I decide not to blurb their books. So I said yes, I’d read their manuscripts. Whether I actually decide to blurb them or not is a different story…

UPDATE (3-1-05) By way of  Diary of a Hype Hag comes this link to Adam Langer’s amusing article on the craft of  blurbing…

Seeing the Strings

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I’ve been catching up on my sister-in-law Wendy’s fascinating ruminations on writing. She raised a point in one of her thoughtful postings that’s stuck with me all day. In this age of rampant blogging, where personal contact with your favorite author is only a mouse-click away, are we destroying the illusion behind our fiction? Are our readers getting to know us too well?

Wendy describes what it was like becoming a regular reader of an author’s blog… and then reading the author’s subsequent novels:

Through her blog, I found her to be charming, witty, and insightful. I returned again the next day. And the next. I lurked until eventually, I left a comment. She responded, she laughed out loud, she said we were kindred sprits.

Why hadn’t I done this before? It was nothing of what I feared. Her site became a daily stop for me. I found the voice of her blog to be separate and distinct from her author voice. I loved reading both.

Things, as they are apt to do, started to change.

In a recent release her heroine broke character with a rant that sounded a lot like the author’s ever increasing web rants. I thought I saw a flash of nylon fishing line. In her following release, the subtext I had previously loved was missing from her dialog. Well, I knew she rushed, too much to write with a deadline on screaming approach. Now, I’m certain—I saw the puppeteer’s hand.

I often wonder as I write this blog, and as I enjoy the blogs of other writers,  if there’s a danger that the people reading our books, or watching our TV shows, will find it increasingly difficult to suspend their disbelief, to become lost in the fictional worlds we create…. that our personalities will overwhelm our work and our audience  will, instead, only be hearing and seeing the writer behind the words. 

You tell me.

The Whole Family is Blogging

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My lovely and talented sister-in-law Wendy Duren is blogging about what she’s doing, what she’s reading, and what she’s writing.  While she mostly talks about novels, she mentions that she found inspiration the other night in a  scene in an episode of LOST.

It
accomplished everything dialog should: it revealed character, revealed
the characters’ emotional states, communicated information, moved the
story along, and, my favorite, was chucked full of subtext. And, it did all that very quickly. It was to the point, without side trips, without the mental meanderings that often trip up dialog in romances. I love stumbling across things like this. I feel inspired and motivated to write. My creative well has been filled at a time when I didn’t notice the level was low. All that and eye candy too. Wow.

It’s not often you find novelists conceding that TV writing is writing… and that spoken dialogue can inspire you the same way the written word can.

Thrills Galore

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At Left Coast Crime this past weekend, there was awell-attended meeting of the new International Thriller Writers organization, hosted by co-president David Morrell and secretary David Dun.  One of the goals of this organization is to get more recognition and respect for thrillers…perhaps, even, to create awards for excellence in the field. So imagine my surprise when I opened up the Los Angeles Times and saw a full-page advertisement for James Patterson’s  HONEYMOON (I think that must be the title by the way… "James Patterson’s Honeymoon"… since it’s co-written by Howard Roughan but the book is never referred to as, say, "Howard Roughan’s HONEYMOON," or maybe he’s legally barred in English-speaking countries from using an apostrophe "s" in public). The ad says:

The world’s most chilling novel. It’s official. James Patterson’s Honeymoon. 2005 International Thriller of the Year.

Apparently,  "James Patterson’s Honeymoon" won this prestigious award… an award I’ve never heard of… even before the book was published. In fact,  I asked a few thriller writers I know if they’ve either heard of the award or entered their work for consideration.  The answer was no to both questions. And since The World apparently voted, I was wondering why I never received my ballet. I like to think I’m a member of the human race, though some Ken Bruen fans have lobbied hard to have my membership revoked.

So I decided to do a little research into this all-encompassing, global kudo … and the first thing I discovered was that my brother Tod had beaten me to it.  Great minds, and incredibly dashing literary hunks, think alike.

Turns out this is the first time the award has been given… and it’s bestowed by Bookspan, the umbrella organization that runs the Book-of-the-Month Club, The Literary Guild, and the Doubleday Book Club. They also publish James Patterson. Comes as quite a shock, doesn’t it?  I tried to find a list of the judges, rules of consideration, even a list of the other nominees for this sought-after award but they are as invisible as Howard Roughan’s possessive apostrophe.

Meanwhile, the International Thriller Writers (which has nothing to do with the  International Thriller of the Year award… but  James Patterson is a member and charter sponsor of the organization) is preparing to make a big splash at Book Expo America in New York with a gala reception. They also have ambitious plans for corporate sponsorship, conventions, and some unique (and very clever) author promotion programs.  Other members of the ITW include Dirk Cussler, John Lescroart, David Baldacci,  Dale Brown, Lee Child,  Tess Gerritsen, Eric
Van Lustbader, Christopher Reich, Lincoln Child,  Linda
Fairstein, Christopher Rice and they even let me in, proving they aren’t a very descriminating bunch.