Books

Western Noir

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Ed Gorman has quietly created his own unique genre — the western noir. I first discovered it when I read his book WOLF MOON. Here’s what I wrote when I read it a year ago this week:

I devoured WOLF MOON in one sitting. I really enjoyed it.
The book came out a few years ago and it’s unlike any western I’ve read
before.  Think of it as western noir, with an emphasis on noir, though
you wouldn’t know that from the standard "western" cover and "frontier"
font.  Sure, it takes place in the west and has all the expected genre
trappings…but it’s the kind of tale Charles Williams, Harry
Whittington, Dan J. Marlowe, Wade Miller, Vin Packer and Charles
Willeford like to tell. Dark and violent. Grim and doomed. It’s about a
bank robber who gets double-crossed, goes to prison, and seeks revenge.
Sounds pretty standard but trust me, it isn’t. The hero of this book is
an original…a guy who is literally rabid with revenge. I
can’t help but wonder how the book would have fared, and the attention
it might have garnered, if it was marketed as a weird twist on a dark
crime tale instead of western.

Now the folks over at Bookgasm have discovered Ed’s unique brand of noir with GHOST TOWN:

GhosttownThis being my first exposure to Gorman, I loved every second of it. Just
expecting a typical Western, I was blown away by how he turns the genre on
its ear like some of the Western writing of Elmore Leonard. I’m talking some
great scenes of double-crosses and a nice-sized body count. Like some of the
revisionist Western films that have come out in recent years, this book 
does not have a happy ending; it just makes you feel the empathy for  the
characters to which you have been exposed.

I wish Ed was getting more attention for these great books instead of having them relegated to the sadly neglected western shelf.

Hollywood & Crime

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Hollywood
Here’s  sneak peek at the rough cover for HOLLYWOOD AND CRIME, the new anthology edited by the prolific Robert Randisi (author of over 400 novels!). My contribution to this anthology, which comes out in February,  is a short story entitled "Jack Webb’s Star." My friends Max Allan Collins, Stuart Kaminsky, Michael Connolly, Paul Guyot, Dick Lochte, Gary Phillips and Gar Haywood are just a few of the other authors who have contributed stories, all of which feature at least one scene at the corner of Hollywood & Vine (Les Roberts, whose name is featured on the rough cover, unfortunately has had to bow out).

Attacking Copyright

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One of the big arguments fanficcers like to make is that copyright is too restrictive and that the rules should be loosened up. Once something is published, they argue, it should belong to the world.

The fanfic take on copyright is one championed, oddly enough, by proponents of Google’s effort to digitize books into their database. The New York Times ran a piece a week or two ago in which Wired contributor Kevin Kelly argued in favor a digital library that would make all books available for free to people around the world. He believes that the original purpose of copyright was to give authors an incentive to keep working, but that now that intent has been warped to benefit the commercial interests of corporations. Books, Kelly argues, should now become public domain shortly after publication for any derivative use you can imagine. On this issue, he wrote, in part:

But the 1976 law, and various revisions and
extensions that followed it, made it extremely difficult to move a work
into the public commons, where human creations naturally belong and
were originally intended to reside. As more intellectual property
became owned by corporations rather than by individuals, those
corporations successfully lobbied Congress to keep extending the
once-brief protection enabled by copyright in order to prevent works
from returning to the public domain. With constant nudging, Congress
moved the expiration date from 14 years to 28 to 42 and then to 56.

While
corporations and legislators were moving the goal posts back,
technology was accelerating forward. In Internet time, even 14 years is
a long time for a monopoly; a monopoly that lasts a human lifetime is
essentially an eternity. So when Congress voted in 1998 to extend copyright an additional 70 years
beyond the life span of a creator—to a point where it could not
possibly serve its original purpose as an incentive to keep that
creator working–it was obvious to all that copyright now existed
primarily to protect a threatened business model. And because Congress
at the same time tacked a 20-year extension onto all existing
copyrights, nothing–no published creative works of any type–will fall
out of protection and return to the public domain until 2019. Almost
everything created today will not return to the commons until the next
century. Thus the stream of shared material that anyone can improve
(think “A Thousand and One Nights” or “Amazing Grace” or “Beauty and
the Beast”) will largely dry up.

Sara Nelson, editor of Publishers Weekly, took exception to this and I agree with her views. She said, in part:

Such a suggestion, frankly, disavows the amount of work—the
amount of time!—it actually takes to create a book, not to mention the
lack of financial reward that comes, even in this era of inflated
advances, during that sometimes lifetime-long process. Why shouldn’t
generations of Joyces or Morrisons or, more pointedly, Richard Yateses,
benefit from the work that the authors scraped by to produce? Believing
that your book could become a source of enlightenment for generations
is a great thing, of course. Knowing that it might provide some comfort
for your own great-great-grandchildren ain’t such a bad incentive
either.

[…]Yes, it’s hard to keep track of copyright, especially when
publishers (who, essentially, "lease" copyright from the author)
disappear and morph and merge, as they do […] But as books become digital files that
require few warehouse fees, and the whole notion of "out of print"
becomes moot, copyright should be similarly simplified: it should rest
with the author, or his descendants, for way longer than they both
shall live.

Your thoughts?

Blow Job Empowerment

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Author Meg Cabot doesn’t understand why some girls think that giving blowjobs is empowering.

In “The Notebook Girls,” the allegedly
“real” notebook kept by four teens who attended Stuyvesant High School
in New York City, we are repeatedly told how “empowering” blow jobs
are…which left me wondering, as always, what’s so empowering about
giving sexual pleasure without receiving any in return?

It’s a question she tackles in her new book QUEEN OF BABBLE.

(That’s to Sarah for the heads-up…no pun intended).

Writing Blind

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Novelist John Connolly has an interesting post on researching his novels. But what intrigued me was this little nugget about how he writes:

I brought with me to the US the initial draft of The Unquiet.
I imagine it would be almost unintelligible to anyone who tried to read
it as a coherent narrative. My first draft tends to be a little rough.
There will be inconsistencies of dialogue and character. Some
characters will appear in the early stages only to disappear later,
their failure to manifest themselves once again left entirely
unexplained. Some things seem like good ideas at the start, but quickly
prove to be distractions from the main thrust of the book, and as soon
as that realisation hits me I tend to let those elements slide.

I don’t fret too much about how untidy the text may be (although,
in my darker moments, I wonder what might happen if I didn’t live to
finish the book and someone else, for whatever reason, decided to piece
together whatever was left behind. I wish them luck. I mean, I’ve
written it, and sometimes even I’m not entirely sure that I always look
forward to trying to put all of the pieces together). After all,
there’s nobody looking over my shoulder, and my main aim is to get the
plot and characters from A-Z, even if that means bypassing Q and R
entirely, and occasionally having to loop back to P just to reassure
myself that I have a vague notion of what I’m doing.

I’m guessing that John doesn’t write with an outline. I know a number of authors who write the same way he seems to…just going where ever the inspiration takes him.  I’m not going to knock it because clearly it’s worked great for him.  But I don’t think I could ever write that way. That doesn’t mean that I stick religiously to my outline, or that characters don’t come and go (I’ve had characters who were meant to die in Chapter One that I kept alive through the whole book), but I need it to keep me more or less pointed in the right direction. I would find writing a book, particularly a mystery, very difficult to do on-the-fly.

Tod Finds Self-Published POD Gem

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My brother Tod Goldberg has reviewed DANCING ON THE FLY ASH, a self-published P.O.D. book, in his Las Vegas City Life column:

It’s a sad state of affairs, however, that the one book spawned from a
blog that actually succeeds has gone virtually unnoticed: Dancing On Fly Ash by Matt Bell and Josh Maday.

The
differences between Bell and Maday and their blog brethren is they are
actually fiction writers, unlike Cutler, who slept with a lot of
people, and Cox, who is a fine journalist but not a fine fiction writer
(it’s not a trait that is easily shared), and their blog (found at
dancingonflyash.com) is a daily splash of flash creativity: Each day,
in 100 words or less, either Bell or Maday writes a complete short
story. Dancing On Fly Ash collects the best 62 of these entries
and the result is both exciting and frustrating — exciting in that the
best of these short-short-short stories packs the emotional wallop of a
novel and frustrating because several stories beg for more than the
form allows.

The stories veer from the dramatic to the poignant to the absurd, the best of which contain all three styles.

Naturally, the authors were thrilled by the review:

This is the first review for our book, so I can’t help but be excited,
especially since it’s mostly positive.  It’s so hard to get a
self-published book reviewed in the first place, much less by an author
of Goldberg’s stature.  We’re very thankful to him for his
encouragement and support.

Making a Living

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I had lunch with a TV writer-friend not long ago, and he was lamenting how the business was letting him down lately. He hadn’t worked much in TV during the last year and was despairing about his future. He told me that he wished he wrote books, too. So write one, I said. But I could see from the expression on his face that he wouldn’t. He liked the idea of writing a book…actually doing it was something else. He was a TV writer, and that was it.

I decided long ago that I was going to be a writer first and a TV writer second. There’s no question that I make most of my living in television…but I believe it’s important to me professionally, financially, psychologically and creatively not to concentrate on just one field of writing (It probablyhelps that I started my career as a freelance journalist, then became a novelist, then a non-fiction author, and finally, a TV writer/producer).  So I write books, both fiction and non-fiction, I teach TV writing, and occasionally I write articles and short stories… most of the time while I’m simultaneously writing & producing TV shows (though the TV work always takes priority over everything else). 

While the income from books, teaching, and articles doesn’t come close to matching what I  make in TV, those gigs keep some cash coming in when TV (inevitably) lets me down, keep me "alive" in other fields,  and, more importantly, keep my spirits up.

As a result, who I am as a writer isn’t entirely wrapped up in whether or not I have a TV job or a book on the shelves. I often have both, or one or the other — but if I have neither, I have a class to teach or an article to write.

I’m not producing a series right now. But last week, I partnered with a major production company and pitched a movie with them to a cable network. I met with representatives of a European TV network that’s interested in having me teach TV writing to their writer/producers and consult on their series. I rewrote a  TV movie treatment to incorporate studio notes.  I turned in a freelance script to the producers of a new drama series. I taught an online screenwriting class. I submitted a short story to Amazon shorts. I wrote 60 pages of my next novel. Next week, I have a meeting with a studio exec who has shows to staff up, a notes meeting on the freelance script, galleys to proof on one of my novels, more pages of my book to write, and probably a whole lot more that I don’t even know about yet. 

The bottom line is, I am always writing something for pay, even if that check is miniscule and hustling for my next gig, whether it’s in TV, publishing, or something else.  Why? Because that is who I am… a professional writer. And I have a mortgage to pay, just like everybody else.

Mr. Monk and the Blue Flu

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Monk_and_blue_flu5_6
Here’s the cover for my third MONK novel, MR. MONK AND THE BLUE FLU, slated for publication in January. I think it’s the best MONK cover yet. Speaking of Monk, Tony Shalhoub talked briefly in the new issue of TV Guide about "Mr. Monk Can’t See a Thing," the episode that Bill Rabkin & I wrote, which is loosely based on my book MR. MONK GOES TO THE FIREHOUSE:

Monk will contend with temporary blindness. "He has solvent thrown in his eyes," Shalhoub says. "It becomes a really dark show" as Monk must rely on his other senses to solve the crime.

DM on DVD

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Diagnosismurders1
Tvshowsondvd has the latest news on the first season boxed set of DIAGNOSIS MURDER, which  will be released on  Sept. 12.  So far, it looks as though they won’t be including the original pilot (which aired as an episode of JAKE AND THE FATMAN) or the three TV movies which preceded the hour-long series. The set will include a flier advertising my seventh DM novel, THE DOUBLE LIFE, so that should be reason enough to buy it!

Reviewing the Script

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The LA Times did something today that newspapers and major magazines never do — they reviewed a published screenplay of a recent film, Akiva Goldsman’s adaptation of THE DAVINCI CODE. The book critic’s opinion of the script is  secondary to the extraordinary nature of the review itself, which probably never would been printed (or even assigned) if not for the fact that the film had one of the biggest opening weekends in movie history. Which, perhaps, is why the anonymous editor felt it necessary to preface the review with his rationale for publishing it:

"The Da Vinci Code" is not just a mega-selling book, not just a
crowd-drawing movie, it’s also, at $21.95, an "illustrated screenplay"
replete with storyboards, stills from the movie, musings by author Dan
Brown and the movie’s principals and boxes of production trivia (such
as " ‘The Da Vinci Code’ had 25 revisions over six months" and
"Twenty-four rue Haxo doesn’t actually exist in Paris.") At the heart
of the "official making-of-the-movie book," though, is Akiva Goldsman’s
script. The Times asked film and book critic Charles Taylor to consider
how it plays on the page.

Screenplays are published all the time but are never taken seriously (or noticed at all) by  the general media, only by the script-craft magazines. Does this mean we’ll start seeing more published screenplays reviewed by the LA Times? I doubt it. But still, in its own way, it’s something of a watershed event.