On Other Blogs

Literary Cannibalism

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Here’s a new twist on the fanfic debate:   an article in the Daily Telegraph implies that  Thomas Harris stole from Hannibal Lector fanfic for his novel HANNIBAL RISING. The article quotes some fanfic passages and compares them to passages in Harris’ new novel.

Trawling through the Lecter fanfic, one comes on other tantalising parallelisms. Six years ago, for example, ‘Leeker17’, on www.typhoidandswans.com
posted a narrative which uncannily forecasts the opening chapters of
Hannibal Rising in its detailed description of how the hero’s parents
and sister met their ends in 1944. So close is it that one might fancy
that Leeker17 had some privileged connection with Harris. Or that
Harris himself, under a nom-de-web, may be the ‘leaker’. Or, like
Blythebee, Leeker17 may just have struck lucky.

If
an author picks up and uses something from ‘his’ fanfic is he
plagiarising, collaborating, or merely playing games? One thing’s
certain. Harris won’t tell us.

(Thanks to Sarah Weinman for the heads-up!)

Parker is Prolific

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There are a couple of interesting things about Robert B. Parker’s latest Amazon blog post. For one, he’s openly soliciting people to buy the movie option on his Sunny Randall novels (and offers the name and address of his agents)…which I find extraordinary for an author of his experience and success in both the publishing and TV business.

But the really amazing thing about his post is what it reveals about how prolific he is. His last Spenser came out in November. He has a Jesse Stone novel coming out in February, a young adult novel in April, a Sunny Randall in June, and  Spenser in October. I figure he must be writing a book at least every eight to twelve weeks. That’s an amazing output…especially for a  bestselling author in his late 60s (or is he in his 70s?) who really doesn’t need to work that hard any more.

Change is Good

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My brother Tod and I were talking the other day about certain authors we know who burst onto the scene with a great book and have been replicating that same novel ever since with ever-worsening results.  It’s a dangerous rut for writers to get into, as bestselling author Tess Gerritsen points out.

Selling a book is just the first step in your career as a writer.  Look
at all the first-time novelists who later vanished from the publishing
world.  They discovered a very painful truth: to make a career in this
field, you’ll have to do a lot more than just sell one book[…]

If the books you’re writing aren’t finding an
audience, maybe it’s time to write a different kind of book.  In my
case, I first moved from romance to thrillers.  I loved writing
romance, but I just couldn’t write fast enough to make a living at it.
Writing for Harlequin was fun and satisfying, and I loved the genre,
but when each book was only earning out around $12,000, I knew I’d
never send my kids to college on my earnings as a writer.  As it turned
out, I had a great idea for a medical thriller (HARVEST), which was my
debut novel on the New York Times list.

But four books later, I could see that my medical thriller sales
were flat, and even starting to decline.  By then I had a crime
thriller in mind, one that I couldn’t wait to write.  With THE SURGEON,
I launched the Jane Rizzoli series.  And my sales have increased since
then.

If Harlan Coben had stuck with his Myron Bolitar books instead of shifting to standalone thrillers, would he be the international success that he is now? And if Michael Connelly, Ed McBain, Robert B. Parker, Richard Stark, Laura Lippman, Lawrence Block and Robert Crais hadn’t stepped away from their long-running series to write other books (and other series), would their writing have remained as fresh? I don’ t think so. I believe one of the reasons they’ve been so successful is because they’ve branched out into other areas  (of course, there’s always folks like Sue Grafton, Lee Child, Barry Eisler, and Ian Rankin who do just fine without leaving the confines of their series).

It’s why I’m glad I had the opportunity the last couple of years to alternate between writing the DIAGNOSIS MURDER and MONK books…they are two very different kinds of writing, even though they are both mystery series. DM is written in third person and is essentially a drama. MONK is written in first person and is primarily a comedy. 

Shifting between genres is also one of the pleasures of screenwriting. I’ve written, for instance, about lifeguards (Baywatch), private detectives (Spenser For Hire, Monk), werewolves (She Wolf of London), clever dolphins (Flipper), cops (Hunter), FBI agents (Missing), cross-dressing comics (Dame Edna), and just this week I wrote a pilot about urban street racing.

I like to think that the challenge of writing in different genres, characters and voices — and doing so in books and TV — keeps me and my writing fresh.

(updated 1.1.07)

They’re Watching

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You never know who is reading your blog. I was stunned when my post about Dean Koontz’s racist rant at Men of Mystery showed up as a story in the Los Angeles Times. And I’m sure my friend Ken Levine felt the same way when the Los Angeles Times yesterday used some of his blog posts  as the basis for a story on comedy writers who hate STUDIO 60 ON THE SUNSET STRIP.

Take Ken Levine, a seasoned writer who has worked on "Frasier,"
"Cheers" and "The Simpsons." His blog, By Ken Levine, has become the
hub of an online community of viewers who loathe "Studio 60," thanks to
his running commentary on the first several episodes.

"After watching Episode 2 of ‘Studio 60’ I must let you in on a little
secret. People in television, trust me, are not that smart," he wrote.
"And they keep talking about how unbelievably talented that Harriet
[Sarah Paulson] is. Have you seen evidence of it yet? I haven’t. But
then again, I’m not that smart."

One week later he was less forgiving, writing, " ‘Studio 60’ is like
the Rand Corporation Think Tank doing a late night sketch show."

It’s easy to forget that blogging is publishing, and that what you post can have a life beyond the blog. It’s made me slightly more cautious about what I say here…but not much.

The Spot for Crime

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Crime novel bloggers across the net are joining together today to give a big thank you to Graham Powell for creating the Crimespot blogreader…which collects the latest postings from a wide assortment of mystery blogs. It’s my first blog stop of the day…and it should be yours, too.

Ironside with a Laugh Track

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Ken Levine is out of town, so he’s handed over his wonderful blog to Emmy-winning writer/producer Peter Casey, who talks today about the creation of his hit sitcom FRASIER.

We frankly feared that anything we created for Frasier would pale in
comparison to CHEERS. Kelsey wasn’t particularly interested in
continuing the character of Frasier either, so we came up with a new
concept. Kelsey would play this very high-brow, eccentric
multi-millionaire publisher (think Malcom Forbes) in New York who was
paralyzed from the waist down in a motorcycle accident. He would run
his publishing empire from his bed in his fabulous Manhattan penthouse.
His live-in nurse would be a very street smart, dedicated Hispanic
woman (we pictured Rosie Perez) who would be a thorn in his side, but
bring out the humanity in him.
Kelsey liked it, Paramount hated it.

This anecdote reminds me of something a producer once told me (was it Steve Cannell? Michael Gleason? Fred Silverman? Roy Huggins? I can’t remember). He said that veteran drama series stars love coming up with series concepts for themselves where all they have to do is sit somewhere and everybody comes to them. It began, he said, with Raymond Burr and "Ironside." The producer said that after "Ironside," every drama star wanted his gig. I believe the producer said that it was one of the things that killed "Bret Maverick" — after "Rockford Files," James Garner didn’t want to have to run around any more. He wanted the stories to come to him, preferrably while he was sitting on a soundstage at a poker table. Which is why Maverick settled down in a small town on the Warner Brothers backlot instead of roaming the west…

Uh-oh Guyot

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Paul Guyot is blogging again. And for this is what he believes:

I believe in God.
I believe Roy Buchanan was the greatest guitarist who ever lived.
I believe Emmitt Smith is the most overrated player in NFL history.
I
believe an author who writes a great cozy about a crime-solving cat is
every bit as good a writer as an author who writes a great hard-boiled
story filled with graphic sex, violence and language.
I believe Sheldon Turner is going to be the next Brian Helgeland.
I believe Floyd Landis is innocent and the American media has turned its back on him.
I believe most parents refuse to admit they don’t spend enough time with their kids.
I believe Jay-Tee is truly oblivious to how good a writer she is.
I believe Formula 1 drivers are overrated and NASCAR drivers are
underrated, but that F1 drivers are better drivers than the NASCAR
wheelmen.
I believe it’s fine to drink red wine with fish.
I believe the best writing being done right now in Hollywood is for television, and not the movies.
I believe people who blog about themselves and what they believe are generally boring and really have nothing to say.

Lazy Ass

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Annpic
Every time I think I’m working too hard, I read a blog post like this from Elizabeth Lowell that makes me feel like a lazy ass by comparison. Look how many books she’s written. She could fill the shelves of a small bookstore by herself…and she writes under so many names, no one would know the stock came from just one author.

The Desperate and the Impatient

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All aspiring writers are desperate to get into print. That’s a given. I certainly was, but that was before the advent of  POD vanity presses, which prey on the "I-want-it-now" impatience that afflicts so many aspiring writers these days. These aspiring writers just don’t want to invest the time and effort that’s a necessary part of shaping their voice, their skills and their careers. Bestselling Tess Gerritsen writes about that today:

What makes a new writer today think he should be immune to that
desperation I felt?  What makes him think this is SUPPOSED to be easy?
What makes him think his very first book is going to get published — or
deserves to get published?

I’ve lost count of how many crappy novels I wrote before I got my break. Tess wrote three unpublished books before she finally sold her fourth. And she knows another writer who wrote seven books before finally selling her eighth.

Think of her desperation, her
hunger, to be published.  It had to be there, driving her, or she would
have just given up.  But she just kept going and wrote manuscript #8. And it sold. Think about that — writing seven books that don’t sell.  Would you
have the persistence to start writing #8?  Do you accept the fact that,
yes, there’s an apprenticeship involved in being a writer, a period of
training that you will be forced to undergo before you finally
understand what the craft is all about?

No, it isn’t easy to get accepted by a publisher, and get paid for
your work.  It’s a lot easier to whip out the checkbook and pay a
vanity press to print your manuscript.

That’s the real danger posed by these vanity presses — besides the emptying of a gullible writer’s bank account. The self-publishing companies are also robbing the writer of the experience that’s required to become a successful writer (and part of that is learning to deal with, and learn from, rejection).  Too many aspiring writers fall for what appears to be  "the easy way" — when, in fact, it’s not — rather than
accept the fact that their books are unpublishable and that they have a lot more work to do on their writing.  They don’t want to work. They want a book now. Or at least the illusion of one. But it’s a career-sabotaging move…not to mention stupid and expensive.

And if you can just pay to get published, where’s the incentive to hone
your craft, to study your own work with a critical eye, to polish and
polish some more?  Where’s the incentive to write books number seven
and eight and nine if each one is just going to mean you have to whip
out that old checkbook again to pay to see yourself in print?

There isn’t any. Sure, there are a handful of people who have found a measure of success self-publishing, but for the vast majority it is a financial sink-hole and a self-destructive mistake.

UPDATE 11-26-2006: Author Mat Johnson blogs about how the lure of vanity presses is ruining African-American fiction.

If I had hit my wall just three, or even two years later, all of those
self-publishing options would have been available to me. As desperate
as I was, I don’t know if I would have said no to the idea. I don’t
think I would have known to. At the time I was working on that book, I
actually considered it good enough to be published. I might have jumped
at any opportunity not to take "No" for an answer.

[…]I saw a generation of black writers fall into this
trap, authors that could have been original voices that added to the
canon, who instead became literary canon fodder. They went pop, blew
up, and then almost instantly started vanishing, their worth dwindling
with their sales.

Sadly, instead of working actively on getting better, many of this crew instead try to falsely justify the merit of their work.

32 Flavors of Awesome

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Some yahooer sent me this link to a Live Journal blog post that mentions yours truly. I don’t know about you, but I think it was my brother Tod who sent it to me:

Also, totally love Tod Goldberg. He’s the brother of Lee Goldberg,
known for throwing periodic hissy fits over the existence of fanfic.
But while Lee is an asshat, Tod is a brilliant writer. His blog
is wonderful, and his short-story collection "Simplify" is . . . umm,
lots of good things that I am not qualified to elaborate on. I am
usually not a fan of straight fiction, because I hate reading about
normal people doing normal things, but Tod Goldberg is 32 flavours of
awesome.

She’s right… I am an asshat and Tod is a brilliant writer. But I’m thinner and have a lot less body hair.