#1 New York Times Bestselling Author & TV Producer
Writer Kristine Kathryn Rusch talks about tie-in writing and the publishing biz in an interesting interview with SciFi.com. Along the way, she had this to say about self-publishing:
Vanity presses are called "vanity" presses for a reason. They appeal
to the writer’s vanity, not the writer’s sanity. Stay away if you want
to be a serious writer.
Good advice!
Author Jeff Mariotte talks on his Amazon blog about the unique obstacles he faced writing the first original LAS VEGAS series tie-in novel. He worked up an outline, turned it into the show’s creator/ep Gary Scott Thompson, and went off on a road trip with his family before hunkering down to write:
During that
time, Gary had a new idea. Since I wasn’t checking e-mail every day on
the road, I missed an e-mail scheduling a new conference call. Gary
kindly agreed to yet another to make up for the one I missed, and he
told me his new idea. At the end of Season Two, the Montecito Hotel
and Casino was blown up. Season Three picked up six months later,
during which time a new one had been built. All the characters had
been scattered to the winds, relationships had ended or changed, and
one character, Nessa Holt, wasn’t returning. Gary wanted the show to
pick up with the opening of the new Montecito, and didn’t want to have
to fill in the missing six months on the air. So he wanted the novel
to do that, to tell fans where Nessa went, what happened between Danny
and Jenny, how the new Montecito was built so quickly, etc.
In many ways, I bet this was a creative blessing for Jeff. It allowed Jeff to break new ground creatively with the characters and yet, at the same time, still remain true to the show. It will be a hard act to follow for his second LAS VEGAS book…assuming another calamity doesn’t befall the characters in this season’s finale.
You never outgrow being a TV geek. I’m proof of that. But you can’t even shake it off if you become an Emmy-winning producer of a cult hit series like, say, LOST. My friend Javi is proof of that.
it’s no secret that one of my favorite shows is “gilmore girls” (the
third spoke in my triumvirate of televisual greatness along with
galactica and 24) – so imagine my surprise when – during a quick break
from the mountain of work under which i currently find myself (remember
hulk in the secret wars – that’s me right now) – i happened upon an
instance, in a three-week-old episode, of lorelai gilmore saying
“frakking celine dion!”i must have tivo-d that moment about a dozen times.
seriously,
that may have been the most transcendent vignette of television i have
experienced in recent memory (although the recent actions of secretary
of state james heller on 24 were pretty awesome – and reminiscent of
the famous punchline “you’re not gonna make a canoe out of me!”). it
is also as decisive an acknowledgment of galactica’s newfound hipness
as you are likely to find. to have a character in a show that is as
relentlessly incompatible with most of the conventions of genre as
“gilmore girls” acknowledge ron moore’s reimagining of glenn larson’s
contribution to the vernacular is – to quote another sci-fi icon
“fantastic.”
I’d pity Javi if I wasn’t just as bad as he is. For me, the high point of MISSION IMPOSSIBLE III was hearing musical cues from the TV show in the score.
Author HelenKay Dimon pointed me to this article that claims romance readers have a lot more sex.
Experts agree that readers of romance novels find it easier to “get in the mood” and on average, even have sex with their partners more often. Psychology Today
states that women who read romance novels make love with their partners
74% more often than women who don’t. Why? Because, according to a
scientific study conducted by Harold Leitenberg of the The Journal of Sex Research and Psychological Bulletin,
when women fantasize frequently (as they do when they read romance
novels), they have sex more often, have more fun in bed, and engage in
a wider variety of erotic activities.
I’m told DIAGNOSIS MURDER books have the same effect on women.
Bookslut pointed me to an interesting article in The Guardian on movie posters as cover art.
"It’s a no-brainer. You’d be crazy not to do it," says Marcella
Edwards, senior commissioning editor at Penguin Classics. The sales
surges that come with a film or TV tie-in book cover are irrefutable.[…]The film or TV tie-in cover, which generally lasts for around three
months (the life of the film, and sometimes the DVD), often running
alongside the original paperback design, is an ever-growing trend in
publishing. "It’s happening more and more often," says Edwards.
"Publishers have got wiser. You’d be stupid if you didn’t do it."[…]Film tie-in covers might be glossy and glittering and force a surge in
sales, but they are truly the Ivana Trumps of the book jacket world.
Garrison Keillor is tired of writers who whine about how hard it is to write:
It’s the
purest form of arrogance: Lest you don’t notice what a brilliant artist I am,
let me tell you how I agonize over my work. To which I say: Get a job. Try
teaching eighth-grade English, five classes a day, 35 kids in a class, from
September to June, and then tell us about suffering.The fact
of the matter is that the people who struggle most with writing are drunks.
They get hammered at night and in the morning their heads are full of pain and
adverbs. Writing is hard for them, but so would golf be, or planting alfalfa,
or assembling parts in a factory.The
biggest whiners are the writers who get prizes and fellowships for writing
stuff that’s painful to read, and so they accumulate long résumés
and few readers and wind up teaching in universities where they inflict their
gloomy pretensions on the young. Writers who write for a living don’t complain
about the difficulty of it. It does nothing for the reader to know you went
through 14 drafts of a book, so why mention it?
The news that Jeri Ryan, who played the Busty Borg on STAR TREK VOYAGER, will be guest-starring on the two-hour season finale of BOSTON LEGAL is going to send Trekkies into a galatic tizzy. Why? Because the episode represents a cross-over rift in the casting time/space continuum between three different STAR TREK series. Jeri and her Borg boobs will be sharing the screen with William Shatner
(STAR TREK) and Rene Auberjonois (a regular on DEEP SPACE NINE and a guest-star in one STAR TREK movie).
It’s just the kind of stunt-casting we were famous for on DIAGNOSIS MURDER. Obviously, someone on BOSTON LEGAL is a TV geek after my own heart. It was only a few months ago that they paired Shatner up with his TJ HOOKER co-star Heather Locklear. I kept waiting for James Darren to show up.
If BOSTON LEGAL comes back next season, I wouldn’t be surprised if Leonard Nimoy, Walter Koenig, George Takei, Joe Regalbuto, Faith Ford, and Grant Shaud appear in episodes…
Author John Barlow writes for Slate about the agony of writing a book for 17th Street Productions, the book packager behind Kaavya Viswanathan’s controversial novel and a number of other hit teen novels.
However, having never lived in the United States, I had no idea about what
was permissible in terms of cussing, especially in kids’ fiction. We had agreed,
previously, that I would write the thing as naturally as I could, and the people
at 17th Street would filter out the unacceptable elements. So, I did just that,
leaving in the text a modest fistful of shits, craps, a
bastard, and several fucks. I even told them so when I mailed
the finished text. Did they filter? Did they read? No; they gave the manuscript
straight to the 8-year-old son of the company president. Little Timmy saw a
shit and a fuck. He cried. He read the word bastard
and needed counseling. It was a catastrophe.My 80,000 words were dead words. A book that I love never got published. Or
even edited. Or read by a single kid (apart from Timmy). I blew it. My chance of
Harry Potterdom, of country homes, of cars that start every time, of book
signings where enough people come to form an actual line … all down the drain.
However, it was a great way to learn that you can’t write a book by committee,
and to be paid 10 grand to learn it. So, thank you Sweet Valley boys. It was
great fun, really.
I know I’m supposed to read this and side with the author…but, I have to say, my sympathies are with the book packager. Maybe because I’ve written so many television shows (where I get input from a thousand people) and work-for-hire tie-in novels. Maybe because I’m a complete sell-out and a talentless hack. Whatever the reason, this guy strikes me as an unprofessional, self-destructive, whiny putz. He couldn’t bring himself to do some minimal preparation like, oh, actually read some other books from the packager…or other books in the same genre. He was an artist. He was following his muse instead of doing the job he was hired to do.
Barlow implies in his article that the disasterous experience is all his (then) agent’s fault for getting him into a deal with a bunch of talentless suits. But the truth is that the fault is entirely his own. What killed the deal wasn’t the class between his high, artistic standards and their gutlessness and lack of taste. What killed it was Barlow’s ego, laziness and astonishing lack of professionalism.
Ken Levine has a terrific post today on the importance of "room chemistry" in putting together a writing staff.
When putting a writing staff together I always think of the great line
from either Bob Schiller or Bob Weiskopf – what six people would you
like to be stuck in a Volkswagon with driving across the country?
Besides talent, so much depends on chemistry because you spend so much
time together in close quarters under enormous pressure. By the end of
the season even the closest staff starts getting on each other’s
nerves. It’s like, take a fifty year marriage and compress it into
eight months.
He is so right. Writing talent is only one part of what gets you hired on staff — just as important is how you will mix with the other writer and whether you’re someone the showrunner will enjoy hanging out with. There’s a freelancer we used a few times who was great at crafting stories and turning in a solid first draft — but in a room he was this incredible blackhole that sucked the soul right out of you. Ten minutes with him felt like ten decades… which is why he’s never ended up getting on a writing staff despite a long list of freelance credits.
Ken catalogs some of the typical writing room personalities (Dr. No, Mr. Let’s-Go-Back, etc.) and he’s spot-on. He misses a couple, like "Mr. Out-of-Sync," the writer who is never, ever, in step with the flow of the room or the direction of the story — his suggestions, his jokes, his clues, etc. never fit. They aren’t bad suggestions, they just aren’t right for the way the story or scene is flowing. It’s like he’s doing a different episode or, worse, an entirely different series. The problem is, whenever he pitches one of his out-of-sync ideas, it knocks everyone off track (though, to be fair, some times when explaining to Mr. Out-of-Sync why his suggestion is so so wrong, it does lead us to a clever solution).
Another one is Mr. Cliche — every one of his suggestions is so painfully familiar, so incredibly over-done, so lazy, that you just want to leap across the room and strangle him (which, in itself, is a cliche).
Mr. Cliche’s close cousin in the writing room is Mr. Steal From the Movie I Saw Last Night. In one case, Mr. Steal From the Movie I Saw Last Night was the showrunner. He mapped out the season on the wall with index cards. Each index card referenced a recent or classic movie. For instance, let’s say the show was called DEFECATOR. The cards read like this: "Defecator’s Dirty Dozen," "Defecator’s Deliverance," "The Defecator’s Million Dollar Baby," "Brokeback Defecator," etc.
Of course, I’m none of those people. Then again, I’m sure Mr. Out-of-Sync thinks the same thing…and my constant fear is that he is me.
Screenwriter John August pleads with writers to take a vow to stop having characters crawl around in air vents. Why? Because it’s stupid, lazy, unrealistic… AND STUPID. I’ve even seen people in movies crawl through the airvents in a house. So I applaud John for waging war against this inane cliche:
Here’s what I’m proposing: The Screenwriter’s Vow of Air Vent Chastity.
I, John August, hereby swear that I shall never place a
character inside an air duct, ventilation shaft, or any other euphemism
for a building system designed to move air around.One day, I’d love to win an Oscar. An Emmy. A Tony Award. But if all
I accomplished in my screenwriting life were reducing the number of
times characters climbed through air vents, I’d consider my work
successful.