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Sex Sex Sex

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Sex_1Novelist Tess Gerritsen talks about the difficulties of writing sex. She offers a lot of great advice, but the bottom line is:

Ask yourself, as a writer, what your love scene is supposed to accomplish. If
it’s just to show that your hero is a normal guy having sex, that’s about as
interesting as watching him eat bologna sandwiches. No, the best sex scenes are
those that accomplish something far more profound. They offer us a deeper
understanding of character, or show us emotional awakening or healing.

I agree with her. She was brave enough to share an example from one of her books to prove her point, so I will, too. This one comes from MAN WITH THE IRON-ON BADGE:

I guess
something I learned from “Mannix” was true. Being a private eye really is an
aphrodisiac to women. Carol had never attacked me like that before.

I’m afraid the surprise and excitement were too much, because I came in about three minutes. But I
don’t think Carol minded; it calmed me down and allowed me to concentrate real
hard on getting her off. And believe me, it took my complete attention.
Pleasing a woman, especially Carol, isn’t easy and with me, at least, there’s a
lot of potential for embarrassment and humiliation.

She rewarded me for all
my hard work with a nice, squealing, writhing orgasm that nearly broke my nose
on her pubic bone, but I didn’t mind. I even jumped in, literally, to enjoy the
last few squeals of it with her.

It was so dark, and things happened so fast, she never saw my cuts and bruises, so she mistook my
occasional groans of pain for pleasure.

Carol fell right to sleep afterwards.

Between the sex, the pain, and the things on my mind, I didn’t get as much sleep as I would have
liked. But I get laid so rarely, I’m willing to sacrifice just about anything
for it, especially sleep, when I usually dream about having sex anyway.

While the scene is explicit, more by implication than actual description,  it’s not about the choreography or body parts. It’s about attitude and character — or, at least, I hope it is. To me, that’s how you get around the pitfalls of writing the sex scene, unless the point of the scene is to arouse the reader.

By the way, I’ve written my share of awful sex scenes. I honed my "craft" in college. My girlfriend was an editorial assistant at Playgirl and she got me a gig writing sexually-explicit  "Letters to the Editor" for the grand sum of $25-a-letter (Gasp! You didn’t know they were fake? You probably think Penthouse letters are real, too).  I actually had a lot of fun writing them (often in class, which got me some strange looks from the people around me)  and it helped me learn to write in different voices for different characters. Plus the letters got my girlfriend all excited, but that’s another story…

Blog Suicide?

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A few days ago, author Sandra Scoppettone  blogged about her editor, Joe Blades, leaving Ballantine and her anxieties about it.  This prompted an anonymous commenter to warn her that her very candid blog posts could be damaging to her career. Sandra angrily fired back. Soon, the ugly little argument spilled over to  other   blogs. Now Galleycat has picked up on the catfight, so-to-speak, and it will mushroom from there…

Unfortunately, it illustrates that even someone who’s been in the
business as long as Scoppettone has (and whose influence on two
different genres continues to be felt) can sometimes let things go all
too haywire. And it further illustrates the power of blogging in the
publishing world — because you never know who’ll be out there reading,
passing judgment, and jumping to conclusions.

The blog skirmish brings up an interesting issue — how honest should you be on your blog? I have to admit I cringed a bit at some of Sandra’s posts, and at my friend Paul Guyot’s surprising candor about the ups-and-downs of his pilot experience, and at my cousin regularly trashing her employer. Sure, it makes good reading and can be cathartic for the author  — but is it self-destructive? I don’t know. I just know I don’t want to find out for myself.

I’ve been very careful here not to talk about the shows I am working on (except to hype them when they air), or the executives and producers I am working with (or hope to work with), or authors/writers I work and socialize with (unless it is to hype their latest work).  I  rarely name individual producers, writers, editors or executives. I talk in general terms, for the most part, or about personal experiences that are safely in the past. 

I’m clearly not shy about expressing my opinion — but I’m careful about it. I don’t hesitate to criticize fanfiction, self-publishing scams, the RWA, or people searching the Internet for Lindsay Lohan’s nipples  — those are safe. But, for example,  you won’t see me trashing a producer, a studio, a network, or a major publishing company.

I think some bloggers forget that they aren’t writing a private diary — it’s like a column in a newspaper. You have no idea who is reading it or how your words are being passed around. Blogging is fun, but my career is far more important.

The Writing Adventure

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Poseidon_poster_2_2In both Paul Gallico’s original novel THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE and Irwin Allen’s movie version, the doomed ocean liner was tipped upside down by a freak tidal wave. In the recent NBC mini-series remake, the ocean liner was tipped over by terrorist bombs. Reviewers weren’t kind to the mini-series and criticized what they seemed to think was an unnecessary change. Screenwriter Bryce Zabel, who wrote the mini-series, explains on his lively blog the creative reasons for substituting terrorists for the tidal wave:

Poseidon purists (or critics looking for something to criticize)
seemed to feel that, somehow, the freak tidal wave from the 1969 book or the
1972 film should have sufficed. They got their life jackets in a bunch over the
NBC version where it’s a terrorist attack in which only one of two explosive
charges detonates and that causes an imbalance in the ship’s metacentric height
and capsizes it.

The reason for making the choice to add a terrorist sub-plot is really pretty
simple. Understand that I was writing a four-hour mini-series version (which
later was edited down to three hours for NBC), not a two-hour feature version.
In a movie theater, the audience has already paid admission and, generally
speaking, is going to stick through the entire film, especially a
Poseidon, knowing the boat’s going belly up eventually. Television is
different. People have their hands on the remote practically all the time and if
something isn’t happening right now, they can, and will, change. This reality
effectively means that simply waiting for an inevitable tidal wave isn’t a
sufficient stake in the TV version: the characters can’t behave differently
because, after all, they don’t know it’s coming.

I didn’t see the mini-series, so I can’t say whether the changes worked or not — but as a writer, I can certainly understand why he felt he had to do something to amp-up the pre-disaster conflict. That said,  THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE is a disaster movie classic — an icon of genre. Everybody knows it’s about a boat tipped over by a tidal wave, so perhaps changing the central concept of the story wasn’t the right choice. 

Abandonment Issues

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Galleycat reports that editor Joe Blades is leaving Ballantine — and publishing.

Why? Though Blades hadn’t responded to email queries as of this writing, burnout
seems to be the biggest issue, according to a recent post by
one of his authors. Though Blades isn’t certain what his next move will be,
it won’t have anything to do with the publishing world.

Blades was especially known for editing mystery and crime fiction, and his
author list included Anne Perry, Sandra Scoppettone, Terrill Lee Lankford,
Rochelle Krich, Mary Logue, Gillian Roberts and William Bernhardt. It remains to
be seen how many of these folks will be kept on by Random House, but Blades will
be meeting with various RH brass to discuss which editors get custody of which
authors.

It’s very scary when your editor, often your biggest champion at the publishing house, leaves. When one of my editors left, on the eve of publication of my non-fiction book,  any interest in  me or the book within the company just vanished… the book was orphaned. There was no effort made by the sales force to sell the book or by the PR department to promote it.  Sandra Scoppettone, one of Blades’ authors, is worried this might happen to her:

What worries me is the new book, Too Darn Hot, which will be published in June. 
Even if a new contract hadn’t come my way, this editor would’ve still been on
top of things and moved the book as much as possible.  As the book is finished
and there’s nothing for a new editor to do on it, it’ll lie there like a lox. 
Unless there’s a new contract and then it’ll be different.  At the moment my
book is an orphan.

 

I don’t blame her. I’d be worried, too. On the other hand, losing an editor doesn’t always mean doom for his list of  authors.  I’ve been extraordinarily lucky at Penguin/Putnam/NAL on the DIAGNOSIS MURDER and MONK books. I’m on my third editor so far  (the first was downsized out of a job, the other left for a richer offer) and they’ve all been wonderful… supportive, enthusiastic, and totally committed to the books.

Streaming Goldbergs

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Have you ever heard Sammy Davis Jr. sing the theme for HAWAII FIVE-O? Do you swoon when Chuck Norris sings "The Eyes of a Ranger?" Well, you’re in for a treat. You can revel in the vocal stylings of  Sammy and Chuck, among others,  as well as the wit and wisdom of the brothers Goldberg over at Pinky’s Paperhaus. You can stream the complete two hour interview and musical extravaganza or you can hear a 15-minute podcast version with all our really stupid comments and our worst musical selections edited out.

Condensing

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Author Lewis Perdue is condensing his 347 different blogs into just three ( I don’t now how he can even do that — I have a hard enough time maintaining just one). His new, main blog is The Crock Pot. He’s keeping his DA VINCI CODE lawsuit blog and his Dan Brown blog as standalones. The inaugural Crock Pot post is about the Author’s Guild lawsuit against Google.  Lew is one of the few authors to come out publicly in favor of Google scanning books without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holders.

From all the misleading sturm, drang und hype coming from the plaintiffs,
you’d think that Google was planning to out-pirate Johnny Depp by stealing every
published word on the planet and posting it on a Kazaa or BitTorrent
file-sharing service.

But … no.

Google is being sued for having
the good sense to scan books in order to make them searchable online much as
Amazon has done. The books would then be available for purchase with appropriate
payments to copyright holders.

Think back a little. When Amazon made books searchable, the industry freaked
out, afraid of a new idea that had dropped from the sky like a Coke bottle in
the African bush. I thought it was a good idea then and a better one now. My
books are searchable on Amazon and, if anything, it has helped sales. I’ve used
the Amazon searches for research and ended up buying books I would never have
considered otherwise.

 

The Runaway Train

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Corey Miller, a story editor on CSI: MIAMI, has an excellent post on his CBS blog this week about the pressures of series production.

Our shooting schedule lasts ten months out of the year. The writers
work eleven. The writers spend the month of June spitballing stories,
thinking about possible character arcs, and honing in on breaking the
first few episodes. We try to get as ahead as we can during this
period, because once shooting starts, there’s no turning back. We have
to have a new script completed every eight working days until the end
of the season. And we’re doing twenty-five.

As far as when the episodes air in relation to when they were shot, there is no pat
answer. It really depends on a number of things. This season, we began
filming our first episode on July 18. But it didn’t air until September
19. So there were two months in between. The episode that I’m doing
that shoots on December 7th is tentatively scheduled to air on January
30th. So you can see how that window has shrunk a bit, the deeper we
get into the season.

It’s all due to that pesky train, because once it is in motion, it’s a runaway.

He uses the runaway train metaphor and for good reason.  When I’m producing a series, I inevitably have the nightmare that I’m on a train, shoveling scripts into the boiler to keep the engine going…and that I just can’t keep up.

ALIAS Axed

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Thanksgiving was death day in TV land.  TVSquad reports that ALIAS has been cancelled.

UPDATE: USA Today confirms the news. The series will end with a "big finish" in May.

"Alias is not going to wind down as it comes to an
end, it’s going to rev up, and we’re going to make it the event it deserves to
be," ABC Entertainment President Stephen McPherson said in a statement.