On Other Blogs

Hot Sex and Gory Violence

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Graham at My Boog Pages has unearthed my sleazy past of Hot Sex and Gory Violence,  which I wrote about in Newsweek.

[The article]  detailed Lee’s work on a timelessly classic men’s adventure series, .357 Vigilante." I’d only read a few lines when I was shocked to realize that I had read this piece when it came out.  21 years ago.

Holy.
Fucking.
Shit.

I
was a big fan of the Mack Bolan, "The Executioner" series back then,
and when I stumbled across the article in a doctor’s office waiting
room I read it. At that time Lee was a disaffected college student who,
instead of partying or dating, spent his time writing about a man with
a large, loaded, concealed weapon.

At the time, I liked to think of myself as a man with a large, loaded, concealed weapon. Sometimes I still do.

The Bottom Line

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A reader alerted me to this "blowback" from my Hot Buttons post from last week. Vera, on her blog, thinks an interesting issue got lost in the 164 comments about fanfic the post generated.

He was reporting on a mystery writer’s knees-up and wrote some stuff
about controversial yet unspoken opinions among mystery writers such as
the inappropriately open membership of MWA (Mystery Writers of
America?) and how many mystery writers objected to fan fiction but were
too scared to ever say this to fans. What followed in comments was
mostly the expected back and forth between a reasonable pro-fan-fiction
writer and a crazy-arse anti-fan-fiction writer with some side comments
from other people.

But what interested me most of all was that no-one – NO-ONE – addressed
the issue of why the mystery writers weren’t going to bring the subject
up with fans they met at cons and signings and things. These pro
writers Lee references behave as though they believe that the people
who are writing the fan fiction are the people who buy their books, and
all the associated merchandise should they be so successful to justify
it, and that to alienate those fans is to kiss good-bye to income.  When it comes down to the line, it’s the bottom line.

So, what do you think?  Are authors afraid to speak their minds on controversial issues for fear of losing readers or awkward encounters with fans?

Don’t Hire This Spenser

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Bob Sassone reports over at TV Squad that Rykodisc is releasing the four, made-on-the-cheap-in-Canada SPENSER reunion movies  on DVD. Those crappy, flatly-directed, and exceedingly dull MOWs shouldn’t be mistaken for the underappreciated SPENSER FOR HIRE  series (and I’m not just saying that because I wrote for it).

Robert Urich and Avery Brooks were the perfect Spenser and Hawk,
the scripts were literate and intelligent, and the on
location filming in Boston added a lot of atmosphere and color. But
then the show was cancelled, and they decided to make these rather
so-so movies, and they don’t include Barbara Stock as Susan Silverman
(sorry again: Wendy Crewson and Barbara Williams just aren’t the same).
The good news? They aren’t the lame Joe Mantegna Spenser
flicks that A&E produced later, and it’s great to see Urich and
Avery together again. The bad news? It’s not the TV series.

I hope the TV series comes out on DVD soon and not just because I’d like pristine copies of my episodes. It was a very good PI series and seems to have dropped out of syndication a few years ago.

Unlike Bob Sassone, I actually liked Joe Mantegna as Spenser a lot (and I love his readings of the Parker novels on CD) …but he was teamed with lousy actors as Hawk and, once again, the movies were shot on the cheap in Toronto with bland Canadian actors. The scripts weren’t so hot, either.  I think if they’d cast Mantegna and Avery Brooks, and shot the movies in Boston, and hired better writers (like Bill Rabkin & me!), the movies might have worked…

Tom Selleck, who did a bang-up job playing Parker’s Jesse Stone on TV recently, would make a good Spenser. So would Robert Forster who, incidentally, does a great job reading the Jesse Stone novels on CD.

What is it about showers?

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A lot of important writing takes place in the shower. Take screenwriter Paul Guyot for instance.

So, my deadline is today. For the heist script. And I awake happy
and energized – knowing I have but two more scenes to right and I’m
done, on time.

Then in the shower, it hits me. A cavernous hole in my plot. In the
actual heist itself. A hole big enough that to repair it means a major
rewrite of about 30% of what I already have.

This happens to me all the time…and in the shower, too. What the hell is it about showers anyway?

On our first series staff job, the showrunner had a shower in his office and I
figured it was in case he ever had to pull an all-nighter on a script and had to freshen up in the morning.
It wasn’t until later I knew what it was really for… every day writing… finding plot
holes, crafting dialogue, and coming up with new stories.

I’ve got to get a shower in my office one of these days. I’d be a lot more productive.

Wasserman is Out

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LA Observed is reporting that Steve Wasserman has resigned as editor of the Book Review.

There since 1996, he informed his staff on Friday, after having a
discussion with editor John Carroll about his waning independence.
Wasserman has been known to be unhappy about the level of scrutiny he
receives from Deputy Managing Editor John Montorio and Associate Editor
of Features Tim Rutten. Some sources say the meeting with Carroll was
essentially an ultimatum, with Wasserman needing to hear that he would
be free to run the Book Review as he saw fit. He didn’t hear that, so
he resigned and reportedly has "irons in the fire," but no other job
yet.  His last day
officially is said to be May 13.

This will come as sad news to all those insomniacs who have been using the Book Review as a sure-fire sleeping pill for the last few years. Speaking of which, The Elegant Variation conducted another brilliant autopsy today of Sunday’s D.O.A. edition of the LATBR.

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Ah, the Eighties…

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Patrick Hynes reviews the first season boxed set of DYNASTY for the American Spectator.

Dynasty is commonly classified as a "primetime soap opera," but it is
indeed more like a cartoon. Most of the characters in this serial drama are
avowed Republicans. As such they are greedy, lustful, and hateful of minorities.
(Not much has changed there, eh?) The angry Middle Easterners look more like
bronzed beatniks. Most of them are played by extras with Italian last names.
And, of course, the rich lead shiftless lives of exaggerated extravagance while
the poorer characters are wholly sympathetic saints…

…In another 25 years or so there will be another television show in which all the
villains are greedy, lecherous Republicans and the heroes are simple folk with
progressive values. That much is certain, the entertainment business being what
it is. We can only hope that the story surrounding these stock characters is as
juicy as Dynasty was. And still is.

Patrick doesn’t have cable, and doesn’t watch TV at all, so he missed the docudrama DYNASTY: BEHIND THE SCENES this season.  Is it any coincidence the show came back in the midst of another oil crisis…and one trial after another of greedy CEOs? This time, though, the Middle Easterners were played by deeply tanned Canadians…

Marmaduchy

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I was doing research on the cartoon strip "Marmaduke," the huge dog, for my MONK novel (Monk loves Marmaduke), when I stumbled on this entertaining discussion of fandom at Websnark. He illustrates his ideas by describing what Marmaduke fandom might be like:

The Marmaduke fandom, on the other hand, spends a significant amount of time
on the Marmaduke forum (the Marmaduchy, let’s call it). They have many different
discussions on Marmaduke, and on things that have nothing to do with Marmaduke
— to the point that the Marmaduke forum moderators had to create a specific
topic for off-topic posts, and have to kick folks there whenever they stray.
They trade LJ icons and forum avatars based on Marmaduke art. They collect pithy
Marmaduke sayings. They affirm each other and their common love of Marmaduke,
and they find close friends through Marmaduke — friends that mean a lot to them
far beyond Marmaduke. This is what the Marmaduke Fandom has given them, and it
means everything to them.

The idea, for many of the Marmaducets and duchesses (so clever, those
Marmaduke fans — the guys naming themselves after currency and the girls making
a delightful play on Marmaduke’s name), is not so much the individual Marmaduke
strips themselves, but the zeitgeist of all that is Marmaduke. It’s the
attitude. It’s how Marmaduke makes them feel, and how much they can amplify that
feeling in the company of others. It can be terrifically empowering and it can
be terrifically satisfying. Right here, in this little community on the
internet, Marmaduke is the coolest thing around, and by showing your love for
Marmaduke, you’re cool too. And as for Marmaduke-creator Brad Anderson? The
Marmaduchy provides feedback and, more importantly, validation. It’s damn hard
to be a cartoonist — or a creator of any stripe. It takes effort and ego and
skill and talent, and you spend a huge amount of time wondering if anyone gives
a fuck. The Marmaduchy tells Anderson "yes. Yes, we give a fuck. We give many
fucks. In fact, if you want us to, several of us will in fact have sex with you
if you want, because you have brought so much pleasure to our lives that we
would dearly love to repay you."

The  dark side of fandom, he says, is Fan Entitlement, which he describes like this:

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Kill Bill, Kill Cinema

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I enjoyed KILL BILL.  Well, at least parts of it. Was it a great movie? No. Was it visually interesting and fun? Sure. That said, I think Ron Rosenbaum’s observations in The New York Observer are absolutely correct:

I don’t blame you if any or all of these made it impossible for you
to stay awake for the eyeball-squishing, that moment of cinematic
mastery, the true climax of the two-part, four-hour Tarantino
"masterpiece."

Still, it’s too bad if you missed it, because it was the perfect
epitome of and metaphor for what I would like to call "The Cinema of
Pretentious Stupidity." The eyeball-squishing represented the crushing
of vision by lead-footed pretension, the blinding of creativity by
referentiality. The idea that ceaseless tedious references to obscure
martial-arts movies known mainly by video-store geeks adds up to art.

I’ve heard so many defenses of Kill Bill that depend on the
apparently marvelous and unheard-of-before wonder of its
referentiality. Dude, just because you make a reference—or many
references—doesn’t make it meaningful or worth four hours of our time.

(Thanks to Ed Gorman for the heads-up on this!)

The Dollars and Cents of Writing

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Romance novelist Alison Kent shares the dollars and cents behind life as a professional writer, sharing with readers of her blog exactly what she was paid, in advances and royalties, for one of her books. And it works out to this:

$18,191.15 from June of 2000 when I sold to December 2003. Thirty
months. That’s approximately $3.50 an hour if you calculate from
contract date to the royalty statement I pulled. The book only took
three or four months to write, of course, but you get the picture.
Making a living in category can’t be done without MULTIPLE releases per
year.

It was brave and extra-ordinarily helpful for Alison to share this (braver and more helpful than I am) with aspiring writers. Just because you get published doesn’t mean you’ve got it made, that you’re swimming in money. Many of the mid-list authors I know have full-time day jobs…because they couldn’t possibliy live on what they make as authors.  Kudos to Alison for giving aspiring authors a glimpse of the real world (and also explaining why some authors must write more than one book a year)

Munch Makes TV History

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A TV milestone was quietly reached last week and only the TV fanatics at Inner Toob noticed. Richard Belzer showed up in the LAW AND ORDER/LAW AND ORDER: TRIAL BY JURY crossover on Friday, which makes his Detective Munch the most crossed-over character in TV history. Munch has now appeared in six different series — HOMICIDE, LAW AND ORDER, LAW & ORDER:SVU, THE BEAT (UPN), THE X-FILES (FOX) and now LAW AND ORDER: TRIAL BY JURY (he may even have appeared in animated form in THE SIMPSONS, but my memory may be playing tricks on me).

And it shouldn’t be long before he finally catches up to Sam Drucker of ‘Green Acres’, ‘Petticoat Junction’, ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’, and ‘Return To Green Acres’ fame. Without counting TV
shows that moved part and parcel from one network to another, Munch probably stands alone in another distinction – that of the most networks as the same character, with three.

I don’t know if the folks at Inner Toob are right…but even if they aren’t, what is it about Munch that makes him such a well-travel character in primetime? It’s not like he’s a particularly popular or beloved character…so what gives?