Current Affairs

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)

Coming this Fall on The SciFi Channel

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Thousands of turtles have  exploded in pond in Hamburg and scientists are baffled.

”It’s absolutely strange,” said Janne Kloepper, of the Hamburg-based Institute for Hygiene and the Environment. ”We have a really
unique story here in Hamburg. This phenomenon really doesn’t seem to have
appeared anywhere before.”

The toads at a pond in the upscale neighborhood of Altona
have been blowing up since the beginning of the month, filling up like balloons
until their stomachs suddenly burst.

”It looks like a scene from a science-fiction movie,” Werner Schmolnik, the
head of a local environment group, told the Hamburger Abendblatt daily. ‘

I’m sure it will be, very soon. Rob Lowe, call your agent!

Worst Opening Lines

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My buddy novelist Joel Goldman has sent me the top 10 winners of the Bulwer-Lytton Contest (aka Dark and Stormy Night contest) conducted by San Jose State University’s English department. Contestants compete to write the first line of a really bad novel.  Here are the winners:

10. "As a scientist, Throckmorton knew that if he were ever to break wind in the echo chamber, he would never hear the  end of it."

9. "Just beyond the Narrows, the river widens."

8. "With a curvaceous figure
that Venus would have envied, a tanned, unblemished oval face framed with
lustrous thick brown hair, deep azure-blue eyes fringed with long black lashes,
perfect teeth that vied for competition, and a small straight nose, Marilee had
a beauty that defied description."

7. "Andre, a simple peasant, had only
one thing on his mind as he crept along the East wall: ‘Andre creep.  Andre
creep.  Andre creep.’"

6. "Stanislaus Smedley, a man always on the
cutting edge of narcissism, was about to give his body and soul to a back alley
sex-change surgeon to become the woman he loved."

5. "Although Sarah had
an abnormal fear of mice, it did not keep her from eeking out a living at a
local pet store."

4. "Stanley looked quite bored and somewhat detached, but then
penguins often do."

3. "Like an overripe beefsteak tomato rimmed with
cottage cheese, the corpulent remains of Santa Claus lay dead on the hotel
floor."

2. "Mike Hardware was the kind of private eye who didn’t know the
meaning of the word ‘fear’; a man who could laugh in the face of danger and spit
in the eye of death– in short, a moron with suicidal
tendencies."

And the winner is. .
.

1. "The sun oozed over the horizon, shoved aside darkness,
crept along the greensward, and, with sickly fingers, pushed through the castle
window, revealing the pillaged princess, hand at throat, crown asunder, gaping
in frenzied horror at the sated, sodden amphibian lying beside her, disbelieving
the magnitude of the frog’s deception, screaming madly, ‘You
lied!’"

What is the Link Between Trekkies and Pedophilia?

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The LA Times reported on the ground-breaking efforts by Toronto police to track Internet kiddie porn, arrest the pedophiles and rescue the children being victimized. There was a startling fact buried in the article:  All but one of the hundreds of sex offenders they’ve arrested in the last four years has been a die-hard Trekkie.

Det.
Constable Warren Bulmer slips on a Klingon sash and shield they confiscated in a
recent raid. "It has something to do with a fantasy world where mutants and
monsters have power and where the usual rules don’t apply," Bulmer reflects.
"But beyond that, I can’t really explain it."

Star Wars: The TV Series

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Variety reports that the future of STAR WARS is in television. George Lucas is mounting two series…one animated and one live-action… that will continue the franchise.

The first is an 3-D animated half-hour that expands on the "Clone Wars"
miniseries of which Lucasfilm has done two cycles for Cartoon Network.

Series could take advantage of the new CGI animation facility company is
building in Singapore. News also jibes with recent buzz in the toon
biz
that has had Lucasfilm talking to high-profile talent, including "Aeon Flux"
creator Peter Chung, who is known to have consulted on a TV project for the
studio.

Lucas also revealed that the company is working on a spinoff live-action
series that would focus on some supporting characters who’ve been introduced in
the movies.

"We’re probably not going to start that for about a year," he said. "Like on
‘The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles,’ we want to write all the stories for the
entire first season all at once. I’m going to get it started and hire the
showrunners and all of that, then I’ll probably step away."

Both skeins would be set in the years between the end of "Revenge of the
Sith" and the beginning of the original "Star Wars," aka "Episode IV — A New
Hope."

NY Times on Self-Publishing

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At the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books today, I got into a spirited debate with a writer whose books have been published by PublishAmerica, which he thinks has been unfairly criticized by guys like me (ie authors published by real publishers). He feels that PublishAmerica is providing a worthwhile service to writers who can’t get through the door with New York publishers.

I argued that PublishAmerica is a vanity press that deceives wanna-be writers by claiming to be a traditional publisher…when it is far from it. Only later do these aspiring writers realize their book hasn’t been accepted by a "real" publisher at all… but by then it’s too late, they’ve already signed the company’s awful contract.  But the gentleman I spoke to argued that he hasn’t been taken at all, he knew what he was getting into and what mattered most to him was that it didn’t cost him a cent to get published. 

Whether PublishAmerica is a scam or not (and I think it is),  the bottom line is that their titles are dismissed by reviewers and booksellers as vanity press books — badly written, amateurish work that doesn’t meet even the most minimal professional standards.

The PublishAmerica scam was touched on only briefly in a New York Times piece today about the explosion in popularity of print-on-demand self-publishing. The article focused primarily on companies like iUniverse and Author House.

Self-published authors have essentially
become the bloggers of the publishing world, with approximately the same
anarchic range in quality that you find on the Web. Indeed, companies like
AuthorHouse and iUniverse say they will accept pretty much anything for
publication. ”That’s the big problem with self-publishing and the stigma
associated with it.”

Read more

Blogger Identity

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I bought my brother Tod a blog for his birthday. That was three months ago. When the Los Angeles Times mentioned Tod in an article this week, they referred to him as "blogger and screenwriter Tod Goldberg." What’s interesting to me is that in just 90 days, "blogger" has become  his identity (we’ll gloss over the fact they also called him a "screenwriter," even though he’s never sold a screenplay nor, to my knowledge, has he ever written one).  Not "acclaimed novelist," not "LA Times Award nominee," not even "creative writing instructor." No, now he’s "Blogger Tod Goldberg."

How long do you have to be running a blog before it becomes you?  Is 90 days… or less… all it really takes before the mere fact that you have a blog eclipses your professional accomplishments and every other aspect of your public image?

Am I now "blogger Lee Goldberg?" Or am I still "TV writer and author Lee Goldberg?"

My Day at the Bookfest

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I love the LA Times Festival of Books. So many bookstores, so many panels, so many people… so many books to buy.

Today I snagged signed first editions of Ian McEwan’s SATURDAY, Meg Wolitzer’s THE POSITION , Jonathan Safran Foer’s EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE,  Susanna Clarke’s JONATHAN STRANGE,  and Caldwell & Thompson’s RULE OF FOUR, and I got a couple of my old Kinsey Milhone books signed by Sue Grafton. I chatted with Eoin Colfer, T. Jefferson Parker, Kem Nunn, Roger Simon, Harley Jane Kozak, Scott Frost, Denise Hamilton, DP Lyle, Joanne Fluke,  Jim Fusilli, Dick Lochte, Tom Nolan and Mystery Dawg blogger Aldo Calcagno, among others.

I also bought a bunch of architecture and "L.A." books … including tomes on Albert Frey and Richard Neutra. And for my daughter Maddie, I got all the  ARTREMIS FOWL books, signed to her by the author.

Tomorrow, another day, more dents in the credit card…

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?

Pax Goes Info

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Variety reports that PAX is giving up on original programming and going back to being an infomercial network. This news is sure to rile up the fans of one of the worst-titled shows in TV history: SUE THOMAS: F.B.EYE, the adventures of a deaf FBI agent who reads lips and her hearing-ear wonderdog Levi.

03fb_eye1300The show was shot in Toronto and our casting director on MISSING was always touting actors who  delivered " powerful" or "unforgettable"  performances on SUE THOMAS: F.B.EYE like it was the pinnacle of Canadian drama.  The scary thing is, it probably was.

(Click on the photo for a larger image…and then ask yourself: Why does an FBI dog need a photo ID? Could you really tell the difference between the face of one Golden Retriever and another? And if the pooch needs a photo ID, why doesn’t she?).