Current Affairs

Foul Language

by

My sister-in-law Wendy wonders on her blog why  romance writers, and readers, have such a hard time with people using cuss words.

So often, romances have a sanitized vibe to them. As though they have been scrubbed clean for the protection of the reader. Well, you know what? My ‘virgin’ eyes don’t need to be protected from foul words because I can cuss colorfully. My mother says I can make a sailor blush—and she’s been saying that since I was thirteen. I don’t buy into the theory that only the uneducated, who can’t stretch for word choice, pepper their speech with profanity. Everyone
I know, and I mean everyone, in my circle of family and friends went to
college and every single one of them cusses (some more liberally than
others). So why don’t characters in romances reflect this? Why don’t they speak like real people?

It’s not just in romances. You wouldn’t believe how many emails I got when someone said "shit" in the first  DIAGNOSIS MURDER book.  One profanity in the whole book and you’d think I’d spent ten pages describing a scene of bestiality…

Blurbs…the sequel

by

My friend Gregg Hurwitz talks about what it takes to get him to conside giving a book a blurb.  Number two on his list is that author has actually read Gregg’s stuff.

Nothing says
arrogance like an unpublished writer asking me to read his manuscript
who hasn’t bothered to read one of my books.

Even that won’t guarantee Gregg will give you a kudo.

I don’t care if it’s a social novel or a book of lesbian haiku, the first few pages better sing.

Which explains why he wouldn’t blurb my book of Jewish lesbian haiku ("Mazel Love"). I thought it was because my publisher put Dick Van Dyke’s picture on the cover of that book, too.

Martial Law

by

My friend Paul Guyot pointed me to Doughy White Guys, where the blogger praises the second season of Martial Law, which Bill Rabkin & I wrote and exec-produced. 

I miss that show with Arsenio Hall and the doughy Asian guy. Doughy Asian guys
rock. People who thought that show was foolish – see the thematic tie-in? –
didn’t get that it was a comic book. The writers were good, they knew what the
show was and more importantly what it wasn’t. Well, not the writers from the
first season. That first year was weak, the show wasn’t sure what it was
supposed to be yet.

It’s nice to know that someone besides my wife and my agent got what we were trying to do…

At Least One Guy is Reading POD Books

by

I found a blog dedicated to reviewing vanity press novels. That’s right, all that PublishAmerica, iUniverse, POD stuff.  And no, some cruel Judge didn’t order him to do it as "community service" to work off an indecent exposure conviction. So how can he endure it?

I expect nothing. And, in fact, I get
nothing the far majority of the time. But every now and then I stumble
across a winner, a book so compelling and well-written that I feel the
need to immediately call my friends and share. And the fruit, my
friends, is that much sweeter.

Writing for Dummies

by

This book has been out for a while, but I stumbled across it for the first time today while visiting

Romance_for_dummies

the blog Rubis Bleu.  Who knew writing romance was so easy? I’m starting mine today.  (Speaking of which, am I the only one for whom the phrase  "her heaving breasts" conjures images of breasts vomiting or throwing themselves overboard?)

Speaking of Rubis Blue, she posts an example of the kind of email an attentive man ought to leave his lover "the morning after."  To start with, just the notion of sending your lover a morning after email made me feel old. Email didn’t exist when I was dating. And if it did, it would have struck me as an awfully impersonal way of saying how special the previous night had been. Even so…on to her example:

"…and you make those incredibly arousing
whimpering sounds as your body shakes. Then you kiss me hard with this
overflowing passion pressing yourself against me. Especially if I start
out by teasing your lips first, just barely grazing them, flicking them
with my tongue, watching your arms straining against my hand as I hold
you down. Your eyes with that hungry, burning look in them. I felt how
hard your nipples were and how your body trembled. I just wanted to see
you. To slowly pull all of your clothes off. Watch your chest rise and
fall. To feel your thighs, your smooth skin, all the way up. Bite the
insides of your legs while feeling your hips rising under my hand. You
are beautiful. You taste so soft, warm, and sweet. You have no idea how
much I wanted to take you."

I think if I left that note on my wife’s pillow, back in prehistoric times before she was my wife and email didn’t exist, I don’t think it would have aroused her or touched her. I think it would have made her laugh her ass off. 

Then again, maybe I will leave her a note like that. She loves it when I make her laugh.

UPDATE (3/23/05) Sarah Weinman unearthed this wonderful post on the blog "The Sum of Me" about how over-heated sex scenes in romance novels did little to prepare one avid reader for the pleasures, and disappointments, of "real" sex.

In romance novels, it’s not uncommon for the heroine – or hero,
even – to actually faint with pleasure. Like, without the aid of drugs.
Passed out cold because the orgasm was that good.

And then they IMMEDIATELY HAVE SEX AGAIN.

This, apparently, is how you can tell if it’s true love.

This
is also called "fiction" — and reality was a bit of a let-down for a
girl who gobbled up this stuff for years. I think my (rather hilarious)
reaction to the real deal can best be summed up as: "Holy SHIT is that
good stuff, hooo boy." And then a dawning realization and an overall
feeling of – "It IS great. . . but it’s only great? I mean –
plate tectonics never came into play. I’m still conscious. The
bedsheets are not reduced to ashes and no suns have gone supernova,
from what I can tell… are you sure we did it right?"

What Does a Writers Assistant Do?

by

That was the question posed on screenwriter John August’s lively blog today. He’s got a good answer, and so does his former assistant Rawson Thurber, who went on to write DODGEBALL.

It’ s a smart question to ask, since being a writer’s assistant is a good way to break into the business…which is probably why there is so much competition for the jobs (and why so many applicants are WAY over-qualified).  The pay is crap ($500-a-week), the hours are hell (9 am to as late as, well 9 am), and the work is menial (answering phones, running errands, typing scripts, printing revisions, organizing files, putting revision pages into scripts, etc.)… but the experience is priceless. You learn how a TV show works from the inside. You see how stories are broken. You read lots of scripts… not just the one that are written, and endlessly rewritten, for the show… but the specs that come in clamoring for the showrunner’s attention. You see how freelancers succeed… and how they fail. You see how the producers deal with writers, studio executives, network executives, managers, actors, and everybody else associated with making a show. You make lots of contacts…not just with the writer/producers on the show and the freelancers who come in but, if you are any good at what you do, with the network and studio executives who call the office 178 times a day. If you’re smart, you’ll also hang out with the editors, line producers, script supervisors, directors, assistant directors… hell, everyone… and learn whatever you can about production. A job as a writer’s assistant is a graduate school education in the television… and, in your down time (on the rare occasions when there is some), you can write.  And I know it works. Not only have a lot of showrunners I know started out as writers assistants, most of the our assistants have gone on to become professional screenwriters themselves… one even became a development executive (though I lost track of her years ago).

Who is the Tall Dark Stranger There?

by

Maverick_logEd Gorman has been pondering, and remembering,  my friend writer/producer Roy Huggins,  creator of such classic TV series as MAVERICK, THE FUGITIVE, 77 SUNSET STRIP and (with Steve Cannell) THE ROCKFORD FILES. I contributed a few memories of my own experiences with Roy to Ed’s blog, as well as a short piece on MAVERICK. If you’re interested in a little TV history, you might want to mosey over there to Ed’s blog and check out the posts.

House as Dr. Sloan’s Son

by

The folks over at  Toobworld are pondering who should play the father of  Dr. Greg House (Hugh Laurie) on Fox’s hit  HOUSE M.D.  They’ve settled on Dick Van Dyke… as Dr. Mark Sloan.  Here’s their thinking:

From a production viewpoint, [the] obstacles could be smoothed over.  It’s from the inner reality of the plotline that we might face a few arguments.  Most of all, it’s the fact that there was never any mention of a second son for Dr. Mark Sloan in all the years ‘Diagnosis Murder’ was on the air.
He had two children – Steve Sloan, a Los Angeles police detective who often worked with his dad in solving cases;  and a daughter who was tragically murdered.  Added to this is the obvious difference in their last names – Sloan and House.

I’m not the only one who can see the obvious answer, right? Greg House is the illegitimate son of Mark Sloan.

The days when our TV heroes were cast as exemplars of virtue are long gone. Nowadays they have flaws, and foibles, and failings – they are the F-Troop. They make mistakes in Life, but eventually they admit to them and they rise above them. (Unless of course we’re talking about Detective Vic Mackey of ‘The Shield’.) That’s what makes them human, what makes them real. And what makes them interesting to watch week after week. Having been the bastard son of a noted crime-solving doctor on the West Coast might be a great explanation for some of Dr. House’s acerbic attitude towards the rest of the world at large. And a chance to rectify that situation with a renewed relationship with the father he never knew might provide for as many episodes as they wanted to run with it; perhaps a once-a-year type of reunion.  And nothing says they HAVE to iron out all their differences. After all, we don’t want House becoming all sweetness and light – that’s not why he’s
become such an interesting character for the audience.

There’s only one excuse for someone giving this idea so much thought.  Procrastination. The same reason I am posting this instead of plotting my next (the seventh!) DIAGNOSIS MURDER novel.  How’s that for irony, eh?

At The Movies

by

Victor Gischler posted a list on his blog of 25 movies that have most influence his writing… and my brother Tod quickly followed up with a list of his own. I would have a much easier time listing the TV shows that have influenced me but, off the top of my head, here’s my list, in no order whatsoever, with lots of films left out that I will regret that I forgot to include:

  1. Jaws
  2. About  Schmidt
  3. Harper
  4. Get   Shorty
  5. Fiddler on the Roof
  6. Terms of Endearment
  7. Lost  in America (actually, any Albert Brooks movie except Defending Your Life)
  8. Alien
  9. Tao of Steve
  10. The  Terminator
  11. Goldfinger   (all the Bond films, even the bad ones)
  12. Return  of the Pink Panther (all the Pink Panther movies, even the bad ones)
  13. La  Femme Nikita
  14. Funny Girl
  15. Cider  House Rules
  16. Wizard of Oz
  17. Broadcast News (particularly one line in one scene)
  18. Fistful of Dollars (the whole Man with No Name Trilogy)
  19. Dirty Harry (all the Dirty Harry movies, even the bad ones)
  20. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
  21. Raiders of the Lost Ark
  22. Chinatown
  23. The Incredibles
  24. Patton
  25. Jackie Brown

Gee, looking at that list, you can really get a keen sense of  my astonishing lack of depth. Now imagine what my writing must be like…