#1 New York Times Bestselling Author & TV Producer
Novelist PJ Parrish offers some very good advice to aspiring writers under the heading "10 Things You Should Never Worry About." Among my favorites:
7. I’m querying an agent. Should I send my first chapter or my best chapter?
If your first chapter isn’t your best chapter, you’re in deep doo-doo.8. Who should I dedicate my book to?
Geez…9. Should I include my picture with my submission?
Only if you’re Brad Pitt or his wife old whatshername.
Here’s some great writing advice from Jane Espenson:
SHADY GUY
I promised you a half-ton of frozen fish. That’s a
half-ton of frozen fish.
When
we hear that, we know that the previous line was some kind of protest
about whether or not Shady Guy met his end of the bargain. We’ve
established the attitude of both characters by the end of line.As
you look through your own writing, you may very well discover that
you’ve been doing this automatically, too. If not, try knocking off a
few opening lines, see if it doesn’t jump-start the scene!
"A nude Britney
Spears on a bearskin rug while giving birth to her firstborn marks a
‘first’ for Pro-Life. Pop-star Britney Spears is the "ideal" model for
Pro-Life and the subject of a dedication at Capla Kesting Fine Art in
Brooklyn’s Williamsburg gallery district, in what is proclaimed the
first Pro-Life monument to birth, in April…
…[Artist Daniel Edwards’] "Monument to
Pro-Life: The Birth of Sean Preston," Pro-Life’s first
monument to the ‘act of giving birth,’ is purportedly an idealized
depiction of Britney in delivery. Natural aspects of Spears’ pregnancy,
like lactiferous breasts and protruding naval, compliment a posterior
view that depicts widened hips for birthing and reveals the crowning of
baby Sean’s head.
The monument also acknowledges the pop-diva’s pin-up past by showing
Spears seductively posed on all fours atop a bearskin rug with back
arched, pelvis thrust upward, as she clutches the bear’s ears with
‘water-retentive’ hands."
[From the Press Release for the sculpture, via Defamer]
Chicago Sun-Times reviewer David J. Montgomery is single-handedly revolutionizing the publishing industry. No longer will authors have to scrounge through his reviews looking for a blurbable phrase. Today, David has launched his Blurb Machine.
My reviews get blurbed fairly often, but that seems like such a
roundabout way of doing it. Why not, I asked myself, just give the
blurb directly and cut out the middle man?
Why not, indeed! The first recipient of a Blurb Machine Blurb is Lee Child:
"The Hard Way is the best book
yet from one of today’s top thriller writers. Put a pot of coffee on
before you start reading it, ’cause this one’s going to keep you up all
night." -Crime Fiction Dossier
Lori Prokop, the self-described "selfless supporter of families, children and animals," is apparently tired of blogs like this one mischaracterizing her as a get-rich-quick huckster. In fact, "her life goal is to advance the well-being and enlightenment of humanity" when she isn’t selflessly striving to help the downtrodden "achieve the goal of Best Selling and Celebrity Status" and showing "people how to choose most any car off the showroom floor and drive it free while our company makes your payments."
So Lori Prokop, who "lives in and creates from the upper energy levels of life (Anyone can choose to live and create in these powerful upper levels as detailed in Lori Prokop’s Life Guidance System)," is tackling the problem as only she, Lori Prokop, can:
Blogs are a powerful force for good in the hands of those people living in their upper level energies/emotions and less-than-good in the hands of those living in their lower level energies/emotions. (Continue reading to learn about the Energy Mastery System.)
Lori Prokop has an upcoming work being release called, “Launching from Good to Great Online,” which is a definitive work on blogs where she interviews leaders and experts in blogs and human psychology.
I, for one, am looking forward to this definitive work which, no doubt, will be published by Bestseller Publishing, the vanity press run by future Nobel Prize winner Lori Prokop, who describes herself in her fascinating and definitive mass mailings as "Leading Expert, Author and Creator of books, CDs,DVDs, Online Videos, workshops, television shows, speaking and more!"
To learn more about this selfless individual, who has profound "respect and humanistic regard for all species," (She is, afterall, the visionary who asked the burning question: "Where are the best sellers by Doctors of
Chiropractic?”) just read her previous definitive books, like "Awaken Your Million-Dollar Intuition," "77 Streams of Super Lucrative
Income for Authors, Experts and Speakers," and Employee No More: How to Stay Home and Still Make Money."
You, too, can feel her humanistic regard, especially for those species who possess a Visa or Mastercard.
Emmy-award winning writer/producer Ken Levine talks about how hard it was breaking stories for CHEERS.
For every story we used there were always twenty or thirty we threw
out. The core of every story had to present a substantial problem for
one or more of the characters. And it had to have some comic spin. When
an idea is on the table and the writers are able to come up with
possible scenes and twists and jokes that’s a pretty good indication
that we may have hit gold. And very often a story will evolve into
something completely different from what you started with. You begin
with Sam has to hire a new bartender and an hour later it somehow
becomes Lilith’s pet rat dies and she keeps it in her purse…[…] Once we had an area we liked this is how we generally broke the
stories: Our first question was always “what’s the act break?” Then
“what’s the ending?”. Then "when’s lunch?" Once we had the big midpoint
turn and the ultimate conclusion we’d go back and fill in the acts.
Sometimes we would lay out a story and see that two or three characters
would be excluded. So in order to service them we would do a B story
that usually could be told in two or three scenes.
I live in the small, Southern California town of Calabasas, on the southwestern edge of the San Fernando Valley. There are a dozen gated McMansion communities here, horse trails, and an upscale shopping center with a clock-tower that is home to the world’s largest Rolex. This is a town where the only car wash is called an auto salon and serves customers Espressos. But this week our little town made news worldwide for having the most restrictive anti-smoking law in the United States. This week, it became illegal for smokers to smoke indoors or outdoors in any public areas of the city, including parks, sidewalks and out-door businesses. There are people screaming about how restrictive, unfair, and anti-American this is but I have to say I don’t care. I’m thrilled.
The Spur Awards, the "Oscars" of Western writing, were announced this weekend by the Western Writers of Amerca. William Wyman’s novel HIGH COUNTRY copped the top awards — Best First Novel as well as Best Novel of the West — earning him a place in the record books. Loren Estlemen won his fifth Spur award for THE
UNDERTAKER’S WIFE and Johnny D. Boggs won his second for CAMP FORD: A WESTERN STORY. Matt Braun’s DAKOTA won for Best Original Paperback and Louis S. Warren’s BUFFALO BILL’S AMERICA won Best Non-Fiction Historical.
Variety reports that Universal Studios has bought the James Sallis novel DRIVE as a feature film vehicle for Hugh Jackman. This is a coup not only for Sallis, but for Poisoned Pen, the small Phoenix-based press which published the widely-acclaimed novella. Sallis is also the author of the Lew Griffin PI tales set in New Orleans.
In other mystery/thriller book news in the trades today, Paramount Pictures has hired X-MEN scribe David Hayter to adapt Bob Reiss’ soon-to-be-published novel BLACK MONDAY for the screen.
Authors who’ve taken advantage of Amazon’s Blog service need to be careful what they post — because they’re forfeiting any rights to their work. I’ve just been alerted to a troubling clause in the Amazon Connect Terms of Service:
"For all Author Materials that you post or submit in connection with the
Program (including any trademark or similar rights in them), you hereby grant
Amazon a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual and irrevocable right and
license throughout the world in any media to: (1) use, reproduce, publish,
translate, create derivative works from, distribute, and display all of your
Works."
I think the Amazon Blogs have helped publicize me and my books (I’ve seen an uptick in my Amazon sales rankings and in traffic to my website since launching the blog). I’ve been mostly "repurposing" material from this blog over there. But now I will seriously curtail the kinds of things I’m posting, holding back anything that might have value if compiled into another literary work (like anecdotes about the TV biz, screenwriting advice, essays on the mystery field, etc.). I don’t want to grant Amazon free rights to my writing. It’s a shame, because the Amazon blog will suffer because of their ridiculous copyright grab.