Current Affairs

1-800-Golddigger

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Torispellingdownpants
Back when I was doing MISSING, and it was still called 1-800-MISSING and starred Gloria Reuben, Dean McDermott was one of the stars. I liked him. I thought he was a nice guy. And he was close friends with the two writers who created the show. But one of female story editors got an immediate, bad vibe from him.

"He’s a sleazebag," she said.

I was shocked. "Did he say or do something that offended you?"

"No, but I’m telling you, he’s sleaze.  Scuminess radiates off of him. He’s going to cheat on his wife and run away with her money or something."

I shrugged off her comments as ridiculous. Well, it turns out she was mostly right. A few months later, Dean dumped his wife (Canadian TV personality Mary Jo Eustace, the mother of his 7-year-old son and his recently adopted baby daughter) and ran off with Tori Spelling, who he met on a TV movie.  Dean and Tori got engaged over Christmas.

Obviously, my friend’s sleaze radar is stunningly accurate. I may bring her along to every network or studio meeting I have from now on.

Law & Goyim

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My friend author Rochelle Krich is steaming mad over a LAW AND ORDER episode a couple weeks back that portayed orthodox Jews in a less than flattering light.

We have an Orthodox Jewish rabbi dispensing unOrthodox theology and upholding the fiction behind the family chumash.

We have Eric, a greedy Jew who engineers the desecration of a Jewish book that results in someone’s death.

We have Barry, an Orthodox Jewish killer, all-around
louse, and frequenter of lap dancers who recants his testimony against
Eric when he learns the chumash isn’t "the one."

My father lied to me, he says. It’s all a lie.

"It"?

Greed, brazen immorality, hypocrisy, lies.

According to Law & Order, that’s Orthodox Judaism.

I saw the episode and it didn’t offend my Jewish sensibilities, mainly because I’m a bad Jew and LAW AND ORDER portrays everybody as immortal, hypocritical, and dishonest. It’s a murder mystery and every character is a suspect. For that to be possible, everyone has to have a motive. It isn’t the job of the writers to portray every racial, political, economic, cultural and religious group in a positive and accurate light — in fact, they do the opposite and on a weekly basis. They didn’t single out Orthodox Jews — if they had, then perhaps I would share my friend Rochelle’s anger.

Dragging my Feet

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Thegamblers
I like to think I’m reasonably productive, but all I have to do is read novelist James Reasoner’s blog to be reminded that I’m a lazy-ass:

By the way, I finished my 185th novel today.

Can you believe that? 185 novels? And he can fix appliances, too. I have a hard time just changing the battery on my daughter’s tape recorder. His 18oth (or 183rd, who can keep track?) book, TALES FROM DEADWOOD, comes out in May under his nom-de-western "Mike Jameson."

When Did You Know?

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When did you know you wanted to be a writer? Joe Konrath poses that question on his blog today. I’ve known almost all my life what I wanted to be.  Not too long ago, my Mom found a paper I wrote in fourth grade where I said I loved writing stories and that I wanted to be a writer.  I posted one of those early stories here on my blog…along with one of my daughter’s  written at the same age.

When I was ten or eleven, I was already pecking novels out on my Mom’s old typewriters. The first one was a futuristic tale about a cop born in an underwater sperm bank. I don’t know why the bank was underwater, or how deposits were made, but I thought it was very cool. I followed that up with a series of books about  gentleman thief Brian Lockwood,  aka "The Perfect Sinner,’ a thinly disguised rip-off of Simon Templar, aka "The Saint." I sold these stories for a dime to my friends and even managed to make a dollar or two. In fact, I think my royalties per book were better then than they are now.

I continued writing novels all through my teenage years.  Some of my other unpublished masterpieces featured hapless detective named Kevin Dangler. I remember my Uncle Burl being quite amused by that one. He even wrote a story about Kevin Dangler one summer when we were fishing at Loon Lake. Only Dangler wasn’t a detective in his tale. He was the lead singer of a rock group called Kevin Dangler & The Scrotums. Being a packrat, I still have most of those novels today in boxes in my garage (some were destroyed in flooding a few years back).

By the time I was 17, I was writing articles for The Contra Costa Times and other Bay Area newspapers and applying to colleges.  I didn’t get a book published, but my detective stories got me into UCLA’s School of Communications. My grades weren’t wonderful, so I knew I had to kick ass on my application essay. I wrote it first person as a hard-boiled detective story in Kevin Dangler’s voice. The committee, at first, had doubts that I actually wrote it myself — until they reviewed articles I’d written for the Times, including one that used the same device as my essay.

I sold my first non-fiction book, UNSOLD TELEVISION PILOTS, while I was a freshman in college and my first novel, .357 VIGILANTE, shortly thereafter (thanks to Lew Perdue).  And so here I am, at 43, doing exactly what I was doing when I was seven or eight. I haven’t really changed. It’s cool…and kind of weird, too.

Bottoms Up

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The Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy novels report that anal sex is creeping into romance novels.

I think the first anal sex scene I read in a romance was in something by Robin Schone. Was it The Lady’s Tutor
or something else? Anyway, anal sex is currently in the realm of what I
think of as “vanilla kink.” It’s not exactly standard sexual practice
in Romancelandia yet, so there’s definitely a sort of charge to
including it in a mainstream novel, like you’re breaching a
taboo–something that’s definitely not present in, say, oral sex scenes
in romances. On the other hand, it’s not too terribly exotic, like,
say, furry fetishes or whatever.

In erotic romances–the relatively few I’ve read, anyway–anal sex
seems to be de rigueur, and I’m wondering how long before it’s going to
leak into most, if nor all mainstream romances. Anal sex: it’s the new
oral!

That observation prompted someone to comment:

Anal in romance and erotica by straight women (as opposed to gay men)
is either vague or comical.  Either the writers sum things up a la Zane
– “[Reader], I took it up the ass” or they go all hazy and mystical
with the heroine having some sort of assgasm the the instant her
b’hymen is breached with only a dairy-based food product as lubricant.

Assgasm. That’s a new word for me. I can’t wait to start using it in casual conversation.

Shell Scott

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Ed Gorman posted a nice piece about my friend Richard S. Prather’s Shell Scott books on his blog today.

I loved Prather because he was always fun. I was naive about his right-wing
politics so they never got in my way, I just liked the hilarious situations
chicks always led the willing Shell into. One of my all-time favorite scenes is
Shell in a hot air balloon flying above the nudist camp he’s just escaped from.
His attire consists of his holster and gun.

The Shell Scott books are dated but still as laugh-out-loud funny as they were forty years ago. In his heyday, Richard was one of the best selling authors in the world, with tens of millions of copies of his book in print.

I spoke to Richard a couple of days ago — he’d just signed a contract with Hard Case Crime to reprint one of his early, not-Scott books.  So pretty soon a whole new generation will discover just how good a writer Richard Prather is.

Blog Suicide

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Writers Digest is looking for folks who’ve committed Blog Suicide:

Senior Editor Maria Schneider is writing an article on bloggers who were burned by something they posted online. Have you ever posted something on your blog that cost you a job, a relationship or  a writing gig? We may want to feature your story in a future article  for "Writer’s Digest." Tell us about it in the "WD" Forum  or send an e-mail to writersdig@fwpubs.com with "Blogged and Burned" in the subject line.

It seems to me that anybody who has committed Blog Suicide, and then responds to this article, would only be compounding the original mistake. Why draw even more attention to your career-killing, job-costing, dumb move? Not all publicity is good publicity.

Dune Talifans

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Novelists Kevin J. Anderson and Brian Herbert, authors of the bestselling post-Frank Herbert DUNE novels, discuss on their blog some of their bizarre encounters with "talifans":

They started appearing as soon as our first DUNE prequels were announced, vehemently opposed to *anything* new
      connected to DUNE, regardless of whether the novels were based on Frank Herbert’s own notes, regardless of whether
      Frank had asked his son to write additional DUNE novels with him before his death. We can certainly understand
      many devoted fans being protective of their favorite universe, and we can understand their initial skepticism.
      Frank Herbert was a genius, against whom few writers in history can measure up. We felt the fans were showing
      their passion and dedication, and Brian and I worked as hard as we could so as not to disappoint them.

Unfortunately, their tactics soon became apparent. Even before HOUSE ATREIDES
      was published, before review copies were ever distributed, these "Talifan" got together and posted 60
      one-star reviews on amazon.com. None of them had read the book, but that didn’t stop them from trashing it with
      quotes like "This can’t possibly be good, so it has to be terrible" and "I don’t even need to read
      this book to know how bad it must be."

But Talifans can be found throughout "fandom," as Kevin and Brian are well aware.

You’ll find the same sort of rude nastiness on
      the Star Trek boards, on Robert Jordan boards, on X-Files boards. The behavior of a small group of unpleasant fans
      has driven virtually every Star Wars writer to avoid participating in online discussion groups. [My favorite
      ridiculous posting from a Star Wars fan board: "I absolutely hated the first thirteen books in Kevin J.
      Anderson’s series, and I hate the fourteenth one even more!" Any rational person would say, If you hate it so
      much, why keep reading? Go to a bookstore — you’ve got plenty of choices if you don’t like my work.]

The problem is, they hate *everything.*

Remembering THE FIFTH CORNER

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Bob Sassone over at TV Squad fondly remembers the short-lived (two episodes and out) 1992 series THE FIFTH CORNER, which starred Alex MacArthur and Kim Delaney.

Here’s another show that was ahead of its time. I can really picture
this on the air now, as an unfolding mystery that gets a lot of online
attention, fan sites, and speculation, like Lost or Alias.

Like most of America, I never saw THE FIFTH CORNER. The familiar concept was straight out of a 1950s Gold Medal paperback: a guy wakes up in bed with a dead woman beside him and has no memory of who he is or how he got there. Hijinks ensue. But Bob isn’t the only one who fondly remembers the show. One of the background extras on the series writes on his website about copping a feel from Kim Delaney.