Lee Goldberg - Page 53 of 125

Of course, immediately after compiling the list, I started thinking of people I left out… like Charles Willeford, Donald Hamilton, "Franklin W. Dixon," "Carolyn Keene," the guy who wrote "Encyclopedia Brown," the guy(s) who wrote "The Three Investigators," Steven Bochco, Leslie Charteris, Levinson & Link, Robert Ludlum, James Crumley, Trevanian, and Rod Serling…but I only had 25. (Pictured: Michael Gleason and Robert B. Parker & I).

25 Random Things About Me

May 1, 2013January 31, 2009 by Lee Goldberg

I've lost count of how many people have tagged me for this "25 Random Facts About Me" meme. So here goes:

1. When I was a pre-schooler in Oakland CA, I ran away from home, showed up at the door of the Mormon temple, and asked if Shirley could come out to play.

2. I'm a Lee Hazlewood fan.

3. I had a girlfriend who was an editorial assistant at Playgirl. I honed my skills writing sex scenes by writing fake "Letters to the Editor" for $25 each.

4. My favorite BBQ place is It's In the Sauce in Ventura, Ca.

5. When I'm sick, I like to lie in bed and watch old episodes of "Gunsmoke."

6. I wrote my first novel when I was ten. It was about a superspy from the future who was born in an underwater sperm bank. I don't know why it was underwater, or how you made deposits, but I thought it was pretty cool.

7. I love Nacho Cheese Doritos.

8. My favorite James Bond movie is "Goldfinger."

9. I've broken all but one limb…so far.

10. When I was five or six, I used to tell people my name was "Lee Beaudine." I don't know why.

11. When I was a kid, I once threatened to send my little sister Karen to prison for picking apart my Nerf ball. She was so terrified that she gave me all the money in her piggy bank to buy her freedom. I still feel guilty about that.

12. My middle name is Brian.

13. The ugliest city I have ever been to is El Paso, TX.

14. Until I was about 25, I spent two weeks every summer at Loon Lake, Washington.

15. I love the theme to "It Takes a Thief" but I can't hum it.

16. I had a crush on Linda Carter when I was a kid. She was my Wonder Woman.

17. I think Harry Whittington is one of the great, unappreciated authors of noir.

18. When I was a kid, I used to collect Wacky Packs. I thought the cards were hilarious.

19. One of my all-time favorite books is "Lonesome Dove" by Larry McMurtry.

20. I've seen Roger Moore naked.

21. I like to read Motor Trend and the National Inquirer on airplanes. This embarrasses my wife.

22. I can't spell marriage, similar, or envelope.

23. I wrote two episodes of "The New Adventures of Flipper."

24. I once flagged down a cop on Jefferson Blvd. to alert him that a homeless man was "playing a twisted game of Russian roulette" by running into traffic. The cop actually asked me to repeat that without imitating the ABC announcer's voice.

25. I owned a Chevy Chevette.

You Don’t Pay Agents

January 30, 2009 by Lee Goldberg

Author Alison Kent tipped me to this terrific blog post from Jennifer Jackson, her agent:

Just in case there is someone out there reading this who doesn't already know: Reputable agents work on commission. Commissions are based on selling your work. They make money if you make money. It's a motivational system.

This is something every aspiring author needs to know. Any agent who asks for a reading fee, a submission fee, or any other kind of fee is a fraud.

Harvesting More Suckers

January 29, 2009 by Lee Goldberg

Brien Jones is at it again…the vanity press huckster is offering to sell your self-published book to Hollywood using all of his amazing connections (which, translated, means he's going to attend "The Great American Pitchfest" like hundreds of other wanna-bes). Victoria Strauss at Writer's Beware has the scoop on Brien's pitch, which sounds an awful lot like the scams run by Bookman/Airleaf, his former employer, which I first blogged about back in 2005.. Airleaf has since been shut down by the Indiana Attorney General.

Mr. Monk est flatté

January 27, 2009 by Lee Goldberg

French journalist & critic Thierry Attard raves about MR. MONK IS MISERABLE in a lengthy and detailed review. He says, in part:

Mr. Monk is Miserable, his latest Monk tie-in novel, is a perfect sample of the art of this master storyteller. Should you be a fan of the Monk tv series or not, as the show itself regularly flirts with the self-conscious formulaic Tony Shalhoub one-man show. But the talent of Lee Goldberg is to build totally original novels with familiar figures. His reinventions of Adrian Monk's frustrations and anxieties are so wonderfully and joyfully crafted that many of his readers already wish an adaptation of his new Monk Book for the television series.

[…]Mr. Monk is Miserable is a wonderful and fun book with an intrigue devised like a clockwork mechanism. Lee Goldberg's vision of Paris and of the French is sharply realistic.

[…]It's a mystery story with a difference, and all the wit (there are shades of Mark Twain in Paris with Monk's exploration of the City of Light), the humor and the writing skills of a master novelist.

Merci Beaucoup, Thierry!

Is Free, “Ravenously Referential” Fiction the Future of Publishing?

January 24, 2009 by Lee Goldberg

A lot of folks have sent me a link to Lev Grossman's essay in Time Magazine that proclaims that:

Saying you were a self-published author used to be like saying you were a self-taught brain surgeon. But over the past couple of years, vanity publishing has becoming practically respectable.

He's the only person, besides a vanity press huckster, I have ever heard voice that opinion. He tries to back it up by citing a couple of the extraordinarily rare examples of self-publishing success. He neglects to mention, just like the vanity-press hucksters do, that these are extremely rare cases that represent a miniscule percentage of the self-published books printed every year.

But I'm not surprised he neglects that fact…and so many others in his essay. He's the same guy who thought Lori Jareo, the dimwit who self-published her STARS WARS fanfic and sold it as a novel on Amazon, was some kind of "unsung hero." He's also notorious for trying to jack up the rankings of his novel on Amazon by posting scores of fake, five-star reviews.

He believes that publishing books on paper, paying authors advances and giving booksellers the opportunity to return unsold books are old-fashioned practices that are so "20th century" and will soon become extinct in favor of – drumroll please — fanfic.

Put these pieces together, and the picture begins to resolve itself: more books, written and read by more people, often for little or no money, circulating in a wild diversity of forms, both physical and electronic, far outside the charmed circle of New York City's entrenched publishing culture.

[…]Not that Old Publishing will disappear–for now, at least, it's certainly the best way for authors to get the money and status they need to survive–but it will live on in a radically altered, symbiotic form as the small, pointy peak of a mighty pyramid.
[…]The wide bottom of the pyramid will consist of a vast loamy layer of free, unedited, Web-only fiction, rated and ranked YouTube-style by the anonymous reading masses.

And what will that fiction look like? Like fan fiction, it will be ravenously referential and intertextual in ways that will strain copyright law to the breaking point.

Only someone who thinks Lori Jareo is a pioneer, and who wrote a novel about a "Boston slacker who has trouble distinquishing between reality and Star Trek," could make that prediction with a straight face.

He's looking at publishing from within the insular world of science fiction and fantasy fandom, which bears little resemblance to reality. I don't think the majority of book-readers today– the millions who can't speak Klingon and never heard of Joss Whedon — would embrace the "ravenously referential" and poorly-written world of free literature that he desperately hopes the future of publishing will become.

I agree with him that publishing is changing, and I suspect that ebooks and print-on-demand will be a big part of the future of the industry, but I doubt that wide popular and critical acceptance of self-publishing and fanfiction will be the ultimate result. To put it in terms Grossman would understand, I think commercial publishing, brick-and-mortar bookstores, and authors being paid for their work are practices that will "live long and prosper" in the face of new technology and new means of communication.

Mr. Monk and the Psych Signing

May 1, 2013January 24, 2009 by Lee Goldberg

Today I did a booksigning at the Mystery Bookstore in Westwood with Bill Rabkin, author of the PSYCH novels. Our other scheduled guest, Steve Cannell, had to cancel at the last minute due to a family emergency. The fine folks at Hansen's Cakes provided an amazing MR. MONK IS MISERABLE cake that tasted every bit as good as it looked (though I hated to cut into it).

A nice crowd showed up that included our mentor Michael Gleason and his wife Jan, Amazon reviewer Mark Baker, my cousin Danny Barer, the three Richardson women, some old family friends and many avid readers. TV writer and novelist George Mastras, whose signing preceded ours, stuck around to share some of his Hollywood experiences (he writes for the TV series BREAKING BAD and sister writes for MAD MEN) and to have a slice of the incredible MONK cake.

Bill and I shared some anecotes from our experiences in television, told some stories about The Hoff, and talked about writing our books. Bill had a funny encounter with a fan…but I will let him talk about that on his blog (if he chooses to).

I signed lots of books, ate too much cake, and probably told more stories than I should have. I'd like thank Linda and Bobby, and new owners Pam Woods and Kirk Pasich, for making us all feel at home.

UPDATE: My cousin Danny has posted some pictures from the signing.

Sales Performance Anxiety

May 1, 2013January 22, 2009 by Lee Goldberg

The friendly folks at the Mystery Bookstore in Westwood are already setting up for the signing that Bill Rabkin, Steve Cannell and I are doing on Saturday….and sent the picture on the left. Seeing all those books gave me a major case of sales performance anxiety. I hope I draw enough people to clear that table!

The Mail I Get – Unsolicited Filler Edition

January 20, 2009 by Lee Goldberg

Lately I have been getting unsolicited offers to supply posts for my blog. Here's one that came in today from Amy Currie at Phenix Publicity:

Please find pasted below a contributed piece by author and progressive blogger James Protzman, for your consideration. Co-founder of the liberal blog BlueNC.com, Protzman was inspired to overhaul his new book, "Jesus Swept," by combining not only the elements of fiction writing, but also his experience with blogging and freelance business writing. His article shares his experience and this transition.

First off, as a piece of PR, this solicitation sucks. The first line should grab the person you are trying to sway, not numb them into a coma. Please find pasted below a contributed piece…? Ugh. It's as if Ms. Currie, a "Senior Publicist" at Phenix, didn't even make an effort to craft a creative or interesting pitch. Either Ms. Currie was too busy to care or she has a lot to learn about writing press releases and garnering attention for her clients.

Beyond the inept execution of the release, I find the basic premise of the "campaign" ill-conceived. Most bloggers blog because they have a world view, an agenda, a product, an opinion, a cause, or an idea…or a combination of all those…that they want to share. Why would a blogger be interested in an unsolicited post by another blogger flogging his book? If Protzman's blog is as good and as popular as he claims, wouldn't a post there generate enough interest (and links/trackbacks) on its own? Why would I, or anybody else, want to carry a 600 word essay (essentially an infomercial) by someone we don't know about a book we don't care about?

Well, we might if his essay was the least bit interesting or provocative, which Protzman's is not. Here's an example of his wisdom:

With one hand in the blogosphere and the other working for business clients, I started a grand revision of my novel, mixing all three forms – blogging, business writing, fiction – into a spicy soup. I’ve learned these three kinds of writing are as different as earth, wind and fire – except when they’re not.

Uh-huh. I'm enlightened, how about you? There's 500 more words of observations like this available to fill space on your blog if you want it…

The Mail I Get

January 17, 2009 by Lee Goldberg

It's a cliche that everybody thinks their life would make a great story — but now it's not just a story, it's a reality show. I got an email from a guy who thinks there's a show in his budding auto parts business. He writes:

There would be a small but dedicated market for said show on specific cable networks. Not so much featuring the building, but more the economics, structure and work that goes into the business… with the work, cars, and skills being accessories to the focus.
If that interests you, and you would like to discuss further, please let me know. There are a million details, directions and avenues that can be explored within this realm.

I don't know what makes people think that they should share their reality show ideas with me, since I have never written, produced, or created one. But I guess they figure that if you're working in Hollywood, you're plugged into every facet of the TV biz. I'm not. No offense, but you're wasting your time sending me your reality show ideas.