#1 New York Times Bestselling Author & TV Producer
Chris Well has given MR. MONK GOES TO THE FIREHOUSE a warm review. Here’s an excerpt:
Novelist (and TV writer) Lee Goldberg does a remarkable job of
capturing the wit and spark of the series, while exploring the
possibilities that come with a different medium. The story is told from
the point of view of Natalie, adding more layers to the narrative than
possible in a regular episode.
Thanks, Chris!
Tari Akpodiete pointed me to this posting on BoingBoing:
SF writer Lynda Williams sez, "My daughter (18) cared SO much about the ending of the Animorph series ‘selling out’ the readers that loved it with a nasty ending, that she has taken a whole year off school (sigh! be careful what you model!) to write an alternative ending as good as the books ever were! And she did it despite knowing it had to be considered fan fic and couldn’t be a way to start a writing career — just because she really, really
cared."
She took a year off school to write fanfic? Good God, how stupid.
I’m sure some of you will say that I’m being a jerk, that the girl took a year off to hone her writing skills and complete a novel.
And to you, I say, it’s fanfic. I can see how you might write a short piece of fanfic for yourself (ie not posted on the Internet or distributed to others) as a writing exercise. That could be useful and instructive. But spending a year toiling on a fanfic novel? That’s just pathetic. It’s one step removed from becoming a Jareo.
It’s shame her mother, a professional writer, couldn’t have given her daughter better guidance instead of encouraging her in this masturbatory and pointless pursuit (and, worse, being proud of it).
Williams could have taught her daughter something about intellectual property, copyright and the importance of respecting the creative rights of other authors. It doesn’t say whether the work was posted on the Internet…but I hope it wasn’t. But if it was, I hope that Williams didn’t congratulate her daughter on that, too.
Williams could have encouraged her daughter to channel her passion for "Animorphs," and the way she felt the story should be told, by creating an entirely original work of her own that perhaps embodied the same ideals and explored the same themes. That would have been a worthwhile, enriching, constructive use of her time, effort and passion.
Wouldn’t it have been great if Williams’ daughter took a year off and ended up with a finished novel of her own? Now that would be something to be proud of.
But an 18-year-old spending a year on fanfic?
I wouldn’t be proud of that. I’d be embarrassed.
Author M. Diane Vogt took these Thrillerfest pictures of me with Lee Child and my daughter Maddie with R.L. Stine and kindly passed them along (Click on the photos for larger images). 
The scariest thing about RL Stine was that he was wearing all-black when it was 110 degrees outside. He probably lost 30 pounds just walking from his car to the convention center.
Every so often, I check out my stats to see how readers are finding their way to this blog… which is how I discovered Hurt/Comfort Recommendations , a site that explores the s&m fantasies of fanficcers who like to see their favorite characters beaten, injured, or stricken with a deadly disease and then sobbed over and soothed, preferably while the characters are nude and sticking their tongues in each other’s orifices. There are several "essays" about hurt/comfort on the site and recommendations to fanfiction like this:
Picking Up The Pieces by Annie (Starsky/Hutch, NC-17)-
This is the definition of yummy for me 🙂 It follows a rather typical
plotline (that I am certainly guilty of following in several stories,
myself) but the overpowering hurt/comfort elements and adorable
characterizations really save this. The hurt at the beginning is
wonderful- it’s got all the elements that I adore. And when the comfort
portion comes around, it does so with understanding and emotion and hot
hot sex. Who could ask for more?
Here’s a sample of the yummy:
"No?" Starsky queried. "How many guys who didn’t love you would touch
you the way I do, as often as I do? How many guys who didn’t love you
would hold you in their arms and let you puke all over them after you’d
been hyped on Horse, huh?" Starsky smiled to take the sting from his
words but his eyes were grave and steady. "How many guys who didn’t
love you would be so glad when they found you alive pinned under your
car that it was all they could do not to kiss you then and there? Huh?
Tell me, babe. How many?" He leaned forward and slowly pressed his
mouth to Hutch’s, placing the lightest of caresses there.
I’m ready to puke and I’m not even hyped on Horse. Just imagine her take on how Huggy Bear earned his name…
I don’t usually rave about products on this blog, but I can’t contain my enthusiasm for this nifty new gadget that we bought our daughter for her birthday. It’s the Pure Digital Point-and-Shoot Video Camcorder. It’s the size of an iPod and every bit as simple and ingenious. You just point and shoot. It’s that easy. There’s nothing to learn. (It’s also cheap…$125 at your local Target store or on Amazon). There’s a record button, a play button, and a delete button. And a little rocker button that doubles as a zoom and volume control. You can watch videos instantly on the tiny color screen. The Point-and-Shoot runs on two AA batteries, holds 30 minutes of video, and plugs into your computer with it’s built-in USB cable (and, if you like, automatically loads easy-to-use video playback, management, and emailing software on your hard-drive). Within seconds, and I mean seconds, you can email your videos all over the planet. It’s amazing. One minute after she unwrapped the present, my daughter became the next Sofia Coppola, directing epics all over the house. I don’t understand why this wonderful product hasn’t become the Next Big Thing…or am I so out-of-touch that it already has and I missed it?
We just arrived in Phoenix for Thrillerfest. On the way, we stopped in Quartzite, AZ for a hamburger and discovered the most unusual bookstore I’ve ever seen. It’s called Reader’s Oasis and the gregarious proprietor, Paul Winer, likes to walk around the store nude. Naturally, Paul had a large selection of my books. These are my people.
I think Paul has stumbled on the perfect way for independent bookstores to compete with the big box book stores. This idea could really catch on in L.A… if the salesclerks were all Baywatch babes.
Speaking of babes, there’s some kind of sorority or cheerleader convention going on in this very same hotel. I know some single thriller writers who are going to be very busy trying to thrill these other conventioneers. 
Perhaps because of the large crowd, we lucked into an amazing, free upgrade. We are staying in a huge, third floor suite overlooking the golf course. It has a living room, full kitchen, and a giant shaded patio. We may never leave the room.
Tomorrow, I am heading off with my family to Phoenix for five days to attend the Thrillerfest convention. I don’t know if I’ll be blogging much, if at all, while I’m away. And since my brother Tod has a blog of his own now, I don’t have a guest-blogger taking my place. So don’t be surprised if things are a little quiet around here until next week.
As I mentioned here before, I’ve got hundreds of copies of my book BEYOND THE BEYOND that I need to unload to create room in my garage for my Mom’s stuff. In the last few days, I’ve donated books to the New Orleans Public Library as well as Better World Books, among others. But I still have plenty left.
I’ll be glad to send you a signed copy for $9.99, which includes media mail postage to anywhere in the United States.
BEYOND THE BEYOND is about ex-cop Charlie Willis, who handles “special security” for Pinnacle Pictures. His job: to protect the studio and its stars, to stop scandals before they explode, to the
keep the peace in the land of make-believe. How he does it is up to him. In this book, a sequel to “My Gun Has Bullets,” he has to protect the president of a fledgling TV network from an assassin, an A-list screenwriter from his homicidal agent, and the cast of a cult TV series from its legion of rabid,
homicidal fans.
Here’s a sampling of the critical praise for the book:
“Goldberg uses just about everything he can think of to send up the studio system, fandom, Star Trek, Trekkies, agents, actors… you name it, he’ll make you laugh about it.” Analog
"An outrageously entertaining take on the loathsome folkways of contemporary
showbiz,"Kirkus Reviews“Mr. Goldberg has an observant eye and a wicked pen!” Washington Times
“Beyond the Beyond reads like a modern-day Alice in Wonderland set against the venal world of the TV industry. It’s wonderfully revealing and uncannily accurate,” Vancouver Sun
"Stingingly funny! B+" Entertainment Weekly
"Some of the easily recognizable actors, agents and producers who are mercilessly ribbed may find
it hard to crack a smile at the author’s gag-strewn prose. Likewise those seekers after politically correct entertainment. But the rest of us should have no trouble….the novel’s satiric slant is strong enough to have an effigy of Goldberg beamed into outer space at the next Star Trek convention," Los Angeles Times
And yet, there were still 600 copies that didn’t sell. Even with a giant penis on the cover. Can you imagine that? If you’d like to buy one of them for $9.99, just click on the button below:
My Mom is moving to a smaller place close to the beach… so I am cleaning out my garage to give her some storage space. And I have come to the painful realization that it’s time to get rid of my 100s of TV GUIDES. I don’t have the time or patience to scan each cover and sell’em individually on eBay… so I am coming to you, my loyal readers, for suggestions on what to do with them. Is there a library I could donate them to, perhaps? And while you’re at it, have you got any ideas on what I should do with:
I’ve got four weeks until she moves her stuff into my garage…
My brother Tod has a weekly feature on his blog in which he skewers the "fucktards" who write Letters to Parade seeking answers from the fictional Walter Scott. Well, Tod could probably do the same with some of the people who write to TV Guide.
Take Susan A. Davis of Newport, Vermont for example.
She’s peeved about the season finale of CSI, which showed Grissom and Sara in bed together in the closing moments of the episode. TV Guide called it a shocking season finale. But since I only watched two episodes of CSI this season, I didn’t realize I was supposed to be shocked. I just figured the two characters were doing the nasty monkey together now. I wasn’t shocked. In fact, I didn’t care. But let’s get back to Susan A. Davis of Newport, Vermont. She wrote:
The writers ought to sit in a corner with their faces to the wall and chant the following: Don’t mess with canon. Don’t mess with canon. Don’t mess with canon.
"Canon" is a term that fanfic writers like to use to refer to the backstory established in the TV shows, movies, books and comics that they are ripping off. So what makes Susan A. Davis of Newport, Vermont a raging fucktard is that she doesn’t seem to grasp that she was watching the actual, original, CSI tv show…not reading CSI fanfic or CSI/X-Files cross-over fic or CSI slash fic or even the William Petersen Real Person Slash Fic that she probably loves. Because if she did comprehend that she was watching the actual, original, CSI tv show, then she’d know that canon is whatever the creators of CSI say it is. The writer/producers decide who the characters are and what they are going to do…they create the canon.
You may not like what the writer/producers come up with, you may think they’ve jumped the shark and fucked it, too… but it’s what’s happening on the actual, original, CSI tv show, which is still written and produced by the same folks who did the pilot, and that, Susan A. Davis of Newport Vermont, makes whatever they do "canon."
So, I submit that Susan A. Davis of Newport, Vermont, should sit in a corner with her face to the wall and chant "I am a fucktard, I am a fucktard, I am a fucktard…"