Lee Goldberg

Speculating

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I’ve been a television writer for about 20 years now.  In that time, I haven’t written many scripts on spec.  Bill Rabkin and I wrote a spec episode of  "Spenser: For Hire" as a writing sample to get our first TV job (on "Spenser For Hire," oddly enough).  Since then, we’ve written a spec pilot and a couple of spec features, all of which went nowhere… so we never had much incentive to do more non-paying work.

But a few years back, I wrote a spec script on my own based on my then-unpublished novel THE MAN WITH THE IRON-ON BADGE. I did it more out of frustration with the book biz than anything else. The script didn’t sell (at least not yet) but it led to a very lucrative gig writing the so-far-unproduced Dame Edna movie, so it paid off for me. Even so, the big payday didn’t motivate me to spec something else. I’ve stayed away from writing spec scripts, using whatever free time I have to write my books…maybe because it’s paying contract work as opposed to speculation.

But lately I’ve begun to rethink that strategy, especially since scripts are potentially a lot more lucrative than books (so is working at Burger King, but that’s another topic). Bill and I have a spec pilot we’re going to start writing after the holidays and I’ve begun re-reading some of my novels  with an eye towards reworking them as spec features.

I recently adapted my book  MY GUN HAS BULLETS into a script. I had a lot of fun doing it and was surprised how easily it lent itself to the screenplay format.  Of course I had to change a lot of things and streamline the plot, but I think it worked. Well, at least I hope it did. I’ve e-mailed the script to a couple of trusted friends in the biz who haven’t read the book to get their opinions.  Meanwhile,  I’ve started adapting THE WALK into a screenplay.  This one isn’t going as smoothly as MY GUN HAS BULLETS did, but I figure the exercise can’t hurt.

I don’t know why I’ve always been more comfortable writing books on spec than scripts. I guess I feel like scripts are something somebody should be paying me to write (as opposed to books, which you hardly get paid for even when you sell them). That makes no sense, of course.  I blame that twisted thinking on all my years working in episodic television, where you get paid for every script you write and there’s very little spec work that ever sells. But the attitude towards specs in TV is changing now in the wake of the success Marc Cherry had with his spec DESEPERATE HOUSEWIVES pilot.  NBC recently went public asking for spec pilots, though I don’t know if they actually picked up any of them.

I guess I just need to get into the spec frame of mind. I’m not quite there yet, because I’m sort of  cheating by adapting my books instead of coming up with original film ideas.  But I suppose baby steps still count as steps…

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.

How to Order a Signed Copy of MR. MONK GOES TO THE FIRE HOUSE

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Here’s how you can order your own, signed copy of MR. MONK GOES TO THE FIRE HOUSE.

  1. Email Mysteries to Die For with the following information:

Name

Address

Phone number

Method of payment (check, money order or credit card)

Info about how you want the book inscribed (signed only, inscribed to ‘name’, etc.)


  1. Mail your check or money order made payable to Mysteries to Die For ($10.50 if you live in California; $10.00 for all other states except Alaska and Hawaii – if you live outside the contiguous 48 states, we’ll email you with pricing information) to this address: Mysteries to Die For, 2940 Thousand Oaks Blvd, Thousand Oaks CA, 91362.
  2. If
    you want to use a credit card, we will call you to get the necessary
    information so please be sure to include your phone number.
  3. If you want more than one copy of the book, we’ll email you specifics as to cost.

There is a possibility I will be signing with MONK co-star Traylor Howard. Please indicate on your order how you would like her to sign the book as well…assuming she is able to attend.

The Best of the Goldbergs

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My brother Tod continues his "best of…" theme today, picking his favorite posts from some of our family’s many blogs. But he doesn’t really answer the big questions…why do so many members of our family feel the need to share their opinions with the world? What makes us think anybody really cares? Are we doing it merely to advertise a product or service (our books, art work, businesses, etc)? Or is it raging ego? Or is it a very public way of keeping in touch with one another?

Or is it a logical outgrowth of who we are? The fact is, I come from a media-oriented family. My father was an TV news anchorman. My Mom is a journalist and author. My Uncle was a popular FM disc jockey for many years and now writes true-crime books. My brother is a novelist and an English professor (yeah, he’s a prof now). My sisters are artists and published authors. I’ve been a journalist, author and TV writer/producer.  Is it really any surprise that we all have blogs?

For Those Who Think Being a Novelist is Glamorous

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My brother Tod’s Fucktards of the Year" list includes this:

5. The Various Fucktards Who Scheduled Book Signings For Me In Their
Stores And Then, You Know, Forgot To Order My Books, Put Up Signs Or Advertise
My Event.

This should not be confused with the stores who simply had
distribution issues when my book went into a second printing and copies simply
were not available. That sort of thing happens when you’re wildly successful,
so, you know, how the cookie crumbles and all that. No, I mean the people who
actually booked events for me, confirmed them, confirmed that they had plenty of
books and promoted the event and that signs were "already up" and "the writing
group can’t wait for you to get to the store" and "I really loved your book,"
and who, actually, "Oh, gosh, I didn’t know you were coming. Did we speak?"

"Yes. Three times. Including yesterday."

"Well, I looked and all your books are out of print. Are you self
published or something?"

"No, all of my books are in print — in several printings, in fact —
and I just had a signing in your store across town and they had all of my books.
All of them."

"I don’t know what happened then."

I know what happened. You’re a fucktard.

Sadly, he isn’t making this stuff up. I was at one those signings. Okay, two of them.

Living on the Border Between Mundane and Surreal

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No, we’re not talking about TJ HOOKER masturbation fanfic, but the Chicago Tribune’s rave review of my brother Tod’s new short story collection SIMPLIFY.

Tod Goldberg’s collection, "Simplify," contradicts its title: Goldberg
complicates things, in brilliant and moving ways, in stories that live along
the border between the mundane and the surreal.

A young married couple
meet Jesus and the devil every holiday season (Jesus is a coffee drinker, the
devil likes German beer), and their lives are both blessed and cursed. A
dys lexic creates an all-encompassing alphabet, a distinct symbol for every
person and event in his world, evoking the language of a book in
a Borgesian infinite library. A picture of Elvis Presley bleeds, making
its owner a reluctant celebrity.

Goldberg’s prose is deceptively smooth,
like a vanilla milkshake spiked with grain alcohol, and his ideas
are always made more complex and engaging by the offbeat angles his
stories take.

“t3h ebil fanficcers”

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There was an interesting comment that somebody calling himself  Inside Fandom left in the "Masturbation" post. I didn’t write it, and I don’t know who did, but I didn’t want it  to get lost in the clutter:

"t3h ebil fanficcers"

Fanspeak. Sort of like jive, but with wurz speling. In fandom communities the
presumption is that anybody who isn’t really a fan – they actually refer to it
as ‘passing’ – can possibly get it, when they say ‘get it’ they mean ‘fandom in
general’.

In other words, youse either with us or you don’t get it. Sorta like what we
used to tell our parents when we were teenagers and they wanted to know the
names of the kids we were ‘hanging’ with, and what funny smell emanated from our
clothes, or how pretty the plant with five leaves growing on our windowsills was
and how nice we’d taken an interest in horticulture.

At some point, the childish stuff ends. That happens when we grow up. When we
just get older and we don’t grow up, we look for fanfic about TV characters
masturbating so that we can masturbate to it. We continue to have the hots for
David Cassidy in all his 15 year old glory on the Partridge Family. We have
intense and heated arguments with others over the characterizations of cartoon
characters.

We keep doing that even after we get degrees and jobs and look perfectly
normal to the outside world. Whenever somebody questions our proclivity to
invade the sexual privacy of real people, or why we like to write fanfiction
about children having sex, we trot out the degrees and the jobs and we call what
we do ‘scholarship’ and wonder what sort of pervert the person questioning the
action is. That’s called transference.

The most intense discussion of what happens here on Mr. Goldberg’s blog takes
place in LiveJournal land in threads that are largely protected.

Authors, scholars, whoever, do not make any statements here because who wants
their publisher or tenure committee to know that they used to write, and maybe
still do write, lies about real people’s sex lives. Heaven forfend they know we
get off on writing stories about underage people having sex. How about it coming
out that the author of that hot new fantasy series still gets off on Mutant
Ninja Turtles slashfic and spends her off hours making fun of people on Fandom
Wank under an assumed name then TALKS about it on the journal she keeps under
her real name?

There are academic papers to be had in all of this, but the only ones taking
it seriously are the ones with a vested interest in making it appear harmless.

This rings true to me. How about you? And I may be revealing my vast ignorance (which I do here daily) and the limitations of my well-thumbed edition of Websters Dictionary, but is there really such a word as "forfend?" Is there a reason why the "fen" don’t use the word forbid?

Masturbation!

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"MarytheFan"  defends her search for masturbation fanfic and is applauded, in later comments on her blog, for being a classy gal ("Just wanted to say that I fangirl you madly at the class you’re showing").  Anyway, MarytheFan writes, in part:

I have zero interest in a discussion with someone who functions on the
middle-school level that equates masturbation with something stupid and pathetic
that only losers do because they can’t get anything better, rather than as one
perfectly valid, healthy and fun sexual option in a smorgasboard of sexual
options. Maybe if my actual masturbatory experiences had consisted solely of
sad, pathetic situations in which I was a loser who was only masturbating
because I couldn’t get anything better, rather than situations in which I was
enjoying my own body because holy good god, that felt good, I’d think it
was a pathetic and loser activity. Guess what? You also don’t go blind or have
hair grow on your palms, in case anyone out there was still functioning
furtively in the shadow of those old myths. Well, unless you poke yourself in
the eye, I suppose, in which case, wow. Bendy, aren’t you?

I have no problem with masturbation, Mary. It’s healthy, feels good, and
keeps Cinemax in business. What I find pathetic are people who
masturbate over fanfiction that portrays TV and movie
characters masturbating, and the people who write fanfiction about fictional characters masturbating, and people who would announce to the world that they are
searching for fanfiction about TV and movie characters  masturbating that they can
masturbate to.

This would also probably be a good time to, once again, mention Lindsay Lohan’s nipples.