My Blog

Coffee Shop Novelist

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CBS has posted an interesting interview with my friend Harlan Coben, culled from his appearance on The Early Show. Here’s an excerpt on how he writes:

"I usually go to, like, a local coffee shop or the library. I like a
little white noise when I write, but not as much white noise as my
kids. So I usually go someplace. It makes me concentrate harder. You
look like you’re being a jerk writing in a coffee shop, but that’s
where I work best."

Coben candidly admits he’s not as big on research as many other
fiction writers. "I’m more from the, ‘Hum a few bars and fake it’
genre," he says to Smith. "Tell you the truth, I do research, but I’m
really more concerned with making sure that I am holding you hostage
and gripping you. The research has to come secondary. Sometimes a
writer uses research as an excuse not to write, not to grip, to tell
you cute factoids. I don’t want to do that. I want it do it with the
story."

I have no problem making things up — it’s ficton, after all, so I agree with Harlan on that score. But I couldn’t write in a coffee shop or a Starbucks, I’d feel horribly self-conscious (especially in L.A.).  You walk into any Starbucks in L.A., and people are sitting there writing scripts, almost as if they are striking a pose: "Hey, look at me, I’m a screenwriter. Are you impressed? Would you like to fuck me? Or, better yet, hire me?" It feel so fake to me.  I’m sure some of them really are screenwriters, and they just like a good cup of coffee while they write, but I still hate it.  So I try to avoid doing any writing at all in restaurants or hotel lobbies,  especially in L.A., Vancouver or Toronto.

That said,  I write a lot on airplanes, usually because I am on some kind of pressing deadline and can’t afford not to use the five or six hours. Writing on a plane isn’t so bad if I’m with my family or traveling Bill Rabkin, my TV writing/producing partner. But when i’m traveling alone, with a stranger sitting beside me, it’s extremely awkward. It’s not easy writing when my wife is looking over my shoulder, much less a complete stranger…especially if you’re describing a homicide or somebody having sex.  I don’t blame the stranger for intruding on my privacy– we’re crammed so close together it would be damn hard not to look at the screen.   So what I do is put on a pair of headphones, crank up the music, and pretend I am all alone.  In a sense, I have to forget I am on an airplane at all — I have to lose myself completely in my fictional world.  It usually works.

How do you feel about writing in public?

 

Otto is At It Again

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Otto Penzler trashes writers of so-called "cozies" in an interview with Book Standard.  This time, he says cozies aren’t worthy of Edgar consideration.

Are female mystery-writers—most often the authors of
the more non-threatening, proper cozies—even worthy of the award? Otto
Penzler, dean of mystery-writing in America, says no.
 

“The women who write [cozies] stop the action to go shopping, create a
recipe, or take care of cats,” he says. “Cozies are not serious
literature. They don’t deserve to win. Men take [writing] more
seriously as art. Men labor over a book to make it literature. There
are wonderful exceptions, of course—P.D. James, Ruth Rendell.”
 

Margaret Maron, president of Mystery Writers of America, which doles out the Edgars, and winner of one herself (for Bootlegger’s Daughter
in 1993), sniffs at this bias, as she considers it, saying that good
writers have been overlooked by the MWA as a result of unfair favoring
of male authors and their bloodier plots. “Wit, humor, and domesticity
haven’t been considered as significant as blood and violence.

He says this stuff, casually dismissing some of the genre’s best-loved writers and their books,  and yet whenever he shows up at mystery conventions, people bow at his feet like he’s some kind of royalty.  I don’t get it. 

Selling Fanfic to Publishers

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Seaquest2032_aI received an email today from a guy who writes fanfic in "the SEAQUEST universe" and would like to see it published as novels. Here’s part of what he wrote me: 

We see novels based on other universes published all the time. Be they
the Extended-Universe Star Wars novels written by people like Timothy
Zahn or the Star Trek novels which go largely uncreditted by Paramount
studios, and they seem to do fairly well. Do you have any tips on how
I may actually go getting Atlantis published? Obviously there would be
copyright issues that need to be resolved with Universal studios and
so on, but I don’t have the foggiest on where to begin!

First off, your initial premise is wrong: Paramount maintains rigid control over the STAR TREK novels as does Lucasfilm over the STAR WARS books.

I would say it would be impossible to get Atlantis, your SeaQuest-derived work, published and it would be an utter waste of time to pursue it. But, for the sake of argument, you would have to contact Cindy Chang at Universal Licensing in Los Angeles for permission to shop it around. Then whatever publisher you found would have to pay Universal a license fee to publish your work.

There are two ways that licensed novels are usually pursued.

1) The studio offers their TV or movie property to publishers.
2) a publisher contacts a studio and says they are interested in a particular property, what would it cost to license it?

In either case, the studio is paid a license fee, receives royalties, and usually maintains creative control over the property (ie they can approve or reject writers, stories, manuscripts, etc.).
For instance, in my case, Penguin/Putnam had tremendous success with the MURDER SHE WROTE novels (licensed from Universal) and wanted to come up with a companion series that would appeal to the same audience. So they approached Paramount and licensed DIAGNOSIS MURDER from them, then they came to me to write the books (though I had to be approved by Paramount first). I am paid an advance and a royalty. Paramount, in addition to the license fee, also gets royalties.  All my manuscripts are read, and approved, by Paramount before they are published.

My advice to you is to move on. It’s time to write something original…and to put your efforts into getting that published instead.

Marmaduchy

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I was doing research on the cartoon strip "Marmaduke," the huge dog, for my MONK novel (Monk loves Marmaduke), when I stumbled on this entertaining discussion of fandom at Websnark. He illustrates his ideas by describing what Marmaduke fandom might be like:

The Marmaduke fandom, on the other hand, spends a significant amount of time
on the Marmaduke forum (the Marmaduchy, let’s call it). They have many different
discussions on Marmaduke, and on things that have nothing to do with Marmaduke
— to the point that the Marmaduke forum moderators had to create a specific
topic for off-topic posts, and have to kick folks there whenever they stray.
They trade LJ icons and forum avatars based on Marmaduke art. They collect pithy
Marmaduke sayings. They affirm each other and their common love of Marmaduke,
and they find close friends through Marmaduke — friends that mean a lot to them
far beyond Marmaduke. This is what the Marmaduke Fandom has given them, and it
means everything to them.

The idea, for many of the Marmaducets and duchesses (so clever, those
Marmaduke fans — the guys naming themselves after currency and the girls making
a delightful play on Marmaduke’s name), is not so much the individual Marmaduke
strips themselves, but the zeitgeist of all that is Marmaduke. It’s the
attitude. It’s how Marmaduke makes them feel, and how much they can amplify that
feeling in the company of others. It can be terrifically empowering and it can
be terrifically satisfying. Right here, in this little community on the
internet, Marmaduke is the coolest thing around, and by showing your love for
Marmaduke, you’re cool too. And as for Marmaduke-creator Brad Anderson? The
Marmaduchy provides feedback and, more importantly, validation. It’s damn hard
to be a cartoonist — or a creator of any stripe. It takes effort and ego and
skill and talent, and you spend a huge amount of time wondering if anyone gives
a fuck. The Marmaduchy tells Anderson "yes. Yes, we give a fuck. We give many
fucks. In fact, if you want us to, several of us will in fact have sex with you
if you want, because you have brought so much pleasure to our lives that we
would dearly love to repay you."

The  dark side of fandom, he says, is Fan Entitlement, which he describes like this:

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Kill Bill, Kill Cinema

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I enjoyed KILL BILL.  Well, at least parts of it. Was it a great movie? No. Was it visually interesting and fun? Sure. That said, I think Ron Rosenbaum’s observations in The New York Observer are absolutely correct:

I don’t blame you if any or all of these made it impossible for you
to stay awake for the eyeball-squishing, that moment of cinematic
mastery, the true climax of the two-part, four-hour Tarantino
"masterpiece."

Still, it’s too bad if you missed it, because it was the perfect
epitome of and metaphor for what I would like to call "The Cinema of
Pretentious Stupidity." The eyeball-squishing represented the crushing
of vision by lead-footed pretension, the blinding of creativity by
referentiality. The idea that ceaseless tedious references to obscure
martial-arts movies known mainly by video-store geeks adds up to art.

I’ve heard so many defenses of Kill Bill that depend on the
apparently marvelous and unheard-of-before wonder of its
referentiality. Dude, just because you make a reference—or many
references—doesn’t make it meaningful or worth four hours of our time.

(Thanks to Ed Gorman for the heads-up on this!)

Scientology on the Set

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Here’s an astonishing little  snippet from Spiegel’s terrific interview with Tom Cruise. The italicized comments in brackets are mine..

SPIEGEL: We visited one of your locations near Los Angeles and were amazed to find a fully staffed tent of the Scientology organization right next to the food tents for the journalists and extras.

Cruise: What were you amazed about?
[Translation: I’m rich and powerful and I can do whatever the hell I want. Don’t you realize that?]

SPIEGEL: Why do you go so extremely public about your personal convictions?

Cruise: I believe in freedom of speech. I felt honored to have volunteer Scientology ministers on the set. They were helping the crew.
[Helping the crew with what?] When I’m working on a movie, I do anything I can to help the people I’m spending time with. I believe in communication. [I’m sure the crew was clamoring for a Scientologist on the set. Crew members often need to get in touch with their past lives while moving lights around. That’s also why you see so many ministers of other cults and religious faiths on movie sets.]

SPIEGEL: The tent of a sect at someone’s working place still seems somewhat strange to us. Mr. Spielberg, did that tent strike you as unusual?

Spielberg: I saw it as an information tent. No one was compelled to frequent it, but it was available for anybody who had an open mind and was curious about someone else’s belief system.
[So why weren’t there ‘information tents’ from other religious groups and cults on the set…or on the sets of your other movies that don’t star Tom Cruise? I didn’t realize a movie set was a religion and cult faire].

Cruise:The volunteer Scientology ministers were there to help the sick and injured. [Was it a movie…or a war zone? And what help could Scientologists provide to the sick and injured? Isn’t that why you have a nurse on the set? Or how about just calling some Paramedics?] People on the set appreciated that.  [Oh yeah, I bet.]

Imagine what would happen if I was producing a TV series and invited
some Mormons or Jews or Christians or Muslims to pitch tents on the set and minister to the "sick and injured" on my crew. There would be an uproar, and justifiably so. But I’m not Tom Cruise. I don’t make billions of dollars  for Hollywood studios.

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Help Wanted: Humans Only, Please

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Today, I received this email from Wayne Manzo. 

I would like to produce a weekly investigative news program based on my
research and web magazines.

The show will be investigative news but
from a different angle__that we humans are living with ET and it is the
aliens that are controlling our human reality.

I need humans who are
interested in getting involved in the pre-production logistics of this
type of program.

Contact me in interested.

Wmanzo@yahoo.com

Since he’s interested only in working with humans and I am Glarp, alien recon-leader from the planet Glorp, I didn’t reply.

Jag Rag

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I received this email today. I’d reply, but I have no idea what she’s asking or why she’s asking me.

Yes, we have heard that tonight is the last night for the program of JAG, with Harmon Rabb and the other characters.  And we’d like to know what’s what with that program.  And if so, we want to make sure that we’re home to see it. For we have really enjoyed that show and wished that Harmon and
Mac could have gotten married or at least could have had that baby that they had talked about in the show.  But I guess that never happened.  My email address is:

New Definition of Vanity Press

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Keith Snyder proposes a new definition of  "vanity press" that reflects the way self-publishing has evolved since the advent of print-on-demand technology:

We need to stop telling people a vanity press is a company that charges fees, and start telling them a vanity press is a
company that makes the bulk of its money from a very large number of
very small print runs that it sells mainly to people the authors know.

That’s a 21st-century vanity press.

He may be on to something here, though the definition may need a little refining to fully cover scams like PublishAmerica and their ilk.

(Thanks to Paul Guyot for the heads-up).

The Dollars and Cents of Writing

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Romance novelist Alison Kent shares the dollars and cents behind life as a professional writer, sharing with readers of her blog exactly what she was paid, in advances and royalties, for one of her books. And it works out to this:

$18,191.15 from June of 2000 when I sold to December 2003. Thirty
months. That’s approximately $3.50 an hour if you calculate from
contract date to the royalty statement I pulled. The book only took
three or four months to write, of course, but you get the picture.
Making a living in category can’t be done without MULTIPLE releases per
year.

It was brave and extra-ordinarily helpful for Alison to share this (braver and more helpful than I am) with aspiring writers. Just because you get published doesn’t mean you’ve got it made, that you’re swimming in money. Many of the mid-list authors I know have full-time day jobs…because they couldn’t possibliy live on what they make as authors.  Kudos to Alison for giving aspiring authors a glimpse of the real world (and also explaining why some authors must write more than one book a year)