My Blog

Walla Walla Octopus

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PB060133 The big story gripping my mother's hometown of  Walla Walla Washington this past weekend was the controversy over a mural on the front of Inland Octopus, a toy store on Main Street. What amused me was a letter-to-the-editor from David Castleman of Dayton, WA slamming the mural's supporters. He wrote, in part:

"Those good folks who applaud the tawdriness adorning Inland Octopus are the folks who eat at McDonald's and ship at WalMart. They applaud the tawdry, the ill-conceived and the ill-produced. The painter's ostensible deity is Warhol, his priests the Simpsons, his bible the comic strips for domestic imbecility. His admirers pick their noses at stop signs and relieve the expiscations upon their skirts and trousers." 

I have to admit that I had to look up expiscation in the dictionary. 

Chandler’s Big Bender

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51GG9p2iEZL._SS500_ I'm in Walla Walla, Washington for my mother's funeral…but while I am away, my friend Bill Peschel has kindly stepped in to keep my blog going with an excerpt from his terrific and very entertaining new book Writers Gone Wild. Here's a story about Raymond Chandler, John Houseman, three double martinis, a doctor,  a limo and a screenplay…

Some writers go to great lengths to finish a work. To finish a screenplay, Raymond Chandler got tanked.

At fifty-seven, the writer’s best work was behind him when he was hired by Paramount for a rush job. The studio’s leading actor, Alan Ladd, had been drafted into the army, and the executives wanted to keep his profile with the public alive by releasing a movie while he was away. A script wasn’t ready, but Chandler offered to write a new one based on his half-finished novel, “The Blue Dahlia.”

But with the date for Ladd’s induction set, shooting began with only part of the script written. Chandler workedfast, but as the filming caught up, the executives worried whether he could finish on time. With only two weeks left, a Paramount executive called Chandler and offered him a $5,000 bonus if he succeeded.

The next day, a shaken Chandler met with the producer, John Houseman. The offer, he said, implied they had no faith in him. It was an insult to his honor to take a bonus for a job he had agreed to do. Now, he didn’t think he could even finish the script except under one condition: He would have to get drunk.He always wrote faster that way.

Chandler had a list of his needs: two limousines with drivers available around the clock to fetch a doctor, deliver script pages to the studio, and drive the maid to market; secretaries to take dictation; and a direct phone line to Houseman.

Houseman considered the risks. Chandler hadbeen a heavy drinker most of his life before drying out. A relapse could kill him. Still, the movie had to be made, and he didn’t have any alternative. He agreed, and at a celebratory lunch, Chandler loaded up with three double martinis and three double stingers.

For eight days, Chandler drank, passed out, wrote, drank, and passed out again. Twice a day, the doctor shot him up with vitamins and fed him glucose intravenously. Chandler finished the job with days to spare but spent the next month recuperating in bed. The script’s last line was “Did somebody say something about a drink of bourbon?”

Jan Curran

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My mother, Jan Curran, passed away on Monday night with her family at her side. Those of you who have read my blog for some time know she was an out-going, funny, and very talented woman and, like me and siblings, was a writer. She had been ill for some time and moved to Ventura to be closer to her family. She wrote about her new life in an active senior living home in a funny and touching self-published book entitled "Active Senior Living." The incredibly enthusiastic and warm response that she got from hundreds of readers all over the country gave her enormous comfort and joy over the last year. Bruce Fessier wrote a great obituary for my mother for the Palm Springs Desert Sun, the newspaper where she worked. Here it is.

Jan Curran, a popular society editor and features writer for The Desert Sun and Palm Springs Life, died Monday night at her assisted living home in Ventura — almost 35 years after being told she had six months to live.

Curran, 73, contracted lupus when she was a single mother of four kids working at the Contra Costa Times in the East Bay. Her youngest son, Tod Goldberg of La Quinta, said the family created a contingency plan for her death and “There was the very real sense that somebody would take us away.”

Curran had battled different types of cancer since 1995. But she also wrote two books and lived to see all of her children become published authors.

Her physician, Dr. Joel Hirschberg, said, “No matter what happened to her medically, she just had the most wonderful attitude.

“She had an illness that potentially could have been very severe and disabling, yet you would never know to look at her that she had any problems,” he said. “She would just smile and look at everybody else around her and just decide that her problems were very manageable compared to the rest of those out there.”

“I think she was the funniest, bravest person I ever knew,” added society journalist Gloria Greer. “Such great humor, and she was sick for so long.”

Curran, who covered society events for the Contra Costa Times and Oakland Tribune in the 1970s, joined the Jones Agency as an advertising executive in 1985 and soon began covering events for Palm Springs Life magazine.

She was The Desert Sun's society editor from 1988 to 1996, following Allene Arthur. She was the newspaper's last full-time society editor, but covered the rapid growth of social activities in country clubs and fundraising events as the desert population grew east from Palm Springs.

“There was a time that Jan knew everybody,” said Hirschberg, who was active in the Arthritis Foundation's Coachella Valley chapter.

“There wasn't a social event that would actually go on without her being involved in it. And she always brought bright sunshine to the room.”

Current director of society coverage for The Desert Sun Betty Francis said Curran brought her own humor and glamour to the position.

“I thought Allene was the most fair and balanced and kind society (editor) we ever had,” she said. “Jan came along with a little more edge and glamour and was pretty enough and well dressed enough to compete with the various celebrities she was interviewing. Looking at the big picture of society, she brought more glamour.”

Funeral services in her native Walla Walla, Wash., are pending. Goldberg also said a memorial will probably be held in the Coachella Valley.

Besides Goldberg, she is survived by her brothers Stanley Barer of Seattle and Burl Barer of Stevenson Ranch; son Lee Goldberg of Calabasas; daughters Karen Dinino of Thousand Oaks and Linda Woods of Castaic; and three grandchildren.

 

Michelle Gagnon on KIDNAP AND RANSOM

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Michelle_web-1 My friend Michelle Gagnon — the lovely, lethal, and talented author of the Special Agent Kelly Jones series — has a new thriller out entitled KIDNAP AND RANSOM that critics are already calling her best novel yet. So I thought this would be a good time to ask her about  her work, her craft, and her take on where the business is going. 

LEE: The old adage is "write what you know," but the heroine of your books is a kick-ass FBI Special Agent. You've been everything BUT that… a dancer, model, dog walker, personal trainer, bartender, etc. Is writing about Kelly Jones purely an escapist fantasy for you?

MICHELLE: So true, I’m clearly in way over my head. The smart thing would have been to set a book in a Russian supper club starring a modern dancer and call it a day. 

Here’s the thing: with THE TUNNELS, I initially set out to write a college coming of age story. But I kept stalling out after twenty or so pages. Each time I went back and tried a different approach, starting with a different scene or tweaking the characters…and each time, I got the same result. 

Then one night, I had two of my characters walking through this abandoned tunnel system under the university. And I almost inadvertently killed one of them off. I sat back, re-read what I’d written, and shrugged, figuring I might as well see how it played out. A few pages later FBI agent Kelly Jones walked on to the scene, and the story was off and running. I completed a rough draft within a month.

In retrospect, even though it was entirely unintentional, I feel lucky to have stumbled upon choosing an FBI agent as one of my main characters, because she has the capacity to go almost anywhere. It’s enabled me to have books set in the Berkshires, Arizona, and now Mexico City. And although I’m far from an expert, I’ve done a ton of research on FBI procedures, spent time at the FBI Citizens Academy and Quantico, and had an agent vet every one of my books for accuracy. Although that being said, my favorite quote was from a career FBI agent who said that if I really wrote about what she did all day, the book would only be useful as a sleep aid. I stay true to their procedures as much as possible, but take license when the story calls for it. Kidnap&Ransom

 LEE: This latest book, KIDNAP AND RANSOM, is already being hailed as your best work. Wasn't this one inspired by a true story?

MICHELLE: Absolutely it was. While researching border issues for THE GATEKEEPER, I stumbled across an article detailing the kidnapping of Felix Batista. Batista was a world-renowned hostage negotiator who had personally secured the release of over a hundred kidnap victims. While in Saltillo, Mexico for a security conference, he walked out of a restaurant one night, was pushed into the back of a van, and hasn’t been seen or heard from since. The irony of the story grabbed me—the hero becoming the victim, an expert suddenly forced into the position he’d saved so many people from. Stranger still was the fact that his kidnapping wasn’t proceeding normally—there was no ransom demand, and no one claimed responsibility for seizing him. It was a true mystery, and I always find those irresistible. Mind you, in KIDNAP & RANSOM every other aspect of his abduction was fictionalized, and the character of Cesar Calderon is not meant to represent him in any way, shape, or form. Hopefully Mr. Batista will be reunited with his family soon.

LEE: Your books are all mass market, paperback originals. But the talk in publishing circles these days is that paperbacks may be an endangered species, soon to be replaced by ebooks. What's your take on that? 

MICHELLE: Oh no, I’m doomed! After your Bouchercon ebooks panel, we discussed the fact that you stopped buying paperbacks once you got an ereader. I was an early adopter myself: I received a first generation Sony Reader, Kindle, and iPad as presents over the past few years. Yet I’ve still been buying mass market books. I always bring a paperback on planes to carry me through the inevitable forty-five minutes between take-off and landing when electronic devices must be turned off, or to read at the beach, or in the bathtub. I’ve pretty much stopped buying trade paperbacks, and I usually only buy a hardcover novel if I’ve already read it electronically and loved it so much that I felt compelled to add it to my collection. 

So I’m not sure if the mass market format is truly going the way of the eight track. I’d love to see a future where books are bundled in a few different formats—for example, receiving an audio, ebook,  and mass market paperback editions of the same book for a certain price. While I love hardcovers, they’re bulky, unwieldy, and really only designed to be read at home- wouldn’t it be great if you could also have an electronic copy of the same novel when you’re traveling, and the ability to switch to the audio version for a long car drive? 

LEE:  You're an active presence on Facebook, you're a regularly blogger…how important is keeping yourself front-and-center on the web for an author's career these days?

MICHELLE: I think it’s critical, although it can also be exhausting. I’ve tried to be better about turning off my wireless access while I’m writing, and I don’t get on the computer at all after 5pm. Now I share my Thursday slot on THE KILL ZONE blog with the extremely talented Jordan Dane, because I  was becoming overwhelmed by the weekly posts (I don’t know how you do it, Lee!) 
For Facebook and Twitter, I’ll post articles or other stuff that I stumble across that strikes me as interesting.  Even though those networks serve as my virtual watercooler, I’m pretty sure that most of my friends and followers aren’t desperate to know what I ate for breakfast, or how much sleep I got, so I keep those types of posts to a minimum. I have an unfortunate tendency to be easily distracted. So I think that although authors need to capitalize on those resources, it’s necessary to strike a balance, too.

 

Stinging and Accomplished

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Author and screenwriter Stephen Gallagher wrote about REMAINDERED today and to say I am flattered would be an understatement. He says, in part:

Last night I got to see Lee Goldberg’s stinging and accomplished short film Remaindered, and I’m going to recommend it to you without reservation. Yes, I know Lee, and no, friendship has nothing to do with it.

The tale’s as well-turned as you’d expect from a pro, and it takes imaginative flight from a reality that’ll be recognised by anyone who’s ever faced the world over a stack of books at a signing table. OK, so not everyone’s done that. But it’s about those dying-inside times when your soul and your sense of self-worth are laid bare for strangers to pick at, and there’s no escaping them as they oblige.

It’s the mise-en-scene, to get fancy about it, that takes it to another level. The small-town Kentucky locale is perfectly textured for the story, and Lee’s choices are all spot-on. From the opening shots you’ve real sense of a place and its people. A special shout-out here for Todd Reynolds as Detective Bud Flanek, whose easy John Goodman-like screen charisma left me surprised to see that he doesn’t have a long resume of Hollywood character roles.

 

Wow. Thank you so much, Stephen!

What To Do

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I have some time on my hands. Today I turned in the manuscript for my 12th Monk novel, MR MONK ON THE COUCH, which means that, for a few weeks anyway, I don't have any deadlines hanging over my head. I still have to come up with the plot of my next Monk book over the next couple of days (the book is due in June), but that's not worrying me too much.

So I'm sitting here trying to decide what project would be the best use of my time, creatively and financially, over the next four-to-six weeks (assuming some paying gig, like a job on a series or a freelance script, doesn't come along!).

1. THE HEIST MOVIE.  I've got an incredibly detailed outline  for a big heist movie, a project I developed a year or so back for a Big Name Movie Producer…but the project fell through.  It's all mine, there are no strings attached to it, so I could write that up as a new spec feature script. 

2. THE CRIME NOVEL.  I have 20o pages and an outline that I wrote two years ago for a crime novel called KING CITY and then had to set aside for some paying gigs. I could finish that up and give it to my agent…or publish it directly on the Kindle. Or…

3. THE SPEC PILOT. I could go in a different direction and write KING CITY as a spec TV pilot script, since the idea originally began as a TV series pitch that a lot of folks liked, though not enough to actually buy it.

4. THE WALK SEQUEL. My wife thinks I should write a direct-to-Kindle sequel to THE WALK to take advantage of the book's success. The sequel would be set over the same three-day period as the book, but would focus on what was happening to the hero's wife while he was walking across Los Angeles. I have some notions, but I still need to plot the whole thing out.

I'm mulling them all and waiting to see which one inspires me the most over the next couple of days. In the mean time, I've got Men of Mystery to attend in Irvine tomorrow, I want to finish reading Justin Cronin's THE PASSAGE, and I've got lots of episodes of BOARDWALK EMPIRE, NIKITA, and some other shows to catch up on.

Hitchcockian

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Media critic Bill Peschel had some great things to say about REMAINDERED on his blog today, singling out the performances of Sebrina Siegel and Todd Reynolds for praise. 

“Remaindered” is a tight 20-minute tale of a writer, Kevin Dangler (played by Eric Altheide), whose first novel was the peak of his career and his second was, in the words of the book’s best review, “a 778-page suicide note for a once-promising writing career.” Dangler is reduced to traveling to backwater towns, flogging his third book with signings in grocery stores.

There, he meets Megan, the town librarian with a passion for first editions and those who write them. She’s played by Sebrina Siegel, who gets a lot of mileage out of a black bra and a line like “read to me.”

Needless to say, their meeting doesn’t end well, but I won’t say more. It’s a neat mystery short-story, complete with a twist ending that loops back to the beginning, and in-jokes mystery fans will appreciate, including a “Monk” reference.

My favorite performances were by Siegel, who played the librarian with the right mix of fannish admiration and seduction, and Todd Reynolds as the detective. He had a small role, but he made it memorable (it didn’t hurt that he was given some very sharp lines).

If someone ever decides to retool Alfred Hitchcock’s old TV show, “Remaindered” would fit in nicely. It reminded me of one of the mystery story’s great pleasures: of following a tightly plotted tale with unexpected plot twists and a satisfying conclusion. It’s difficult to pull off, but I’m happy to say that Lee succeeded.

Thanks so much, Bill!