Writing

Our Worst Script

by

I published the post below on this blog in July 2006…and forgot all about what I said I’d do at the end. Now I am following through…

Ken Levine writes today about the worst script he and his partner ever wrote.

In 1993 my writing partner, David Isaacs and I did a short run series
for CBS called BIG WAVE DAVE’S starring Adam Arkin and David Morse. It
ran that summer, got 19 shares, kept 100% of MURPHY BROWN’S audience
and was cancelled. At the time CBS had starring vehicles in the wings
for Peter Scolari, Bronson Pinchot, and the always hilarious Faye
Dunaway so they didn’t need us.

We were given a production order
of six with three back-up scripts. We assigned the first two back-ups
to our staff and planned on writing the third ourselves. When the show
was cancelled we put in to CBS to get paid for the additional scripts.
They said fine, but we had to turn in the completed scripts. Gulp!

Bill
Rabkin and I had almost the exact same experience on SEAQUEST. We’d
already turned in the outline for  episode 14 when we got canceled.
But in order to get paid for the teleplay, we had to write it. We did
it in one day, while we were packing up our office. I still live in
fear that some sf fan will stumble on a bootleg draft at a scifi
convention, post it on the net, and people will think we actually write
that bad. I’m in Germany now, or I’d post an excerpt. I’ll try to
remember to do it when I return.

Darwin
UPDATE March 8, 2007:  Okay, here’s an excerpt from "About Face,"  the script Bill and I wrote in a day to get our script fee. We knew no one would ever read it. All you need to know to follow along is that Piccolo a man with gills and Darwin is a talking dolphin (I’m not kidding).

Read more

Sisters-in-Crime Wrestles with POD

by

Now that anybody with a credit card and the email address of a Print-on-Demand company thinks they can call themselves a publisher or a published author, professional writers organizations have been forced to carefully define what it means to them to be a "publisher" or a  "published author" to deal with the issue. Now even Sisters-in-Crime is acknowledging the problem.

It seems that the abundance of POD titles in the Sisters-in-Crime’s annual  "Books-in-Print" catalog has rendered the publication useless to the booksellers and librarians it was intended for. As a result, Sisters-in-Crime is changing their rules about which titles can be listed in the publication. 

According to a member mailing by Sisters-in-Crime president Roberta Isleib, from now on only books that meet "marketplace standards" will be included in the listing.

Following are the criteria for a book that meets marketplace standards:

Is returnable.

Is offered at standard industry discounts

Is available through national wholesaler, such as Ingram or Baker and Taylor

Is competitively priced

Has a minimum print run of 1,000 copies

(We believe that the minimum print run of 1,000 copies shows a publisher’s intent to place the book in the marketplace. It is the same number used by Authors Coalition to determine a ‘published book.’)

Any titles that do not meet one of the standards may be petitioned on a case-by-case basis, so long as all other requirements are met.

[…]POD reprints of titles that met industry standards when originally published will be included in the print BIP.

The Mystery Writers of America enacted guidelines this year that excludes print-on-demand "publishers" from their Approved Publishers list. There was, predictably, a lot of foot-stomping in the blogosphere among the POD crowd, who predicted a mass exodus of members from the MWA as a result of the changes. In fact, the exact opposite occurred — the change actually resulted in a surge in membership renewals and new memberships. We now have more members than ever before.

But unlike the MWA, Sisters-in-Crime has a much more flexible membership policy and includes among its active members many people who’ve had their manuscripts printed using a POD press and consider themselves "published authors." Expect an uproar.

Tired of the Cliches

by

Strattons1
I love mysteries, but I’m burned out on all the cliches. I won’t read about one more drunken, divorced cop with a tragic past.  I wish more authors had the same attitude as author Laura Wilson.  She writes in RED HERRINGS, the UK Crimes Writers Association newsletter (and in Shots Magazine), that she consciously avoided the cliches when she started her new series:

I decided, at the outset, that I did not want DI Stratton to be a conventionally flawed crime protagonist. He is neither a drunk, a compulsive gambler, nor an adulterer, and his psyche isn’t scarred by past personal tragedy — but nor is he a hero of lonely integrity walking the mean streets or a Dixon of Dock Green-like, salt-of-the-earth embodiment of law and order. He is an ordinary man with a realistic background […] lower middle class and father of two, he lives with his family and works in the West End. He is an intelligent, humorous man, but with rudimentary education; cynical, but kind and humane; happily married, but with a wandering eye. Above all, he is pragmatic.

S is for Sloppy Editing

by

Sisforsilence
I have a theory that when an author becomes really, really big, the editors don’t read the manuscripts very closely, if at all. That’s especially true with Robert B. Parker. His books are usually laced with errors (for instance, in his latest Jesse Stone novel, STRANGER IN PARADISE, the spelling of the name of a big estate keeps changing).  What brings this to my mind today is a sentence on page 169 of Sue Grafton’s S IS FOR SILENCE that really boggles me. Her heroine Kinsey Milhone is in a sleazy motel room and makes this observation:

My bedspread smelled musty, and I was happy I didn’t see the article about dust mites until the following week.

How could she have been happy about something that hadn’t happened yet?!

Where the Wild Tie-In Writers Are

by

More and more high profile authors are turning to tie-ins.  Dave Eggers, author of A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS, is
writing the novelization of the movie adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s
classic children’s picture book WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE. The novelization
will be based on the script by Eggers’ and director Spike Jonze, which
expands on Sendak’s 300-word book. Publishers Weekly reports that the
novelization was Eggers’ idea but it was Sendak who lobbied Eggers to
be the one to write the tie-in. Harper Collins will publish the book, Eggers’ first since
2000 not to be published under his own McSweeney’s banner. It was not
an easy deal to craft:

The publisher acquired world rights to the novel about a year
ago, in a deal that involved not only Eggers but lawyers from Warner
Brothers, since a tie-in book was already part of the movie contract.
Intellectual property rights of both Sendak and HarperCollins (Where the Wild Things Are
was originally published by Harper & Row) also had a bearing on
terms. As [editor Dan] Halpern put it, negotiations involved “many different moving
parts.” But the goal was always to have any tie-in book published by a
Harper imprint, per the preexisting deal between Warner Brothers and
Harper, which owns publication rights to the Wild Things
franchise. Sendak, who has since been affiliated with other houses,
agreed “there was something correct” about Harper doing Eggers’s book.
 

Things Aren’t Bleak for Bleak House

by

The MWA has been criticized in some quarters for favoring the big houses over small presses. But as Publisher’s Weekly notes, the Edgar nominations this year tell a different story:

To nobody’s surprise, when the Mystery Writers of America announced the
finalists for the 2008 Edgar Awards last week  titles from the large
New York houses dominated the eight (out of a total of 13) categories
dealing with books. But one small Wisconsin press is more than holding
its own among the 35 books and five short stories selected as this
year’s Edgar Awards nominees. Three of the 15 titles released this past
year by Bleak House Books in Madison, an imprint of Big Earth Books,
have been nominated for 2008 Edgar Awards in three different
categories: Soul Patch by Reed Farrel Coleman (Best Novel), Head Games
by Craig McDonald (Best First Novel), and "Blue Note" by Stuart M.
Kaminsky from the Chicago Blues collection (Best Short Story).

Bleak House isn’t the only small press represented on the Edgar list this year. There are also titles from McFarland & Co, Serpent’s Tail, Hard Case Crime, Rookery Press, Level Best Books, Akashic,  Clarion, American Girl, and Busted Flush.

MWA’S Definition of “Self-Published”

by

The Mystery Writers of America has revised the language of their definition of "self-publication" for membership application, publisher approval, and Edgar eligibility. The changes were made for greater clarity and specificity. 

“Self-published”
or “cooperatively published” works include, but are not limited to:

 a) Those works for which
the author has paid all or part of the cost of publication, marketing,
distribution of the work, or any other fees pursuant to an agreement between
the author and publisher, cooperative publisher or book packager;

b) Works printed and
bound by a company that does not sell or distribute the work to
brick-and-mortar bookstores;

c) Those works published
by a privately held publisher or in collaboration with a book packager wherein the
writer has a familial relationship with the publisher, editor, or any
managerial employee, officer, director or owner of the publisher or book
packager;

d) Those works published
by companies or imprints that do not publish other authors;

e) Those works published
by a publisher or in collaboration with a book packager in which the author has
a direct or indirect financial interest;

f) Those works published
in an anthology or magazine in which the author is also an editor, except an
anthology or magazine for which the author is a guest editor.

g) Those works published
in an anthology or magazine wherein the author has a familial relationship with
the editor or publisher.

Good News for Mankell Fans

by

Henrikssonwallanderweb
Variety reports that Kenneth Branagh has signed to star as Inspector Wallander in the BBC’s series of TV movie adaptations of Henning Mankell’s novels
"Firewall," "Sidetracked," and "One Step Behind." Lassgardwallander

It won’t be the first time Wallander has hit the screen…there have already been 13 Wallander films made for the Scandinavian market, three for theatrical release and 10 for TV.  Wallander has been played by Krister Henriksson (left) and Rolf Lassgard (right).

Mel Odom on Tie-In Writing

by

I stumbled onto an interesting  interview, conducted about seven years ago, with novelist Mel Odom on tie-in writing. He says, among other things:

"A lot of ‘regular’ authors look down on media tie-in authors because they figure ‘You’re not doing real work. You’re not really being a writer. You’re doing knock-off stuff.’ There have been a lot of ‘regular’ writers who try to do what Chris Golden and I do, and they can’t because they don’t assimilate the world enough, or they’re trying to bring too much of their own stuff to it. Media tie-in writing is really tough, because you have to be strong writer, and walk-in there and tell the best story you can, while at the same time you have to set your ego aside and do it ‘their way’ to a degree, as far as ‘Buffy would never do this.’ ‘But, when I was a kid, I would do that…’

He wants to make sure that his books are more than just a screenplay in book form:

I feel that a lot of people, why they try to do novelizations, they squeeze the dialogue in between text descriptions. You know, ‘They were sitting in a restaurant. He had pancakes, and she had a milkshake, and he said…’ You know, and there’s a lot of novelizations that read that way. I don’t want mine to read that way if I can. I want to give them a book that has legs. If you do a really nice book, it may have legs and be out there longer than the movie is. The movie will come and go in a month or two, but if you write the book really well, there will still be people ordering it for a long time after the film has left theatres. There’s something about a book."

Yes, there certainly is.

A Footnote to the Ardai Issue

by

Lately, Hard Case Crime editor and publisher Charles Ardai has gone to great pains to claim he’s not really an editor and publisher…and that his book SONGS OF INNOCENCE, which was published under his imprint, isn’t self-published and therefore should be eligible for Edgar consideration.
I guess he forgot about the interview he gave for this month’s issue of Mystery News about the evolution  of Hard Case Crime:

…and [Max Phillips] went off and mocked up some dummy covers to show me what it might look like if we did publish our own books in the old style. I’d worked as an editor of mystery anthologies for years, so it was simple for me to go to my bookshelves and compile a list of some great and undeservedly forgotten novels it would be fun for us to reprint. And Max and I are both writers ourselves, so we agreed we’d each write a book of our own for the line, guaranteeing that we’d have at least two original novels along with all the reprints.