Do Fish Have Loins?

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My Mom writes on her Active Senior Living blog about a marketing event at the senior living facility where she set her book:

It's so damn dumb. It's a senior prom and there are women downstairs dressed like they are preparing to walk down the aisle as the grandmother of the bride. Lots of pastel shaded lace suits and dresses. I almost got the giggles looking at them. All the furniture is out of the lobby and replaced with cocktail tables and it is decorated like New Year's Eve.. a five piece " orchestra" will play for dancing. The dance started at 5:30 an goes until 8 so we were all told we had to eat dinner at 4:00 and by 3:30 the dining room was full of people, me included. I wasn't even hungry which was good cus dinner was loin of cod. Do fish have loins? I ordered sausage and eggs, ate that and got the hell out before the public began arriving to wine and dine and dance with free champagne and bite size goodies like meat balls, which Jay said were probably better than our dinner. Ah ,the joys of this lifestyle! Guess I can always write about that for the sequel to Active Senior Living.

UPDATE: My Mom blogged about the post-cod loins menu and I laughed so hard that I hard to share it with you:

After baked loin of cod as our menu choice last night … and who ever knew cod had loins, I expected tonight's choice to be roasted leg of Rainbow Trout. Our chef is very creative and not always in a good way. His seasoning of choice is always jalapeno and gravy is on everything. Same gravy, no matter was the entree is. I've gotten used to eating cold mashed potatoes, over cooked beef and chicken that is less than tender but the good news is I haven't lost any weight. Maybe that is because I do the feeding tube for breakfast and most days for lunch , too, and that gives me some good calories.
When we are served a meal that is less than desirable I am reminded of what my friend Ed told me ( and I put in the book Active Senior Living) and that was that he figured the food budget per resident was about $7 a day. " it's like Boy Scout camp," he had said, " only here we have indoor plumbing."
I've talked to residents at other active senior complexes and it is the same story everywhere.. not just here and not just in California. The food tends to be the least most attractive thing about the place. But , as my friend Betsy says, " we didn't have to go get the groceries, cook the meal, clear the table or do the dishes. They can cook it any way they want and it's fine with me!"

The Mail I Get

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This is my favorite fan letter of the week:

I read a book of Criminal Minds by another author and really enjoyed it. The story was true to the characters and I learned even more about them. Everything was written very true to the TV series. Mr. Monk is Miserable, however, is way off base from the TV series. One, pill or not, Monk hates to fly and I don’t believe he would agree to fly so often because of a little pill. Is it too hard to come up with stories in the country of America that can be driven to? […] couldn’t even finish the book because it was so devastatingly off course and I would never recommend the books to anybody else. I think you need to do better research to stay true to the TV series. Read Criminal Minds and you’ll get an idea of what YOU SHOULD BE DOING!

Changing the Act

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My friend author Gar Anthony Haywood has taken a long hiatus from attending conferences. But he's coming back for Left Coast Crime next month. But he's not going to be the same guy he was in the past.

I’ve revamped the act I used to do in public settings such as this and will be testing out the new and improved one at LCC. Gar Anthony Haywood, the conference panelist who never met a punch line he didn’t like, is no more.

It won’t be an easy transition for me. Going for the laugh has always been my M.O. when faced with panel audiences. One, because humor comes more naturally to me than eloquence and, two, because I used to regard writers who can’t bring themselves to crack a smile when answering a moderator’s question as stuffed shirts with an overinflated sense of their own importance. I thought it was better to be remembered as a joker than quickly forgotten as a smart and articulate egomaniac.

Now, I’m not so sure. At least, if being the most memorably hilarious writer at a conference has any long-term benefits, I would seem to have failed to reap them.

It isn’t just humor’s questionable value as a marketing strategy that’s driving my P.R. metamorphosis, however. I’m also looking to more accurately represent the literary heft I’d like to think my more recent writing carries.

I'm not sure he's right. I've seen way too many writers who think because they write dark, brooding, moody stuff that they have to be dark, brooding and moody themselves. I am a firm believer in just being yourself, and if you happen to be funny, that's fine. Nobody likes schtick, though, whether you are telling jokes or being the darkest guy in the room. My brother Tod writes dark stuff, and he's always funny on panels, and that didn't stop him from getting nominated for the LA Times Book Prize. Craig Johnson's stuff is procedural cop stuff that borders on the literary…and he's always hilarious on panels. Hasn't stopped Craig from being taken seriously, or for his books to win widespread acclaim. I guess what I'm saying Gar, if you're reading this, is just be Gar and stop over-thinking it.

I don’t have rhythm

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Since my surgery on Wednesday, I have been trying to write with my dictation software. It hasn't gone well. Not because of the software, which has been working fine (I am using it to write this post). The problem is me and it's mental. Or maybe tactile. Or both.For some reason, the act of typing is very much linked creatively to writing for me. The dictation software has been fine for things like this post, but for fiction, it has been problematic. My sentences are coming out stilted. The words just aren't flowing. Granted, I have other handicaps working against my creativity now…pain, discomfort, drugs. Even so, I feel like I need the tactile connection/sensation of fingers on the keys to really get into the groove, the rhythm of writing. That rhythm is missing for me without the act of typing. I guess it's like trying to dance while belted into a chair. On the plus side, I seem to be a better speller with the dictation software … at least when the software gets my words right, which surprisingly is most of the time.

Yesterday I wrote an essay for the Edgar Award program and what would have taken me maybe an hour took me a lot longer. It was easier than trying to dictate fiction, though. Maybe with practice I get better at it. I hope to be back typing with my right hand again very soon.

Mirror Mirror

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I hate it when authors use reflecti0ns as a way to describe how their characters look. It always feels lazy and flat. But, for some reason, the horror cliche of having an image suddenly appear in a mirror never seems to lose its shock value. Just take a look at this:

Thanks to Alex Epstein for the link.

I’m Going Under The Knife

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..and not for the long overdue nose job, pec implants and scrotum lift.

As I mentioned a few days ago, I’m having more surgery on my right arm again today so I may be absent here for a while…

Then again, I said that before my second surgery on my arm a few years back…and I blogged the next day using my dictation software. This blogging thing is an addiction, my friends…or a desperate cry for attention…or both.

UPDATE 2-10-10: thank you for all your kind comments and support.I wasn’t able to watch the surgery this time because my arm was taking too long to numb-up so he had to knock me out.  The surgery lasted a little over an hour and my modest doctor tells me he “performed another miracle” so all is well. My arm is still numb, so I am feeling no pain…yet. I am writing this using my dictation software and am stunned at how accurate it is. Okay, time to go eat some cookies and drink some gatorade.  

A Book Made For Me

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51lYvEwlv-L._SS500_ I'm a sucker for unusual reference works about the media, whether its books, movies or TV shows (and you gotta love McFarland for publishing so many of them). Bradley Mengel's "Serial Vigilantes of Paperback Fiction" was a must-have for me, even before I read the rave reviews on Bookgasm and Bill Crider's blog.

I've always loved pulp novels like "The Executioner," "The Penetrator," "The Death Merchant," and "The Destroyer." In fact, I did a scholarly, unpublished examination of the vigilante genre myself many years ago for a UCLA class…and as research for writing my first novel, .357 Vigilante, under the pseudonym "Ian Ludlow" (yes, it's covered in this book, and accurately, too. And notice how similar the cover of his book is to mine).

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For me, the best part of Mengel's book is discovering who actually wrote the novels written under "house" names…and learning the inside story on the development of so many obscure pulp series. This book is clearly a labor of love, but it leans more towards scholarly analysis than fannish drool. It's a great book for fans of pulps, rich with details and background information, and offers a historical overview of a genre, and a class of mass market paperbacks, that are all but dead today (except for Gold Eagle's "Executioner" books). Many of these books, and their authors, would have been forgotten if not for this one-of-a-kind reference work, which also offers a glimpse at the influence and workings of book packagers/"creators" in the 60s,70s & 80s.

The only drawback of this book is the steep $45 cover price. To save a few bucks, I bought the Kindle edition, which was also inexcusably pricey at $16, especially since the book doesn't really lend itself to easy reading on an e-reader. Even so, I'm glad I bought it.

Collaboration

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My buddy Max Allan Collins talks on his blog today about his collaborations with Mickey Spillane. Here's an excerpt: 

The truth is, these are genuine collaborations, all of them. I would put them at 50%/50%. I usually take Mickey’s work, expand upon it, and extend it so that it takes up at least half of the finished product. Probably about 60% of the wordsmithing in these novels is mine. But the plot idea, and various notes, and sometimes rough drafts of endings, plus the other 40% of the writing, are all Mickey’s. That’s how it’s done. I don’t believe anything like it has ever occurred in mystery fiction, a writer of Mickey’s magnitude leaving half a dozen substantial manuscripts behind, having designated a trusted collaborator (me) to complete them.

He also talks about his collaborations with his long-time researcher Matthew Clemens, who is uncredited on the covers of Max's C.S.I. tie-ins. Max is very candid about why his name is so much bigger than Clemens' on the cover of their new "standalone" thriller, even though they equally divided the work:N335740  

A good collaboration is synergistic – two plus two equals fourteen. While there are plenty of Matt’s sentences in YOU CAN’T STOP ME, it is about as fifty/fifty a project as you can imagine…and neither of us could have done it alone.

[Bill Crider's]comment that my bigger byline on THE BIG BANG may indicate a bigger contribution by me is at odds with the truth of publishing. Often times, the bigger name of a dual byline did the least amount of work. YOU CAN’T STOP ME is very much a fifty-fifty novel by Matt and me, but my name is much larger, because I am the bigger name (at the moment). But usually with such a situation, you could safely guess that the smaller name did most or even more of the writing.

The blog post is worth reading… it's a very interesting look into the work habits of a professional writer and, to some degree, the business of writing.