Parker is Prolific

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There are a couple of interesting things about Robert B. Parker’s latest Amazon blog post. For one, he’s openly soliciting people to buy the movie option on his Sunny Randall novels (and offers the name and address of his agents)…which I find extraordinary for an author of his experience and success in both the publishing and TV business.

But the really amazing thing about his post is what it reveals about how prolific he is. His last Spenser came out in November. He has a Jesse Stone novel coming out in February, a young adult novel in April, a Sunny Randall in June, and  Spenser in October. I figure he must be writing a book at least every eight to twelve weeks. That’s an amazing output…especially for a  bestselling author in his late 60s (or is he in his 70s?) who really doesn’t need to work that hard any more.

Diagnosis Murder Galleys

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THE LAST WORD, the final book in the DIAGNOSIS MURDER series, will be published in May. If you are a book critic and would like a galley of the book for review,  please send me your name, the title of your publication (or the web address of your review site), and your mailing address.

The Airleaf Morons

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Today, I picked up a letter sent to me in care of Mysteries To Die For, a bookstore in Thousand Oaks, California. The letter was from Airleaf Publishing, the vanity press company formerly known as Bookman Marketing, and they were offering to "sell MY GUN HAS BULLETS to a national audience!"  for the low, low price of $3000.

I wrote about these parasites back in November… when this same "opportunity" to flush your money down a toilet cost a whopping $7000. Since then, it appears that they’ve become a shade less greedy but monumentally more stupid.

The incompetence represented by this letter is so extreme, I almost don’t know where to begin. Let’s start with them sending this pitch to a successful, published author who has castigated them publicly for their business practices before.

And where do these idiots send their letter? They send it to me in care of a bookstore that’s already selling my books.

The folks at Airleaf Publishing are obviously trolling the catalogs at  iUniverse and other competing vanity presses,
figuring if the aspiring authors could be suckered once, they could be
suckered again.

But the dimwit who is doing the trolling apparently
doesn’t know when he’s picking books that are part of either Mystery Writers of America Presents or Authors
Guild’s Back-in-Print programs (both of which reprint
previously published books through iUniverse as a free service for their members).

The dimwit doesn’t realize that when he picks books from the MWA Presents or Back-In-Print authors,  he’s
dealing with experienced professionals who haven’t paid to be published and who know
better than to be suckered by an insanely pricey vanity press come-on.

The Airleaf Publishing corporate policy must be to hire people who are "mentally challenged" or born with only a brain stem…and to hope whoever gets their letters are just as stupid and have high credit lines on their Visa cards.

You’ve Heard It All Before

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You can find a new Q&A interview with me, filled with information avid readers of this blog already know, online at Storylink, which is an off-shoot of the Writers’ Store and Writers University. Here’s a tantalizing excerpt:

1) What were you doing before you "made it"?

I was a freelance journalist, putting myself through school by writing for publications like American Film, Starlog, Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times Syndicate, The Washington Post and The San Francisco Chronicle, among many, many others. I also had a girlfriend who as an editor at Playgirl,
who got me a gig writing sexually explicit letters to the editor for
$25-a-letter, but let’s just keep that between you and me.

Barbara’s New Year’s Wish

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My friend Barbara Seranella wrote about her current health problems in the Sunday edition of the Los Angeles Times…and did so with her usual humor, insight, and honesty:

I won’t bore you with all the complications, but the longest stretch
I’ve gone without being in the hospital since then is five weeks, and
I’ve had another surgery on my liver. I know the entire staff of USC
University Hospital’s sixth floor, and most of the fifth. They know me
well enough to get my jokes. We hug when we part.

These days I
exist in a state of grace. I don’t get angry; there is no one I argue
with. Nothing is a big deal. I’m not worried about my career or signs
of aging. I feed the birds and watch them eat. In my lack of hustle,
mysteries have been solved. I’ve figured out how to use the fabric
softener and bleach dispenser on my washing machine. There are these
written pieces called "directions." What a wonder they’ve turned out to
be.

[…]So I am the lucky one. Odd as this might sound, I wouldn’t change a thing. I earned my suffering and the wisdom attached.

That
said, I am ready to carry those lessons forward into the future. Please
Mr. Wizard, I want to go home. I am ready to be healthy again. I am
having another transplant soon. It will restore my health. I will no
longer have yellow eyeballs, or hippopotamus legs. I will have the
stamina to stay awake all day and play with my friends and my dog. I
will travel and not need a wheelchair. I will be a sightseer in my own
town and take walking tours of Los Angeles. I have never seen the Watts
Tower or Disney Hall. I will go treasure hunting at the beach and maybe
try to learn salsa dancing.

Oh, the places I’ll go and the things I’ll do. I can’t wait. Bring on the new year.

Mr. Monk and the New Book

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Today my third original MONK novel MR.
MONK AND THE BLUE FLU  will be appearing on shelves in bookstores
nationwide. Here’s what the book is about:

Monk is horrified when he learns there’s
going to be a blue flu in San Francisco—until Capt. Stottlemeyer explains that
it just means the police plan to call in "sick" until they get a better
contract. The good news is the labor dispute will give Monk a chance to get back
on the force. The bad news is it means he’ll be a "scab"—and he doesn’t like the
sound of that either.

But before he knows it, Monk has his badge back, and his own squad to
command. Unfortunately, some of the squad members make Monk look like a paragon
of mental health. But despite the challenges, they’ll have to pull together to
catch an astrologer’s killer, solve a series of mysterious fatal assaults, and
most importantly, clean up their desks…

Monk has been working for years to get his badge back, so I thought it would
be fun to see what would happen if he finally got his wish…if only for a
while….and to see him in an entirely different situation than he’s ever been
in before. I’ve been toying with the idea of a "Blue Flu" story ever since I was
first approached to write original Monk novels…but somehow it didn’t seem
right to me as the way to kick-off the series of books.

Part of the fun of doing these books for me is the chance to explore aspects
of Monk’s character that haven’t been dealt with yet on the TV series or, as is
the case with MR.
MONK GOES TO HAWAII, go places and do things that the TV series can’t
for various logistical and production reasons. I’m thinking about sending Monk
to Europe for an upcoming book, but we’ll see what happens.

If you would like a signed, personalized copy of MR.
MONK AND THE BLUE FLU,   they are available through Mysteries
To Die For in Thousand Oaks, California. They will be glad to take your
order online and send books almost anywhere in the world.

By the way, this is the last original MONK novel to premiere in
paperback…with the next book, MR. MONK AND THE TWO ASSISTANTS, the
series is jumping to hardcover. That book comes out in July 2007 and, as
you can probably guess from the title, is about the surprising return of
Sharona, Monk’s first assistant. You can find a teaser chapter for TWO
ASSISTANTS in the back of MR.
MONK AND THE BLUE FLU

Edge

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I took my wife and daughter to the mall, and while they were shopping, I settled down in the food court with a tattered, yellowed, paperback copy of the first EDGE western by George G. Gilman. I’d bought the book  — okay, the whole series of fifty titles in a super-cheap lot purchase on eBay — back in June after reading a post on Bookgasm ("These books have no first gear – they’re all in fifth and overdrive") and on a recommendation from western author James Reasoner.

I read the slim book in one sitting and, despite the absolutely gratuitous gore, I really enjoyed it. The writing is crisp, the action swift, and the hero refreshingly sadistic and amoral. I’m glad I got the whole series at once…because I’m obsessive about collecting ALL the books in a series after I read one that I like…and I can see that I am going to gobble these up.  EDGE is the perfect quick-read for airplane trips, and it looks like I am going to be traveling a lot in the coming year. 

Mr. Monk and the Blue Review

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Overview
The friendly folks at The Monk Fun Page, the Monk fan supersite, kindly gave MR. MONK AND THE BLUE FLU a detailed, rave review. Here’s a small excerpt:

The Monk books just keep
getting better. Better than the TV series? I won’t fully commit to that, but
the novels have what the show sometimes isn’t even aiming for: well executed
fair play whodunit mystery plots. The complex story, abundance of colorful
characters and high body count in Blue Flu may demand a little
more concentration than the show or even the previous two books. It’s too
delightfully long and complex for an episode, but trimmed down it would make a
great entry in the series, just as the first novel (Mr. Monk and the
Firehouse) did when it was adapted for the fifth season episode
“Mr. Monk Can’t See a Thing.

I’m also hoping that Andy Breckman, the creator and executive producer of MONK, will  consider BLUE FLU for an episode… even if it means Monk has to be deaf, speechless, or paralyzed in this one!

Change is Good

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My brother Tod and I were talking the other day about certain authors we know who burst onto the scene with a great book and have been replicating that same novel ever since with ever-worsening results.  It’s a dangerous rut for writers to get into, as bestselling author Tess Gerritsen points out.

Selling a book is just the first step in your career as a writer.  Look
at all the first-time novelists who later vanished from the publishing
world.  They discovered a very painful truth: to make a career in this
field, you’ll have to do a lot more than just sell one book[…]

If the books you’re writing aren’t finding an
audience, maybe it’s time to write a different kind of book.  In my
case, I first moved from romance to thrillers.  I loved writing
romance, but I just couldn’t write fast enough to make a living at it.
Writing for Harlequin was fun and satisfying, and I loved the genre,
but when each book was only earning out around $12,000, I knew I’d
never send my kids to college on my earnings as a writer.  As it turned
out, I had a great idea for a medical thriller (HARVEST), which was my
debut novel on the New York Times list.

But four books later, I could see that my medical thriller sales
were flat, and even starting to decline.  By then I had a crime
thriller in mind, one that I couldn’t wait to write.  With THE SURGEON,
I launched the Jane Rizzoli series.  And my sales have increased since
then.

If Harlan Coben had stuck with his Myron Bolitar books instead of shifting to standalone thrillers, would he be the international success that he is now? And if Michael Connelly, Ed McBain, Robert B. Parker, Richard Stark, Laura Lippman, Lawrence Block and Robert Crais hadn’t stepped away from their long-running series to write other books (and other series), would their writing have remained as fresh? I don’ t think so. I believe one of the reasons they’ve been so successful is because they’ve branched out into other areas  (of course, there’s always folks like Sue Grafton, Lee Child, Barry Eisler, and Ian Rankin who do just fine without leaving the confines of their series).

It’s why I’m glad I had the opportunity the last couple of years to alternate between writing the DIAGNOSIS MURDER and MONK books…they are two very different kinds of writing, even though they are both mystery series. DM is written in third person and is essentially a drama. MONK is written in first person and is primarily a comedy. 

Shifting between genres is also one of the pleasures of screenwriting. I’ve written, for instance, about lifeguards (Baywatch), private detectives (Spenser For Hire, Monk), werewolves (She Wolf of London), clever dolphins (Flipper), cops (Hunter), FBI agents (Missing), cross-dressing comics (Dame Edna), and just this week I wrote a pilot about urban street racing.

I like to think that the challenge of writing in different genres, characters and voices — and doing so in books and TV — keeps me and my writing fresh.

(updated 1.1.07)