#1 New York Times Bestselling Author & TV Producer
Now you can get a sneak peek at the first chapter of THE HEIST, the new novel that I wrote with internationally bestselling author Janet Evanovich. It's coming out June 18. Click here to read Chapter One. A sneak peak of Chapter Two will be available next month.
UPDATE: Link corrected.
A friend recommended a crime novel to me that came out a few years ago from a major publisher and that was also praised by some big-name authors (including some who have praised my work). I brought the book along with me on a short day trip for something to read while my wife & daughter were shopping. The book was awful, but some of the terrible writing was worth sharing. Here are some of my favorite examples:
“A sustained orgasm of flowers filled the strip between the driveway and right side of the house.”
This made me laugh out loud. So did some of the comments my Facebook friends made about it:
And on the other side of the driveway, a foreplay of hedges.
Haven’t you ever had a sustained orgasm of flowers?
Better than a multiple orgasm of concrete.
Not just an orgasm of flowers, but a sustained orgasm of flowers. I want to live in that neighborhood.
Here’s another excerpt:
“Staring at the picture, I had a clear sense of the living person whose image was cradled in chemicals on the bed of thick paper.”
Or as a less pretentious writer might say it: “I got a clear sense of the person from her photograph.”
“The girl in the picture had a glimmer of erotic fear in her dark eyes, waving like a thin, white arm of a drowning person.”
So fear that is sexually arousing… or perhaps fear of something to do with sex…is visible in someone’s eyes as a white glimmer that looks like the arm of someone who is drowning. Yeah, that makes sense.”
Her short black skirt clung like a high priest’s desire to the curves of her ass.”
I suppose this might make sense if anybody had any idea what a “high priest’s desire” is. A high priest of what? Tortured metaphors? Speaking of which…
“The night was filled with the exotic feeling California still evoked for me, surf shushing beyond the campfires, palm trees thrusting their composers’ haircuts up into the starry sky, swaying with the symphony of the wind.”
Surf shushing? Palms thrusting? A composer’s haircut? WTF? And am I the only one who thinks “a symphony of wind” sounds like another way of saying “a herd of cows farting”?
If you’re hiring a publicist, it’s a good idea to find one who can write a coherent press release that reflects well on you and your product. Otherwise, the message you are sending is that you either don’t possess basic English writing skills or that you don’t value your product enough to care about how it is presented. Take this recent pitch from publicist Nancy Parker for example:
After we wrote an article on the blog we try to find sites that might be interested in hearing about the article to see if they would be willing to share it with their followers. Accordingly, we recently wrote an article called XYZ located here: XYZ. It would be great if you could share this with others if you feel that it would be of interest to them especially those that follow your site.
Here is Nancy’s bio:
Nancy Parker, regularly writes for XYZ. She is a graduate in English literature and currently pursuing her masters in Online Journalism.
You’d think that someone who studied English literature and is pursuing a masters in Journalism would not only know how to write a sentence, but also how to compose a compelling hook for a press release. This is an embarrassment. And, by extension, it makes the clients, a website for hiring nannies, look like idiots, too.
We've had a flurry of festival acceptances this week for Bumsicle...and we learned that we've been nominated for Best Dramatic Short by the Bare Bones International Film Festival. The attention we're getting from all of these festivals is a real thrill for me and the entire cast & crew.
Here's the tally of festival picks so far…
White Sands International Film Festival, Las Cruces, New Mexico – August 2012
Louisville's International Festival of Film, Louisville, Kentucky – October 2012
River City Festival of Film, Owensboro, Kentucky – November 2012
Trail Dance Film Festival, Duncan, Oklahoma – January 25-26, 2013
Bare Bones International Film & Music Festival, Muskogee, Oklahoma – April 4-14, 2013
Selected as Nominee for Best Dramatic Short Film
Myrtle Beach International Film Festival, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina – April 24-27, 2013
Cape Fear Independent Film Festival, Wilmington, North Carolina – May 9-12, 2013
Big Island Film Festival, Hawaii – May 23-27, 2013
…and, we hope, more to come!
I got an email from the maker of nutritional supplements urging me to take a stand against “sock puppet” fake reviews. How? By reviewing his product. Not only will I be striking a blow against fake reviews but, as an added incentive, he says it will also boost my own “helpful” review stats.
Help me stop these fake “sock puppet” Amazon reviews.
I found your Amazon Review profile and wanted to see if you would like to review a nutritional supplement with “excessive” buzz?
XYZ was recently featured on the Dr Oz show and instantly became the world’s #1 selling nutritional supplement. I’m not kidding, this product beat the top selling Multivitamin in Sales Rank!
Right now we are competing with some other companies to be the product with the most reviews on Amazon for “XYZ”.
I’m pretty sure the two biggest reviewed competitors above us are using fake reviews to get to the top sales ranks. After looking through their reviews, it’s pretty obvious that some of the “customers” are not real people.
Just shill accounts with hilarious reviews:
“This product is puppy dogs and rainbows. I lost 100 pounds, it cured my cancer, and it made me a millionaire in 5 seconds! Buy it!”
We’ve decided under no circumstances to use fake reviews, but we still want to beat these guys!
Right now we have 49 reviews and 4.5 stars, all from real customers.
The top seller has 302 reviews, a bunch of which are fake.
We can beat them the old fashioned way. With real reviews!
I’d like to send you a free bottle of our product XYZ in exchange for an honest review. I’m not asking for a 5 star review. You can give it 1 star and I’ll be happy.
Since this is one of the hottest selling products on Amazon, you have the opportunity to rack up a ton of helpful votes and views for your review.
I don’t see how helping him rack up reviews for his product will strike a blow against sock-puppetry or help him battle the unfair tactics of his competitors (especially since he claims his pills are already “one of the hottest selling” products on Amazon). He may not to be asking for fake praise, but his solicitation is still uniquely idiotic and sleazy.
Here’s a book I will never read:
Dear Lee,
I would like to introduce you to Fembodyverse: An Inner-Stellar Adventure into Womanhood. Seventeen-year-old Estelle has one wish—to feel like a woman. She believes by losing her virginity she will receive this magical feeling. Not only does this modern induction fool her, but an inner voice beckons her to a more ingenuous initiation. With a trusted guide, Estelle begins her inner-stellar adventure into womanhood, traveling through her body’s vast and starry dimensions. There, she cavorts with creatures, unravels mysteries, and meets unforgettable friends as she unlocks her embodied wisdom. Back and forth from the internal world and the external world she travels, her family and friends think she’s lost her mind as Estelle courageously claims her majestic value from the inside out.
Fembodyverse chronicles the adventures of a new archetype and superheroine of our time; Estelle is here to infuse our world with inside-out value for women and girls everywhere.
I don’t know about you, but I’m afraid to ask what it means to “infuse our world with inside-out value for women” by “cavorting with creatures” and exploring your “body’s vast and starring dimensions.” But I do like that last phrase. I am no longer on a diet to lose weight. I am dieting to control my body’s “vast and starry dimensions.”
This has been a great week for my short film Bumsicle, which I wrote and directed in Owensboro, Kentucky last year. We were picked up by both the Big Island Film Festival in Hawaii and the Cape Fear Film Festival in North Carolina.
So far, "Bumsicle" has been selected by half-a-dozen festivals… from Hawaii to North Carolina, from Oklahoma to Kentucky. There are still thirty festivals that we've submitted to and haven't heard from yet…but at least we're on par now with Remaindered, the short mystery that also featured Todd Reynolds as Detective Bud Flanek. Clearly I am going to have to do a third short one of these days about Flanek.
These festival picks are the result of the wonderful work done by actors Todd Reynolds, Rick Montgomery, Sadia Brimm, and Josh Loren, singer/song writer Matt Branham, producers Rachael Nunn, J. Laine Nunn, and Roxi Witt, and everyone else in our talented cast and crew. I'm so glad they they are getting some notice outside of Owensboro for their work.
UPDATE 3-21 Bumsicle has been nominated for Best Dramatic Short at the Bare Bones International Film Festivals in Oklahoma. Winners will be announced April 14.
I made two slabs of hickory-smoked, Santa Maria spare ribs on Sunday that were absolutely incredible. Marinated them in Santa Maria rub overnight, let them sit out for an hour or so at room temp, then smoked them for three hours in a Smokin-It Model One with two hickory pieces in the smoke box. After they were done, we let them sit for 20 minutse under tin foil then dug in. They were perfect! I may never go out to a BBQ joint in LA again. I know this sounds like an advertisement/plug, but it’s not. It’s a genuine rave. My wife got me the smoker for my birthday and I’ve fallen in love with it. I’ve been smoking everythng but my Atkins bars!
I’ve been munching on the left-over ribs today as I toil on book #2 in th new series I’m writing with Janet Evanovich. Just finished proofing the galleys for THE HEIST, book #1 in the series, so now it feels real to me.
I've been fortunate that every one of my 15 MONK novels has earned a great review from author Bill Crider and, I am pleased to report that MR. MONK GETS EVEN, my final book in the series, has kept that record intact. He says, in part:
Goldberg managed to do a great job of giving the books clever mysteries and good characters, but he did something even more difficult. He gave them humor and heart. Not only that, but he took the characters beyond the television series and gave them lives of their own. They changed and developed over the course of the series in ways that were believable and intriguing.
[…] It's a fine conclusion to Goldberg's work with Monk and his friends and family. The title of the book, given Monk's proclivities and given the way that the story concludes, is perfect.
I've mentioned before that I'm not a big fan of books that mingle first- and third-person narration. Goldberg does it so skilfully here that I have no complaints. I've never seen it done better. Heck, I've never seen it done as well. Congratulations to Goldberg on leaving the game as a big winner.
Thank you so much, Bill. I'm flattered!
I spent the day Saturday in the company of a bunch of talented writers to plot a DEAD MAN novel…not just any book, but our biggest tale yet, both in page count and ambition. The story will be published next fall as a Kindle Serial (six to eight, 10,000 word "episodes" that will add up to one, cohesive novel). The project is being written by Phoef Sutton, Lisa Klink and Kate Danley from a shared outline. So series co-creator William Rabkin and I, along with DEAD MAN author David Tully (THE KILLING FLOOR), got together with them and we all spent the day cracking the story in a "writer's room" setting.
Bill, Phoef, Lisa and I are all experienced TV writer/producers, we are very comfortable with the "writer's room" process of hashing out the story as a group, analyzing every character motivation and story beat until we come up with all the moves of the story, which we layout on a white, dry erase board. It was a new experience for Kate and, to a lesser extent, for David, who has been part of a writer's room on some television projects in Germany (where his wife was a network executive).
The writer's room process is wonderful because not only do you benefit from the creativity of everybody in the room, but it also forces you to really explore, analyze and figure out all the angles of your plot and the motivations of your characters.
The group experience also forces you not to give in to the easy, lazy or cliche way of resolving plot and character issues…to go further and dig deeper. It means there are some inevitable frustration or disagreements, but it's all positive…because you end up with a much stronger, more-thought-out story.
It's my favorite part of the TV writing experience…spending hours, days and weeks in a room full of smart, clever, outrageously creative writers…all working to together to tell the best possible story.
Our writers room session for THE DEAD MAN went great. We first discussed character and our over-arching, creative goals for the book. Then we started talking broad plot points. Then we drilled down to the novel equivalent of the eternal TV question: "what do we want our act breaks to be?" (Or, in this case, the "cliff hanger" moment at the end of our six "episodes") And once we had that, we got into the nitty-gritty of the specific beats of each "act."
That's where the real work was. We hashed it out in spirited debates while eating lots of food (and, occasionally, diverging into discussions of lame plot points in SKYFALL and the last BATMAN movie. Do you realize Bond failed at *everything* he did in SKYFALL? He didn't do anything right. Still a great movie, though).
We got started at 10:30 am and by the time we finished around 5:30 pm, we'd plotted out the novel and felt great about what we'd come up with. Or, as one person in the room put it, we accomplished in one day what it would take an author by himself a month or two to figure out. It's going to be a kick-ass, standalone DEAD MAN novel that requires no previous knowledge of the series to enjoy…but that will also satisfy our loyal fans with a game-changing story that acknowledges past events, answers some long-standing questions, sends Matt Cahill in an exciting, new direction.
Now everybody is writing up their portion of the outline, which Bill and I will cobble together into one document and submit to our editors at Amazon Publishing's 47North imprint for their notes. Once we have their input, the authors will start writing.
I wish I had a writers room for my novels…