Archive for the ‘All Things Literary’ Category
Saturday, June 6th, 2009
Tom Piccirilli, whose books you should be reading voraciously, sent me this link. It is the greatest thing ever and you should check it out. As Tom said, “At 100K, it’s a steal.”
SELLING MY RIGHTS to my finished MANUSCRIPT “PROMISES” – eBay (item 110388914313 end time Jun-10-09 13:18:31 PDT)
Damnit, I hate computer stuff. The above is a link but I don’t know how to copy links so cut and paste or whatever and go check this thing out. Be sure you read the chapter she has posted, it’s brilliant. Brilliant, I say!
UPDATE – Here is the link to the ebay auction:
SELLING MY RIGHTS to my finished MANUSCRIPT “PROMISES”
Posted in All Things Literary | No Comments »
Friday, December 5th, 2008
And it’s getting even uglier for books. The last two days, for those of you don’t obsessively watch the trades like I do, have seen reorgs, layoffs at the biggest publishers, backpedaling by HMH on the whether or not they’re buying books (and regardless of what they say, they’re pretty much not).
Today’s news is a salary freeze at Penguin of anyone making more than $50,000 a year. But in a situation where people, including senior editors, are losing jobs, it’s hard for me to feel anything for employees simply not getting a raise. The Penguin CEO said he hopes that will be enough to get Penguin through the next couple of years.
Let me pause for a moment and mention how petty all this must seem to the man or woman putting radios in new Fords who’re watching their CEO drive to Washington in a hybrid (and for my money, symbolism doesn’t work quite as well when someone has to point it out to you…it’s like a forced apology) to beg for money so you can keep your job and buy shoes for the kids.
I realize whining about books and lack of books is petty. I realize this particular Bushian-driven recession is entirely too deep to cry about the arts, but the arts are what I do, they are what affect me so their slow death by strangulation is what I see.
But it is the way of the near term. If basic security is in question, luxuries are doomed. Keeping a job is a basic security. And as basic as books are, they are definitely a luxury right now.
So if you’re buying Christmas for someone, think about books. Think about Tom Picirrilli’s new one, or Sean Doolittle or Ed Gorman’s. Or Craig Johnson’s newest Walt Longmire tale which is fabulous. Johnson has really stretched and taken some literary chances that pay-off brilliantly.
So buy some books. Please?
Posted in All Things Literary | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, November 25th, 2008
You’re paranoid, they said.
You’re gloomy about the entire industry because you got boned by an editor, they said.
But mostly, you’re wrong. So said a couple of my writer friends who were put off by my pronouncement on the state of the book industry a few days ago.
What I wrote was, “…over the next couple years, I fervently believe there will be no vibrant market. There will be, in fact, damned few books deals going ’round. It’s been ugly for a while, it’s getting uglier, and there will be lots and lots of great writers whose voices you won’t hear for a few years when it comes to novels published by a major house.”
Trey, don’t be such a wet noodle.
Uh-huh.
Here’s a bit of an email I got yesterday, it’s from the PW (Publisher’s Weekly) Daily Alert.
“It’s been clear for months that it will be a not-so-merry holiday season for publishers, but at least one house has gone so far as to halt acquisitions. PW has learned that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has asked its editors to stop buying books.”
There is other verbiage, that’s it’s “not a permanent change,” that the right projects could still be greenlighted, etc., etc. But what else do you need to know? One of the largest book publishers in the world is no longer buying books.
Yeah, that Trey is so gloomy.
I mean, okay, yeah, I am, but that’s not the point in this particular case.
One of HMH’s head muckety mucks, in the press release, said, “In this case, it’s a symbol of doing things smarter; it’s not an indicator of the end of literature. We have turned off the spigot, but we have a very robust pipeline.”
First of all, they didn’t turn off the spigot. The spigot is the user end of the pipe, where water pours into a cup and where the books pour into the hands of the readers. What HMH did is close the valve at the water plant, where all the water is collected and sifted and filtered and made palatable and put into the pipeline. So when he says there is a robust pipeline, how long does he think that will last when the very thing it is filled with – literature – is no longer being put into the pipeline?
But believe it or not, there is one tiny, little, micrscopic bit in the release that actually got to me maybe more than the lack of acquisitions. This guy who doesn’t know one end of a pipe from another said that HRH’s decision “is less about taking drastic measures than conducting good business.”
Therefore, by his definition, conducting good business for a book publisher is to not buy any books. Huh? Seems to me, then, that the obvious and logical inverse is that the bad business model for a book publisher is to buy books to publish.
And this is one of the people charged with care and feeding of the industry. There are two things I’ve done my entire life, two things that are absolutely essential to how I view and how I define myself. One is music and the other is writing. And this mope is in charge of the writing side of things.
Man, oh, man, does that blow industrial chunk.
And then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, here’s the last sentence in the PW story. “But perhaps an editor at the house put it best; in an e-mail, the editor mentioned the policy and added, ‘Who knows what’s next.’”
Great…it might get worse than not buying books. I don’t even want to think about what that actually means.
Posted in All Things Literary | No Comments »
Friday, October 17th, 2008
So I write a post that’s about 414,983 words long bemoaning the ups and downs of Bouchercon. A writer friend of mine sends me a note saying, “Jesus. Bouchercon. It’s like golf: emotional torture for hours on end, then you meet David Simon. It takes a sick person to keep at it.”
That’s…like…414,957 fewer words than I used and it gets to the point much faster.
Damn you, SD, you and your talent! Damn you damn you damn you!
Posted in All Things Literary | No Comments »
Sunday, October 12th, 2008
I love Baltimore.
I love its dirt and grime, its tourists with big old baggy shorts and cameras hanging from around their necks. I love the horrible drivers who get hired as cab drivers. I love the smell of rotten fish down at the Inner Harbor. I love the Edgar Allan Poe grave site.
I especially love that Baltimore was the setting for two of my three or four favorite TV shows of all time, “Homicide: Life on the Street,” and “The Wire,” both created and written and produced and whatnot by David Simon.
Spent the weekend at Bouchercon, the annual mystery convention, wherein we gather all kinds of writers and editors and agents and publishers and fans and sycophants and various whoevers, and have a ball.
I always find myself, when surrounded by writers I admire, getting inspired. They make me think about things more deeply and work the craft more seriously and read more assiduously. In short, seeing these people and catching up with their projects makes me better.
There’s a great line in Metallica’s “Some Kind Of Monster,” documentary where the band has just offered Robert Trujillo the bass spot. Hetfield looks at Trujillo and says, “You make me play better.”
The writers of Bouchercon make me play better.
But they also make me crazy. See, I’m predisposed to jealously. Hate to admit it, but there it is. When someone gets a great deal or gets included in a Year’s Best anthology or wins a prize or whatever, I get jealous. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy for them. No, really. I want to see my friends and acquaintances do well. I want to see them get rich and get awarded and get good.
I just don’t want to be left behind.
The same jealousy happened to me when I wrote and published lots of horror, too. Went to those conventions and had all the same petty and ugly bullshit. I had hoped it would all lessen as I got older but I was wrong, it’s still there. And understanding they’re there has done nothing for my control of them.
First of all, even before we got there, things were rocking. On the plane, LuAnn and I had to sit separately. She ends up sitting next to Dennis Lehane and I didn’t realize it until half way through the flight. Lehane wrote “Mystic River,” and “Gone, Baby, Gone,” both of which became great movies. He is an incredible writer and one of those I consider waaaaaaaaaaayyyyyy up the food chain from my perch. We ended up talking with him while waiting on bags at Balto airport and it was sweet.
So Thursday night, I hung out with friends and caught up and it was wonderful. Lori Armstrong’s new book just came out and it looks to be great. Sean Doolittle’s next book is scheduled for February and it’ll be fabulous, I’m sure. Karen Olson and Alison Gaylin have new books just out or on the way out and they’re rocking and rolling. Libby Fischer Hellman’s new one – ‘Easy Innocence’ – is just out and doing well. Michael Black and David Case, both Chicago PD members and writers, are doing well.
Everyone was doing great and sitting around just chillin’ out and it was fabulous.
Friday, same story. Some panels, wandering around Inner Harbor and taking a tour of the U.S.S. Constellation and the U.S.S. Tursk submarine and those were extremely cool. Then Friday night we went to Lee Child’s annual bash (he picks up the tab on an open bar for two solid hours and any attendees of the convention can drink…his way of saying thanks to some of the people who’ve put millions of dollars in his pocket…it’s a cool gesture).
And it was at the bash that the first great moment happened. I went to see F. Paul Wilson (author of ‘The Keep’ that became the movie…as well as tons of other great books), who I hadn’t seen in a few years. We’re talking, catching up, and some drunk guy bumped into me.
Turns out it was freaking Thomas Monteleone. “Trey,” he slurs. “Great to meet you!”
I almost shit a brick. This guy is one of the foremost writers in horror, one of the top editors, too. Back in the day, I had tried and tried and tried to sell something to him and just never cracked him. The fact that he was there at all, and that he remembered my work, blew me away. We had a fabulous conversation about all things writing.
Saturday was good, though things slowed down. And then I went to a shitty dinner at a shitty bar that played shitty music and had shitty-shitty food. Other than that, it was great. Ended up at the hotel bar on a panicked mission to find and schmooze an editor who has a book of mine. I’d been looking for her for the weekend and just hadn’t found her yet. Now the hours were ticking away and I was getting panicked.
No doubt the panic played into the bipolarness.
Remember, too, the building jealousy over the contracts and great reviews and all the rest. It wasn’t on display, but it was there…it always is.
So then I get introduced to two – FUCKING TWO – writers I’ve never heard of. Nor have I ever seen a byline with their name. Why? ‘Cause they’ve never written anything. Except the novels they just sold.
To the publisher I desperately want to be with.
Huh? Been working my ass off for 14 years and have no deal and these guys woke up one morning, wrote novels, and got contracts in the space of…like…37 minutes? Fuck that shit.
Oooohhhh, did I become Grampy McCrankypants. Jealous bipolar in full drama queen mode. I mean, I didn’t throw anything or yell at anyone or anything demonstrative like that. But I did have my glary face going and my monosyllabic grunt answers and flaring nostrils. And yeah, that’s all pretty hard to miss. I’m pretty obvious when I’m annoyed at something.
So, knowing I was channeling John McCain’s Grampy McCrankypants, I blew that popstand and went to bed. I figure if you’re looking for an editor to suck up to, best not have an attitude about her house offering hacks contracts but not you. See…ain’t so stupid.
Then Sunday, I was pretty much back to normal. In fact, Dennis Lehane saw me and asked after me by name…and then introduced me to? That’s right…David Simon. Couldn’t believe it. This man who wrote the book ‘Homicide,’ and then worked on the TV show, this man who showed the world it’s not just about car chases and shootouts.
And we end up having a long conversation because he’s been to Midland to cover stories. My hometown. We ate at some of the same places, we covered some of the same stories – me as a college journalist, him as a real one for the Baltimore ‘Sun.’ It was amazing. The man’s also been to Wink, Texas, home of Roy Orbison.
Then it was over and I said goodbye to some dear friends: John Purcell and Sandy Loper Herzog and Jared Case and the Jordans. And some new ones: Jim Born and Keiran Shea and it couldn’t have been a nicer weekend.
So out of the entire weekend, my bipolar/jealous/petty/ugly time, happened over about four hours. That’s a pretty good ratio of bad hours to good hours. And as horrible as all this sounds, I’m actually getting better about it. In a few more years, say around the end of President Obama’s second term, I’ll be all better.
Now that it’s all over and my bipolar has passed, I get to go work on a new short story, wherein I’ll play two different people; a situation that’s less bipolar than multiple personality disorder.
Posted in All Things Literary | 3 Comments »
Monday, May 26th, 2008
“I grew [my hair] out because I’m married and I’m successful and I don’t have to impress anyone anymore.”
A writer on his newly long hair.
“The .357 is like a kiss…the .45 is like getting ass-fucked.”
A writer on the difference in recoil between two of the guns we were shooting.
“What Louisiana beer do you have?”
“Well, we have St. Paulie Girl.”
An exchange between a writer and a waitress at a Cajun restaurant.
“You didn’t get invited because you have a pussy, now shut up and go away.”
A writer on why a female writer he was talking to didn’t get invited to what the commenting writer thought was a male-only writing convention.
Posted in All Things Literary | No Comments »
Monday, May 26th, 2008
Okay, truth in advertising. I didn’t actually shoot up Mayhem In The Midlands, but we did do some serious shooting.
At an indoor range, rather than the indoor writers’ convention…though there were at least three moments when, if I’d been strapped, I’d have shot the crap out of a particular writer…not three writers during three moments, but the same writer over and over and over again.
Mayhem is a delightful little convention in Omaha I’ve been attending the last few years. Sean Doolittle, one of the two or three most underrated writers in America today, lives there and I head over to hang with him for a few days.
Sean is, in fact, the shooting buddy. There are always some other people along, but it’s got a core of me and Sean, blasting away for an hour or so, burning through ammo and targets like we’re made of freakin’ money. And in and around the shooting sessions, we have conversations about things like point of view narrative and the big reveal versus the little reveal and realistic violence versus stylized violence. So yeah, we’re writer geeks, but we’re writer geeks with guns.
I usually participate in a couple of discussion panels and I did this year. Some are always good and some always blow industrial chunk, and mine this year were about evenly split between good and total bullshit. The crap panel was supposed to be – we were told – on short stories. Instead, the moderator decided it was better to offer the attendees ‘entertainment’ rather than answer their questions on the topic. Who gives a crap what my favorite short story of my own is? And I would bet most people couldn’t give two hoots what my favorite food is.
Honestly, I don’t go much for the panels. I’ve been going to conventions long enough that mostly I’ve seen all of them and all their recycled cousins too many times to count. So I go for the comeraderie (is that even spelled right? What’choo want, I’m'a writer…spelling is for the editors). What that actually means is drinking too much, eating too much, bitching too much, gossiping entirely too much, but doing it with other writers so it can be written off on my taxes.
And, in this moment of truth between just you and I, I can admit that I love being there for the trainwrecks. Hehehehe…that’s sometimes better than everything else. Though the trainwrecks were minor this year, they did include watching a writer introduce himself to a writer he’d never met before by throwing himself to the floor when invited to have a seat, then stroking his newly longish hair and saying, “I grew it out because I’m married and I’m successful, I don’t have to impress anyone anymore.”
Bite my ass, moron.
The other of note was watching a writer who claimed to have once been a hugely successful trial attorney go completely blank when another writer and I (him a former NYPD copper) talked about ‘making a case.’ The former attorney had no clue what that meant.
Uh…what?
I met some interesting new people, including JT Ellison, author of “All The Pretty Girls,” and Twist Phelan. Saw some regular compatriots, too: Libby Fischer Hellmann and Sue (who in my memory never has a last name) and Lance Who Knows Lori (and who, again, never seems to have an actual last name).
But the over-arcing highlight was Craig Johnson. I’ve been a fan of his Walt Longmire series for a while (set in rural Wyoming with the county sheriff) and being able to spend some time with him and his wife was nothing short of a gas. Craig is, like me, a fan of writing (it sounds goofy, I know, but there are lots of writers who aren’t actually fans of good writing…they’re fans of good contracts and lots of press coverage, but not the actual writing), and to have a lunchtime conversation with him (also Sean, Anthony Neil Smith, Judy Johnson, and Twist Phelan) about good writing was possibly the most relaxing hour of the entire weekend.
For me, conventions are usually 50/50 – that is, 50% inspirational and 50% toxic. I love how talking to writers and reading pieces of current projects and buying newly published projects so completely inspires me to reach higher and harder on my own work, but they are also toxic in that I hate seeing how absolute fucking idiots who have no clue about good writing and who, in fact, couldn’t write their way out of a bad episode of ‘Blossom,’ or who have not a single human social skill end up with big, fat contracts which they then tell me all about while blowing stale beer breath in my face.
Mmmmm…delicious.
Those people are the ones, in fact, I usually shoot while at the range. I don’t see a silhouette, I see -
hehehehe, no names today.
So that was Mayhem for this year. And like either Ah-nold or Herpes, I’ll be back.
My favorite food, by the by, is hot links from Johnny’s Barbeque in Midland, Texas.
Posted in All Things Literary | No Comments »
Thursday, December 13th, 2007
As of about ten minutes ago, and after just under two long…long…really long…years, the new novel is finished.
Yeah, it sucks, and yeah, it needs a ton of work, but the first draft is finally done.
I had the idea during the daily chemo back in December 2005. So I assumed the idea sucked because of chemo-brain. Then I did a big chunk of the writing during the thrice-weekly chemo in 2006. So I assumed the writing sucked because of chemo-brain.
But somehow, it doesn’t blow as badly as I thought it might. The first draft is ragged and unpaced, unfocused and chaotic, but it’s done.
Now what the hell do I do?
Posted in All Things Literary | 4 Comments »
Sunday, July 8th, 2007
I love Dave Zeltserman.
I mean, not in a carnal let me take your clothes off kind of way. (Although, to be honest, I’ve never met him but I’ve seen his picture and he’s a decent looking hombre)
What I mean is, he and I are spiritually connected when it comes to short fiction. I like most of what he’s written and ditto him with my stuff. We both tend toward the darker end of the spectrum; places where everyone is in it up to their necks.
What I like to tell readers is that I like fiction that’s like Shakespeare: where everyone is all good and everyone is all bad and damn near everyone ends up dead…
…or at least maimed.
Short fiction is one my great loves (along with my wife, my dogs, my music, and my first real girlfriend my freshman year in high school) and the markets for mean, tough, gritty short fiction are few and far between. Actually, they’ve been drying up since Edgar Poe’s day. There are a couple pieces of his published ‘marginalia’ where he bemoans the lack of short story markets.
So it’s great that there is this editor who likes what I send. He hasn’t bought everything, and he had a couple problems with the piece I just sent him so it’s not like he’s a guaranteed sale or anything, but he’s certainly a guaranteed submission and a guaranteed sympathetic read. I’ll take two out of three every damned time.
So he asked me to submit a story and I said yes, thinking it was time to do another con/scam story. I love those and haven’t done one in while. So I thought and thought and then thought some more and couldn’t come up with dick.
Then I trolled the ‘net, the FBI database and Rat Dog’s place and some of my crime CD-Roms and all kinds of crap and still nothing.
Until I found the obits.
And not the obits you remember where bad guys scan obits for visitation times and hit the residences at those times. No, this is scan the obits and then make a COD delivery to the bereaved.
What? Wow. That’s horrible. That’s barbaric and cruel and all the rest.
And, pervert that I am, I thought it was cool.
So that’s the story I wrote. A guy tapping into a loved one’s grief in order to crab up a few bucks.
Hehehe, that’s sick enough to be interesting. What kind of person would do that? What happens to the person who pays the COD and they open a box full of rocks or shredded newspaper or whatever? I mean, the possibilities are endless!
So this is all by way of saying I sold a story today and I’ve been putting some good miles on the new novel and I’m writing every. single. damned. day.
Maybe, for the first time in a year or better, I’m actually back to normal.
(yeah yeah, keep your smart comments to yourself)
I’m sleeping pretty well, getting lots of exercise, enjoying my job again, writing. All is good.
And I went to the doctor two weeks ago and for the first time in almost exactly two years: everything was average. All the tests and counts and analysis and all the rest were absolutely, boringly, normal and average.
Whew.
Lastly, go check out HardluckStories.com. Not for anything I wrote, but for the magazine in general.
It rocks the bone.
Posted in All Things Literary | 2 Comments »
Friday, November 4th, 2005
The stack of books — my novel 2000 MILES TO OPEN ROAD — was a beautiful thing.
Call it twenty books. Stacked in nice piles of three or four each, spread out over a beautiful Arts and Crafts style table, a nice splay of matching bookmarks, a glass of water, a poster announcing my arrival and signing, giving a few critically praiseful words about the book.
A great display at the Crystal Lake Barnes and Noble.
Until the idiot chick with the coffee. Until the idiot chick with her mother, a cup of coffee each, and a bag of donuts or bagels or some crap.
Let me say this: those kinds of appearances, where there is no particular reason for you to be at the store, where there is no discussion of writing in general or a panel exploring great crime fiction or even a reading from your book, are odd. It’s always like you’re not quite supposed to be there, like you don’t quite fit it. There are lots of readers, lots and lots and lots, but they are general readers; few of them are specifically crime fans. They are there for the magazines or the romances novels or the latest non-fiction political assassinations parading as journalism.
It’s different at mystery/crime bookstores. Those people are specifically mystery fans and so you start on the same page as they do. Usually you’re there for a specific event: a reading or a discussion or whatever. Because of that, you never feel like a shirt two sizes too small on fat man.
Anyway, the staff at this particular Barnes and Noble did an amazing job of making me feel comfortable. I didn’t have a reading or discussion, but I had the book to sign and every few minutes, they’d make an announcement over the store system, letting shoppers know I was there.
When I do signings like that, I keep an eye on the mystery section. Again, in a general bookstore, most customers aren’t going to be interested in whatever you’re selling. Maybe I’m a failure as a salesman, but I simply can not sell, much less pitch with excitement, a gritty, bleak crime novel to someone thumbing through Pico Iyer’s latest travelogue. Don’t get me wrong, I love Iyer’s work, but his fan base and mine are on different mailing lists.
I know writers who can sell any book to anyone in any section of any store. That’s not who I am.
So I keep my eye on the mystery section and when someone wanders into it, I’ll head over, novel in hand, introduce myself, and pitch them the book. Usually, because we’re both into crime fiction, we’ll end up talking for a little bit, discussing favorite authors and techniques and books and whatnot. Most times, they’ll take my book and give it a look or two, many times they’ll buy it. Sometimes, they shrug, never touch the book, and head to the bathrooms.
(A quick aside, the worst moments during these kinds of cold-call sales are when I approach single women. Picture it this way: your sister or your mother or daughter is trolling a bookshop, looking for something to juice up a long road trip. While she’s looking, a man she’s never met, hiding behind a full beard and without a store namebadge, holding a couple of books, comes up to her and starts talking. “Hi, my name is — ” kind of stuff. She looks around, unsure of what’s going on, unsure of who this guy is, to make certain A) there is an employee or a cop somewhere near and B) an escape route even closer.)
So last Sunday, I’m trolling the mystery section of the BN, managing to sell a few copies of the novel, and when I get back to the table near the front of the store, a woman and her daughter (call Mom late 30s and daughter mid-teens) are at my table.
Cool, someone interested in the book.
No, someone who stopped at my table because it was simply on the way to their next appointment. These two ladies stopped long enough to pull a friggin’ donut out of the bag from the in-store coffeeshop. They emptied their bag, left it sitting on my books (not on the table but on the books themselves), spilled quite a bit of their coffee on my bookmarks, then strolled toward the front door as I returned to the table.
“Excuse me,” I said, holding up the stained bookmarks so they could see.
Both ladies tossed me a glance, then without even a dismissive shrug, left.
All I wanted to do was grab the stained bookmarks (and no, they don’t cost me much but that’s hardly the point), chase them down in the parking lot, and jam the wet paper into their faces. Stain my bookmark with your coffee? I’ll stain your face with my bookmark, how’s that?
An ugly impulse, wanting to bang these cheap chicks around for fouling up five or ten bookmarks. But really, it wasn’t about messing up the marks, it was about the lack of concern that they’d messed up the marks. It was about the balls it took to leave the donut bag on my books, to stain the bookmarks, then ignore me when I pointed it out, as though it simply wasn’t their problem.
That was what it was about.
But I played nice. I chuckled (probably more to save face with the sales clerk standing next to me) and shrugged them off. I planned to simply toss the stained bookmarks, but the lady who’d stood in line to buy a copy of my novel said she’d take them. So I signed them for her.
Her name was Christina and, unlike the other two, she was cool. Enjoy the book, Christina.
Posted in All Things Literary, Random Thoughts | No Comments »
