Feeding the Story Machine
by Gary Phillips
First, big ups to Taffy Cannon who volunteers for Get on the Bus. Most excellent. Secondly, her post and Dusty’s dovetail it seems. Prison and the people who populate them, and what happens to them once they get out, continue to be among the sources of the stories we write. On a couple of mystery blogs lately there had been some comments about the cancellation of the Alcatraz TV show. For those who might have missed this effort, the premise was the last group of prisoners on the “Rock,” 302 men, suddenly disappeared one fateful night 49 years ago. Now they’ve returned to modern day San Francisco, having not aged a day. Great premise, uneven in its execution. 
Sam Neill was Emerson Hauser, now an FBI agent who has been anticipating the return of the inmates. He’d been a young guard at Alcatraz back then. Let me add, for a cat who’s supposed to be in his seventies in the context of the show, Hauser was a bad mother. Arthritis nor old man’s eyesight didn’t seem to impede him from shootin’ a fool now and then. Anyway, there was also the young plainclothes cop Rebecca Madsen played by Sarah Jones. Her homicidal grandfather, Tommy, was one of the inmates, running around doing bad things. Rounding out the team was Jorge Garcia (the lovable big guy from Lost) as Dr. Diego “Doc” Soto, who wrote the authoritative book about Alcatraz, and owned a comic book shop.
The bigger mystery of what it all meant was hinted at, it seemed to me the episodes became too much procedural—hunting down the latest returnee who was a sniper, a bank robber, etc. — and not teasing out enough the big story. While Alcatraz didn’t quite gel, series be they television or prose demand a constant feeding of the story machine. The ways in which we’re delivering these stories has changed, but for the characters that capture the public’s imagination, the demand remains. Arthur Conan Doyle was beside himself keeping up with the demand for more Holmes stories. Looking to expand his canon and tiring of the grind, he killed the great detective off only to bring him back acceding to fan demand.
At the height of the Great Depression, The Shadow magazine and Doc Savage magazine were the number one and two bestselling monthly pulps respectively. Walter Gibson, a one-time assistant to Houdini, though he didn’t create the character, is the man who fleshed out the the Shadow’s backstory, the characters around him and so on. Lester Dent had been tasked with creating a rival to the Shadow and did in Clark “Doc” Savage. Where the former was dark and mysterious, the cops after him as well as the crooks, the latter was the golden warrior, a public hero everyone trusted. Riffing on this, Dent was one of Doc’s arch enemies, the only villain to appear more than once in a Doc adventure, named John Sunlight.
At one point due to demand, Gibson had to grind out 50-60,000 word stories twice a month — 325 Shadow stories versus 181 Doc Savage stories all told. There were ghost writers brought in to keep up the pace for both men. There were also some issues of Doc Savage where Dent had written the Doc novel-length story and the short stories, be they westerns, detective, what have you, under different names in the rest of the book.
Star Trek was going to be canceled after its second season in the ‘60s only to get another year due to a letter writing campaign by its loyal fan base. Thereafter Trek was kept alive via fan fiction, first realized in what were called fanzines (mimeographed hand stapled magazines that gave way to typeset, offset printed ones) and appearances by the leads at sci-fi conventions. The show gained cult status leading to big budget films, novels, comic books and TV spinoffs. Back in the day Paramount knew about the fan fiction but looked at this as benign copyright infringement. They realized fan fiction kept the Trekkies happy and wanting more in the wilderness years, so they didn’t, in most cases, pursue legal remedies. Plus it would have just made them look like the big, greedy monster going after a couple of geeky kids.
Another spur in the story machine process has been venerable characters with name recognition entering public domain and being redone in prose and film and TV. Sherlock Holmes and Frankenstein are PD. Abe Lincoln (as in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter), a public figure, fair game. So too are the earlier works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, that is Tarzan and John Carter of Mars.
Currently the ERB estate is suing Dynamite Comics not for copyright infringement over their Warlord of Mars and Lord of the Jungle books, but trademark infringement. Dynamite has responded that these suits are baseless. One of the publications Dynamite cites was a recent prose anthology called, Inspired by the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom. While it’s clearly new stories about John Carter, the collection, published by Simon & Schuster, stated it was not authorized by the ERB estate.
To me the answer to Dusty’s question about putting out two novels a year is more keeping the stream of stories out there in various accessible forms. From short stories done exclusively online, e-book and hardcopies of novels, mash-ups using public domain characters and public figures, writing new adventures of licensed characters (I’m currently co-editing and contributing to anthology using Operator 5 a super spy character from the pulp era wherein each short story is linked to the overarching plot), it’s all in the mix of germinating the idea, writing the tale,m and getting the work out there.
For instance, it turns out everybody’s favorite media uncle, broadcasting giant Walter Cronkite, as detailed in a new bio by Douglas Brinkley, liked him some freebies, had dinner with a go-go dancer (oh my heavens!) and once bugged a GOP meeting. Maybe taking my cue from the aforementioned and the runaway success of the 50 Shades of Gray trio, my next character will be this kindly, fiftysomethng, pipe smoking slightly paunchy guy circa the late ‘60s. He’s unassuming and looks like he might own the corner hardware store. Only of course he’s a contract killer specializing in making his hits look like accidents and a ladies’ man who dabbles in S&M.
A Man Called Cronkite…danger has a new name!
Here’s to our vets past and present on Memorial Day. Send the troops home.
Rereading your favorite novel, love or leave it?
They say that every time you read a book it’s a different book, because you are different. If you read a book when you’re twelve you bring one set of experiences, opinions, and influences to that reading. Read it again at twenty-one, it’s a new book because you’ve survived to your majority, studied, read, and maybe even written something yourself. So if you keep reading that book, at thirty, forty, fifty, does it keep changing for you?
I submit that it is possible to read a book too many times. Unless you are dissecting it for the purpose of figuring out its structure you can bore yourself. There are so many books in the world! Read a new one! Only my most favorite novels hold up time after time, offering up nuggets of humor and wisdom again. My favorite novel is Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen precisely because there is so much left out of it. I read it first at seventeen. I reread it looking for more, sure there is something I missed. Most novels, even ones that I absolutely adored, stories that make me gasp and cry, leave it all on the page. Because, frankly, that’s where it’s at, writing-wise.
I’ve been thinking about reader reactions, and rereading, since reading this piece in the Guardian. Authors are generally voracious readers and sometimes reread novels out of necessity (nothing else in the house) or to study the way an admired author got the job done. Poetry, of course, and classics like Shakespeare, Doestoevsky, and Jane Austen are definite rereads. The classics hold up because they are dense and enjoyable and fulfill a reader’s need for philosophy of living, human emotion, or just plain excitement.
As you can see from the article authors have a diverse list of favorites that are often very personal. Reading is like that. Have you ever given someone a book (that they didn’t request, written by someone they’ve never read) and wondered why they never read it? You loved it so they should too. But like jewelry and perfume, novels are an individual taste. Often as readers we don’t know exactly why some stories resonate, holding us captive and nestling deep in our subconscious, while famous novels loved by millions leave us cold. It doesn’t matter what you read as long as you’re reading for pleasure (unless you are in a Nazi book club. If so, my condolences.) Pick a novel, new or old, fresh to you or as familiar and comforting as an old sweater, and read it. Enjoying reading is one of the most basic, simple pleasures of life.
Reader reactions fascinate me. As a writer you can only write the book you can write, and hope that it appeals to someone (or many someones.) In the age of online reviews anyone who reads a book can offer his or her opinion of it to the world, uncensored and often poorly spelled. It’s sort of like fan mail. One of my novels now has nearly 40 reviews on Amazon (a consequence of a giveaway campaign last summer) and as much as I hate the bad reviews and cherish the good ones I find the whole thing amusing. How can one reader write: “something for everyone, intrique, romance, murder and all tied up neatly together,” and another have the opposite reaction: “too much nonsense in it. It took me forever to read as I was very bored with parts”? Well, because one might be fifteen, the other seventy. One might be used to reading romance novels, another might be into ‘Twilight.’ You never know. I couldn’t have written this book when I was twenty (Blackbird Fly, by the way, written when I was 50ish. I couldn’t have written any novel at 20 but I loved my journalism classes.)
I bring to the table my own experiences, just as the reader does. I love that I can hear what they think. It makes writing a lot less lonely.
Okay, okay, I’m blogging!
I am often asked 1) why don’t I write longer books, or 2) do I journal?, or 3) why don’t I blog more often? That’s an easy question. I don’t want to waste any words. I write slowly, and short!
I am a woman of few words. It takes all the energy I have to write 1000 words a day, the minimum I need to put on paper to get a book done in a year. Some writers bleed words. I drip them. Very slowly. So I can’t waste them. All the words I can muster on any given day must go into my work-in-progress!
I had a college professor once who said I wrote “with pith.” Is that ever an understatement! Never use two words when you can get away with one, that’s my motto.
When I’m on retreat with my writing buds, I can hear them all tap tapping away. Tap tap tap tap tapping for hours–you ladies know who you are! All the while I tap…………..tap. It’s just the way I am. I’ve fought it, I really have. Once I added twenty-five extra pages to one of my Simon Shaw mysteries because I thought the manuscript wasn’t long enough. My editor at the time at St. Martin’s, the legendary Ruth Cavin, spotted the padding and insisted I edit it out. I protested that my book was too short! She answered me, “the book is as long as it is.” A few months later I was sitting in Ruth’s office while she showed me some of the other manuscripts she was editing. They were all lovely and thick, up to Tom Clancy thick. Much longer than mine! So I whined about what I thought was a real problem for me–writing short. She shook her head and said “of all my writers you are the one who knows best what to leave out of a book.” I try to remember her words after I check my word count and the end of my work day and try to figure out What Else can Happen in this story!
There are advantages to shorter books. They can be read in one to two days. More of them fit into a shipping box, and if you don’t think publishers and bookstores are concerned about that I have a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you! Shorter books cost less to produce and can be priced less, an advantage when some of these tomes I’ve seen, you know which ones I’m talking about, cost over thirty dollars!
My new publisher, Severn House, requires in my contract that my manuscripts be less than 80,000 words. Love them! Not that there’s a chance I’ll get close. So far I think my longest book has been about 75,000 words. Counting punctuation, you understand.
Must stop now. Need to save words for tomorrow’s writing quota!
Saving Pup
I am an accidental animal rescuer. I don’t go out of my way to rescue animals, like some of my more heroic friends, who devote most of their free time and energy to abused and abandoned animals. I’m a nomad, and you need to be settled and have ample resources for that kind of mission. Instead, animals in need find me. A street cat howls under my window until I let her in, feed her, and listen to her tale of woe for a couple of hours (1). A feral farm cat tames himself by inching closer and closer, meowing softly so as not to frighten me away, until we are fast friends (2). A cat follows me down a road to my door and then demands food. A wounded dog trots up to me, puts his paw on my knee and looks up beseechingly. Well, what do you do? You help them.
Pup is the most recent example. She was shivering, weak, sick, terrified and hungry when she found me in a Nepali lane. Once our eyes met she had me. I picked her up, thinking I could get her into an animal shelter, which is almost impossible here except in the most extreme cases (3). Finding a home for her here hasn’t worked out either and my visa is expiring, so I am taking her on to India where I have a good lead on a home for her.
But taking a dog to India turns out to be an expensive and arduous process and I am not in a position to do it alone. So I started an Indiegogo campaign for her here, where you can read more about her. Can you spare ten bucks to help a special dog find her love connection? Thank you.
(1) Irma La Douce found me in Paris in 2004 and went to live with my Dad in Canada in 2005. She was a forest cat and loved Canada so much–big trees, huge yards, mice galore and a family that loved her–she didn’t miss me at all when I left. When we had to put her down in 2009, the vet found a faded and blurry tattoo in her ear. Only a few letters were visible, but they told the vet the cat was at least 21 years old. She had lived 16 years already when she came to me.
(2) Norton lived in a barn in Wahoo, Alberta for several years. He was wild and aggressive at first, but became a love bug. Unfortunately, the coyotes got him. RIP. Great cat.
(3) Mango.
Read this: Rescued by a Rescue Dog
Read more.
The Originals
Mystery writers and writers of all types, spend a lot of time at the keyboard pounding out their stories. We hope we’ve crafted something interesting, engaging and original. That this is the time for lightening to strike and the book that really takes off, that gets made into that perfect gem of a B hardboiled indie movie or like Elmore Leonard and Justified, a rugged, gritty series on basic cable will be based on your short story. One idea begats another…the original and the other stories inspired by it.
For example my fellow TPAC blogger J.D. Rhodes mentioned in his last post the Princess of Mars, the novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the basis for the recent film John Carter. Now here’s a film that I went to see, having read that book and a couple of the sequels many years ago in paperback with those great Frank Frazetta covers – an example of which Dusty used in his piece. I liked the film, produced by Disney, for what it was — a big budget effort that harkened back to the days of Saturday morning serials. It had cool action scenes and special effects, stalwart heroes and dastardly villains, and the filmmakers made Dejah Thoris, the Princess of Mars, she of the rockin’ bod, a scientist and a deadly swordswoman, and not just clinging eye candy. But this $250 million wonder is a flop.
In one weekend the Hunger Games (based on a series of YA novels set in a dystopian near-future) pretty much made domestically what John Carter (and it was a bonehead move by Disney to not use John Carter of Mars as the title) took in globally. That even the mighty pop culture machine that is Disney couldn’t withstand the attack of the long knives. I would call your attention to a piece on forbes.com by Erik Kain who I think does a good job defending the film. I also note that some of the critics who slammed the film still had to acknowledge it was Burroughs who was one of the originators of this sword-planet-romance adventure that’s been riffed on from George Lucas, Ray Bradbury to James Cameron’s Avatar. How strange then that a movie based on source material originally serialized in All-Story magazine in 1911, would be criticized for being derivative.
It’s also been discussed by some critics that the Hunger Games riffs in various ways from Battle Royale, a Japanese film that mostly played the festival circuit over here in 2001, though now available on DVD (a fully loaded version has the sequel Battle Royale II: Requiem) and Blu-ray. Royale in turn is based on a series of manga, Japanese comics where teenagers are deposited on an island, given random weapons, and ordered to hunt and kill one another until there is only one survivor. But such comparisons haven’t hurt the Hunger Games box office or book sales. Even John Carter had a precursor; in 1905 Victorian poet Edwin Lester Arnold wrote Lieutenant Gullivar Jones: His Vacation. In this story, Confederate Navy officer Gullivar Jones is on shore leave (Carter is an ex-Johnny Reb) and is transported to Mars via a magic carpet.
Presumably Burroughs read Arnold’s story and figured he could do it one better. Suzanne Collins, the creator of Hunger Games, denies knowledge of Battle Royale. But isn’t Battle a mix of a video-era version of Lord of the Flies by way of the classic often filmed short story “The Most Dangerous Game” by Richard Connell written in 1924 where a big game hunter hunts a couple on an island. Its many versions include Run for the Sun with Richard Widmark, The Naked Prey with Cornel Wilde to an episode of Get Smart.
“Off there to the right – somewhere — is a large island,” said Whitney.
“It’s rather a mystery–”
“What island is it?” Rainsford asked.
“The old charts call it `Ship-Trap Island,”‘ Whitney replied.” A suggestive name, isn’t it? Sailors have a curious dread of the place. I don’t know why. Some superstition–”
“Can’t see it,” remarked Rainsford, trying to peer through the dank tropical night that was palpable as it pressed its thick warm blackness in upon the yacht…
“It will be light enough in Rio,” promised Whitney. “We should make it in a few days. I hope the jaguar guns have come from Purdey’s. We should have some good hunting up the Amazon. Great sport, hunting.”
“The best sport in the world,” agreed Rainsford.
“For the hunter,” amended Whitney. “Not for the jaguar.”
Here’s to the hunters and the jaguars, originality and the inspired forever chasing one another.
Where Dreaming Takes Us
I love architecture, and I especially love conceptual architecture with a practical heart. This Dutch architect working in China is one of my favorites.
“FREEZE is a response to the rising need to achieve a non-political space.
A space that can absorb the lives and ideas of an evolved humanity. A space that is highly utopian yet painfully necessary at a time of increased global tension, diminished democracy and intensified censorship. A space void of territorial concerns. A futuristic Noah’s Ark of ideas roaming freely as the world’s sea levels are rising.” Neville Mars, Adrian Hornsby
What will 2012 bring?
A quick note here, and a nod to TeleReads which has published this analysis of publishing trends in 2011 and what may be coming in 2012. It was a crazy year for self-publishers, with new authors, new millionaires, and new wrinkles. I’m not a data cruncher myself but I do appreciate it when somebody does it for me. What do you think? Will 2012 bring as many publishing changes as last year? Check it out: http://www.teleread.com/paul-biba/top-self-published-kindle-ebooks-of-2011-a-report-by-piotr-kowalczyk/
Well, You Can Parking Lot THAT Pre-Plan!
by Taffy Cannon
Perhaps the only thing dedicated grammarians agree on is that the English language is under continuous assault by linguistic barbarians and probably will not survive the attack. This position was first articulated in a compelling series of grunts by a cave librarian who overhead some surly cave teens using slang, known in that culture as “dung,” and has been regularly updated ever since.
Popular culture takes a lot of heat for perpetrating atrocities on language, and in my lifetime alone the named culprits have included beatniks, hippies, greasers, gangstas, hipsters, and folks in all manner of music fields: R&R, RNB, C&W, disco, bubble gum, hip-hop and rap. Was ever thus. Who can forget the Music Man warning the parents of River City to watch out for such nasty words as “swell” and “so’s your old man”?
I believe, however, that the single most dastardly attack on language today comes from a source that might be considered laughable if it didn’t have so much money. Yep, I’m talking Corporate America.
A young grammarian of my acquaintance we’ll call Deep Briefcase has become immersed in a major national corporation, and has found the language challenging since orientation, when new employees were warned to avoid email jail, proactively touch base with others on the team, and keep everybody in the loop about the timing of bio breaks. Bio breaks, it turns out, are a TMI way of letting others know your excretory habits, as opposed to the more discreet “breaks” that we used to take a few decades back when I was wandering around the business world as a perennial temp.
Deep Briefcase was happy to provide the following sample of current corporate lingo, which no longer pushes the outside of the envelope or thinks outside the box. Instead, it seeks sufficient bandwidth to take a 30,000 foot view of reallocation of resources, thus assuring a win-win.
I’ll ping Rick and communicate to him that moving forward, we need to circle back with the team to parking lot that idea. My understanding is that he wanted to spike out some of those concepts and leverage them into a more brand-centric approach to client communication and get this project off the ground in the 3rd quarter. We are using a much more robust piece of software, and should be able to solution for this issue I referenced earlier and drill down to deliver the final product by EOD Monday.
There is much to find annoying here, of course, but I think that the single most irritating feature of current Bizspeak
is its reassignment of words to different parts of speech. For the most part, this involves turning perfectly good nouns into highly questionable verbs, and of the current crop, I have to say “parking lot” is my favorite. Sure, it has lots of competition: repurpose, ball park, transition, prioritize, incentivize. But “to parking lot” actually carries a pretty good visual. Your idea, that brilliant concept those morons couldn’t understand – it’s sitting out there under an eerie orange-brown light in row 5-H, surrounded by other junker notions.
Certain outright corporate doublespeak has blossomed in recent years as a sign of unfortunate economic times. Take termination, which now has as many synonyms as “snow” in cultures located above the Arctic Circle. Few, of course, come even close to addressing the central issue, being fired, or the end result, being unemployed.
There’s downsizing. Rightsizing. Outsourcing. Reduction in Force, also known as RIF, which doesn’t feel like a Keith Richards move when it happens to you. Some companies will even say with a straight face that you are being de-hired, as if the whole thing were simply Pam’s bad dream on Dallas.
And if Bizspeak has gotten cagier about ending things, it is falling all over itself with beginnings, which now have their own beginnings. You don’t plan until you have pre-planned. Prepare at your own peril if you haven’t pre-prepared. All of which will get you ready for the pre-meeting to set up the meeting on Best Practices, which is usually another way of saying outsourcing.
But I’ll have to get back to you on that. I’ll be out of pocket the rest of the day, drilling down on some low hanging fruit.
Happy new electronic year!
Got a new Nook or Kindle? Lots of folks are jumping on the e-book bandwagon and as authors we are all thrilled to get more folks reading fiction, whether ours or somebody else’s. Several of us here at Thalia Press Authors Co-op have free or specially priced e-books right now. Go forth and load up those e-readers!
Gary Phillips is offering up up a free holiday story for everyone – The Kwanzaa Initiative at FourStory.
Sparkle Hayter has the first book in her very funny Robin Hudson series, available in many formats for free at Smashwords.com
Katy Munger is offering many of her mysteries for free for Amazon Prime members. Her Casey Jones mysteries are a kick-ass ride. Check them out!
Rory Tate (that’s Lise McClendon) is also offering up her new thriller Jump Cut for free to Amazon Prime members who can borrow books for Kindle.
And don’t forget DEAD OF WINTER, the short story anthology for your Kindle and Nook. Chilling stories from bestselling mystery writers for only $4.99.
Subscribe to the blog to find out about future promotions and free e-books.
Hardboiled Like a Mutha
Hardboiled just don’t get old. When I find myself sweating over a story or characters, pretty much all I have to do is turn on cable news for inspiration. In these days of 24/7 of the number of soap bubbles in a soap dish, granted you have to filter out the latest insignificant brouhaha about one of them Kardasians – not to be confused with the scaly alien Cardassians on Star Trek: Next Generation, kind of junior league Klingons – but once you do that, there’s some awfully juicy stuff floating around out there.
Submitted for your approval; the story of one Patrick J. Sullivan. For twenty years Mr. Sullivan served as the high sheriff of Arapahoe County, Colorado. Fact this law-and-order was named sheriff of the year in 2001. Recently he was busted for offering a man meth in exchange for sex. He was cuffed, booked and jailed in the Patrick J. Sullivan Detention Facility.
Or take Mister Please, Please, Please, Black Walnut, Herman “Big Daddy” Cain. Here’s a cat when the first of several sexual harassment allegations surfaced about him, initially stated as if reading from the Watergate textbook of Stonewalling, he had no recollection of any sort of settlement in this regard. Then as evidence mounted to the contrary, he countered as if it were semantics, “you say settlement, I say agreement.” But the best was on Halloween at a National Press Club press conference he was conducting in D.C. Hermdog got the show started by singing a few bars from a gospel number called “He Looked Beyond My Faults and Saw My Needs.”
You can’t make this stuff up. In the old days if you re-worked this for your book, an editor would say such a passage was too over-the-top. But damned if you can’t riff on a character like Cain who, at least as far as his public personas goes, is almost a parody of himself.
But is there any topping Jon Corzine in his testimony before Congress regarding his investment firm Man Financial Global “misplacing” $1.2 billion? Here’s a former governor of New Jersey, a former U.S. senator and Goldman Sachs honcho too, doing the equivalent of the yokel bit Cain did when he quipped, “Uz Becky, Becky, Stan, Stan,” proud of his ignorance about foreign countries and foreign intricacies.
“I simply do not know where the money is, or why the accounts have not been reconciled to date,” Corzine said under oath. He further stated, “I know only know what I read,” said Corzine, who added later that he first learned that “there were un-reconciled accounts” on the night before the bankruptcy filing.
Astounding. Wasn;t there a clue that somethig was up if the initials for the investment house was ‘MF?’ I recently completed a four issue comic book mini-series about a high end money launderer called The Rinse. My anti-hero Jeff Sinclair gets involved in a scheme wherein 25 mil is ripped off from a mobbed-up individual – a gent who’s made that money skimming for the take he’s supposed to pay out to his silent partners — who runs a casino in Las Vegas. The couple who’ve ripped off the gangster are on the run from his goons and need Sinclair to wash, to do the rinse of their money, and obscure its illicit roots. In my original pitch, I had Sinslair getting sucked into doing the rinse for a crooked general who helped himself to a few million of those pallets of money we sent over to Iraq.
Almost $12 billion in $100 bills was airlifted into Baghdad on shrink-wrapped pallets by the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority. The cash was distributed with no proper control over who was receiving it, and how it was being spent. This was the biggest transfer of cash in the history of the Federal Reserve has been graphically laid bare by a US congressional committee.
I had to crank it down from the initial idea as it was deemed too out there, too controversial.
Heh. Like I said, hardboiled never gets old.
