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
The changing marketplace
My favorite librarian sent me a tweet this week:
Hi, Lise! I like buying books from Amazon, but am concerned about its multiple efforts toward dominance/monopoly. Your thoughts?
Lately Amazon seems to be taking drastic measures to destroy its competition. This isn’t exactly news. They’ve been in that zero-sum game for some time, where they spent vast amounts of money to expand into everything from diapers to lawn mowers, not to mention their bestselling Kindles and exclusive deals on e-books. They undercut everybody else’s prices, hoping to drive everyone else out of business. And then what? Are they going to raise their prices? Are they going to be sued by the government like Microsoft? Or just sit back and rake in the cash?
This week brought the news that both Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million will not carry Amazon Createspace titles in their stores. As far as I can tell they will still carry them on their websites. E-books are a different story, not apparently affected. But for the library market, well, often librarians buy directly from Amazon or Barnes & Noble. It’s faster and cheaper. But will it stay cheaper if Amazon is the only game in town? The future is murky, my friend.
I told my librarian friend that things are changing so fast in publishing that I couldn’t get riled up about any particular change. Tomorrow there will bring something else. Jeff Bezos of Amazon said: “As a company, one of our greatest cultural strengths is accepting the fact that if you’re going to invent, you’re going to disrupt. A lot of entrenched interests are not going to like it. Some of them will be genuinely concerned about the new way, and some of them will have a vested self-interest in preserving the old way.” He says they plan to disrupt themselves. They can be something different next year, next month. They can change on a dime, and plan on doing so. Are bookstores entrenched interests? Absolutely. Are publishers? Without a doubt. Are libraries? I hope not.
Let’s face it: the old way of publishing, where you as a publisher bribe bookstores to carry your book then take it back at full price (hardback) and/or encourage them to tear the cover off and throw it in the garbage (paperback), was fundamentally broken 50 years ago. Entire forests have died for unloved literature. Yet the broken system continued plodding along, until the Internet and Amazon turned it on its head. Thank God for Amazon!
But if you don’t like the changes, you can always squawk about them — everywhere. This week showed again the power of social media when the Susan Komen Foundation decided to blacklist Planned Parenthood, pulling over half a million dollars in grants for breast cancer screening. Three days later they got the message loud and clear: petitions on Facebook, rants on Twitter. The outcry was deafening and they backtracked. News travels at warp speed on the Internet. Public opinion of your decision, good or bad, is democratic and widespread. Everyone has a voice. Like the revolutions in the Mideast, you can’t keep a good opinion down, no matter how much money or power you have. As an old sociology major I find this fascinating — and encouraging.
The biggest change this past year for Amazon is expanding into their own publishing with Larry Kirshbaum at the helm. (An interesting article about him here.) The ultimate insider, Kirshbaum brought Jeff Bezos to a publishing meeting way back in ’98 when Amazon started as an “internet bookstore.” (Another article, on Bezos, here. Wired Magazine, by the way, is full of great writing!) As much as publishers (and some authors) talk about Amazon’s business strategies being evil, they are making money there. (Full disclosure, I made about $11,000 on e-books at Amazon last year, much of it on books that had been traditionally published years before.)
Every year won’t be like 2011. It was a wild ride for e-books, e-readers, publishers, self-publishers, and authors. But it’s hard not to be excited by all the changes. The author is now in the driver’s seat, (even if your book is proclaimed by Publishers Weekly to be “The Worst Novel Ever.” At least you can upload it and get a reaction.) Nobody is forcing readers to buy your book but at least they have a chance to see it and decide. You have to write the best book you can, get it edited and proofread, put your baby out into the world all fresh and shiny. You have the opportunity with Amazon — and Barnes & Noble and Smashwords and Apple. May there always be choices in the marketplace. Lots of competition out there, from great writers, mediocre writers, and crap writers. Amazon and those who followed them have leveled the playing field. Will the cream rise to the top? I can’t wait to see what happens next.
Monday 2/6: We didn’t have to wait long for the next part! Over the weekend Indigo Books in Canada also decided to not stock Amazon books. And this just in: Amazon will open their own bricks-and-mortar store. Reportedly to open in Seattle in the next few months. As the worm turns…
I Really Should Get Out More, or Should I?
If there is one truth universally to be acknowledged about the writer’s life, it is the critical importance of planting one’s butt in the chair (or in the more genteel words of my late mother, one’s seat in the seat) and keeping it there until the work gets done. In the case of those of us who write novels, that can mean a year or more, depending on how the story develops and how many rewrites it takes.
I know what you’re thinking–your tabloid minds immediately flash to stories of those people whose flesh has grown attached to their sofas, or those sad folks who’ve become one with their toilets seats after sitting there for years. No. This is not that kind of attachment. It’s more a matter of discipline than a matter of inertia. But there is a downside to being so disciplined and sitting in the chair day after day and week after week–we miss the stimulus of the outside world. We can begin to miss contact with others. Conversation. The convivial exchanges that take place with other humans.
So from time to time I venture out. And too often, it seems, I’m immediately put in touch with the dark, violent side of myself. By the time I’ve driven from my little house in the woods across the highway to the other side of town and the grocery store, I’m usually ready to mount a bazooka on the front of my car. My first target? Those blonde, gym-rat suburban housewives in their enormous Suburbans who some screeching out of their driveways right in front of me, absolutely have to get there first, and then slow to a crawl as they start dialing on their cell phones. By the time we reach the first intersection, they’ve done the speed up, slow down thing half a dozen times, and then, when the light turns green, they do not go. Far too deep in animated conversation to notice that they’re keeping everyone else waiting.
Take a deep breath, I remind myself. Shelve that anger, you can give it to a character later. Everything is grist for the mill. Homicidal impulses are good so long as I don’t act on them. Eventually, the chatty little bimbette moves her behemoth and I make it to the post office.
Relief? Not exactly. In my town, it’s not the postal employees who make one want to go postal, it’s the customers. The ones who draggle up to the counter with the birthday gift in one hand and a box in the other, and proceed to pack it and address it, while the clerk, and the long line, waits. The next person wants stamps. No. Not those stamps. Pretty ones. Well. Maybe four of those. And five of that sailboat one. And some flags? And maybe just a couple of…? All of which must be paid for in change dug up from the bottom of the purse like a miner panning for gold. By now, the line is 15 people long, and I am holding books that need to be mailed. And books, as we know, are not light.
Finally, that errand is done. Now there is only the grocery store and the gas 
station. More lovely human contact. More opportunities for observation. More chances to pick up clues to the indelible character that will make my novel sing. The bewildered man trying to identify the right type of potato is moving back and forth like a security guard in front of the potatoes and onions, ensuring that no one gets the perfect potato until the person on the other end of the line has given him sufficient direction. I move left. He moves left. I move right. He moves right. I need to get home and put my ass in that chair. I need potatoes. Finally, remembering my soccer coaching days, I gently shoulder-check him out of the way, get my potatoes, and move on. As I turn the corner, two running 8-year-old boys crash into me and speed off without apology. I think with horror that in another 8 years, they’ll be behind the wheels of cars.
At last I arrive at the checkout, and find myself behind the elderly person who is counting out change from a small change purse. Penny by penny. Nickel by nickel. I remind myself that I will be elderly soon enough myself, and that patience is a virtue. My virtuous character is really getting a workout, though, because half way through the counting, he begins to question the prices he’s been charged, and the patient checker has to run the order all over again. Back to nickels. Dimes. Quarters. I will pay for his groceries myself if it will only get me out of here.
Then. Last, and how can this go wrong, the gas station. I turn in right behind a green Subaru wagon. Instead of pulling through to the forward pump, she stops at the back one, leaving me cooling my heels while she putters and fidgets and fusses. But this slow-mo tank filling is not enough discourtesy. When she’s done pumping her gas, instead of driving away, she comes over and bangs on my window. “You’re going to have to back up,” she says. “Because I want to back up and you’re in my way.” The space in front of her is empty. She can easily drive forward and turn onto the road.
“You know,” I say, casting virtue to the wind and curious to see what happens, “I don’t think I will.”
With a vehement shake of her ratty gray hair, the Subaru queen glares at me. “You’re not going to move?”
I smile sweetly and shake my head.
She retreats to her car, grabs a giant, ethnic handbag, and trots away down the 
street.
All right. For now, she’s won. She’s clearly too crazy to tangle with and I have to get home. So now I back up and drive away. But what a successful outing it has been. Getting out was a great idea. I now have four or five useful new characters to more fully imagine and stick in my book. My other characters are going to love them.
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/
Crime Fiction Is People!
by J.D. Rhoades
Back when I was in college (UNC-Chapel Hill), I took some classes in the creative writing curriculum. At the time, I was writing short stories in the genres I loved: science fiction and mystery. My professor was rather sniffy about genre fiction. Mystery, he claimed, was a lesser form of writing because it relied on puzzles and on “tricking” the reader. But he reserved his special scorn for science fiction. Sci-fi, he claimed, could not be real literature, depending as it did on gimmicks and deus ex machina. But, I protested, what about Kurt Vonnegut? What are Slaughterhouse-Five or Cat’s Cradle if not science fiction? He just smiled indulgently and told me that Vonnegut wasn’t really a science fiction writer, he just used the conventions of the genre in literary fiction.
I could have strangled the man. Some days, I’m amazed that I didn’t.
It’s an old and irritating prejudice: genre fiction can’t possibly be real literature. If it’s good enough to be real literature, it’s not genre fiction. I was pondering this recently while reading a book lent to me by a friend, Tim O’Brien’s 1994 novel In the Lake of the Woods.
By any measure, this is a mystery story: Kathy Wade, the wife of failed Senatorial candidate John Wade, has disappeared from the cabin where the couple went to regroup after the collapse of the campaign. Did he kill her? Did she run off? Did she die by accident? As the story unfolds, the crimes of Wade’s past come to light. It’s a riveting book, gripping from the first page to the last. It’s brilliantly and evocatively written. And, as I said, clearly a mystery, or, to be even more accurate, crime fiction. Yet in none of the reviews or accolades I’ve read for this book is it referred to as such. That, I suppose, would make it less literary. Less serious.
As Nero Wolfe would say, Pfui.
Another book I’ve read and loved recently is Laura Lippman’s The Most Dangerous Thing, which I got for Christmas.
Like In the Lake of the Woods, The Most Dangerous Thing deals with the repercussions of an old crime that casts a long and blighted shadow down through the lives of five childhood friends. It’s a fantastic book, filled with complicated and realistic (and seriously screwed up) characters. The prose is simply stunning. I’d put this book up against any so-called ‘literary’ fiction you’d care to name.
Laura, bless her, is unapologetic about calling her books crime fiction. And yet, inevitably, some reviewer has to come along and claim that her work, or some other other work of crime fiction, or sf, or romance “transcends genre”, because it’s well-written, as if being good disqualifies it from being genre.
These works don’t transcend genre; they show us how good the genre can be. They do that because the authors realize that, at their heart, these are stories not about crimes, but about the people affected by them. It’s not the mystery that pulls us in, it’s the people. It’s not the mysteries that bring us back to series characters like Casey Jones, Robin Hudson, Simon Shaw, et. al.; it’s the characters themselves, and often the supporting cast.
Don’t get me wrong, plot is important. But plot alone without characters you care about is…well, it’s exactly the sort of crap that my professor looked down on. And characters without plot…well, it’s exactly the sort of crap that all to often passes for literary fiction these days.
Tell us, if you would, about some books you’ve read that weren’t called mysteries—but should have been. Or some books that you think, in the words of critic Oline Cogdill, don’t “transcend” the genre, but instead elevate it.
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.
Is hard copy still alive & kicking?
I’m pretty sure the book in its physical, dead-tree form is not going away, at least until we quit paper entirely. But I do like holding a book in my hands for reading. That love, instilled in childhood, will probably be the first thing to go as children grow up reading on electronic devices. Keep your children reading real books! Objects of affection that last and last. (What was your favorite book from childhood? I have a falling-apart copy of The Night Before Christmas in Texas That Is, given to us by my Texas grandparents. It’s still pretty funny to see Santa in cowboy boots.)
That said, digital seems to the wave of the future. But like me, people still like real books. I just formatted my mystery Nordic Nights to be printed on demand (one at a time, less waste) by Amazon’s Createspace. I’ve done about four or five books so far for them so not a new experience…. or so you would think! Every time I format a book I have to re-learn certain aspects of Microsoft Word (which as much as I hate it is the only word processor that has all the bells and whistles I need.) Section breaks are the main bugaboo, and headers, and pagination, and do-you-start-every-chapter-on-the-right-or just flow? After about a week of hair-pulling I got it right. And the reason I know is there is a new gadget at Createspace that lets you actually look at your uploaded text. It’s called Interior Reviewer and after you upload your file (pdf/x please) you can turn the pages, get called out for your mistakes, and re-do it if necessary. It appears there is still some actual person doing final review but this new feature lets you fix the major things. I can see reviewing interior text formatting errors would be a major hassle for Amazon (it’s a major hassle for me and I only have to do one book at a time.)
The templates you download from Createspace make interior formatting much simpler. But beware adding new pages (to make certain text on the right or left usually.) I found out the new pages weren’t sized properly, going in at 8.5 x 11, instead of the document page setup size. That wreaked havoc with pdf/x, making it break down each size into a separate file. Such joy, to get the NO ISSUES report from the Interior Reviewer. Ring the merry bells! And I thought designing the cover would be a bitch.
Oh, it’s the little things this holiday season…. cheers!
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.
Growing old waiting for your audiobook? Take action!
A quick note here mid-week to give a shout-out to Iambik Audiobook who have released three of my books on audio recently. Not only does the author have input into the narrator selection (akin to having final approval on your book cover — when did that happen?) but you work with the narrator and Iambik to make the best product you can. I found the experience transforming, maybe because I’m doing my books with Thalia Press these days. (That means I edit myself basically so I love having a team at Iambik!)
The company is bundling the three audiobooks — my two Dorie Lennox mysteries, One O’clock Jump and Sweet and Lowdown, plus my stand-alone suspense Blackbird Fly, with a 25% discount right now! The single title price is only $6.99 but you can all three for just over $15. (The discount code is mcclendon-audio through the Iambik website.)
To find out more about the books and their narrators, check out this Iambik blog post. I loved what they had to say about my writing (another reason to love Iambik!)
