New Directions

I know New Directions sounds like a Christian publishing company, or a storefront therapy shop in some windblown strip mall. But, dear readers, it is nothing of the sort. I think I've espoused the view that traditional publishing is dead, so I am an advocate of electronic publishing.
The new direction I'm speaking about is launching The Spy Who Loathed Me as a trade paperback. Yes, for the long run I still believe that digital publication is the way to go. But how does one establish a market to begin with? I think I've found a way. Ten years ago, the only option would have been to fork over several thousand dollars to a printer, and weeks later take possession of several crates of books which would probably remain unopened in the garage, collecting dust and spiders.
We now have Print on Demand. One buyer. One book. No spiders.
More importantly, in terms of financing and cultivating buyers, we have micro fund-raising platforms like Kickstarter.
I know several people who have successfully launched their own creative projects with Kickstarter, raising $5,000 to $15,000, and I think this system is a very exciting trend in the arts. Call it micro patronage. It returns power to the artists, but it also confers some responsibility on them. That is, if the project is not interesting to buyers, it won't get funded... so maybe it needs some work. The beauty of it is, though, that through the Internet it is accessible to virtually the entire world.
People raise anywhere from $500 to millions of dollars. I saw today that Charlie Kaufman, the writer of Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and others films, has launched a campaign to raise $200,000 to finance a stop-frame animation picture. He reached his goal in a couple of days. Good for Charlie.
My goals will be more modest. I'm going to be seeking under $4,000, which will finance copy editing, cover and interior design, printing, packaging, shipping, and other expenses for the publication of The Spy Who Loathed Me. At once, I will have the book published, have some readers who I hope will write reviews, and, viola, I have launched the book.
So, if you're reading this, consider yourself an insider. I'm hoping to have it up by the end of August, so keep an eye out!

What's Paper Got to Do With It?

Last week, I met with my friend, who shall remain nameless for no reason other than I haven't told him that I would be trumpeting his name to my millions of followers. I'll just make up a name: Larry Shames. Damn! That really is his name. Oh, well.
Along with a busy career as a ghostwriter, Larry is the author of a series of eight crime novels set in Key West. But his most recent title is off-genre for him--that is, not a part of his series--and Larry has decided to epublish it.
"Up until eighteen months ago, I was a snob," he told me. "I thought if you weren't published on paper, you weren't really a writer. But I've totally changed my mind. Traditional publishing is dead." I won't claim that this is an exact quote, but it's very close. Close enough to avoid charges of libel, anyway. Larry, if you're out there, please correct me.
It wasn't as though his insight was a surprise. However, it was reassuring to me to hear it from yet another  who is established, and has a solid record of sales over a long period of time.
Over lunch, we spoke for a couple of hours about writing and publishing. Among the smart things Larry has done is to release his backlist as ebooks, which involved, first, securing the rights from his publisher. Having accomplished that, he had the books scanned and formatted, and had new cover art designed. All of it was accomplished by a company called geniusbookservices.com. They did a great job on his books, and when I'm ready--which will be soon--I expect I'll use them.
As for quality of writing, let me pervert the Tina Turner song from the 90s: "What's paper got to do with it?" There are thousands upon thousands of well-written ebooks. And, it's true, there are thousands upon thousands of poorly written ones.
Obviously, with no barrier to entry, anyone can epublish, so there's a lot of drek out there, supporting the position that writers need gatekeepers, in the form of agents and editors, to vet their work before unleashing it on the unwary public. But the market does have wisdom: witness Joe Konrath, Amanda Hocking, and, I hope, Larry Shames, and me.
When the gatekeepers work for and serve just a half-dozen giant conglomerates it can only be expected that their standards will change, and that the gate will get narrower. The result, of course, has been that publishers have gone the way of the film industry, spending all their money on a few brand name writers, then tossing crumbs to the rest, who will be lucky if they earn back their piddling advance.
The big names don't even make back their multi-million dollar advances, but the publishing giants would be too embarrassed to let them go.  Can you say, "John Carter?"  That is, for those who are not movie buffs, a reference to the recent flop John Carter, which cost Disney $250 million (at least), and cost studio head Rich Ross his job. I'm not worried about Rich Ross. He'll fail upward. But squandering that sum of money on a film is, of course, analogous to publishers squandering millions on a title by a name-brand writer not because it's great, but because it'll be a tent pole, a profit center (they hope) and a builder of prestige. Meanwhile, a couple hundred writers who would have been thrilled to get a $10,000 advance are out in the cold; like John Carter, shivering on Mars. Big pub--as people more worthy than I have observed--has forsaken its responsibility to find and nurture new talent, and to expand the art form. It has succumbed to the same blockbuster, shopping mall, commodification, fast food mentality that has, and continues to, destroy individuality not just in culture, but in commerce as well.
I suppose this is a little like railing against gravity. There clearly are economic, technological, and cultural reasons that traditional publishing has taken this route. But ebooks give writers the chance to escape their particular gravitational pull.
Maybe there's a happy medium. Agents, as in Larry's case, are moving into more of a publishing model. They're still gatekeepers, but are not beholden to big pub. Without the overhead of publishers, or the costs of printing, perhaps the market will create an opportunity for them to once again discover and develop new talent, and earn the allegiance of readers and writers alike.

Being Entitled

I shall start bravely, with a cliche: You can’t judge a book by its cover.

            But maybe you can judge it by its title. At least that's kind of what happens as a writer. 

Previously, I’ve started novels with a title, which provided a sort of guiding principle. But this latest novel began as a short story, which was itself based on an experience I had when I’d first arrived in L.A..

Bear with me as I digress: The year was 1981, and Anwar Sadat had recently been assassinated. Shortly after his death, the CIA—which hadn’t seen the assassination coming (what’s new?) took out full-page ads in major magazines—remember magazines?—seeking recruits to help fill what they had determined was an enormous intelligence gap.

I was in L.A., hanging out at The Improv, writing spec sitcom scripts, hoping to break into the industry, and getting nowhere. But I was also very interested in foreign affairs. I saw one of the CIA ads and thought, “You know, I might be a pretty good spy.” I’d been a reporter before the TV-writing bug bit me, and figured that a spy was really just a reporter who didn’t reveal that he was reporting. You had to be able to listen, which I’d always been told I was good at. You had to be able to write, which I could do well also. Besides, I liked to travel, and the job sounded exciting.

I wrote a letter to the CIA in which I spelled out my qualifications—not mentioning my forays into sitcom writing--and noted my alarm over the state of world affairs. It must have been a good letter because a few days later I received in the mail a letter from the CIA, inviting me in for an interview. If memory serves, the letter arrived in an unmarked envelope, but my imagination may be embellishing this particular detail.

I went for the interview, which was an utter failure. (Or was it? I could be lying. I may actually be a spy, you know…)

Anyway, I didn’t write this story for thirty years, but when I finally did write it I thought that it had the seeds of a longer tale, with this premise: “What if a struggling sitcom writer got a job at the CIA?”

The concept went through many iterations before crystallizing as this: What if a struggling sitcom writer gets a job for the CIA, but doesn’t even know he’s working for the CIA? I knew I had something interesting there, but it seemed a little far-fetched. How could you work for the CIA and not know it? A passing remark by my brother, Bruce, answered the question. Bruce had a friend who was in the CIA and wanted to join the civilian workforce. Unfortunately, his entire career had been basically classified, so he had no resume.

I thought, what if my character worked for a CIA cover company that was created to give legitimacy to CIA agents who are leaving the agency? This dovetailed with another experience of mine, which was writing for the employee magazines of a big insurance company. The CIA cover company, I decided, would be an insurance company. Retired and compromised CIA agents worked there, built up their resume, and then had the credentials to join the working world. My character would write for the company’s employee magazine, yet have no idea that his real employer was the CIA.

I really love this idea, and I won’t spoil the story any more other than to say that it turned out to be something more of a subplot than the actual plot of the book. But that is neither here nor there.

Remember, the previous several paragraphs were a digression. I started out talking about titles, so let me get back to that. As I wrote the book, which spooled out in many funny and unexpected ways, my working title, Secret Spy, became less and less accurate. My character, Tom Huttle (who is the central character in two other novels, Echo Valley and Huttle the Hero, both set many years later) was not a spy at all, secret or otherwise. He wasn’t the main character, either, much to my surprise.

Ultimately, the story does have a lot to do with spies, however. It’s just that Tom isn’t one of them. I needed a title that reflected what the story is really about. So, here is the description of the book: “Hollywood, 1982. For FBI Special Agent Terrence Tillberry, being in love with Petra Tarasova is wonderful, except for two things: First, she’s in the KGB. Second, she can’t stand him. It’s not like Terrence is much of a prize, either. He’s barely holding onto his job, and since his divorce, he’s ballooned in weight, thanks to a diet of Hostess fruit pies and Twinkies. And the financial strain of caring for his increasingly demented mother hasn’t helped him feel any less desperate. Luck seems to turn Terrence’s way when he discovers a secret list of CIA operatives. Treason might just be the way to win Petra’s heart, and maybe solve the rest of his problems, too.

But when the bodies start piling up, Terrence realizes that his problems are only just beginning.”

See what I mean about the Tom Huttle story being a subplot? He doesn’t even bear a mention in this description. Poor Tom. Not to worry, though. He has plenty to do. In any event, it was clear that Secret Spy would simply be an inappropriate title for this story. Trying to come up with a better title, I brainstormed, I asked my writing group, and generally worked myself into a later. In darker moments I thought, “What if I never come up with a title? What if I’ve written an entire book and it will languish forever because I can’t figure out what to call it?”

The thing is, titles have an enormous amount of work to do. They have to convey the tone of the story: in this case, funny. They have to give an idea of the central conflict. I dabbled with Spies in Love, but that’s the actual title of a recent nonfiction book about terrorists. Not funny. Ideally, the title also provides a sense of the setting, too. (Flashback: I wrote my first screenplay in 1981. It was a drama about a girl molested by her father, which at the time was a very taboo subject. I titled it—pretentiousness alert—A Bird and a Memory. How embarrassing. Needless to say, it went nowhere.)

I shared my perplexity with my pal, J.B. White, and told him the central conflicts of the story. “How about The Spy Who Loathed Me?”

That was it! The story is essentially about Terrence Tillberry’s increasingly desperate and self-destructive efforts to gain the affection of KGB agent Petra Tarasova. She doesn’t like him. Plus, being a play on the James Bond title “The Spy Who Loved me,” the title had a nice retro-homage feel to it.

Then came the cover. I wanted to use a Hostess fruit pie with a bite out of it, against the Soviet hammer and sickle. But my friend Barbara Morgenroth felt that, given the constraints of ebook thumbnails, such an image would be too busy. She made the a great cover using a battered hammer and sickle against a red background. The title, in an homage to the Saul Bass movie posters for the Hitchcock and Bond pictures of the 60s and 70s, is a nice retro typeface, which stands out against the red background.

You can see it at the left. Yes, it’s only a couple of square inches, which is no reflection on the acres of work and thought that went into it.

sdrawkcaB gnitirW

  Oh, man, sometimes I am just amazed by my own cleverness, and by my modesty, too, of course. You see that headline up above? It would take a regular Leonardo DaVinci to... oh, wait, you figured it out? Yeah, it's kind of a dumb gimmick, and I guess that proves that I'm not above dumb gimmicks.

  But I do write backwards. For the very literal-minded, I don't mean that I... no... no one thinks that I mean it yllaretil. Here's what I mean: let's say I have a scene, or a character trait I particularly want to have in my book. In Secret Spy (still the working title), for example, I wanted the main character, Terrence Tillberry, to be munching a Hostess fruit pie.

I will digress and explain why I wanted this: First, the character on whom Tillberry is based was a real FBI agent. However, all I really know about him is that he had a girlfriend who was a KGB operative, and that he--and this is true--ate donuts and other junk food every day. His boss described him as "lunchie." I don't know if he ate Hostess products or not. I, however, DID eat Hostess fruit pies every day for lunch when I was a freshman in high school. They're repulsive to me now, but I thought I could bring credible sensory detail to the myriad pleasures of consuming them.

Okay, so I have Tillberry eating a cherry-flavored Hostess fruit pie. Great! But then I started to ask, "Why?" This ultimately developed into an entire back story about Terrence as a young boy: When he was about to start seventh grade, he felt very insecure. He confided in his beloved Uncle Martin, who counseled him to start lifting weights. Martin was also a Special Agent for the FBI, and because of Uncle Martin's example, Terrence is inspired to become and FBI agent himself.

But why, I asked, did he start eating Hostess products? Well, how about if he had an aversion to going to lunch? Why would that happen? Well, what if there was a particularly traumatic event that happened in the FBI dining room? What would have happened? Well, how about if he is embarrassed for some reason? Who would embarrass him? His boss might embarrass him. What would his boss do or say to embarrass him? His boss might ridicule him. What would his boss ridicule him for? How about if his boss accuses him of being the beneficiary of favoritism? Remember, Terrence's Uncle Martin was in the FBI.

As you can see--and if you can't, I'll just tell you--the entire process of developing Terrence's story was one of asking questions, and then answering them, and it all started with "Why would an FBI agent eat a Hostess fruit pie?" Each question prompted multiple answers, and more questions, and as each question was asked and answered, Terrence got more real, and more interesting.

The novelist John Rechy, under whom I studied at USC's Master of Professional Writing program, said that "writers ask questions, and get answers." It's really as simple as that, and (drumroll for the approaching irony) as complex. That is, the bigger the question, the deeper the answer in terms of how it will influence your characters, their motivations, and the plot of the book itself. My first novel, Echo Valley, really started because I wanted to have a scene in which Tom Huttle, the protagonist, emerges, dressed in tin foil, from the back of a burning garbage truck that has just flown through the air. Now, this was a somewhat more difficult question to answer than, "Why would an FBI agent eat a Hostess fruit pie?" However, it led to the same type of question-and-answer sequence, and in ways far too complex to explain right now, became the spine of the entire plot of Echo Valley, which is about Tom Huttle's misadventures as he writes a book called Garbage.

So, as for the advice portion of our program: if you have a scene that springs to mind, by all means, write it! You may not know precisely where it might ultimately fit in your book, and perhaps you don't know what it means. That's okay. Ask yourself, and then answer the question.

Oh, by the way, in a craven effort to draw readers to this blog, I'll always put nude in the labels field. I have nothing against nudity, by the way, though typically don't practice it in a public setting. Now I can put public nudity in the labels field, too. I am that diabolical.

Ferpectionism

The rewrite stretches on. Just when I think I have, at last, trimmed, sharpened, modified, deepened, and adjusted every character, scene, conflict, and theme, I find... something that's out of place: a clunky description, an awkward transition, a bit of stilted or unrealistic dialog, a scene that just doesn't play. I fix them, and move on to the next part, which I thought was perfect, only to find that it, too, needs changes.

At this point, it feels as though the rewrite will take forever. Every time I read the manuscript, I find something else that displeases me. Lines that in earlier drafts made me laugh now fall flat. This is one of the hazards, of course, of writing comedy. Comedy is, by definition, surprise. In fact, the best description of humor I ever read is this: Surprise without promise or threat.

Well, nothing in this manuscript surprises me anymore, which... isn't any surprise, as I have read the manuscript dozens of times. So, I have to trust that the positive responses of my few readers--all of them intelligent, perceptive, and helpful--were genuine at the time, and know that I shouldn't mess with what amused, intrigued, or excited them. For the rest, I have to trust myself.

On the subject of rewriting, my wonderful writing teacher, the late, great, and much beloved Paul Gillette, said, "At some point, you've got to say, 'This is the quiche of the day.'" I guess that point has been reached when change would make the story different, but not necessarily better. Naturally, every significant change resonates throughout the manuscript. You give a character a different goal, and every thought, every line of dialog, is affected. In other words, there is a point, and I believe I am close to it, when the manuscript is good enough.

There is no such thing as ferpection, in other words. Mortals, and writers, can aspire to it, but only God and F. Scott Fitzgerald can attain it.

The Best Things

As they say, the best things in life are free, like butterflies or dandelions, or... I know, Echo Valley and Deadlines!

Kindle Select is a Kindle program that lets the author give away books as a promotion. I listed Echo Valley and Deadlines. I haven't yet figured out what the actual benefit of it is for the writers to give away their work, though I can see the appeal for readers. Free books? Okay.

I suppose the point for writers is to generate interest and, one hopes, reviews, which, the the benevolent circle of commerce, lead to sales, more reviews, ad infinitum.

I am so far at Step One: Give Away Books. I was delighted to see that both books posted some pretty healthy numbers, meaning that they now reside collectively on some 650 - 700 Kindles from the U.S. to Germany.  That's cool. I hope the people enjoy them.

But what does does it mean that people have downloaded my books for free? That's hard to say. For one, it says that the covers were eye-catching. So, for that, I thank Barbara Morgenroth for Deadlines, and my son, Drew, for Echo Valley.

That people downloaded the titles must also mean that the descriptions made them sound interesting. I'll take almost all the credit for that, except Barbara again gave me good advice as to the blurb for Deadlines.

So, we have answered a couple of crucial questions in the marketplace of ideas: namely, that based on the cover and the descriptions, people are willing to take a few seconds to download the books. But the question remains as to how they value them, or whether they value them. That's a trickier calculus.

I suppose that a Free Food day at the supermarket would draw enormous response. The shelves would be cleaned out in an hour. Does that mean people are hungrier? Maybe they just like free stuff. If that's so, are they more appreciative of the box of mac & cheese they paid $1.69 for, or the one that cost them nothing? Probably the one they paid for. However, maybe they'd never even try mac & cheese if it weren't free, and I guess that's what I'm hoping for. I'm hoping that people who downloaded my books, a) read them  and, b) review them and/ or tell their friends about them.

I mean, really, is that too much to ask? If you got a box of mac & cheese at the Free Food Giveaway, wouldn't it be a nice demonstration of gratitude to tell your friends, "Hey, I got some free mac & cheese, and it was really tasty. Go get some!"

Not to get moralistic about it, but I think it would be wasteful, to just just stash that mac & cheese in the cupboard and not appreciate that, any other time of the day, it had measurable value.

If I've lost you in this dense metaphor, let me return to the concrete and say that I hope that all of the people who downloaded Echo Valley and Deadlines read it and enjoy it, and that if they do they will take just a few minutes to write a review and tell their friends.

Now, for some reason I'm hungry. I wonder if there's anyplace giving away food for free?

Coincidence, and planning

In the final chapters of Secret Spy, many loose ends must be tied up. The best way to take care of one of them was for one of the character's cars to catch fire.

Others who read the chapter said that this felt like a handy coincidence. Cars do catch fire, it's true. But when that fire drives some of the narrative in a particular direction that is desirable for the writer, and doesn't seem rooted in the story, then the reader feels manipulated.

But this problem was easy to solve: all I needed to do was weave into earlier portions of the story some hint that the car has a problem: a funny smell, a small mechanical flaw. Then, when the fire occurs, the reader will look back on the previous "hints" that something was amiss, and think, "Oh, that makes perfect sense! I should have seen that coming."

That sense that they "should have seen it coming" is a very good one to instill in the reader because it makes them feel as though they are in able hands: you as the writer have been able to insert just enough information to assure that everything feels logical, but you haven't put in so much that the plot is predictable. "Oh! I knew that car was going to blow up 60 pages ago. Finally!"

I wonder if aversion to coincidence  has a certain resonance to real life, as indicated by sayings such as  "everything works out for the best," and "there is no such thing as a coincidence." Perhaps this sense that stories all cohere is an iteration of the human drive to look at the events in one's life--or, indeed, of history or civilization itself--and be able to say, "Yes, I can see the pattern now, and it all makes sense. It couldn't have happened any other way." Of course, "it" definitely could have happened in a multitude of "other ways." There are no guarantees in life at all. Maybe the ending of a book is like the ending of a life, except you get a do-over. How nice.

I suppose this might branch into discussion of multiple dimensions, or multiple universes, or an analysis of reality, but I'll leave that to much smarter people. My goal is to avoid writing plot points that just serve my purposes, and are not sufficiently rooted in the reality of the story.