Listen! Don't Read!

Update: Some good news. My story, Rat Baiting, won first place in the Arizona Mystery Writers short story contest. And---- my story, A Shadow The Length Of A Lifetime, was accepted and published in the Bacopa Literary Review magazine.

Now back to pessimism and sarcasm:

Irreverent, you say. A writer who tells you not to read? Blasphemy! What is the number one answer that all successful authors give when asked for the best advice to eager, fledgling writers?  The answer? Read. Read a lot. Read a lot of everything. Read everything.

Quite true. They know what they’re talking about or they wouldn’t have the modifier: Best Selling Author in front of their name now would they? These great authors were the nerds in school who always had a book in front of their noses during lunch and recess. Everybody picked on them but they’re getting their revenge with every best-selling novel they pump out. So if your child says he or she is being picked on in school, assure them they will have the last laugh and they better buy you a beach condo when they hit the big time or you’ll take away their books.

So what’s up with JJ saying to stop that confounded reading? (By the way, I was a nerd also but only read comic books. I blame my parents.) Why diss reading when real authors who make real money are telling everyone to read? My curt answer is that as an alternative to reading a book you should be listening to them instead.  

Why? Several reasons:

1)      To save your eyes. Have you ever read four chapters and then looked up at the highway stretching in front of you and all the white lines are blurry? It’s tough enough to read while you’re driving, don’t screw up your vision too.  Ah yes, reading while driving. I call it old school texting. Hell, I did most of my college homework on the drive to the campus. Number 42 of my list of reasons why I should be dead by now.

2)      You retain the material better if you listen to a book. Remember all those Little Golden Books your mother read to you from the time you were crapping your diapers? Of course you do. The same goes for audiobooks. It’s a scientific fact that it’s a shorter path to your brain from your ears than it is from your eyes. Einstein proved it.

3)      Subliminally, listening to a book teaches you the proper way to write, including narrative, dialogue, syntax, grammar and attributions. If you listen to a Leonard Elmore novel and hear she said or he said a million times, it gets beat into your psyche and flows into your own writing automatically.

4)      It’s easier to listen to a book than it is to read one. If you have a long commute you can go through a six CD novel in a few days. You are forced to listen, whereas with a book you might put it down and forget about it for a month. I have a commute of eighty miles a day so I go through about seventy audiobooks a year including the snoozers that have twenty or thirty disks in them. The only drawback is sometimes you arrive at your destination right at a climax in the novel and you have to wait until your next drive to hear the conclusion. Also, don’t listen to that exciting end in your garage with the engine on either, or you will have a surprise ending.

The only other drawback with audiobooks is when they use a famous actor to read them. The actor or actress forgets he or she is reading for the audience and tends to overact to show how talented they are. The worst are Anne Heche and Joe Mantegna.

I still read a couple of books a year. Not all the classics are on tape so I have no choice. The new Audible.com sucks because you have to download the book to your computer and then on to your IPod and then you have to hook the IPod to your car if it happens to have a USB port and then after all that, the audio is iffy, sometimes too loud or too soft. Stick with books on CD if available and boycott those stupid I.T. people that want you to download everything and kill off every bookstore left in the world. Damn nerds.

And stop reading! You’ll go blind.

The Absolutely Undeserved Hatred of Adverbs

Actually.

That's it.

I wanted to start with an adverb so just--Actually.

Actually, though, I do have some news. I was awarded the American Literary Merit Award for my short story, Your Sister's Wedding Reception. See award above post.

Where was I? Oh yeah. Actually adverbs get a bad rap from the writing community. Stephen King said, "The road to hell is paved with adverbs." He'll probably write a thousand page book about it some weekend. He could have Automaton Adverbs rise from the River Styx and attack lost souls cast from Purgatory to Perdition or some such nonsense similar to the recent crap he's been putting out. We need another short story from him to inspire movies like The Green Mile and The Shawshank Redemption. All in favor?

And then there's my hero, Elmore Leonard, who wrote, "Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said" . . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange."

He's right, of course--to a point. I enjoy reading lines of dialogue from the classics such as, "You may look as you like, my dear," he said, deliciously. Now truly, really, doesn't deliciously imply something wicked about the dude's character? He's a slime-bucket and a pervert. Only an adverb could describe a character so completely.

The adverb is a gem and comes to its full potential singularly in the English language. In English the ly comes off the tongue like beautifully, lovely, carefully, constructed candy. But only in English.

For example, let’s look at the adverb, Darkly, first in English, and then in other languages.

English------Darkly.

Spanish-----Misteriosamente.

French------Obscurement.

Russian-----Mpayho.

Icelandic----Dokkleitar.

So if you wanted to read your favorite poem, Through a Glass Darkly in Iceland, you'd lose some of that ardent emotion. Through a Glass Dokkleitar just doesn't cut it.

So fight the orthodoxy (noun, not an adverb) and spew those adverbs throughout your work, fellow writers, resolutely, magnificently. Throw caution to the wind and watch King and Leonard and your creative writing professor cringe--------excruciatingly.

 

How to Cook Meth (and other embarrassing research searches)

I love to write fiction because theoretically I can get paid for lying and I love to lie. I'm a huge liar. As a matter of fact, I'm lying now so that actually makes me the most honest person in the world. Now that you're confused, I'll get to the point. Authors owe it to their readers to get their facts right in fiction despite it being a pile of made up crap.

Research is an integral part of your fiction since there are a million nerds out their just waiting to e-mail you that you screwed up your facts in your novel. The rich and famous authors can afford to travel to the locations they write about, where they'll spend their time sipping Guinness and interviewing the locals, listening to their colorful tales, but if you're like me, you only have two sources: the library and the Internet. With the advent of the World Wide Web, an author has access to almost any subject with a tap of the mouse, including dangerous and embarrassing subjects.
I'll get a lot of hits on this post from sickos trying to learn how to manufacture meth-amphetamines. They'll search just like I did, but the difference is, I only want to write about it.

The problem is organizations like the FBI and the Polk County Sheriff's Department are looking for these sickos and won't be able to differentiate between criminals and innocent, handsome authors. I can imagine if the FBI ever confiscated my computer and scanned the hard drive, they'd come to the conclusion I'm a sick, dangerous, perverted sociopath. Why? Because my last six books and two hundred short stories were about, war, sex, terrorism, assault rifles, drugs, pedophilia, genocide, patricide, matricide, fratricide, suicide, regicide, homicide, insecticide--no, wait a minute--skip that last one. Anyway, you get the point, these are things crime writers search for daily.
The reality is, I love babies, have not fired a gun since I was nine, and swerve my car to avoid slow turtles and fast squirrels.

Despite my caution, it's still hard to explain to your mother-in-law why you have instructions on how to cook meth on top of your desk. I was just lucky she didn't look in the drawers where I keep the instructions on making fertilizer bombs and have that list of white sex slave websites.
My best advice for you writers is to delete your history on your computer especially if you're sending it in to Best Buy for repair and forgot to delete the video of your two-year-old daughter doing cartwheels, Au natural. As parents, we think it's cute, but sixteen year old technicians will call the Polk county mounties and have your ass busted.
I guess I won't paste it on Facebook either no matter how adorable it is.

It's Time for Writers Idol

 WRITER'S

I'm off to Dennis LeHane's Writers In Paradise workshop in St. Petersburg at beautiful Eckerd College. Eight grueling days and nights of workshopping our writing and lectures and presentations and one-on-one training with best-selling authors like Andre DuBus, Stewart O'Nan, Laura Lippman, Tom Franklin, Sterling Watson, and of course, Dennis LeHane.
One of the unique features presented at the workshop is the Writers Idol spot, where the famous authors judge two pages of your writing. There are usually three judges and if two of them hold up their hands while your piece is being read, it means they found something wrong with it or just decided they didn't like it and are pleading with the reader to stop the madness. 
I've only been through it twice. The first time Ann Hood stopped the reading after a few sentences when she didn't like the way I called an amputee's stump a stub. Of course my name isn't on the two pages, but you still die in your seat when they raise their hands. The second time I made it through the first page until LeHane stopped it for having too much narrative and not enough dialogue.
 Anyway, below is my two-page submission for this year. It's from a short story and not part of the workshop. Elsewhere on the blog page is a poll to vote for when you think those bastards will raise their hands and humiliate me among my peers, despite it being anonymous. Seriously though, when the hands pop up it is usually for a good reason. So vote. It's free. I think I'll go two pages. My wife thinks they'll stop it after two words. I sense a lack of loyalty on her part.


 

Your Sister’s Wedding Reception

If you sit still on your mother’s yellow and brown paisley sofa, right in the center, and if your face is tan enough and you know you are the middle child, and quiet, then you can understand how you can be invisible.

It is December 1968 and the whirlwind of your sister’s wedding reception weaves about the backyard, the living room, the kitchen, the four small bedrooms and two baths. One of which hasn’t worked for four years.

Your house can accommodate the seven in your family easily, but there are a hundred guests in the backyard. That’s where the warm Florida sun is. That’s where thirty pounds of jumbo shrimp are and that’s where the makeshift tavern is, with enough Black Label beer, cheap liquor and cigarettes to satiate all the adults. With little supervision of the bar, no one notices the missing booze used to inebriate your seventeen-year-old brother, Ed, and his friend Bruce.

Your eight-year-old brother, Charlie, gets into the spirit when, with beer can in hand, he and six-year-old, Frank, march like drum majors on top of the endless rows of parked cars that line both sides of the long street. The neighbors see your little brothers, see the beer, watch as they dent the trunks of the cheap imports, but say nothing. It’s that kind of neighborhood.

You turn around, bored by your younger brothers’ adventures. Across from you, in the orange and green half-price sofa, sits Aunt Dottie, your parents forty-six year old friend who dresses and smells like a twenty-year-old and isn’t really your aunt but that’s what you call her. You have never seen her sober, and now, wedged between your brother Ed and his buddy Bruce, she is as drunk as you have ever seen her.

Eddie nibbles her ear as Bruce slips his hand between her arm and the Carolina blue dress to feel her up. They glance your way, but they can’t see you because, like you already said, you are invisible.

“What’d ya say, Auntie?” Eddie slurs.

“What?” Dottie slurs back, the ash on her cigarette dangling precariously over her best dress from the cedar closet of her double-wide at the Rocky Water trailer park where she lives with Uncle Marty, he not your uncle either.

“Ya wanna do it?” Bruce says. His hand snakes through the lace and silk like a confused gopher.

“It?” she asks.

“It-it.” Bruce says using all of his high school debate rhetoric to convince her. She stares dumbly through you, unable to see your nearly pubescent grin. It.

Eddie manages to work his hand in from the other side to join Bruce’s.

“It,” Eddie says, jerking his head toward one of the four ten by ten bedrooms. Charlie’s is first in the queue. “C’mon, damn it.”

Outside, guests drink, smoke, and laugh while avoiding your hundred-dollar aluminum pool full of rainwater, sporting some kind of green algae. Uncle Marty staggers from the horde toward the house, vodka and ice dancing in his Flintstones glass. The acrid odor of fresh-cut weeds floats in as he slides open the screen door, contemplates, walks through the kitchen, bumps the black Madonna statue, and stumbles toward you—and Eddie—and Bruce—and Aunt Dottie.

He stops by the sofa to stare at the roving hands. Dottie looks up and sucks the burnt filter of her Winston. “What the hell do you want?”

How To Act Like A Best Selling Novelist

Danielle Steel's House

Despite your negative attitude and barely passable writing you have somehow managed to con both your publishers and your public and now hit the best-seller list every time you release a new book. You have reached that pinnacle of the writing world you’ve strived for since you typed your first double negative on to a blank piece of paper. Everybody loves you. You’re famous. Celebrities mention your books on talk shows. The public adores your continuing character, Deke or Zeke or whatever other masculine name you gave your private eye or rogue cop who never solves cases in the orthodox ways.

Congratulations.

Now that you’re a big shot author, how do you act like one?

That’s why I’m here to prepare you for that day of success, how to handle it, and how you should alter your behavior befitting your new status in the writing world. I will guide you step by step through the maze of celebrity. I took Psychology 101 in college and I have a subscription to People so I know my subject.

• ·         When doing radio interviews to promote your new book you must insist that it be on the morning drive program to reach the largest audience. Have in your repertoire of pat answers, “Well, (name of radio host here) that’s why I’m a best-selling author and you’re a radio DJ.”

• ·         At book store signings, demand ten percent of all sales of your book that day and all the Barnes and Noble coffee you can drink. Be aware there may be a few in line who will try to sneak a Wal-Mart copy of your book they bought for half price, so you’ll need security to screen the cheap bastards. Here are some typical comments to write above your autograph:

To my biggest fan.

Best of luck.

All the best.

Many warm thanks.

Enjoy!

 

James Patterson's House

• ·         Remember at writing conferences, you are there to sell books and make money, not spend it. All your, travel, room and food expenses should be gratis. Try to let your dinner guest pay for the drinks. If they insist you teach a one-hour session to the poor schmucks, make the subject simple enough to keep the technical questions down. Success in Writing is a perennial favorite. After your class, there will be a line of participants waiting to talk to you about their manuscripts. Cut them off after a minute. A fake phone call usually does the trick.

• ·         Whenever your novels are adapted for a movie, loudly tell the media you hate what they did to your masterpiece, that they didn’t stay true to the book. Stephen King is a good example to follow as The Green Mile, The Shawshank Redemption, The Shining and Misery were all better movies than the books.

 

Stuart Woods House

• ·         Once you have ten best sellers in the bag, have co-authors punch out four or five books a year with your name plastered across the cover so the ignorant will think they’re buying your book.  Big bucks, little effort.

• ·         Write a book about writing despite not knowing what a dangling participle is.

• ·         Demand editors leave in the 500 pages they want to edit out of your latest 1000 page manuscript. You are too important to have any editing on your books now except for punctuation and grammar.

• ·         In your personal life, divorce your spouse of twenty years after your second successful novel but before your third. This will limit the alimony and settlement so that future mega-bucks coming in from sales afterward will go to you. Then you’ll need to marry someone fifteen years younger than you after a proper prenup. Have a child with this new spouse who you can spoil and dote over while ignoring your children from the previous marriage. This sounds harsh but you have to suck it up if you want continuing success. Then dedicate three books to the new spouse and one to the new kid. 

There you have it. Now go forth with the assurance that if you hit the big time you are prepared for chaos that ensues.

Your House

Find Dennis LeHane's Dog

I haven't written a blog in quite a while but I have been busy over the holidays. First, some news about me. (I'm sure you're all holding your breath in anticipation) I have signed on with a literary agent. She is Jeanie Loiacono of the Sullivan-Maxx agency and she has agreed to take me on for a year. She intends to push my novel Prodigious Savant to publishers. Also, I have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize for short fiction. This goes to show you the power of negative thinking, which will probably be my next blog. Anyway, preparing with an agent does take some time as you both must edit the manuscript and set up your page on their website.

Now back to Dennis LeHane's missing dog. I have the pleasure of attending the Eckerd College Writers in Paradise workshop every year for the last three years. Dennis LeHane and Sterling Watson sponsor the workshops each year and bring the big names in books to be instructors for 8-10 students for eight days of workshops where your work is critiqued by them and the students in your group. So far I have had Laura Lippman, Stewart O'Nan and John Dufresne for instructors and this year it will be Tom Franklin. Other notables that have taught are Andre DuBus, Dennis LeHane, Stephen King, and Ann Hood.
Dennis is a hell of a guy and loyal to a fault to his peers and students. That's why all who know him feel the pain he is feeling since he lost his beloved beagle, Tessa, when she jumped ship at their Brookline house in Boston a few days ago. If you find the dog, Dennis will let you name a character in his new novel. So if you live in Boston be on the look out or if you know someone in Boston, call them.
So help Dennis and name your character. I could see his new book with the protagonist team of Angela Gennaro and JJ White. Cool

When Is a Novel a Novel?

I've written six novels though none have been published and may never be published. Who knows what that great and evil publishing god has in store for us? Now, here's the problem. Is it a book if it's not published and what does one define as published?

At a recent writer's conference the literary agent asked me the standard question of me:

"What have you written?"

I said, "Six novels, 250 short stories, magazine articles, etc. etc."

And she said: "Are the novels published?"

My answer: "No."

Her smart-ass reproof: "Well then, they're not novels then, are they? To be a novel it must be a tangible book with an ISBN number and front and back covers."

My smart-ass comeback: "So if I write some tripe and self-publish, you'd consider that a novel?"

Her bored reply: "Yes. If it has an ISBN number, pages, and covers, it's a novel."

Like Peter Griffin said, "That really grinds my gears." I would rather have six half-decent manuscripts collecting dust than self-publishing junk and selling the books out of the trunk of my car like an Amway rep. To me a manuscript has earned the right to be called a novel or a book.

Here's how I write, which I am sure is different than most writers:

I take a few months to research and outline and then I write about 50 chapters in longhand through blisters and calluses. Then Pam types them up for me to organize and edit, which I do about four times. At that point I have my small writer’s group go through it and then I send it off to Castle Walls Editing for a final check-out. When I receive it back, I do one final edit and then self-flagellate myself by pitching it to bored agents and editors.

So, we all agree. It's a novel, not a manuscript.

Let's compare it to art and music. When Leonardo da Vinci finished a painting, could it be called a painting? Here's a conversation he had with a relative, Luigi da Vinci, one of the Luigi brothers.

"Leo. What's that you got there?"

"It's-a the Mona Lisa."

"What's wrong with her mouth?"

"I screwed-a it up-a so I rubbed it with a Kleenex and now-a I make them think it's-a supposed to be that way."

"Why are you talking like that? We're both speaking Italian so what's up with the this-a and that-a?"

"That's-a the way I talk. What do you think of my painting?"

"Leo. Baby. It's not a painting until you sell it and people see it."

"No, Luigi. It's a painting. It will end up in the Louvre some day when-a those French pigs steal it from us. You'll-a see."

"Whatever."

And music. Is it a song if it's created by a songwriter and not published? If not, what do you call it? This was a conversation between George and Ira Gershwin.

"Summertime, and the livin' is easy."

"Hey, that's good George. My lyrics are great so how come you get top billing. Why not Ira and George Gershwin? "

"Because the music is more important than the words, Ira. The song's the thing."

"It's not a song, Georgie. Not until it's published."

"It's a song, my song."

"That you stole from black cotton pickers."

"Yeah, well, what do I care, I'll be dead in three years, anyway, and a good thing because then I won't have to hear Sammy Davis Jr. mess it up."

So, there you have it. If a song is a song and a painting is a painting then your manuscript is a novel.

And if you write a novel in a month, (NaNoWriMo) then it ain't no good.