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Items of (dubious) interest

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From a former book publicist: What should air on C-SPAN’s “Book TV” this weekend. Well, I thought it was funny.

Twenty Best Cthulhu Tales–I’ve only read a fraction of the stories on this list, but I’m copying it here so I can reference it later. Mythos! I love it.

Man writes book that will take a thousand years to read. Embarrassingly, after 750 years, readers will discover that he used “it’s” when he should have written “its.”

This next one is off the (accidental) book theme of this post, but I do hope you’ll all read it: Urban Farmer finds success. So cool.

As for items of a non-linking variety: Tomorrow I get one of my birthday gifts–reading time. Just like Father’s Day, I’m going to spend a significant amount of time sacked out in bed with a book. I still have Spirit Gate by Kate Elliott on deck, and I hope to make a sizable dent in it.

Also, I’m told that Child of Fire will have the opening chapter of book 2 at the very back. Now, this is cool news, but I should come right out and say that I never read preview excerpts in books.  Invariably, I buy the excerpted book, put it on my shelf for a couple months (or years) and when I finally start it, I get a disturbing reader’s deja vu.  “Have I read this already?”  Since I’m terrible with titles, I can never be sure. 

Eventually, I just swore off the practice. 

And book 2, Everyone Loves Blue Dog, will soon have a new title.  There’s a current front runner, but I don’t want to talk about it until things are settled.  The happiest part for me is that I like this title and it doesn’t turn up in a Google search. 

With that, I’ll sign off to enjoy the holiday.

In The Midst of Death

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by Lawrence Block.

I grabbed this one off the shelf almost at random. I was looking to try one of Block’s novels, and despite the terrible title, I grabbed it.

The protagonist, Matt Scudder, is a former cop getting by as an unlicensed P.I. He’s also soon to be divorced and drinking a ton. He’s hired by a crooked cop who’s been framed for extortion and murder to look into the case and find out who really did it.

It’s good, as this type of book goes. It’s a terrific example of this specific genre–It was written in the mid-seventies, just about the end of the time you could realistically show an alcoholic wandering around without every person in his life gently pushing him toward AA. The cynical world view is there, and the text has that telltale lack of affect that signals the protagonist’s inner demons (with traces of real emotions popping up in unexpected places).

But here’s what I wanted to say about that: people often talk about urban fantasy as though it’s very noir–I often hear this about the Dresden Files, for example–but the major diff between UF and real noirish mystery is that UF is full of combat. The protagonist gets attacked in parking lots, at crime scenes, while trying to crash Mr. Big’s party, whatever. Violence. Lots of it.

Most of the noir mystery I read is not like that at all. There is, maybe, one scene of violence right at the end, and maybe one, possibly two, somewhere in the middle. Actually, there are rarely as many as two in the middle. Most of the book is just two people talking.

That’s where UF falls down in it’s attempts to be “noir”. You can be as cynical as you want, but if you’re doing the violence as much as setting it right, you’re in a different genre.

And no, I’m not sure how Mike Hammer fits into all this.

Anyway, I don’t know if anyone ever say the movie 8 Million Ways To Die, but Jeff Bridges played Matt Scudder in that one. It’s from a later book in the series, when the protag is in AA, and it was Hal Ashby’s last film. It’s also a goddam mess. Bridges is a good actor, but he was seriously miscast, and I’d heard that much of the film was improvised. It looks like it was improvised, too, since the scenes have no shape to them. It was an enormous flop at the box office, even for a P.I. mystery.

But I didn’t read Eight Million…, I read In the Midst of Death. It’s an interesting book, and very short. If you’ve wanted to dip your toe in this genre, you should try this one.

Didn’t I say I this would be my best post ever?

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In case you haven’t noticed, the President has been appearing in a lot of comic books lately. You don’t need me to link them–or maybe you do–but considering the appearances he’s made so far, I guess I should have realized that this was inevitable:

Barack the Barbarian cover

Yes, it’s “Barack the Barbarian” a retelling of the 2008 presidential election in the form of a Conan comic from the ’70’s. It’s full of bloody murder, girls in leather bikinis, and a barechested Barack high-fiving the Amazon warrior “Hilaria.”

America: A country so fucking crazy, even Johnny Depp had to leave.

The best part is that it’s actually funny. Continue reading

Links ‘n Stuff

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Boring! What you need is an action scene! a webcomic about writing. :)

Why I read Savage Love. (Link NSFW, in case you didn’t realize. Check out the first letter). It’s not for the advice which is sometimes so-so but is absolutely perfect for that letter. It’s because those letters are a window into people’s private lives that I would never see otherwise–especially the crazy, twisted thought processes they go through.

Mother fails to recover custody of her children when she showed up for a psych evaluation with 13 beers in her. Apparently, the psychologist did not put much weight behind her claim that it was no big deal since she could “drink like a fish” and therefore wasn’t drunk.

Book Marketing 101: an introduction by Andrew Wheeler. A book marketer talks about his trade. It’s the first in a series, and I plan to follow them closely.

Huh. I appear to have left out the “stuff.”

Five things make a Friday post

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1) Child of Fire is now at 340K in sales rank at Amazon.com! What is that, one sale a month? Not too shab for a book that won’t come out for more than three months.

2) I’m already checking Amazon.com sales rank numbers! I’m doomed!

3) The Best Discount Gun Shop for Kids in Seattle–which is too bad, because that is a rocking park. Mango Eater and I had a blast there one day, just walking the paths.

4) A bookseller meets with a Random House sales rep to discuss orders from the fall catalog. Strangely, my book wasn’t mentioned. I know! Crazy! (seen via pubrants)

5) To wrap up the most narcissistic five things post ever, I’m now on Facebook. No, I won’t play Mafia Wars. No, I won’t take a quiz to find out how girly I am. I didn’t want to join, but my sis-in-law puts pics of my nephews there, and the only way to see them is to fork over my identifying information. Grrrrr, Facebook. Hate.

Quotes of the day

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“Camping in South Central Los Angeles is not like camping in a forest in Virginia. I know they sound the same, but they’re totally different.” — Emily Blake

“Creative-writing programs are designed on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a publishable poem. The fruit of the theory is the writing workshop, a combination of ritual scarring and twelve-on-one group therapy where aspiring writers offer their views of the efforts of other aspiring writers.”

and

“The workshop is a process, an unscripted performance space, a regime for forcing people to do two things that are fundamentally contrary to human nature: actually write stuff (as opposed to planning to write stuff very, very soon), and then sit there while strangers tear it apart. There is one person in the room, the instructor, who has (usually) published a poem. But workshop protocol requires the instructor to shepherd the discussion, not to lead it…”

both from a New Yorker piece by Louis Menand. I wish I had time to read the whole thing.

Stuff.

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I hit my goal again today, which means I’m back in the groove (last Monday not withstanding). I wish I could do well above my groove, but such is life.

Meanwhile, have some links:

1) Back to the Future 4: Escape from Guantanamo. Marty McFly is in serious trouble.

2) Pediatricians address the effects of bullying on victims and bullies. My son’s two schools so far have done a good job of dealing with bullying incidents, but I don’t know if they’re this sophisticated.

3) Nick Mamatas on making money off your fiction. I’d always heard that novels are where the money is, but he offers an interesting counterpoint. Not that it matters to me, since my productivity crashes as the word count shrinks. It’s not that I can’t write short stories; it just takes me longer.

4) Finally! A plan to help people compare and contrast insurance plans.

5) How to make big money fast as a novelist… in Sim 3.

I make it because I know I’ll have to destroy it

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Sundays aren’t the expansive, relaxing work days that Saturdays or Tuesdays are. I have a definite time when I have to be finished with my daily goal and back at home so my wife can go to work. It’s enough time to do what I need to do (considering my process) but I need to get up on time and really focus.

And today, I found myself thinking Why am I writing this scene? I’m just going to have to cut it in revisions.

It’s a scene where the protagonist wakes alone in a strange place. He thinks he’s been taken by enemies, but it’s really just his reckless asshole compatriots. He’s also been terribly injured, so he’s terrified and desperate. As I described everything he did, I kept thinking Nothing comes of this. It’s all setup and no payoff.

On the other hand, it’s what the character would do.

So I wrote it all out, thinking that maybe I was cheating on my daily goal, but knowing that it’s better to follow the character than try to lead them. And who knows? I may find a better payoff for it later.

Huh.

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Lee Child has a fiction excerpt on the NY Times editorial page. It’s pretty good, too. I read Child’s debut novel and found it interesting but curiously airless–everything that happens turns out to be related to the overall plot, and the coincidence that kicks off the story strains even my credulity. But this was fun. I may have to give him another try.

One thing I never read, though, is those LiveJournal posts that are just collections of Twitter posts. If I wanted to read tweets… well, the rest is obvious.

Normally I don’t mention posts I skim over, but the clutter is getting to be a bit much.

Books!

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Two recent books:

First, Joker by Brian Azzarello. This is the first version of Heath Ledger’s take on the Joker to appear in comics (that I know about, anyway–I only read trades). It’s a creepier, uglier Joker (just look at that cover), but I don’t know if it’s all that much scarier than previous versions. It recasts him as more of a gangster than comic book villain, but what should I expect from a crime writer? Aside from the bullshit setup, it’s solid work and interesting stuff (I found I couldn’t put it down), but when I reached the end I found myself vaguely dissatisfied.

Second, there are a lot of books out there about Winning A For-Real Fight, and many of them are filled with specific tactics and annoying macho puffery. Well, Rory Miller had been a martial arts student for many years before becoming a casino bouncer and then a prison guard. He had a “fight-a-day” job in which he tried to apply the lessons learned in the dojo to real-life violence.

The result of those lessons are here, in Meditations on Violence: A Comparison of Martial Arts Training & Real World Violence, which I read because of a recommendation by David Hines. Miller talks very clearly about the way violence takes place–the context of it, the execution, the mental state a person enters when they’re attacked, the mental state of the person doing the attacking. He also talks about the way certain martial arts training is pure fantasy and how dangerous it can be.

Even more interesting is one topic he touches on several times: self-imposed limits–people who believe they don’t have permission to behave rudely to alarming behavior. People who believe they could never win a fight. People who feel they must respond to a challenge to their authority. People who want to appease authority figures. People who think fighting will be like sparring.

As an author who writes about violence, the clear descriptions of the mental and emotional states reinforced and deepened my understanding of the processes of physical conflict. I’m also grateful for the way he talks about breaking through artificial limits, which I’m going to apply to my life globally. There are so many ways I box myself in because of what I believe about myself…

This isn’t the time for that discussion, though. It’s something to think about and you might find it useful, too.

Anyway, I’m not interested in martial arts training (I’ve tried it more than once and it’s not for me) and I thought this was a fascinating, thoughtful book. I didn’t agree with everything here, but this is rich, fertile soil.

Highly recommended. Thank you, David.