Recently there occurred a terrible crime in Gotham: an imam and his assistant were shot execution style in the back of the head while walking on the sidewalk in the middle of the afternoon. NYPD already caught the assassin and charged him with first degree murder. The case is still pending. Whether this was a hate crime—the Bangladeshi community was justifiably outraged and thinking it was—the perpetrator will get life in prison.

Besides being shocked, angry, and saddened, in that order, I was impressed by how the police did their job. While forensic science stepped in, of course, old-style detective work found the killer—interviewing witnesses, identifying the suspect’s car with video (no visible plate, though), and connecting the murder with a hit-and-run that occurred nearby right after the shooting—the suspect was in a hurry to get away.

Forensics data could be used later to build an air-tight case against the suspect, and more data could be forthcoming to prove it’s a hate crime (that’s not so easy, by the way, although it seems obvious in this case). But what’s interesting to this crime writer is that the old gumshoe methods of the NYPD detectives led to this suspect’s capture, not the forensics. It made me wonder: Do the old-style PIs and police detectives still have a place in our modern crime literature?

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Writers tend to be introverted, so I have no problem working mostly online. (As you get older, it’s harder to be social in the conventional sense—many of your friends and colleagues have passed on, after all. The crowds in the pubs are younger; if you go to church, you only see irascible oldsters like yourself worrying about their mortality; and so forth) But three news items from the business world caught my attention recently. First, venerable Macy’s is closing a slew of stores. Second, bookstore-barn-giant B&N just fired their CEO. And third, the Trump casino in Atlantic City will file for bankruptcy. What do these news items have in common? Their cause, the internet. At least partially. Let me explain.

People are spending more time online, whether via smartphones or computers (their distinction is only semantical now), and whether buying, playing, or socializing.  All department stores from Macy’s to Wal-Mart have been affected by online buying. People don’t go out and buy as much anymore.  And if people get out to shop in these hectic times when you might not be sure you have a job next week, they often don’t buy; they just look (window-shopping is the old descriptor), assess their options, and go home and order the goods online. Some pundits call this the Amazon effect, usually in a pejorative sense, but that gives that retail giant way too much credit.

B&N bookstores’ problems are just bigger ones that every bookstore shares and are comparable to the department stores’—online buying is preferred by many customers. The B&N bookstores are big barns for books; the department stores are big barns for clothing, home furnishings, and other goods. The merchandise is different, but the effects of the internet are the same. There are other effects, of course. B&N has been in a downspin since they spun off the Nook business. Macy’s has been hurt from the top and the bottom—your elite stores like Nordstrom’s and Lord and Taylor’s pretend to have better quality merchandise and your Targets and Wal-marts the same products at better prices. And then there’s Amazon.

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[An oldie but goodie that bears repeating…]

In essay-land (that includes op-ed, of course), theme rules: you have to have at least one theme to opine.  For writing fiction, not so much.  And, perhaps because I do both, I make a semantical distinction between theme and plot when I write fiction.  A good story doesn’t need themes per se, but it does need a plot.  But one or two themes make for a better story—they enhance the plot.  The theme or themes in a story are motivating issues: spousal infidelity or abuse, mental illness, the horrors of war, how spies make it through the night, sexual aberrations, child pornography, and so forth.  The plot weaves these themes together to create a good story, so a plot is a wee bit weak if there’s nothing to weave!

As an avid reader (even if you’re a writer, you should be an avid reader), you probably have many examples of what I’m talking about if you just stop and think about stories you’ve read.  If you’re like me, you enjoy the added complexity of having some themes woven into the tapestry of the novel.  Often themes and how they’re woven into a plot make a reader stop and remark, “Geez, that’s a twist—I never thought about those issues in that way.”  A good story is more than entertainment; it should be the genesis for those type of internal dialogues.  Of course, some readers don’t appreciate that complexity—that’s fine, because there are many novels, even enjoyable ones, that don’t make you think.  But you probably can’t avoid that type of mental introspection when reading my novels.

So, at the risk of being accused of beating my own drum (I can, because this is my blog), let me analyze the ebooks in my “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series.”  I’ll call my cops C & C for brevity.  As you might guess, I’m an expert on those novels!  (Here’s a link to my Amazon book page for access to more descriptions.) They provide examples of how themes are woven into plots.  I can’t help it—my stories contain themes associated with problems I’ve observed during a lifetime of observation.  My first goal is to entertain, but, in doing so, also comment.  The ebooks in this series are mysteries or thrillers—they tend to alternate, and all contain suspense.  The two cops are main characters, of course, and there are some nasty villains.  How they solve the crimes or stop the perps is the entertainment.  The themes are usually associated with the perps’ nastiness.

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The beginning and end, two very important parts of a novel. I work and rework them. Every author should. Readers expect good ones and are disappointed when they don’t get them. An author wants his readers to continue with her or his novel; s/he wants the reader to say, “I want more,” when the book is finished. Readers want to feel that way too.

The beginning is often called the hook. That’s a bit insulting to the reader—s/he’s not a fish, after all. But the author shouldn’t wait too long to grab your reader’s attention. While Howey’s Wool is a wee bit too disconnected (he published the different parts separately at first), his opening line is great: “The children were playing while Holston climbed to his death; he could hear them squealing as only happy children do.” I would only change that semicolon to a period. Although I began to lose interest when the book became a treatise on potato farming, Weir’s beginning of The Martian gets your attention: “I’m pretty much f&*^$ed. [This is a PG-13 blog—sorry, Andy.] That’s my considered opinion. F&*^$ed.” I would only omit the word “considered” here—it’s superfluous. In each case, your curiosity is piqued.

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No, this isn’t about either political candidate—the whole election thing is getting to be a drag anyway. (I’ll be voting Green this year, foregoing the usual “vote for the lesser of two evils” that has made my entire electoral life miserable—so that’s settled.) This post is about editing. Yeah, I know. If you’re a reader, you just expect what you read to be well edited. “Skip the details and just do it,” you say. If you’re a writer, it’s one of those things that must be done as part of your job, but you’d rather just be writing. That reader is like your boss in the day-job; s/he doesn’t care how or when you do it, s/he just wants it done. Readers rule; so does your boss. Whether you’re indie and do it all, or traditionally published and just getting that next MS ready for an agent or editor when s/he asks for it, you have to edit.

I’ll let both readers and writers off easy. After 19 novels and 3 short story collections, I could write a whole book about editing, all kinds of editing—content and copy editing and proofreading, even if we don’t delve into the details of each one. Editing is a wee bit like that recurring nightmare where, night after night, you fall overboard from a cruise ship and become food for sharks. I do so much of it that I edit those streaming news tickers on newscasts, restaurant menus (I tend to avoid Chinese and Thai menus—can’t blame them really because English is so weird), and spoken speech on movie soundtracks. I catch many errors now, but here I’ll just talk about apostrophes. You’ll see the reason for the title of this post in a moment.

Guides to the proper use of apostrophes are legion, and most differ. Writers should pick one and be consistent about using it, at least throughout a novel. (That’s a meta-law about editing, by the way: be consistent!) What guide do I use? Not one recommended by writing gurus! As much as I criticize the NY Times, I use The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage. They make their own rules for “All the news that’s fit to print.” I follow their rules because I think journalism is the best thing to study if you’re going to become a writer (OK, that’s a stupid reason)—if you feel that you need to study something specific.

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Authors have many choices these days, but the end result is always the same: if you want readership, you have to (1) let people know you write books and (2) promote individual ones wherever you can. With notable exceptions, you won’t win the lottery, rise to prominence, and receive fantastic marketing like Higgins Clark, Patterson, Grafton, King, and other old mares and stallions in the Big Five’s stables. Big publishers only bet on sure horses as far as PR and marketing money goes. The majority of indie or traditionally published writers need to push their books out to readers—no one will do it for them.

Given this current state of affairs in the publishing world, most fiction writers have a lot in common JUST BEFORE AND AFTER their books are published. They are all looking to win that lottery, a bestseller, by whatever definition you want to give (selling 10,000 copies of a book? A million? Appearing in the NY Times book review?). IT IS A LOTTERY, no matter how much you wish it to be or delude yourself in thinking otherwise, and it obeys the familiar rule: you can’t win if you don’t play. In that sense, buying that lottery ticket or tickets is where the hard work lies, no matter how you publish. But this post isn’t about what happens after a book is published. It’s about rethinking traditional publishing and its one unique advantage which is a tremendous disadvantage in the indie world.

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[For authors mainly, but also for readers who want to understand authors better….]

I bought another one of those megapacks—genre: sci-fi; subgenre: space opera. It’s a collection of short stories, novellas, and novels covering many years of sci-fi writing. You sort of feel like you’re reading some of Chesterton’s Father Brown tales, though. Long sentences and dialogue, but also long narrative, and quite orthogonal to anything you might call minimalist (hard-boiled for mystery lovers). There are delicious turns of phrase, though, one reason I recommend that even the most fervent atheist take a course about the Bible as literature. If the latter in its best King James Version reads like Shakespeare, you shouldn’t be surprised—they were contemporaries, and I suspect each plagiarized the other.

One thing you see right away with those old space operas, though, is how dated the science is. E. E. “Doc” Smith, who wrote many good tales and is often called the “father of space opera,” entertained me a lot as a kid with his Lensman and Skylark series. They were dog-eared and coke-marked in our local public library even back when I read them, and that goes pretty far back. Skylark #1 is in the metapack. The protagonist is a brilliant Rambo-like romantic scientist who was maybe the model for Stan Lee’s Ironman (Tony Stark). The prose has many of the characteristics I indicated above and, in retrospect, I wonder how I got through it in junior high (I’d read all the sci-fi books in the public library by the time I finished and all of my brother’s sci-fi book club editions too).

Besides passing on my OD experiences with nostalgia, hardly worth doing nowadays for all the non-readers of all ages out there who have trouble reading anything beyond 140 characters, let me take this opportunity to give warning to authors: dating your prose is another reason for minimalist writing. Doc Smith, a food engineer, not a scientist, strove to make his Skylark character appear to be a brilliant scientist by describing his inventions in excruciating detail. It’s all techno-babble of the times. In his defense, he was writing at a time when many of the advances in science and technology we now take for granted didn’t exist. The story’s not a bad one, especially if you like Tony Stark. Like Ironman, it’s not even an extrapolation into the far future.

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When ad people make their spins, truth is lost and deception wins.

[Note: If no source is indicated for these pithy pieces of advice, I am the source. I particularly liked this one. It applies to political ads as well, of course.]

Happy 4th of July! Please celebrate safely the birth of the nation. Make wise choices about drinking, traveling, and fireworks. Your family and friends need you.

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At the risk of seeming to be like a 4th of July car ad, the “Mary Jo Melendez Mysteries” are on sale. Mary Jo is inviting you to celebrate with her for leaving Amazon exclusivity and appearing on Smashwords too. She’s an ex-USN Master-at-Arms who manages to get into a lot of trouble as a civilian; she also manages to beat the odds and survive, though. Muddlin’ Through (Smashwords coupon code KY27A) is an international thriller where she works to clear her name and pay back the group that framed her. In the process, she discovers the MECHs, Mechanically Enhanced Cybernetic Humans, and romance as she runs around the U.S., South American, and Europe. Silicon Slummin’…and Just Gettin’ By (Smashwords coupon code VT64E) takes place almost exclusively in the Silicon Valley where she has two government groups pursuing her, one U.S., the other Russian. She also has a stalker on a revenge mission. Both books, normally $2.99, are $0.99 on Smashwords, using the coupon codes, until August 1—lots of entertaining summer reading for $2!

In libris libertas!

As a reader, do you pay attention to genre? Same question to you if you’re an author. “Genre fiction” is often a snooty put-down, but bookstores invented genres long ago as a means to order their bookshelves, and they’ve hung on, even though cross-genre books abound and one can now argue against the need for them. As a reader, I don’t pay much attention to genre—maybe more so than Amazon’s star ranking, though—I’ll read almost anything if it piques my interest. I determine that from the book blurb and the “Peek Inside” feature for the most part if I’m buying it at Amazon. And I’ll make a confession: if I’m browsing for books in a bookstore (I do more browsing on internet sites these days), I’ll leaf through the book and then go home and buy the ebook version (it had better not be comparable in price to the paper version, though—that kills any motivation for buying).

As an author, I NEVER pay attention to genre while I’m writing the novel. Following Clancy’s advice, I’m just telling the damn story! I’m a storyteller, not a mystery writer or sci-fi writer or…you get the idea. When I release a book, I have to think about genres sometimes—retail sites ask for them—but I just consider them keywords. Sometimes it’s easier to describe one of my books by saying what it’s not. My YA novel The Secret Lab is NOT a magical fantasy story, and my new novel Rogue Planet isn’t either, but hard sci-fi, space opera, and fantasy are good keywords for the latter because it contains elements of all those genres—adventure and saga would be some other key words.

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Many writers have faced it. Indie writers are always fighting it because the likes of Stephen King, James Patterson, Lee Child, Douglas Preston, and many others equate indie books to the old vanity press paradigm, notwithstanding successes by Andy Weir (The Martian), Hugh Howey (Wool), and E. L. James (Fifty Shades of Grey). The old stallions from the Big Five stables I just named all write genre fiction, so that snootiness isn’t motivated by an erudite attitude of a critic’s-determined literary giant.

Of course, the latter is also a source of snootiness. “Literary giant” means a person who writes books that are considered literary fiction, as if genre fiction is somehow not up to the quality of these “masterpieces of literature.” Here’s an SAT type of question: modern classical music is to popular music as literary fiction is to X. What’s X? Answer: Genre fiction. Modern classical music is boring crap erudites, mostly academics, write for other erudites. Same for literary fiction.

Genre fiction carries on the age-old tradition of exciting and entertaining storytelling. Literary fiction supposedly tells a story, but it’s often not entertaining—just boring and ponderous. A lot of classics can be described by those two adjectives. Modern literary fiction can often be described by the same two, mostly because nowadays it’s written to impress erudites and achieve academic promotion and not to entertain. Even those old classics were written to entertain—they just became boring and ponderous because modern genre fiction has evolved so much.

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