If you’re a Yankees fan, probably not; if you’re a Red Sox fan, most certainly not.  If you’re thinking that the new college playoff plan is better than the BCS, you’re right—almost anything would be—but it’s really nothing like the NCAA tournament (you’d have to start the football version back in late August or early September when college teams begin their seasons!).  In the sports world, no matter the playoff that takes place, being number one after a lengthy season is largely irrelevant—it’s the series that counts.  Having a winning series in the book world is altogether different.

Take Patterson’s Women’s Murder Club mysteries.  I’ll give the old boy credit.  It was an original idea, and he avoided the cardinal sin of making each successive book dependent on the previous ones.  You can jump in anywhere.  Looking back over the titles I read in the series, I’ll confess that the order I read them in was completely random (yeah, I used to read Patterson).  Sure, the characters and setting were familiar from book to book, but you can pick up any book from the series and enjoy it.  At a higher quality level, Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus series also has that positive feature too.  I started with Resurrection Men when I brushed up on how to write mysteries and police procedurals (some of his books take on new meaning—I’m hoping the Scots vote for independence).

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Recently the inventor of those pop-up ads apologized for creating them.  I guess he finds them annoying too.  Here’s my take: Many websites offer all kinds of “free services,” so they’ve decided to make money by convincing corporate advertisers that those pop-up ads, especially those targeted to a consumer’s interest, really are worth it.  I guess that’s progress.  We’ve progressed from the carnival quack screaming about his wondrous elixirs; to TV’s screaming used car salesmen (they’re invariably men—they scream the best, Toyota’s ever-present spokeslady notwithstanding); and finally to the internet’s pop-up ads, which now are often videos with people—you guessed it—screaming about some wonderful product they’re selling or recommending (streaming video’s inventor should also apologize!).

I can’t believe any sane person enjoys this.  Millennials love to scream—go to Central Park in the summer to any GMA concert, or to any popular protest event that’s a la mode.  GenXers love to scream at their kids—they have kids now, and the GenXers pandering to their every need has backfired for these paraents.  Baby boomers no longer scream—they lost their voices (and hearing, for that matter) screaming at protests (against the Vietnam War instead of against Wall Street or Israel), rock concerts (lots of dBs there), and their kids (the boomers overly permissive parents too).  I suppose turn-about is fair play.  The internet is so democratic that it screams at all of us, although it can tailor the content of the screams to the audience using all that info about ourselves that we give the data brokers.

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[Note from Steve: be sure you see the offer at the end of this post!]

My character, NYPD Homicide Detective Rolando Castilblanco, is a complex guy.  His partner, Dao-Ming Chen, is the yin to his yang (or, vice versa—I never can keep them straight).  His wife, Pam Stuart, is a crime reporter for a local TV station.  He’s hooked on ethnic foods and strong coffee but uses Tums to counter his acid reflux (so you can’t answer Telly Savalas to the question in the title, because Kojak was addicted to lollipops).

The big cop’s acerbic quips, sprinkled through the books in “The Dectectives Chen and Castilblanco Series,” seem to contradict his gentle nature.  (OK, sometimes he has to be violent while on duty when his life’s at stake—he’s an ex-SEAL, so he knows a bit about combat, even though he’s a bit soft now.)  He’s romped through four novels (soon to be five with The Collector), covering the mystery, suspense, and thriller genres, and he’s appeared in a number of short stories (see Pop Two Antacids and Have Some Java and Donna and Alex Carrick’s soon-to-be-published new anthology World Enough and Crime).

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As a progressive, I’m reluctant to attack that so-called bastion of liberal Northeast thought, but the NY Times is starting to piss me off.  So, launch the torpedoes!  Every newspaper in the world has an editorial slant that permeates their news reporting, especially ones in totalitarian states or theocracies where the press is part of the government.  Even not printing certain news items is an editorial slant, so the NY Times, in violation of its famous motto, is doubly culpable.  It biases the news it deems “fit to print” and considers some news involving opposing viewpoints not “fit to print” because these newsworthy items will negatively affect its livelihood.

I’m referring to how the Times is reporting on the Hachette v. Amazon controversy.  Every article I’ve seen (last Monday’s  is but one example) is completely biased.  But I’m not going to call for a boycott of the Times or even cancel my subscription.  I simply feel sorry for the venerable dinosaurs of the publishing industry who feel so threatened by the digital revolution in publishing.  Their days are numbered, no matter what they do (although they seem to on a tear to hasten their demise).  The last article was about Amazon’s email to KDP Select authors and publishers (mostly indies who are completely ignored by the Times) where they used the paperback book as a model for how new technology can revitalize publishing.  That’s a valid point; the Times irrelevant rebuttal: Amazon quoted Orwell out of context.  Huh?  Do I care?

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The Amazon v. Hachette dispute has now turned author v. author.  I’m talking about trad-pubbed authors v. indie authors, of course.  Apparently Preston (of Preston and Child—their book Relic is on “Steve’s Bookshelf,” an honor few have, albeit it’s probably only an honor in my eyes) has formed a protest group of Hachette-related trad-pubbed authors dedicated to attacking Amazon.  Of course, this really is an attack on indie authors.

I saw it coming.  In this cutthroat publishing environment, I knew it was inevitable that the Goliaths would work to turn author against author.  Divide and conquer is a well-known tactic on the battlefield and in corporate life.  Preston et al are making a big mistake, though.  (1) They will turn all indie authors against the “establishment.” (2) They will fight the battle for Hachette and other Big Five members, but lose the war.  (3) They will hurt the people they claim they’re trying to protect, namely the readers.  Let’s consider these points.

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Last week I considered some of the incorrect advice often given to writers [Note from Steve: you’ll have to look for it—I don’t think I pulled it as one of the “classic posts.”].  Now I’d like to consider some editing myths.  Some of these have been created by people with an agenda (for example, a copy editor wants to make money, after all); some have been created by traditional publishers who are threatened by the indie writing movement; and some are just old warhorses that should be eradicated once and for all.

Self-published books and indie writers often fight negative stereotypes.  Every stereotype has some basis in fact, but they’re often nasty extremes designed to insult.  Irishmen are drunks (yes, we tend to like our liquor).  Writers are nerds (yes, we tend to be introverts, but not always nerds).  Psychiatrists are nuts (I won’t touch that one).  Women are distracted drivers (most men could never compete with Danica Patrick).  Men never ask for directions on a road trip (why should we?  We always know where we’re going.  Sure!).

One of the negative stereotypes about indie books is that they’re unprofessional in the writing, editing, and presentation, especially ebooks.  As a reviewer and avid reader, I can look at a book and form an objective opinion about quality.  Let me restrict my attention to ebooks where one might think that this quick route for releasing a book is a temptation to gloss over details that distinguish a professional product from an amateur one.  Over the last few years, I’ve focused on ebooks in my writing, reviewing, and casual reading [all my books are now in ebook format—the ebook second edition of Soldiers of God was just released and just received another good review on Amazon].  I haven’t found that the unprofessional stereotype rings true.  There are exceptions that fit the stereotype, but, in general, indie authors take pride in their work and ensure its quality.

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No, this post isn’t about Jane Austen.  I loathe most 19^th century sappy novels in general and hers in particular.  Yeah, I know she’s enjoying a revival of sorts—like an oozing zombie rising out of the tomb to bore us to death with romantic drivel [Note from Steve: maybe like these “classic posts”?].  Instead, I want to talk about all the senses you might use as you write your thriller or mystery.

I was reading Preston and Child’s Two Graves (no one gave it to me as a gift—it was on sale at $2.99), and I was struck by the scene where Pendergast’s ex-special forces manservant uses his keen sense of smell to help him combat a serial killer (if you don’t know the book, fine—I won’t give away any spoilers).  In my sci-fi mystery Teeter-Totter between Lust and Murder, Detective Castilblanco appeals to Detective Chen’s sense of smell to generate some additional and useful evidence about the events surrounding a murder (again, no spoilers here).  Castilblanco comments that the police don’t use odors much for evidence.

I’m not sure this is true in real life, but I believe it is.  I’m willing to bet juries don’t pay much attention to anything beyond hearing and sight because even those are highly subjective—if witnesses so often become confused with sights and sounds, think about the other human senses.  But, forensic evidence aside, can you use a character’s other senses to improve your prose?  The answer is yes, even in titles.

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If you’re an avid reader (I read more than I write, if you can believe it), you know there are certain things that slow you down.  One is what a prospective agent of mine long ago labeled in a critique of my MS (after sitting on it for many months): “…too much narrative.”  I wrote and asked her to define that, but received no response—not surprising, because it required more than a form letter, so she couldn’t bother.  I was left to figure out what she meant, naively giving her the benefit of the doubt instead of thinking it was a lame excuse pulled from a list of similar lame excuses she maintained (you’ve already concluded what I think of the phrase now).  The novel, a lengthy sci-fi tome, later became “The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy.”  [Note from Steve: see the webpage “Books and Short Stories” for a complete list of my books.]  Back then I figured she was complaining about the world-building—it tends to lengthen hard sci-fi, but needs to be done—and also that there wasn’t enough dialogue [Note from Steve: I now put the blame squarely on her inability to understand the difference—there’s no guarantee that an agent knows anything about writing].

Lots of narrative—lengthy description or back story about characters and situations, or world-building in sci-fi—can slow a reader down.  I’ll admit that.  One of the worst examples is Melville’s classic Moby Dick.  [By now, you’ve probably got the idea that I hate this novel.] You’re reading speed slows down from whatever a normal fiction [reading] rate is for you to one comparable to a snail crawling uphill in a molasses spill.  The book is partly a how-to book—How to Hunt Whales Unmercifully and Turn Their Blubber into Lamp Oil should be the subtitle (today whale meat is for Asians [in Japan and China, mostly] who feel sexually inadequate—they need to complement the ground rhinoceros horns and tiger gonads).  If that’s not boring enough, you have endless pages of description and very little dialogue.  I’m not sure Melville knew anything about dialogue—many 19^th century writers didn’t.  These literary wunderkind wouldn’t have a chance in today’s competitive publishing arena.  (And Einstein wouldn’t have ever left the patent office, let alone have a paper accepted by Physical Review—but that’s another story.)

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I’ve discussed naming characters in other posts to this blog, but today I thought I’d dedicate a whole post to the subject.  I probably spend an abnormal amount of time fretting over titles and names of characters.  Here I want to throw a wee bit of mud at my fellow authors: don’t be so politically correct!  Readers and writers both might enjoy the mudslinging.  Or not.  (It’s really not a strong critique, so don’t get all snarky—and read on.)

When I’m reviewing a book and an author’s description of a character shows he or she is Latino, for example, I have a hard time identifying with the character if he or she is named John or Jane Smith.  Many authors, desiring to offend no one, make the mistake of using bland and generic names.  Consequently, their writing becomes bland and generic.  Sure, the U.S., and to some extent the rest of the world, is one big melting pot.  I would never use names as a code to promote a prejudicial agenda.  However, parents who can be identified as having one dominant ethnicity still tend to give their kids names that are in sync with that ethnicity.  We’re socially very far away from changing this, and I don’t think it’s necessarily a good thing to try.

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Last Tuesday’s post was a bit heavy on Catholic humor—I’ll admit it.  [Note from Steve: I don’t have any idea about what I’m referring to here, but I must have had a brain fart.]  All churches, synagogues, and other places of worship are often home to well-meaning people who enjoy giving a helping hand to people in need.  The emphasis is on “well-meaning people” and not the actual building, of course.  (In Soldiers of God, for example, one of the main protagonists is a priest who thwarts a terrorist attack by radical Catholics.)

No, in line with the interview yesterday [ditto ?], I thought that today I’d stay on the topic of writing and the writing business.  Don’t worry, though.  The title doesn’t mean that I have an old Borders or B&N store to sell you, though they’re generally in great locations for anything from an Apple store to a Victoria Secrets store or S&M store featuring “Fifty Shades literature.”  No, I’m going to write about setting or choosing locales in your writing.

You can find one aspect of how stupid the advice “write what you know” is in an author’s fiction locales, those settings where the action and drama take place and transport readers around the world, through the solar system, and into the far reaches of the Galaxy.  While it’s clear that I know nothing about what will be found in the 82 Eridani star system (a location or setting for my “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy”), for example, I can imagine it.  Even if it’s hard sci-fi, that just puts logical constraints on what I can imagine, but doesn’t hinder me otherwise. The same holds for more earthly venues of my fiction.  In short, what I know is what I can imagine!

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