[Note:  Lots of news today…and comments on that news…for both readers and writers.  Enjoy!]

#216:  Books as Christmas gifts.  I’m not adverse to using the word Christmas and gifts in the same sentence.  Sure, Black Friday and Cyber Monday show that the holidays are becoming more commercial.  What isn’t?  For me, there’s little difference between tee shirts with the faces of Santa Claus, Christ, the Buddha, or Che Guevara—as Yoda would say, “Still commercial they are.”

However, reading is an educational, mind-bending, and exhilarating experience anytime.  Because people love to read, gift the readers among your family and friends—and yourself—some books.  With eBooks, I’m talking about just a download (counts for online sales?); for trade paperbacks and hard-bounds, FedEx, UPS, and the U.S. Postal Service come into play, but you do end up with something to wrap.

Are you looking for bargains?  My suggestion is to boycott the Big Five’s high prices, even for eBooks, and support indie authors.  You’ll get more bang for your buck.  Compare Lee Child’s eBook version of A Wanted Man at $13.99 to my Angels Need Not Apply at $4.99.  I’m not pretending to be Lee, but you just know Random House has inflated that eBook price to make more money for them, not for Lee (and maybe to drive readers to the other formats).  Lee’s a good guy, makes money off the volume of sales, and deserves all the success he’s had with Jack Reacher (see below), but I won’t spend more than $10 on any eBook—not even his.  You shouldn’t either.

(more…)

Just before hurricane Sandy came roaring into NJ like a banshee on the loose, we went to see Ben Affleck’s Argo.  As usual, we arrived early to get good seats.  Another early arrival commented that a friend (or was it a relative?) refused to see the movie—she never watched violent movies, he said.  That started me thinking.

To paraphrase Tom Clancy, the problem with fiction is it has to seem real.  He’s talking about military thrillers, of course, but that statement is true about many fiction genres (probably not fantasy or paranormal).  It’s interesting that Argo is a movie based on true events surrounding the daring escape of six Americans from Iran during the hostage crisis.  A CIA agent, Tony Mendes, engineered the escape from the Canadian embassy.

(more…)

[Another guest post from thriller author Gina Fava.  Writers should especially pay attention.  I think she brings up some very important points on this one.  Thanks, Gina.]

Does that little voice inside your head ever use a language other than the one you speak everyday?  Ever consider dabbling in a foreign language to enhance the novel you’re writing, as in Diane Johnson’s Le Divorce?  Or creating a sense of mood with dialect, like Mark Twain did in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, or just as Dennis Lehane did in Gone, Baby Gone?

How about making up a foreign tongue, like Vulcan, Romulan, or Klingon in the Star Trek series? Thought about using slang to add a touch of humor or the right amount of grit to a story, as in Dude, Where’s My Car? or Mario Puzo’s The Godfather?

Maybe you have an urge to go full throttle and write a whole work in a dead language (one that remains in use for specific contexts like science, law, or religion, such as Latin) or an extinct or endangered language (one lacking in speakers or users, such as Aramaic) or a combination of both, ala Mel Gibson’s screenplay for The Passion of the Christ.

Playing with language to flavor your characters and plot might just help your story exude an added level of texture and an authenticity that could distinguish it from other works in your genre.  Both of my novels, The Race, as well as The Sculptor, are based on American characters who reside in Italy.  Often, these characters interact with native Italians, so a fair amount of dialogue is sprinkled with Italian language.   I use it to evoke mood, setting, humor, and/or authenticity, depending on the scene.  Similarly, one of my chapters in The Race recreates the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster in 1986.  I enhanced character pathos and increased tension in the plot by peppering their dialogue with Russian slang.

In one of my earlier blog posts, A Thriller Audiobook That Hits You Like Bleach,  I recommend listening to the audiobook of Ken Follett’s historical thriller, Fall of Giants.   The lilt and cadence of every dialect and accent will practically transport you to Wales, Buffalo, Russia, England and Germany during the First World War.  Hurry, because the second installment in the trilogy, Winter of the World , is due out in September.

DID YOU KNOW that nearly half of the world speaks a Top Ten Language:

1. Chinese*
2. Spanish
3. English
4. Arabic*
5. Hindi
6. Bengali
7. Portuguese
8. Russian
9. Japanese
10. German

*Includes all forms of the language

UNESCO ranks the world’s languages by degree of usage between generations.  One language dies nearly every 14 days.  Nearly 2,724 languages of the roughly 7,000 languages ever spoken on Earth are now endangered.  Here are just a few:

• the Aramaic dialects that linger primarily in the Middle East
• Tuvan, spoken by about 200,000 people in Russia
• Aka, limited to less than 2,000 people in India
• Seri, spoken by a mere 700-1000 Mexican natives

For more information on the planet’s endangered languages, check out the article “Vanishing Voices” by Russ Rhymer [http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2012/07/vanishing-languages/rymer-text] in the July 2012 issue of National Geographic.

Recently, Google has initiated and funded a project to protect endangered languages.  So has Rosetta Stone, a language-learning software company.  Click on the Google or Rosetta Stone links above, and click The Endangered Languages Project link for more information on what you can do to protect global linguistic diversity.

What do you think of peppering your prose with another language?  Any suggestions or ideas?

[Note from Steve to writers and readers:  This is an important question.  If we apply the Goldilocks Principle, what is too much, too little, or just right?  This is especially important for dialog.  Comments are welcome!]

In libris libertas….

[Note: Continuing this week of respite from the elections, I wrote this light-hearted but serious piece on writing techniques.  Enjoy.]

I shook the mathematical beliefs of my thirteen-year-old niece the other afternoon.  An elementary problem in algebra required knowing that the measures of the interior angles in a triangle sum to 180 degrees.  That’s in Euclidean geometry.  I commented that there are other non-Euclidean geometries where that “rule” is not true.  In one of these geometries, parallel lines can meet.

Many of you might be yawning now, I suppose, but there’s a message about writing here.  That algebra help session with my niece started me thinking that a novel’s timeline is linear, but its plot lines can be parallel.  But plot lines are non-Euclidean—they satisfy a stranger geometry where they have to meet at least once by the end of the book, either in the climax or in the denouement.

(more…)

[As a toast to all those who were able to vote yesterday, I offer some good travel advice from guest blogger and thriller author Gina Fava to her editor.  Thank you, Gina.  My apologies again for not including your lovely pictures—I don’t include them to speed up loading on slower systems and browsers.  Readers can see them in Gina’s original post.]

Amanda’s Italian Itinerary  While sharing a bottle of Castello Banfi’s Rosso di Montalcino 2006, with my editor and friend, Amanda—more on her professional editing company later—we poured over photos from a recent trip my family and I had taken to Italy.

She told me that she and her husband had dreamed of visiting Italy someday as the ultimate anniversary gift to each other.  They even had their ideal itinerary planned, which included such cultural gems as Florence, Rome, and Venice.

I told her to scrap the plan.  (Cue the scratch of the needle on the vinyl album.)

Romantic anniversary, trip to Italy,  lovers of fine wine?  Redo.  Add some wine to this itinerary, and now you’ve got something to write home about!  A trip with such promise MUST incorporate a drive through the hills of Tuscany.

(more…)

[Hi, folks!  You have already met thriller author Gina Fava as an interviewee on this website.  She has written two novels, The Race and The Sculptor, short stories, and is working on a sequel to The Race.   (Visit her website.  I also found some interesting articles on her blog I’d like to share with you.  Here’s the first one:]

 One of my favorite things about Cape Cod is looking for sea glass, those shards of broken glass lovingly smoothed by the ocean that wash up on the shore, painstakingly sought after and plucked from the wet sand with as much glee as if spotting gold.  [Note from Steve:  Gina had a nice picture of sea glass in her original post.  My apologies to her–I make it a practice not to include images, since text-only speeds up the loading in most browsers.]

Karen L. Day (YA Author of A Million Miles From Boston) wasn’t supposed to start my day with nuggets of knowledge, but she did it anyway.  Instead of combing the sand for sea glass, I was surprised to find that it just washed up into my shoe.

I’m attending the Cape Cod Writer’s Conference this week.  Cape Cod Writer’s Center of Osterville, MA is celebrating the 50th anniversary of its conference, and they’re pulling out all the stops with thrilling keynote speakers (Joseph Finder, Amy Caldwell, and Andre Dubus III), literary agents, manuscript reviews, and a plethora of writing and publishing classes.

(more…)

As a special treat today, I offer you an interview with fellow thriller author Gina Fava.  A Buffalo, NY native, Gina lives in New England with her husband, Jamie, and their two children.  A writer of award-winning short stories, Gina Fava is working to publish two novels, The Race and The Sculptor, both suspense thrillers based in Rome, Italy.  She’s currently writing her next thrillers in both series.  She travels to Italy often to research first-hand the red wines that her characters imbibe.  An active member of MWA, ITW, and SinC, Gina’s a thrill-seeking bridge jumper, a Formula One racing fanatic, and a nut for blogging about skeletal recomposition.  You can learn more about Gina at her website.  Thank you, Gina.

1)  Why, how, and when did you start writing?

I started writing to entertain myself in grade school.  In high school, Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot blew me away, and his Night Shift short stories prompted me to write to entertain family and friends.  It wasn’t until I returned from studying abroad in Italy that I sent my short stories and feature articles out to the rest of the world.  I think I needed to experience life a bit before I realized that I had novels clamoring to get out too.

2)  What is your biggest problem with the writing process. How do you tackle it?

Characterization.  I love my characters from inception, but it takes some development in their infant stages until I grow close enough to them to appreciate their true personalities.

(more…)

#188:  Interview on “Phalanges.”  Gina Fava, also an author of thrillers, interviewed me for the Q/A section of her blog called “Phalanges.”  I will review her here shortly.  I also look forward to having her write a guest post for this blog on various topics.  Meanwhile, check out her website. (www.ginafava.com)  [Also, see my interview policy on my “Join the Conversation” webpage.]

#189:  Try a book.  I will soon have ten books (see below).  Maybe it’s time to try one.  They are all sci-fi thrillers, although some are more sci-fi than thriller, or vice versa.  There are three series:  “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco,”  “Clones and Mutants,” and “The Chaos Chronicles.”  The first books in each series are The Midas Bomb, Full Medical, and Survivors of the Chaos.  Try one of these.  Or, introduce yourself to my fiction with the YA novel The Secret Lab (for young adults and young-at-heart adults) or the short story collection Pop Two Antacids and Have Some Java—both are only $0.99.  [See “Books and Short Stories.” ]

(more…)

I write sci-fi thrillers.  Readers and writers have preconceived notions about what that means.  The sci-fi part is well understood—or is it?  The whole Star Wars juggernaut was fantasy, not sci-fi, for example—or, at best, a fantasized rendering of Asimov’s Foundation series souped up with language from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter series (Jedi warriors, the white beast on the ice planet, etc).  Still, I’ll give you that sci-fi writing is well defined, even if Hollywood doesn’t know the definition.

Hollywood has also played fast and loose with the concept of thriller.  A modern movie thriller has a protagonist who faces unspeakable adversity and violence, suffers through interminable car chases or escapes from murderous robots, zombies, vampires, or werewolves, and saves one or two unnaturally slim and buxom women in the process.  Compare Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity with the movie version.  If the movie is a sci-fi thriller, the women become super smart scientists as well (the movie version of I, Robot comes to mind).  It’s hard to find a few cinematic seconds that are devoid of sex, violence, or other intense action.

(more…)

I’ve been writing full speed now, trying to satisfy Ashley Scott and my muses.  Who’s Ashley Scott?  For those who have read The Midas Bomb and Angels Need Not Apply, Ms. Scott is a DHS agent and analyst and a good friend of NYPD detectives Chen and Castilblanco.  She thought it was time to receive top billing and my muses agreed.  She will appear in my new novel The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan, which she and the muses are tasering me to finish (about 60% complete now—I can’t wait to see how it ends!).

I wrote the post “Female Characters” four years ago.  Based on my own experience with just three novels (eight now—yep, I’ve been doing this for a while), I gave some advice about portraying strong female characters in your writing if you’re a male writer.  My thesis:  It’s tough, but you have to do it.  You stand to lose half your potential audience if you don’t.  I won’t repeat any more of that advice here (writers and readers might enjoy reading that old post), but I’ll make some comments about what’s gone on since then.

(more…)