News and Notices from the Writing Trenches #81…
Item: Harry Bosch from a parallel universe? As Michael Connelly observed, the new Amazon series has made a “fair amount of changes” to his famous LAPD detective. Why would we expect otherwise? Hollywood always has to tinker when turning a book into a movie! In this case, we’re talking two books, Bosch #3, The Concrete Blonde, and Bosch #8, City of Bones, for the premier of the TV series on Amazon Prime. Bosch in the books is an ex-Vietnam tunnel rat; TV makes him re-enlist after 9/11 to become an Afghan tunnel rat too. Bosch is played by Titus Welliver, an unfamiliar actor for me (probably a good thing—I have my own mental image of what the Bosch in my universe looks like). Readers should stick with the books, in spite of the fact that they’re so damn expensive (probably more than what you’d pay for the series). No movie allows you to get inside the heads of protagonists and antagonists like a good book! Sorry, Amazon—you should just sell Michael’s books and leave well enough alone.
Item: What are people thinking? To elaborate on the above, movies made from successful novels are always suspect. The 007, Bourne, and Harry Potter series are three OK examples where Hollywood couldn’t begin to match the intensity and depth of the novels. Gone Girl started with a bad book and ended up a very bad movie. It set the tone for the screen version of Fifty Shades, a terrible series of books (no, I didn’t read either Gone Girl or was interested in any of the S&M found in Fifty Shades—the blurbs and peek-insides were quite enough to convince me to leave well enough alone, and friends’ subsequent comments only reaffirmed the wisdom of my decision). I think the lines at the box offices formed by voyeurs waiting to buy tickets are highly amusing. Good luck with that movie, people! The only positive thing I can say is that the cases of Gone Girl and Fifty Shades have confirmed my belief that achieving writing success, if measured by book sales and/or number of readers, is a complete lottery; a fickle reading public can make any author, no matter how bad, a winner!
Item: The Facebook-Nazis strike again! Over the years I’ve used up a lot of adrenalin being in a rage about the arbitrary shenanigans FB programmers pull. Beware geeks bearing gifts! They’re continuously adding features I don’t give a damn about, and most of them just cause me acid reflux. The egregious trick perpetrated recently on an unsuspecting public is a “security test” for people wanting to share articles and pictures to Facebook, either to their timelines and/or fan pages (my author page, in this case)—both applied to me. I liked to share my blog posts to Facebook and Google+ (Goodreads and LinkedIn are smart—I can just RSS to those sites—but no, FB’s programmers, in their infinite stupidity, don’t allow that).
As a result, I’ll not be returning to Facebook in the near future until someone there apologies to me (yeah, I know, it ain’t gonna happen—they’re narcissistic sociopaths at Facebook who want to dictate to everyone). Here’s the test: I went through several (at least ten) pics asking me if there was a chair contained in each one; when I finished this “security test,” my blog post still wasn’t shared! My friends on FB will just have to follow me on Google+, and you can bet I’ll give bad press to FB every chance I get! Pox on their house!
Item: Something in the air (and it isn’t even close to spring!). My unhappy experience with the Facebook geniuses was upstaged by two recent encounters with internet companies. First, TurboTax, in its haste to suck the most money out of the most people (around 30 million, in fact), took needed schedules out of the Deluxe Package we always used. Time spent with customer service led to a band aid for this year and a promise that next year they’d return to the previous version (i.e. they listened to the many complaints and possibly solved the problem). (Note: this has nothing to do with scammers collecting unsuspecting people’s state tax refunds by submitting a false TurboTax return first, a common enough occurrence that several states stopped accepting TurboTax efiles. That’s ID theft, pure and simple, and Turbotax isn’t responsible. To submit, all the crook needs is your name and SSN—geez, I wonder where they got those from? Target, Anthem, Google, or Mr. Snowden?)
Second, 1800Flowers has apparently decided to implement cost-cutting measures, using their “farm” (?) in Edison, NJ, as the local supplier, and UPS as deliverer, cutting out the local florists who took pride in what they delivered (this is nation-wide apparently, so caveat emptor to all online shoppers). I never received the right order (and they apparently have no desire to solve the problem)—in fact, the first iteration was someone else’s—and both iterations weren’t red roses and the flowers were dead and lifeless.
What does all this have to do with writing? Crap like this irks the hell out of me because it wastes time I can spend much better at my writing business. It’s one reason you’ll never find ads on my website (another FB torture akin to waterboarding that I no longer will suffer). I might have links to some trusted sites, but otherwise my site is commercially clean—it’s dedicated to readers, writers, and, of course, my own writing (books and blog posts). You can get all the pop-up ads you want elsewhere on the internet, but not here. But maybe I should start a blacklist of businesses? Bottom line: Facebook is out; TurboTax is on probation; and 1800Flowers is out. (“Out” means I’ll never do business with them again. GoDaddy’s out and a bunch of fast-food places like Papa John’s, Domino, and Chic-Fil-A are out too. Consumers should protest with their pocketbooks. For what it’s worth, I can do it in this blog too.)
Item: Authors v. authors. If you read “Parodies v. Truths” in this blog yesterday, you’ll know I mentioned this problem already. Traditional publishing loves to pit traditional authors (their old warhorses like Patterson, Preston, et al) against indie authors, attacking the latter and leaving their midlist authors to flounder in the no-man’s-land in between. I can’t emphasize enough that readers are the ones who will suffer from this. New voices will rarely be heard with the current version of the traditional publishing paradigm, and, even if the traditional publishers call them “new,” they won’t be because they’re the SOS (FYI: that doesn’t mean “save our ship” here). Even though readers have access to 17 ebooks from yours truly (soon to be 18 with the release of Silicon Slummin’…and Just Gettin’ By), I count myself in the group of “new voices” (most indies are).
The number of books to an author’s name is irrelevant to solving the discovery problem, by the way. John Stockmyer, author of the Z-series of mystery novels and the “Under the Staircase” fantasy novels, with many books in those series, has never been “discovered”—and readers are missing out on some really good entertainment from his books. Whether readers should think about eschewing the formulaic tales from traditional publishing’s old stable horses (Baldacci, Connelly, Deaver, Higgins Clark, King, Koontz, Patterson, and Preston are some that come to mind) and their copycats, and search out new voices, is probably more attributable to the difference between adhering to old habits v. being adventurous, but it’s certain that new voices are disappearing (fleeing?) from the traditional publishers’ stables. Traditional publishers and readers especially shouldn’t bet on the old nags—they’ll eventually start losing races, except for the ones to the glue factory.
Item: Cameos. Prince Harry (The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan) and several other European royals (Aristocrats and Assassins) have cameos in my books (hint to authors: this is possible as long as the cameo is positive and/or the author asks permission—defamation and slander are no-nos). There’ll be one in the new Mary Jo novel, Silicon Slummin’…and Just Getting’ By (not a royal, but a VIP, to be sure). Now you can hobnob with royalty and/or pretend you’re Hitchcock (famous for his cameos in his own movies) by having your very own cameo. In my sci-fi novel, More than Human: The Mensa Contagion, I’ll include five readers’ names as character names (of course, unlike the royals, this is voluntary). You will live a long life and prosper as a sci-fi character. Just use my contact page or drop an email to steve@stevenmmoore.com, and answer the question: How many books are in a trilogy?
By the way, by having your email address, I can send you a free copy of that new ebook via Amazon when it comes out so you can show friends and family that you’re famous. (I’ll not keep your email address after that, so don’t worry.) In the “Notes, Disclaimers, and Acknowledgments” section at the end of the book (always there, by the way), I’ll say something to the effect that “reader X has graciously allowed me to use his real name as a character name in this book—his participation doesn’t necessarily imply agreement with the opinions expressed or the actions performed by this character.” That way, I can even make you into a villain, and you can feel OK with it!
I can’t use email handles for this, of course—HotInternetMama or CaptainNonObvious aren’t character names, for example—so I need a real name, and make sure you tell me what version of your name you want me to use (sometimes parents saddle their kids with terrible middle names, for example, so you might not want that “out there” on the internet). First come, first serve. (If response is good, I’ll think about doing this again for other books.)
In elibris libertas…
