What If You Could Not Fail

Another Use for Your Cell Phone

A few weeks ago I noticed that Michael Connelly, author of The Harry Bosch police procedurals and Mickey Haller courtroom dramas, came out with an app.  Alas, it appears as if the only version right now

is for MAC, and since I am an Android and PC type of fellow, I can't download it.

I did pat myself on the back, through, because one of the things on my wish list for promoting Rules for Giving is an app for a cell phone. I thought of it months ago. I have read some short stories and even a novella on my cell phone and it's pretty cool. I love it for those times I get caught in a long line at the post office or the return line at Wal-Mart. An app would work well for Connelly's Harry Bosch character. Harry is a jazz connoisseur. If I am not mistaken, Connelly has already released a CD of Bosch's favorite jazz pieces.

I suspect the app also includes character sketches, a list of the novels for each character, and some other juicy stuff. Connelly was one of the first ones with a good interactive website, complete with quizzes and photo albums of locations from various novels.

Then in today's Los Angeles Times in the Jacket Copy column, there is a piece about how Cornelia Funke, author of YA fantasy novels Fearless and Reckless, has launched an app based on her novels. While Bosch's app is free, Funke's app is $5.99 (or available free when you buy one of her stories), but is also includes sixteen stories based on her books.

Any way you can get kids to read works for me.

See ya’ later.

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Because Writing Seldom Pays the Mortgage

Thanks to Grant Snider and Writers Write. 

Advance Submissions at Writers' Conferences

I have registered for the Santa Barbara Writers Conference in June. One of the decisions I have to make this week is whether to take advantage of any of the advance submission agents who will be present at the conference.

For those of you unfamiliar with advance submissions, these are often available at a conference. You select from a list of agents who have registered and you send them a sample of your novel or book. At the Southern California Writer’s Conference they asked for the first chapter and a two-page synopsis. At the Santa Barbara event they are asking for the first five pages. At the conference you meet with them for ten to fifteen minutes and they give you their feedback. 

There is a charge connected with this opportunity. In San Diego it was $50 for each agent you selected (I went with two). In Santa Barbara it is $40 per submission.

Most of the advance submission readers at San Diego were freelance editors or published novelists. In Santa Barbara it looks as if most of them are agents. There are only two agents who are interested in my genre—adult contemporary fiction—and one of them I have already submitted to and received a rejection. Perhaps I should submit to him again just to get some in-person feedback.

How did the experience go for me last time?

It was kind of a draw, an illustration of how subjective the agent business can be.

The first editor said she liked what she read, but she was concerned that there was too much going on. She was concerned about how much she needed to remember.

The second reader—which ended up being a spur-of-the-moment thing there at the conference—stared at me with a blank look and said, “I don’t get it.” He writes spy thrillers, however, so my guess it that unless blood is running ankle deep in the by the second page, the manuscript doesn’t have a chance with him.

When I sat down at the table and introduced myself to the third reader, she shuffled through some papers and pulled out my manuscript. She took one look and said, “Oh, this guy [referring to my protagonist/narrator] is hilarious.” The remainder of her critique was very complimentary.

So there you have it. If you decide to pop for a writer’s conference, spend a little extra for the advance submissions.

I should also warn you: writer’s conferences are not cheap. Advance registration was $550 for this one, plus another $400 for the hotel room (if I had opted for the host hotel it would have been closer to $600. Add meals and gas, and the total comes closer to $1,400 or $1,500.

I had better publish something quick.

See ya’ later.

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Getting Around the Rhinoceros in the Story

In another life, some thirty-five years ago, I was a police officer. It didn’t work out. I didn’t like the job, and it didn’t like me. It’s much more complicated than that, but I don’t have to the space here to go into it.

The time I spent wearing a badge, though, and the several years afterwards, were formative periods in my life. There were a lot of discoveries, realizations and changes. Being a police officer means being a member of a very exclusive subculture. You only hang around cops—on duty and off duty. You think like a cop 27/7. It never stops.

If you are in a group of non-police people, they treat you differently. You’re a cop and they expect you to be one. In order to escape this, you go back to hanging around cops, where the chief topic of conversation is being a cop. It’s hard to get out.

The downside is that once you leave the police department, you are ostracized. That is the rule of the subculture. The second you take off the badge you have no friends. Other cops will talk to you, but it’s not the same. You have to go out and make new friends, and that is difficult because you still think like a cop. My experience is that it takes years for that part of you to go away, and at least in my case it required a lot of alcohol and drugs.

So here is the dilemma. There are many rich and interesting stories I can tell related to the time I was a police officer. But the setting of the character wearing a badge and a gun is—at least for me—overpowering. The police part of it wants to take over center stage and commandeer the story. 

The reader expects it, or at least I expect the reader to expect it. How do I get around it?

See ya’ later.

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They Killed Bobby Baccalieri

Like everyone else, I watched the last episode of The Sopranos and thought my cable TV had gone out. I am still sorting out what happened. I should probably get over it. That was six years ago.

But the most emotional part of the series came for me a few episodes earlier when Phil Leotardo's men targeted the top management of the Soprano family, and when they killed Bobby Baccalieri.

They killed Bobby?

Not only did they kill Bobby, but they killed him in the store when he bought the model trains he so loved. How could they let this happen? Bobby was the gentle giant, the brute who wouldn't hurt a flea.

I'm still upset about it. We loved him too much.

Realistically, though, they had to kill someone. They couldn't depict the brutality of mob life without taking out someone close. So they settled for Bobby. Before they took him out, however, they made us love him. I loved the character so much, in fact, that I spent the rest of the episode in denial.

There is an interesting lesson here. If you want to leave your readers breathless and unbelieving, give one of the secondary characters a story arc that turns bad. I considered this is Rules for Giving--I have not ruled it out yet. Before you do, though, allow the reader to love the character, just like we loved Bobby Baccalieri.

See ya’ later.

WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Photo courtesy HBO

 

 

Old Lines Updated

Bliss by Harry Bliss

Los Angeles by the Books

I have threatened for a while to drag some of my critique group friends out for a day-long road trip of

noteworthy bookstores in Los Angeles. It's a good thing I procrastinated. The Los Angeles Times has taken advantage of my hesitation and developed the map of Literary Los Angeles.

It is divided into three categories--scenes from various novels, bookstores, and other literary landmarks. With the exception of Highwire Moon by Susan Straight, the rest of the locations, sixty-three in all, are in Los Angeles Country.

Like any map of this type, I see a lot of books that were left out. There is nothing by Michael Connelly, who has done as much as any recent author to depict Los Angeles. The map also includes names that deserve to be there--Walter Mosley, Raymond Chandler and Charles Bulowski. I also see a lot of novels that need to go on my reading list.

There are twenty-six bookstores listed. At the rate of five stores a day, that means five trips, if we can shoehorn in an extra one of one of the excursions. There are also nine landmarks--ranging from the Huntington Library to Clifton's Cafeteria.

Looks as if we have some full days ahead of us.

See ya’ later.

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Gertrude Stein

“It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much, doing nothing, really doing nothing.” 

“You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place 
between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting...”

“Why should a sequence of words be anything but a pleasure?” 

“For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts.” 

 

 

Mystery Novels: Window to Another World

I have mentioned before the novels of Naomi Hirahara, a Japanese-American born in Southern California. Both her parents were near Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was detonated.

The hero of Hirahara 's novels is Mas Arai, a Japanese gardener who, like her parents, survived the Hiroshima blast. He is now transplanted to Southern California, where he works as a gardener and in his spare time solves mysteries (Hirahara's father was also a gardener). I have only read the first novel--Summer of the Big Bachi--in the five-book series, but Arai appears to be the reluctant hero, always in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Hirahara was interviewed at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books this last week (click here) and she talks about her character, and how she uses the vehicle of a mystery novel to bring the reader into the sub-culture of Japanese-Americans. It is a successful formula. Walter Mosley (who Hirahara cites as one of her influences) uses the same motif with his series novels (Easy Rawlins, Socrates Fortlow and Leonid McGill)  to let readers peek into the world of African-Americans. Lawrence Block does the same thing with the Matt Scudder series and alcoholics.

In each of these novels I have gained valuable knowledge about a culture I knew little about. The novels of these writers changed the way I looked at the world.

That's the point of good literature.

 See ya’ later.

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Crowdsourcing to make Autism in Love

Last month I posted about Kickstarter, a website that allows artists to do crowdsourcing--raising funds from the online community for worthy projects.

Arman Khodaei, a member of our writing critique group, is part of a group using Kickstarter to raise money to fund the production of Autism in Love, a feature-length film documentary exploring how adults with autism fall in love and manage romantic relationships. Follow this link to the Kickstarter page. Armand is the young man pictured in the opening image seen on this blog post.

As described on their Kickstarter page:

What began as research for a book quickly morphed into a feature-length documentary. After all, what better way is there to capture a love story than to see it unfold before your eyes? We've been working on AUTISM IN LOVE for almost 18 months and could not be more excited about the phenomenal people in the autism community we've already had the pleasure of meeting--from participants in our documentary, to passionate parents, to therapists, and everyone in between!

The story is told from several unique perspectives. We're filming couples who are in different stages of their relationships as well as single adults who are actively looking for their soul mate. We're most interested in giving a voice directly to people on the autism spectrum, letting them tell the stories of their ups and downs in the pursuit of love. We will share their remarkable journey with the utmost respect, integrity, and honesty.

This is a worthwhile project, and as you can see from their Kickstarter page, it is being led by some very skilled and knowledgeable people. Dig deep and give.

 See ya’ later.

WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.