Read Out

I think I read myself out. My reading list lately has included:

Andromeda Strain - by Michael Crichton
Dirty Martini - by J.A. Konrath
Fight City - by James Scott Bell
The Man in the Mist - by Agatha Christie
The Girl Who Cried Wolf - by Robert Ferrigno
and I just started a well reviewed book A New World: Chaos - by John O'Brien

I'm having a hard time getting into this A New World: Chaos book. I wrote the other day about being on the cutting edge of current events. In that post I used the example of Texas secession. I think that's what O'Brien has done with his A New World series of books.

While looking for a new book the other day I saw a very well reviewed A New World book and in order to start the series I started with book one. It may have been too big a jump for me. I'm not commonly a huge fan of fantasy and this one is about Zombies taking over the world. O'Brien is trying to make it intriguing and gripping but so far he has failed.

Granted, I've been lately going through some fairly intense life changes so perhaps that, combined with the intensive reading I've been doing lately, has left me just a bit read out. I'll give O'Brien a few chapters till I give up. Like I said with The Girl Who Cried Wolf I almost stopped, but now I'm glad I went on.

Critique Groups Again

I always find interesting things in The Kill Zone so I never feel bad about promoting that site or re-posting  What's funny is that so often I find myself completely agreeing with whatever they say.

This most recent post, called Getting pecked to death: Are critique groups worth it? by P.J. Parrish is just as good as the others (here). The article is pretty well structured with both good advice as well as some great thoughts on critique groups. I was in a critique group for awhile and didn't like it one bit, the whole story is laid out in other posts (here). Long and short is that it was a mixture of too many different genres and skill types. I'd rather have one or two dedicated writers like myself to count on.

This is where the article by P.J. Parrish yielded some fruit. Down near the end is this nugget (here) about the best methods or tricks of the traded in setting up or finding your own critique group.

Although I ostensibly agree with what Stephen King said in On Writing about not being a fan of critique groups. The last one I used was online and it wasn't bad. I might use it again if the tricks on the linked page don't pan out. But now, I think I'm at a point where I need that critique group around me.

As a Texan I Should Have Seen This Coming

There was an article a few days ago in the WSJ called The Yellow Prose of Texas? Secession Movement Blooms in Fiction by Miguel Bustillo, and boy does it ever fill me with regret.

A couple of years ago I remember talking about the secession movement in Texas with a buddy of mine. We both agreed that it was terrifically silly, but that as a chance to brainstorm and pontificate it provided lots of material. I should have made that next jump and thought about it in terms of thriller writing and fiction.

the Prose of Texas article is all about people who took that spark that I remember and blew on it to make it flame up. You want to know what? I think they all sound like lots of fun and if I didn't already have so many other ideas I'd probably start trying to think of my own.


"The Secession of Texas" by Darrell Maloney of San Antonio envisions an independent Texas with its own border patrol, guarding against people trying to sneak into the country illegally—from Oklahoma.

"Lone Star Daybreak" by Erik L. Larson of Houston tells the story of recruits in the Texas Defense Force, a militia that protects the separatist state from Yankee armies. "Yellow Rose of Texas" by Dennis Snyder describes a U.S. saddled with $22 trillion in debt, a defanged military and a leftist president who promises to remove religion from public life, prompting an armed and economically vibrant Texas to declare that it has had enough.

Like I said, they all sound like fun and at least one needs to be on the to be read list. I will say this though, the next time I'm at a friends house and ponitificating the strangeness of a movement or an event or anything at all, I'm going to try and imagine a "what if" scenario and find a way to write it into a book.

Thriller Writers Listen Up

I may not ever read the book that inspired this post by James Scott Bell at The Kill Zone, I find most 40's and 50's noir to be much the same, but this post, 11 Keys to Making Your Novel a Page Turner has some good advice.

There are some really good passages in there to read, but the eleven keys are:


1. A decent guy just trying to find his place in the world
2. The trouble starts on page one
3. Unpredictability
4. A nasty but charming bad guy
5. Sympathy for the bad guy
6. A spiral of trouble
7. A love triangle
8. A crisp style
9. A relentless pace with a tightening noose
10. Honor
11. A resonant ending

Without the supporting text some of these may be scoffed at, but whilst scoffing I encourage you to jump over to post and read the passages following each key. You will find great advice like this that bolsters the second key, starting the trouble on page one:


HE WAS DRIVING AN MG—a low English-built sports car— and he was a tire-squeaker, the way a wrong kind of guy is apt to be in a sports car. I heard the squeal of his tires as he gunned it, and then I saw him cutting in front of me like a red bug. My car piled into his and the bug turned over, spilling him and the girl with him out onto the street.

Turns out the other guy and girl are not hurt. The guy walks over to Jim and sucker punches him. He's about to stomp Jim's face into hamburger when the girl who was with him grabs him from behind.

The guy's name is Buddy Brown. The girl is Wild Kearney (her real name. Love it!) And immediately Jim is drawn to her—another noir trope. She is a "bronze-blonde" but "looked like the kind of girl that would be with winners, not losers, top winners in the top tournaments and never the second-flight or the almost-good-enough. Not the kind of girl that I'd ever known."

So here we have both violence and potential romance from the start. And the Lead is vulnerable in both toughness and love.

The rule here is simple: Don't warm up your engines. Get the reader turning the page not because he's patient with you, but because he needs to find out what is going to happen next!

I have that series about the importance of first lines and first passages. Whenever I need to spell out why I continue that series I might refer to that final paragraph. "Get the reader turning the page not because he's patient with you, but because he needs to find out what is going to happen next!"

Anyway it's a good post, well worth reading to provide a boost to any writer. And who knows, maybe I will read John McPartland's Big Red's Daughter. If it pulled James Scott Bell into a "fictive dream" it might be well worth the time.

Word Wiz Jr

It's a Saturday so I won't feel too bad about slipping in a post that's not related to writing or publishing. I have a series about words my kiddo's say (here), and today I'm adding a couple more.

First, my three year old was running around for weeks saying "I'm a Biz-ommy." Had NO idea what this meant. At least not until he held his hands up and came at me like Frankenstein's monster. He's a "big zombie" don't you see. I liked it.

He also pointed at the helicopter and said, "Heli-hop-ter" which I also thought was apropos.

The Book is Better than the Opening

I'm trying a new book, from a writer I don't know, that seems fairly political. The Girl Who Cried Wolf by Robert Ferrigno is so far a fun and interesting book to read. The first line would have to be pigeon-holed in the "not so great" category though. In fact the first few chapters should be slated as such. Thankfully it picked up by chapter five.

GLENN PUMPED AWAY on the swing, rusty chains creaking as he watched the last of the sunbathers lazing on their towels, legs crossed, bodies tangled. Music drifted from cars in the parking lot. Little kids played tag with the crashing waves, foam tickling their bare feet as they dashed out of reach, squealing. He swung higher now, pulling himself straight into the clear blue sky, leaving the earth behind. The setting sun hung just above the horizon, the Pacific streaked with red and purple and gold. Toxic as far as the eye could see. If he thought about it too hard, his head would explode. 

Eli rinsed off under the shower at the edge of the beach. A short, muscular surf rat in knee-length jams, he was an amped-up nineteen-year-old with crackling blue eyes and sun-bleached dreads. He turned off the shower, shook out his hair, and sauntered over to the swing set. “Tree’s still not back? You think something’s wrong?” 

“Everything’s wrong.”

Ferrigno, Robert - The Girl Who Cried Wolf

It doesn't necessarily make me want to read on, but it's not too too bad. Truth be told, I almost put the novel down at about chapter three. But, like I said, chapters five and onward make it worthwhile.

Following a New Blog

If you look to the right you'll find links to the blogs that I commonly go check out. I've added to the list recently. I've found that most bloggers who run their own blogs, as compared to blogs that have a host of writers who write an article once a week or once every two weeks a la The Kill Zone, are far more apt to stop posting for several weeks even months at a time. This is an occurrence that I try to avoid.

Nevertheless whilst rambling around Thriller Ink I found this article by James N. Roses entitled Maybe I Write My Book Backward. It's a really good article. It was good enough, anyway, to make me eschew reposting an article on writer self discipline that was posted on The Kill Zone.

Mr. Roses is experiencing a bit of an author identity crisis. He's not sure what genre his books truly fall into. He says:

I guess I could always label my books as dramatic, contemporary thriller/mystery fiction novels, but I’m yet to come across that section in the bookshop.

Then goes on to say:

I feel it is important to just tell the story I want to tell. So far my novels are based in the real world, no sci-fi as yet, and because of this, my work will always include the highs and the lows, the problems and the solutions if there any, and good and the bad, the serious and the funny.

So, why do I find this compelling? Years ago while shopping around Toe the Line I ran across an agent who disagreed with a premise in my query. I wrote imagine Dick Francis with a focus on adventure racing instead of horse racing. Then later I wrote that it was a mystery. This agent said that I was wrong in choosing mystery as a genre and saying that I write like a thriller writer like Dick Francis.

I remember I chose mystery for a reason. I read many many books on writing and publishing (see here) and most of them identified or defined mystery in a certain way and thrillers in a different way. I chose mystery for a specific reason. Among many other reasons I remember an editor I had defined Thrillers as needing to have international destinations and globe trotting protagonists.

Slightly simplistic? Sure. I found it funny that that editor, who had several oddities, his thriller definition not at all the strangest, but that there are so many blurred lines in the industry. Does Dick Francis write thrillers or mysteries? Does Diane Mott Davidson write thrillers or mysteries? Its a funny, blurry line in so many cases.