Took My Time With This One

I just finished The Ghost War by Alex Berenson. For the most part it was a pretty good book.

There were some instances where I thought it amaturish. Saying things like, "Then Well's told them of his plan," or "Was it any wonder Duto was so tired," idioms and "tricks" that took me out of the story and made me realize this was Berenson's second novel.

Still, it was good enough that I am looking forward to the next one. The ending seemed abrupt, almost too tidy, but sometimes that is necessary. In this case it seemed like I had read his outline for the book and it all tied together too conveniently. The last line was decent so I've pasted it below:

THEN, FROM ABOVE, THE GRINDING SOUND of metal on metal. Followed almost instantly by an enormous explosion, two hundred yards ahead, and a second even closer. Wells bowed his head as sizzling bits of metal crashed around him. 

They’d collided. The wind shift had left the helicopters blind. In their eagerness to get the kill, they’d come too close. They had crashed into each other in the dark and gone down, both of them. This filthy cloud had saved his life. Wells lifted the engine out of the water and looked around, trying to orient himself in the dark, thick air. Distant helicopters behind him. Somewhere overhead, a jet. 

And ahead, a voice. Amplified. American. 

Calling his name. 

He closed his eyes and lowered the engine into the water and steered for it.

Berenson, Alex - The Ghost War

Today's Writing Links

There is just so much to write about, today I'm writing a compendium of links to help keep it all sorted.

First, there is a terrific article from The Kill Zone by Claire Langley-Hawley regarding how to successfully integrate back story into a novel. This is a pet peeve of mine, right up there with poor foreshadowing, so I loved this article. Had it not been for the other links below, this would have been today's post all by itself. Well worth the five minutes it takes to read it.

The second link is this story about Apple appearing before the Justice Department today to discuss price fixing for ebooks. How can you have an ebook and epublishing series and not include this? Personally? My thoughts? Despite Cook's demurral, I believe what Job's said in hisbiography,

"We'll go to the agency model, where you set the price, and we get our 30%, and yes, the customer pays a little more, but that's what you want anyway," Mr. Jobs said in the book."

Then there was this article in the weekend WSJ about how to create a spy. This article resonated with me due to the fact that I'm reading The Ghost War right now by Alex Berenson and it's all about moles, spies and the CIA. Based on the article I'm looking forward to reading Jason Matthew's novel Red Sparrow.

Finally, there is this article from Thriller Ink that goes hand in hand with what I wrote last week when discussing Stephen King, established authors fearful of epublishing. I like Thriller Ink's take on this, mostly cause it echoes my own. Again, worth the five minute investment.

I Can't Wait to Try This!

I'm sure everyone reading this has experienced one of those minor epiphanies that come along in life. A shift in the way you see things, a minor one maybe, but effective and mind blowing (or mind clearing). I find them exciting and fun which is why I was so happy to see this post at The Kill Zone and re-post it here.

It is a post by P.J. Parrish and she lays out a way of outlining via drawing the notes. She provides many samples but you know the one I like most? Norman Mailers. I don't even like Mailer! Yet I can't wait to use his style of visual plotting.

For any writer I think the post is worth reading and the link to more is definitely worth it.

Despite the Plethora of Great Stuff . . .

There is so much material to write about today.

In the WSJ alone I found two terrific articles that fit the content and task of this blog. The first by Jefferey A. Trachtenberg about the upcoming book and publishing expo (here). A great article on the most recent trends in the publishing industry.

The other is this review from the weekend about a new thriller out of Norway (here). As a fan of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series I'm always keen for more from that AO. But the article I like the most is this one by Carl McCoy called Dear Grads, Don't Do What You Love.

In this article the author writes that telling graduates to follow their hearts ins't necessarily the best advice.

"Do what you love" is an important message, but it's unwise to build a career on the notion that we should all be paid for our passions. The advice captures only part of the story. It tells us how excellent work might be accomplished—by loving it—but it doesn't tell us why the work should be done. What is the point of all the effort? What is being worked toward?

The answer lies in working with a deeper sense of purpose or vocation. You don't need to be a religious or spiritual person to tap into this higher purpose; it can be derived from a sense of community and a desire to pull together. Yet without such a higher purpose where all this love and ambition can be directed, we don't have a very useful guidepost for meaningful success. We simply have a call to discover what it is that we love, and then to do it.

It's an interesting few passages, and it gets more interesting when he writes about how multifaceted our lives are. Can we truly only love one thing? Can't we love to train, to analyze trends, to write technical manuals and to write all with the same passion?

Also, there is this:

Then there are those who love things that will never pay very well. As someone who has tried living as a starving artist, I can attest that there's nothing romantic or noble about being impoverished in pursuit of doing what you love. When you're working two or three jobs, and you can't pay your bills, it doesn't matter how much you love any of them. You just get worn out.

This is where I find myself. Do I love to write? Yep, sure do. Do I have a lifestyle that allows me to live comfortably, provide for my family and write what I want? Nope, not even close. If I only followed my heart I'd have nothing by now except debts and probably some hungry kiddos living in a too small house.

The long and short of it is that you can't always do everything to the extreme. I consider myself a black and white person. I don't like the grey areas of life. But my writing life is one huge grey area, a career that I nibble at and pick up when the moment allows.

I think the more apropos message to graduates would be to identify you "passions" (plural) and play to them all. If one pans out, then consider yourself lucky.

Not a Dan Browner

Although I like Dan Brown's novels, and was rapt when I read The Da Vinci Code, I felt the old ho hum feeling when I read in the WSJ about his just released book, Inferno. The review, The Ninth Circle of Sell by Tom Shippey says:

Chapter after chapter ends with Langdon saying, "My God, that's it!," or with Mr. Brown telling us, "In an instant, he knew." But the "it" is never all of the puzzle, and there's always something else to know. The pace is so hot that it is not till you are well into the chase that you pause to wonder who has set up all these clues and why whoever it is wants them to be solved. Even then, you won't be able to figure it out. Langdon can't, and he knows everything. Of course, he's suffering from short-term amnesia, he's dashing from place to place like a tourist with one day to cover Italy, and people with guns are chasing him, but his real problem is just that nothing is as it seems.

In one of my writing classes the instructor pointed out that it's generally a bad technique to describe the main character by writing something akin to "I looked and the mirror and saw the same brown hair, the same 6'1" man with schlumpy shoulders and hang dog look that I had seen for all of my fifty-two years."

It was at that point that the instructor paused and said, "I mean unless your Dan Brown." At that point he went through the top ten techniques never to use and pointed out that Dan Brown broke everyone of them in the first three chapters of The Da Vinci Code.

But it was this article, Dan Brown's Secret to Keeping Secrets by Alexandra Alter that really piqued my interest. In it she writes:


For Mr. Brown, who has made a name for himself writing novels about explosive revelations and codes, secrecy is paramount. So he uses a technique that he has mastered as a thriller writer: misdirection.

"If I'm trying to keep things secret, it's impossible to talk to these specialists without them saying, 'Oh, my God, you wouldn't believe who was here today and what he was asking,' " Mr. Brown says. "These trips usually take longer than they should, because out of 10 things I see, five of them have nothing to do with the book. I'm constantly trying to keep people guessing as to what I'm doing."

I guess this speaks to me if only cause it makes me wonder what it would be like to have thousands of ardent and adoring fans that they would actually care with a passion about when the next novel is coming back. I have two or three, I'll let you know when I hit two or three thousand. Maybe next year.

Still, they're both worth reading when you get a mo.

First Lines

Yet another in the first line series. This one comes from Alex Berenson's The Ghost War. I read Berenson's The Faithful Spy and didn't find it too bad. Kinda fun to read in fact. I'm hoping for the same from this novel. So far, as it hits on North Korea, one of my faves, it's headed in the right direction.

This is not just the first line, but the first few passages. I found the most poignant stuff several paragraphs in. It was worth getting there though:


TED BECK WALKED WEST DOWN THE ROTTING PIER, squinting through his wraparound sunglasses into the late-afternoon haze. He moved without haste. He’d arrived early, and the boat he’d come to meet was nowhere in sight. 

At the end of the dock, trash from three countries—China and the two Koreas—bobbed in the dank water, the eastern edge of the Yellow Sea. The air was heavy with smoke from the ships that docked at Incheon every day to load up on cars and televisions for the United States. The sun had baked the fumes into a brown smog that burned Beck’s throat and made him want a cigarette. 

He fished a packet of Camel Lights from his pocket and lit up. He’d tried to quit over the years. But if he was going to sign up for missions like this one, what was the point? He smoked slowly and when he was done flicked the butt away. It spun into the harbor, joining the empty beer cans and condom wrappers. 

Then he heard the low rumble of a boat engine. 

Incheon was an industrial port fifty miles west of Seoul and a few miles south of the Demilitarized Zone, the strip that separated North and South Korea. During the Korean War, General Douglas Mac-Arthur had landed here, cutting behind North Korean lines to stop the Communist advance. 

A statue of him stood atop a hill not far from this pier. Binoculars in hand, the general looked out to the Yellow Sea, which separated China and the Korean Peninsula. This afternoon, Beck would head into those waters, on a mission smaller than MacArthur’s assault but just as dangerous. 

The rumble of the distant boat grew louder. Beck pulled his wallet out of his pocket, a battered piece of cowhide that had seen him through thirty-two countries and three counterinsurgencies. He wasn’t carrying any identification or a passport, just money. About $3,000 in all. And three pictures: his wife and their two sons. He took out the pictures and kissed them. 

Then he flicked his lighter to them and watched them burn, holding them as long as he could, until the flames singed his fingers and he had to let them go. Their remnants sank into the water and drifted away.

Berenson, Alex - The Ghost War

Yeah, so don't you want to know why he burned up the pictures of his family and flicked them away? I do.

P.S. Yes, this means I gave up on A New World, Chaos. I just couldn't make myself care that much about Zombies.

Do You Validate?

I ran across a small blog post by Anna Jones Buttimore entitled Why I Prefer Traditional Publishing. I read it with an eye toward wanting to enjoy it and understand the author's point of view, but one of the final passages made me a bit angry.

According to Miss Buttimore she has published, through traditional means, several books. The first two made her some profits the third not so much. She has seen very little from her self-publishing ventures. She writes:

My sixth book, co-written with my friend Hellen Riebold, was self-published because of its controversial subject matter. Royalties from that, so far, are zero. Well, not quite zero, but Amazon only send you a cheque once your royalties reach a certain level, and we're not there yet.

It's obvious she's got some arguments about the structure of royalties from Amazon, that she doesn't want to go into in this article. If she had I would refer her to this post I wrote last year about Andrew Hyde's book "This Book is About Travel." The post is good, but what I would commend enthusiastically is the hyperlink embedded in the post (this one) for the breakdown of royalties from different means that Mr. Hyde provides.

Then she hits the reader with this passage, and this is the one that got my ire up.

Those things are all very nice. But actually the reason I like traditional publishing best is because of the validation. I like knowing that someone believes in my work enough to invest in it. I like imaging that industry professionals think I'm good at what I do. I like being taken seriously as an author: when anyone with any level of talent (or none) can put out a book, I like being set apart from them and recognised as someone whose work was actually put into print based on its own merits.

Validation from the publishing world is not something I'm after. Validation from my readers is what I want. There is a significant difference. In just the few, small, bites I've taken from the publishing worlds buffet I've not been impressed. I see a lot of nepotism, a lot of glad-handing and too much subjectivity. This is not sour grapes, in fact before I self-publish I throw my manuscript out to a few agents to judge their reactions. 

I think that the publishing world has evolved into a morass that makes it very difficult for new authors with no connections to find a place. The method of submission is abbreviated, truncated and ambiguous. The rules are arcane and petty. The subjectivity is off the scale, and based on the results of popular writers like Hugh Howey (of Wool fame) and J.K. Rowling, its not at all precise. 

So, I agree with Miss Buttimore that we are all seeking Validation, but I disagree with the direction from which she is expecting it or hoping for it. The publishing industry was long overdue for a shake up and personally I'm glad to be in the middle of it and living through it. 

Make Up Your Mind Will Ya?

I used to love Stephen King novels. I remember reading Salem's Lot in high school and jumping when someone came up behind me cause I was so enthralled and wrapped up into the novel. It was genuinely scary!

I remember reading Christine one summer and thinking that it was good but could have been better had King not belabored so many themes. I still liked it, but like many of his books I felt that he had a tendency to get too preachy  as if the pacing of the writing didn't match the pace of the story. The Stand, Tommyknockers, Carrie, Cujo, IT, Misery, Pet Sematary, The Shining, Firestarter,  . . . I enjoyed them all.

Then came The Dark Tower, which I gave up on, and The Talisman . . . another that I just couldn't wade through.

With each of his newer works I found myself less inspired to commit. I tried but quite reading Gerald's Game, Bag of Bones and Dolores Clairborne. I finished Needful Things but felt like it had been a waste of time.

I read The Green Mile with skepticism and really only did so due to the marketing of it as a serial. I ended up happy to have read it. Then I tried Hearts in Atlantis and On Writing. Having even wanted to read a book of his since. If anything I've wanted to go back and read some of my old favorites. Wouldn't you love to read The Stand again? I wonder if it's as good the second time? Also, he's incredibly prolific. Take a look at the bibliography . . . extensive doesn't even begin to describe it.

Now King is in the news for his most recent book, Joyland. This article by Jefferey A. Trachtenberg entitled Stephen King Says No to E-book, to Scare Up Business has me just a bit irritated and bemused. I like the fact that King was an author who tried new things in publishing. I may not like is more recent novels, but I liked that he was willing to try new things, even if they were old things. The Green Mile experiment, publising Riding the Bullet as an e-book all the way back in 2000 . . . these all seemed like things that were designed to push the envelope so to speak in the publishing world.

Now this? He has no plans to publish his book as an e-book? Smells of curmudgeondom to me.

Mr. King's latest move to make "Joyland" only available as a physical book is essentially the reverse of what he did in 2000, when he became one of the country's first writers to make a new work available exclusively in a digital format. Then, CBS Corp.'s CBS +3.97% Simon & Schuster publishing arm issued Mr. King's 16,000-word ghost story "Riding the Bullet" as an e-book priced at $2.50.

The tone of the article suggests it's being done to "save" the bookstore. Don't get me wrong, I was a lover of bookstores, but just because I loved em doesn't mean I think we should stop their demise. I love the Pony Express, but I don't think it should be used when there is FedEx and UPS and airlines to transport the mail.

If King is hep to save something and wants to harken back to the good old days, as a lover of his earlier works I would encourage him to go back to the style of writing and the themes that made him so popular in the first place. (Now who sounds like a curmudgeon). Then again, perhaps I should give his newer works another look. It's been a while since I tried reading a King book, I wonder if I'll like the new stuff now that I'm older. I can tell you this though, . . . if I do decide to invest it a Stephen King novel . . . it's going to be an e-book . . . if only to twist the knife a bit.

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.