Author Spotlight: James Cormier and Exile: The Book of Ever

So it's time to spin the dial and let the arrow land on a fellow writer who toils ceaselessly for love of the craft: the author of YA, fantasy and pretty much anything that he finds interesting: James D. Cormier.

I met Jim on Twitter a few months ago and followed him into that hell of an alternate universe called Ello, where we are still slogging through the mud trying to convince ourselves that it's Normandy on D-Day instead of wet sand in the see-saw area of the local park.

Jim has his first novel, Exile: The Book of Ever, Part I, out on Amazon as an e-book and it's available for free until this Sunday, so if what you're looking for is an engrossing novel of a young heroine in a post-apocalyptic world who must overcome great odds and face perilous treks, get over here and download your copy today.  And it wouldn't hurt to leave a review, would it?

Without further ado, we dive into the mind of Jim...

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1. How did the writing bug bite you -- was it a gradual interest or a thunderclap of inspiration?

I've wanted to be a novelist for as long as I can remember. I think it probably started in a way that will be familiar to a lot of fantasy fans -- I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and a deep desire to build worlds of my own was born.

For a long time I questioned whether being a writer was a "realistic" decision, and as such I sought out a career as an attorney before finally deciding to go after what I really wanted. I think it was all for the best, however: I'm a better writer because of it, and my life experience to this point has certainly informed my writing in a positive way.

My approach has certainly been gradual, in the sense that I've got a lot of fits and starts under my belt; I've got notebooks and hard drives filled with notes and outlines and partially-finished manuscripts. The story for Exile: The Book of Ever, my first novel, was certainly more of a thunderclap, however: the idea came to me and I started writing the same day. It's funny how it all works.

2. Your first venture is a story in the post-apocalyptic genre with strong faith-based symbolism and lore -- do you think the role of religion is ignored in post-apocalypse stories, or were you more interested in a what-if extrapolation?

The initial concept for The Book of Ever was based on my own speculations about what it would take to survive in a post-apocalyptic world of the type described in the book. Ever Oaks and her people live centuries after a nuclear apocalypse that destroyed or affected most of the world, and while the immediate dangers of radioactive fallout and things of that nature have subsided, they live in what is essentially a 19th Century state of technology.

A lot of the post-apocalyptic fiction, film, and TV you see focuses on people who are basically trying to live the same lives they lived before the apocalypse in a world that is no longer hospitable to that lifestyle, people who are trying to survive the immediate aftermath and figure out how to live now. I wanted to explore the idea of a group of people who embraced the idea of living differently, and who had a definite set of values that set them apart from the mainstream, and see how they fared against the ruins of a civilization reduced to barbarism and the struggle for basic survival.

Have you ever played the game of looking around at people, either friends or strangers, and asking yourself how they'd fare if the world ended tomorrow and they were forced to survive without 21st Century technology and resources? I think we all know two types of people: people who'd make it work, and people who'd be hopelessly out of their element.  With Exile, I focused on a community that had prepared for the apocalypse centuries before, and which survived it and, relatively speaking, flourished in it because they focused on timeless values like preparedness, community, charity, and faith.

I think the role of religion is either mostly ignored or focused on to the exclusion of everything else: your options seem to be The Walking Dead, which is gritty, realistic, and violent (don't get me wrong, though, I like it as much as the next guy), and books like Left Behind, which is an entirely Christian-centric view of the Rapture and the End Times.  I was interested in finding a common ground between the two, and exploring how people of faith might use their values, abilities, and beliefs to aid in their survival.

I also wanted the novel to be balanced, in regard to the Christian elements. My intention was to put the Christian elements in there for readers who were interested without turning them into a distraction for those who aren't. I don't view Exile as Christian novel, so to speak, but rather a novel with Christian characters in it. I may or may not have achieved that, but I hope that there's something in the story for everyone.

3. Which authors or books gave you the most inspiration to write?

How long do you have? Hah. Tolkien was a huge inspiration to me, of course, as was Tad Williams. If The Lord of the Rings made me love fantasy, Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn made me realize I wanted to write it. On the science fiction end of things, William Gibson was a big inspiration, too.

Outside of the genre, the writers that inspired me to write included Hemingway, Faulkner, and Michael Chabon.  Reading Chabon taught me that you could think outside the box and tell the stories you wanted to tell and stories that entertained and still be a great writer acknowledged for his craft.

4. Was your protagonist, Ever Oaks, modeled after a specific person or was it a composite sketch of different character traits?

She's a composite sketch, but her best qualities--courage, determination, faith, intelligence -- are reflections of my wife, who is the best person I've ever known and an example to me every day of my life.

5. The story of Ever Oaks continues past the first book -- was this a planned series or did you reach the story's end and feel that there was more to the character's adventures?

It was most definitely a planned series -- a trilogy, to be precise.  I did want each book to have its own narrative arc, but the story as a whole is only one-third finished.  Here's hoping I can fit the rest of it in two more books.

I know where they started, where they're going, and the broad strokes of what happens, but the middle of the story often ends up telling itself as I write.

6. Are there other genres that hold your interest or in which you'd like to write someday?

Absolutely!  My wheelhouse is fantasy and science fiction, both YA and adult, but I'd also like to write some mainstream literary fiction.  I'm working on a book of short stories right now that is pretty much literary fiction, for lack of a better term, though there are some magical realist elements to it.

I've also got a thriller in me of some kind, probably paranormal.  That project excites me, but at the moment all I've got are some incomplete ideas.

7. Which is the next book you're planning on reading, and why?

I just finished Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson, which was good but too long. I'll be posting a review at my website. I'm planning on reading Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood next, mostly out of simple curiosity: I've heard a lot of good things about Atwood, and wanted to check it out.

I'm also reading a couple of nonfiction books at the moment: The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans, and Rough Stone Rolling, a biography of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon Church.

8. Do you find it easier to write straight through as you work the scenes in your head, or do you edit as you go along? Which is more productive for you?

I tend to edit as I go. I find that blowing through a scene or chapter only results in missing things, for me, so I write carefully and try to think about the scene in detail as I write. I don't tend to write in drafts, so to speak; it's more a continuous editing process.

9. Going from lawyer to writer was quite a switch -- were there any moments of hand-wringing or cautionary self-assessment?

It was certainly a risk financially, in the sense that writing income isn't always as "stable" as receiving a traditional salary or billing hours as a private attorney. But I think it would actually have been harder for me not to do it: I'd been thinking about writing for so long that I had to at least try it out. I found that I wasn't nearly as able to focus on it as much as I'd like to while still working as a lawyer.

10. Anything else you'd like to tell us about your upcoming plans or projects?

I'm working on the sequel to Exile, Extinction, which is Part 2 of The Book of Ever. In addition to that I'm writing a stand alone sword and sorcery novel for adults, tentatively titled The Trials of Karthanas, and I've also got about half of a book of short stories written. So there's a lot on the stove at the moment--and I couldn't be more excited about it!

Thank you for such a wonderful interview!

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No, on the contrary, I thank Jim for taking time out of his busy schedule of writing and editing and feeding the two cats which every fantasy author receives upon publication of their first novel to instead ruminate on his responses to this interview.  Jim, we wish you the best of luck with your future books, and we look forward to Book 2 of the next Ever Oaks novel!

Again, Exile: The Book of Ever, Part I, available here from Amazon, and free until Sunday 11/23, so grab your digital copy now!  Of course, it wouldn't kill you to pay for it, either...

The Short, Unhappy Life of a Rushed Book Cover

I am, by nature, the most impatient of assholes.  Whether it's traffic on the motor bank lanes at First Federal, televised State of the Union addresses, or the unique corporate torture of only three out of 18 checkout registers which stay open at Target during peak shopping, I have just never liked waiting my turn, plain and simple.  Which can make for a damned unattractive trait in an indie writer doing his or her own book covers.

What's that?  Fuck the world, you say?  You want it all and you want it right now?  Okay, let me take you for a walk on the impatient side and impart the lessons that left me scarred and listening to Billy Joel for days on end.

The original cover, bland as a Sunday
pancake with no butter or syrup...

I slipped and tumbled into this abyss early this year when I was hopping to go live on Amazon with my first short story, which I had called, at that time, Squirters.  It was the first piece of fiction I was about to circulate, and I was as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs (I don't remember where I heard that line, but I readily admit I clearly stole that one).  However, thanks to what turned out be a very misleading title, despite 99.9% of the population expecting titillation and porn, I gave them a supernatural war story instead, and a pretty pissed off, otherwise expectant readership was born.  But poor title selection was just the beginning of this mess I made.

Because there's this: the tumult of book cover design goes beyond the usual headache of should I pay a professional or do my own?  A professional, just like any industry, will charge you based on complexity of the thought process, and unless you are buying one of the designer's stock covers, you will not get what you pay for if the road is traveled in fits and starts.  When I was in my teens, I had trouble selecting the exact snippet of a song that would best represent my individuality for my answering machine, so you can see my problem there.  And I haven't outgrown the habit, so indecision can kill this tete-a-tete collaboration really fucking fast.

You have to remain actively involved in the progress of the design, or even a customized job may not work out for you.  Even worse, if the soul of a bitchy art director is trapped inside your body trying to get out, you may also end up frustrating the book cover designer or graphic artist you're working with, and the partnership will end with someone flipping the bird, billing for time spent, and perhaps even a veiled reference to Yoko Ono will be muttered.

Well, I decided not to go that route, for those aforementioned reasons.  I don't have and have never used Photoshop because back in the mid-90's I failed to master the unique male compulsion for retouching photos of women's boobs and lady bits, so that skill set was out.  Plus, Photoshop is expensive and unless it is for a full-time career move, better to grab a Dodge instead of a Lamborghini for your first trip out on the back roads, know what I mean?  Instead, I patrolled the Google landscape and found my way to a couple of free (emphasis on free) graphics programs (GIMP, which you can download here, and Inkscape, downloadable here) and began one of the fastest and most intense learning-curve marathons known to man.

Once that was done, I needed what any red-blooded nerd trapped in his mother's basement with a bag of Doritos and an overclocked Alienware will need: images.  A plethora of images.  And here I was at a real roadblock because not only does my mother have no basement, but I hate Doritos and I can't afford another Alienware.  So I just tapped my Asus laptop on its smooth little forehead and told it, "Go fetch."

A big, big note here: if you are tempted to just find, copy and use any image floating through the digitalsphere...DON'T.  Just don't.  There is a mine field of copyright infringement lawsuits just waiting to shred you and your checking account to pieces -- and a phalanx of online, Starbucks-sipping, Arcade Fire-listening, website-chasing lawyers who have nothing better to do than try to make a quick one or two grand in billable hours filing on unsuspecting or impetuous writers (like me).  Basically, if you are not the person who took the photo or generated the original image, you do not have any ownership rights to re-use that image, in ANY fucking way, unless the owner of that image gives you said permission first.  (And you'd better get it in writing, too).

So the sources I decided to use for this maiden effort came from some Department of Defense websites, mainly because photographs taken by soldiers on active duty are considered to be in the public domain under Section 105 of the US Copyright Act.  NASA is also good, all those astronauts and their high-resolution cameras really have a public-domain gold mine going on if you're a sci-fi writer.  Specifically, the disclaimers on Wikimedia Commons will say something like the phrase below, corresponding to the following image:

This image or file is a work of a U.S. Air Force Airman or employee, taken or made as part of that person's official duties.  As a work of the U.S. federal government, the image or file is in the public domain.

So that's the first thing you should check, and then you can use the image as I've done below:

Credit: U.S. Air Force photo [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Note that even public-domain images need attribution, and Wikimedia Commons will actually have a link on the image page telling you what this attribution should state.

You may run into a lesser form of public domain that will say something else, like this:

The copyright holder of this file allows anyone to use it for any purpose, provided that the copyright holder is properly attributed.  Redistribution, derivative work, commercial use, and all other use is permitted.

Which is almost as good as public domain, except that you absolutely have to credit the copyright holder, because copyright is still with the owner of the image, not you.  So you do something like what I've done with an image under this license below:

Credit: By Georgios Pazios (User:Alaniaris) (Own work)
[Attribution], via Wikimedia Commons

Don't be alarmed by the selection of photos, I'm not planning on bombing any small industrialized nation anytime soon.  I searched for jet fighters and the results provided included the images above.  This can be done with any kind of image that you may be looking for, just like a Google search, except you're going through the Wikimedia Commons repository where most images which are uploaded were intended to be shared, albeit with one or two restrictions.  This will yield better search results than using Google, where a majority of your image search results will probably include copyrighted images.

My revised attempt; and guess what?
It still sucked...

Now, am I a patent and trademark lawyer?  No.  This is all based on information I read on Wikimedia Commons, and if some bloodsucker comes after me, I'm going to encourage them to go rifle through Jimmy Wales' coffers, not mine.  But his Wikimedia Commons page has great information on the images that it has to offer, I doubt that it is there to lead you astray, and it will even tell you if the images are public domain, if they can be re-used with credit given (which is a really small price to pay, so just pay it already), or if there are other restrictions which the copyright owners have imposed on sharing or using the images.  It's all explained in legalese that's as clear as mud, but bottom line, try to go for stuff that won't get you strung up by your thumbs in a courtroom.

There is also a much easier solution to this and that is going out and taking your own photos.  At least, it's easier from a copyright-holding perspective as long as there are no people in your shot.  But I'm a lousy photographer, I don't know a damned thing about filters or shutter speeds or whatnot.  And if you are taking photos of random people on the street, you'll need to get a release from each and every one of them before you can even think of using their faces or likeness for commercial purposes.  If you commission a model for a photo session, however, they usually sign such a release, but you are also paying them for that photo session.  See how complicated this can get?

Finally, a photo that doesn't involve
worrying about fucking copyright...

Notice that nowhere thus far have I mentioned the dark art of skill that needs to be applied to these creative bursts of hemorrhoid-like flare-ups.  Oh sure, you can go out and decide to comb through the offerings of eBay and learn everything there is to learn about designing book covers -- and if you're going to do that, go buy Chip Kidd's excellent introductory book, A Kidd's Guide to Graphic Design, which distills a good chunk of his vast professional knowledge into a very approachable treatment of the subject.  Seriously.  It is that good.

However, even after a revised cover, I saw the zero-sum sales on my KDP page and figured it was time for some professional CPR.  So after some perusing, I found a website and graphics developer at SkyRuby.com which charged me very reasonable rates to prop up what was at that point a dead body and try to at least make it look like it had once walked the earth as a living thing.  This is where I discovered how detail-oriented and obsessive I could be over even the tiniest details.

Call this chaper The Adventure of the Skull Moon...I could write an entirely separate post on the imagery that haunted my brain, just trying to get that thing right.  The skull moon was a key image in my concept of the cover design, you see.  But the original skull moon was this:

Revision No. 3; or How I Learned To Stop
Worrying and Prematurely Love
My Skull Moon...

I had decided to change the title and was using a half-assed placeholder title, but I still wasn't feeling that skull moon...it looked sad and maybe a little hungry, like a kitty cat that just wants to be let inside the house.  Those Special Forces soldiers aren't heading into danger, they're embarking on a mission of feline mercy to deliver a bowl of milk.  And the title?  Might as well have called it Waiting for Cuddles.

Problem was that I had already told the designer that I was happy with the outcome...but I wasn't.  It was like tasting jalapeno poppers for the first time: you don't really know it at first, but you keep eating them and suddenly get up from the table knowing that, somewhere along the way, you've made a grave mistake.  And this is a key thing to remember when you are working with a professional: don't be afraid to speak up.  You're paying for services rendered, you have to be able to say what's on your mind.  This isn't your marriage, no one's going to bitch you out for admitting you hate to get up early to take out the trash...um, yeah, anyway.  So I emailed her again the next morning and said, Hey, we need to talk...

The designer I worked with was very patient, and she charged by the hour but she brought mad skills to the game and worked very fast, and in a matter of just two hours (I shit you not) I had a much better skull moon, the best one I think I will ever find.

And what did I end up with?  A final cover, which now looks exactly like this:

Prey.  That's right. Prey.  As in, "pray" that this is the last
fucking change this asshole makes to his book cover...

The moral of the story is yes, I am a control freak, yes I drove my cover designer crazy andd you can, too!  But fuck it because you know what?  You will get a cover design that is much closer to what you envisioned than if you were to hand the reins to a publishing firm.  Publishing firms have their own designers and art departments and they decide on a marketing plan, not you.  They decide what your cover will look like, not you.  They may even decide to change the title of the book, and suck it up, buttercup.

I'm made of much more arrogant, self-centered stuff.  I want my ideas, my concepts, my execution out there.  This is not the way for everyone; I sincerely understand that.  For those who have already reached the hallowed halls of traditional publishing, giving up final cut, as it were, in exchange for the freedom to write more stuff may be exactly what they want and need.  But I'm having a hell of an adventure in this indie environment, and I'm in no particular rush to do anything except enjoy the ride.

I'm speaking non-pornographically, of course.

The 7-7-7 Challenge: Or, I Just Have Seven Sentences...

For this latest outing I have to thank fellow scribe Paige Randall, who will slide a tumbler of bourbon across the bar to you, give you a friendly nudge, and in quick measure proceed to drink you right under the table.  Paige is an expert in the microdynamics of male-female interactions, from the heady onset of romance to the harsh reality of the breakup.  This makes her a great observer and chronicler of the most complicated facets of our human condition.  Who else can trace the emotional algorithms of pain and joy, friendship and betrayal, and reshape the psychic experiences into words that everyone can relate to, except the most gifted writers and poets?  Paige is one of those people.

One of the spots where Paige ruminates on the human condition and proceeds to shoot down thoughts of the day; it is her personal Dealey Plaza... (photo courtesy of Paige's website, because she is way cool like that)

Paige also has a great romance novel, Circling, which is winding its way to the reading public, and she is already working on its sequel.  She lives in DC and spotted Janet Napolitano once; if you're a fan of cutting wit, cuss words and no-holds-barred straight dope, go check out her blog right here.

Without further ado, then, below are my little creations:

Captain Anton Brubaker knew better. He had fought and bled and survived and managed to hold out this long, but a part of him was gone. It had been gone for a while, therefore what he had just done didn’t insinuate itself in his mind with any crippling sense of conscience. He sat in his chair and reflected on that. He was calm.

Blood seeped along his right sleeve from where one of his sergeants tried to stab him with a pair of scissors just over an hour ago. The cut along his bicep was deep and painful, but that sergeant was also dead in the secured server room.

And thus begins the second part of my short story Dead Air Dying Sky; this scene follows the first scene where a group of pilots begin reacting to something happening to them while in flight, and the skies are soon peppered with the flying dead.  It may help you to know that the original title of this story was Zombie Pilots Over Tulsa, but for purposes of avoiding the narrow straits of niche marketing, it was suggested that I veer away from that one.

The new title was actually suggested by the spouse of a friend.  That switch in the title will likely save the story, as poorly chosen titles can capsize even the sleekest of Ohio-class nuclear submarines.  I will forever be grateful to them for recommending this.

Why zombies?  Oh, I don't know.  Why does every truck driver in the world seem to be able to find the Walmart parking lots with disturbing divination?  Why do bluebonnets spring up in the most messed-up places along IH-35 in the springtime?  Why is Outlander so fucking boring?  (Sorry, Suzie K!)  We will never know, and we have to content ourselves with the not-knowing, with simply accepting what we can't ever understand and move on with the lesser mysteries of life.

Well just like Phil Hartman's Frozen Caveman Lawyer, I am frightened and confused by these blog-based challenges I find myself in, and I haven't tagged anyone for follow-up on this specific challenge, either (sorry Paige!).

Instead, I'm going to list a host of writers off the top of my head who I have met on Twitter and who are fellow rowers, those who together have shared the ravings of galley slaves, who suffer the lashes of the creative whip, and who pray for the break of dawn known as success, however we choose to dress up that little buttercup.

And here goes:

Paige motherfucking Randall at PaigeRandall.com: I don't know what her occupation is but I think she's either a lawyer at a PR firm, a lobbying firm, or some other kind of firm.  Too smart for the federal government, in my opinion.  Her blog has great insights on the creative process and the adventures of trying to find an agent in these complicated digital times (remember, the road to hell is paved with agents making you wait for weeks on a yes or no).  If you want to laugh out loud right now, read her blog post, "Ode to the Gym."  Yes, yes, I know I mentioned Paige already at the top of this post.  But she set me on this challenge; it's only fair that she get extra credit.

Kenneth Harmon at GhostUnderfoot.com:  Kenneth is a fine writer whose novel, The Amazing Mr. Howard, will be published by JournalStone in early 2015.  I told him once that his writing style reminded me of Robert Bloch, and I meant it.  He and I direct-message quite a bit, and in addition to being probably the number-one cheerleader I have on Twitter, we have shared a keen interest in wordsmithing, a general gripe about the pitfalls of traditional publishing, and a too-detailed discussion of enlarged prostates, an affliction whose burden, fortunately for him, is not his to bear.

Eric Keys at EricKeys.wordpress.com:  Eric is an aficionado of that special brand of fiction that blends horror and erotica.  Sometimes I call it "horrotica" and it reminds me that I'm no poet.  His novelette, Grace and Blood, is probably the best example of this structure, and it's available on Amazon.  But his most personal piece is probably "A Single Act of Prolonged Vengeance," which was anthologized in an inaugural volume under the title A Light in the Darkness as a collaborative effort for Writing Out Child Abuse, and is also available on Amazon.

A.U. Gonzales at scriptogr.am/infinityinthemiddle: A.U. was so drawn to the craft of writing that he resisted his family's urging to continue a trans-generational career in the medical field and become a doctor.  It's not every day you get to tell your folks you're following a far different path than what they expected, so he is to be commended for his bravery and his confidence.  And his skill: go check out And Then Acid Fell, an anthology of very well-written stories connected only by nature's soft wrath.  It's available on multiple platforms, including Amazon, Smashwords, Google Play, pretty much every damned digital platform A.U. could think of, and then some.

Kym Darkly at TheHorrorInMyHeart.com: Kym's narratives, which appear on her blog, are little gems of madness, a storyteller by the fireside entrancing her audience with her latest tales.  She has also recently posted a very interesting and insightful interview with a demonologist.  The best place to enjoy the horror in her heart is to go to her blog, also titled in like fashion.  My only complaint is that, although she has written many television and film scripts because her influences come from that medium, she hasn't yet published a longer piece, but I suppose I could characterize her as the female version of Thomas Ligotti.

Teresa Hawk at TeresaHawk.com:  Teresa is somewhere in a classified location in the Nevada desert (okay, okay, it could be Area 51) and she writes full-time while waiting for the zombie apocalypse that she is certain will be upon us soon.  Her story Meat had a very Southwestern Gothic vibe, if I do say so, and Death Ray Potato Bake was a total blast to read.  And speaking of blasts, she also shoots guns, many many guns.  Very precisely.  So for those who wish to tread on that classified location, remember that curiosity killed the wandering zombie.  Anyhow, her work is available on multiple platforms, including Amazon, as well as through her website in PDF direct-download.

Katerina Baker at KaterinaBaker.com:  Katerina is an accomplished traveler (I think she was in Budapest the last time we tweeted, and I encouraged her to run along the rooftops like Liam Neeson in Taken 2).  I can only assume she uses her acumen of observations from her bad-ass trips to weave the interesting settings for her stories.  She's a daytrader or stockbroker or something related to the financial industry by profession, and a self-described unrepentant romantic.  Check out her musings on her website's blog for inspiration and a sampling of her great storytelling.  Her books include All Roads Lead to Anatolia and The Day I Became a $py.

A.S. Washington at ASWashington.com: A.S. is both a writer and a poet; but his poetry is meditative and graceful, and his sword-and-sorcery fiction (check out An Insurrection, his latest short story) is violent and visceral.  A family man who practices martial arts, he has gone down from 300 lbs. to I think he said about 204 lbs. on his last post, which is an amazing example of perseverance.  His debut novel was The Virgin Surgeon and his first book in the Danger Kids Universe, The Twelve, with co-author DeQuan Foster, has one of the most compelling and vibrant cover designs I've seen in a while.  Go check them all out on Amazon.

There are many other authors, writers, poets, artists, and talented people I've met on Twitter that I can't list here today for reasons of space and the annoying ring of the dinner bell, but I'll feature them in subsequent posts, just because that's the sort of kind, compassionate asshole that I am.

COB Journal: My Writing Process

This is my first but hopefully not last blog hop slash whirlwind spin into the creative process.  I've read an entire bookcase of tomes about the writing process, some good, some meh, but all have helped orient me to the details of the craft.  Many thanks must go to fellow writer, Twitter colleague, and maven of cutting wit, Susan Kicklighter, for sending you crashing through my front window.

Susan's excellent and very entertaining insider view of her writing synthesis can be found at this Tumblr post.  Thank you, Suzie K!

1.  What are you working on right now?

Right right now, I'm finishing the last couple of scenes of a short story called Dead Air, Dying Sky, and if this was a Hollywood schmooze-fest in the back room of the Viper Pit, the high-concept pitch would be Zombie Pilots Over Tulsa.  Which was, in fact, its original title before I hijacked the narrative and took the whole thing in a different direction so that it became less Sharknado and more Jaws.  The title had to go, it was just too tonally inconsistent, and the last thing you want to do as a writer is mislead the audience, violate that implied contract.

My Own Private Oklahoma...

The story itself should be ready for prime time in about another week as I write this, fingers crossed.  The project began just a couple of weeks ago after two fellow writers, Teresa Hawk (her website is found here) and Eric Keys (his website here), basically Twitter-dared me to do it after hearing the title.  It was just one of those zombie-story brainstorms that took on a life of its own, no pun intended.  Sometimes you just have to follow that flash of inspiration down into the rabbit hole.  It can lead you to some pleasantly surprising places.

I'm really proud of this particular little number because I have never written at such a fast writing pace and come up with what I think are a very effective set of scenes which form a prequel to my upcoming novel whose title I am still mulling.

Besides that, I'm also in the middle of another short story and two novels which I am aiming to finish by the end of September or early October, in time for Halloween.  At my age, I have to push myself to keep writing and finish because the ideas just keep coming, and if I don't commit them to their digital homes, they'll go out into the street and start mugging people for cash and recreational weed.

2.  How does your work differ from others in the genre?

Funny thing.  Some time back I picked up a copy of The Secret History of Science Fiction, which is an anthology of authors whom people don't normally associate with sci fi, and one of the contributing writers, T. C. Boyle (who penned the excellent Descent of Man), said art "is supposed to be unconventional" and he wants "to be taken to a different place every time."  Now, in that same blurb, T. C. was kind of an asshole because he called genre readers "morons."  And I certainly don't mind calling him an asshole if he is not going to mind calling me a moron.  (Laughs).

I find it laughable that he didn't seem to realize, or didn't care, that he was being included in a book specifically marketed for genre readers.  But more seriously, he was addressing the general issue of predictability in fiction, which I don't think is a failing exclusive to any genre or literary work in the first place.  We've all sat on that couch staring at a plot twist on a TV show or reading a key exchange in a scene and said, "Oh come on, there was a better way to do that!"  It's that impulse to do it better which drives me and fuels that creative engine.  All of us have it.  We are all born with that instinct to improve ourselves and what we see and hear.  And when it comes to creative writing, some of us just want to actually put that baby out on the highway and drive it, and see where it will take us.  Because we know there is a better way to do that.

3.  Why do you write?

Wow, this one is tricky.  I used to write because I wanted to tell stories.  But the stories were very poor quality, maudlin in many cases, and the narrative was making all those fundamental errors that rookie writers make.  Shifting points of view within a single scene, collapsing and summarizing important scenes while dragging out minor ones, dialogue that meandered and didn't accomplish much of anything.  By all indications, I should have never been that creative sperm which found that egg called Writer's Digest.  But that magazine opened up my mind to my mistakes, made me read books about the craft of writing, excellent and everlasting-truth books like Gary Provost's Beyond Style: Mastering the Finer Points of Writing.  I did so much reading back then.

The first rule is we don't talk about writer's block.

But back then, I wanted to write in order to make money and become famous.  Which are still perfectly valid goals.  They just aren't mine anymore.  I highly recommend to any writer who will listen to me, go out and download a free copy of Michael Allen's The Truth About Writing (or I can e-mail the free PDF copy that the author himself provided to anyone who wants it).  It is a sobering look at not just the publishing industry, but one's chances of becoming rich and famous in that industry.  His special dose of reality took the pressure off my mind of becoming rich or famous, and to just concentrate on that bottom truth which was the essence of my creative impulse: I write for a sense of self-satisfaction.

And you know what?  My writing improved; my ideas improved.  I didn't care if a particular story would sell in a chosen category at the Barnes & Noble Superstore.  I don't care if anyone ever reads my stuff.  I want to feel that I was able to write what I wanted, when I wanted, and how I wanted.  And I feel that I've actually reached that point, the tip of that hierarchy of need that Abraham Maslow started calling "self-actualization."  Creatively, it is the most liberating feeling in the world, so Maslow must have been on to something.

And that's why I write.

4.  How does your writing process work?

These days the creative seizures are happening so often I've started timing them to see how far apart they are.  Everything is inspiring me and I am literally near my laptop as often as possible, and when I feel a flash of something, the germ of an idea, the notion of a narrative, the spinning web of language and imagery, I commit it to its digital realm.  It may be nothing more than one sentence or it may be several scenes of a story.  But if you are serious about writing, you absolutely positively cannot afford to ignore that creative voice, because if you do, it will start to go silent.  You don't lose it, you can never lose something like that, but it becomes harder to find if it goes silent for a long time.

Everything else is just scheduling and coordination: when you write, how long you write, where you write.  Those things all vary depending on everyone's lifestyle, so it doesn't behoove me, or them, to get into any of those details and start making recommendations as if suddenly someone out there is going to say, "Oh shit, so I need to write first thing in the morning!"

Don't get me wrong, I am reluctant to say that those habits are not important, because they are in a tangential fashion, but the most important thing is to commit to paper (or MS Word document, or Scrivener binder) those little hobgoblins of ideas that won't stop yammering at you.  They are the left-brain part of you trying to get out and expose their private parts to the world.  They are the part of you that makes you unique.  From those raw materials, you will hammer out your future novel, poem, short story, script, play, music video, etc.  Listening to and following an idea is the hardest element of writing to master, I think.  The words?  The words will come, subject then verb then direct object.  Don't stress out over style, it will come eventually.  Grammar is important, but only because bad grammar causes distraction, and you can't afford distraction when you are storytelling.

And one last thing: make sure you finish what you start.

**********************

Well that was fun, it's only almost one o'clock in the morning in my neck of the woods.  Again, thanks to Susan Kicklighter for this great chance to stretch my writer's legs and chat with the denizens of the digitalsphere.

The Five Ways James Patterson's Opinion Can Kiss My Ass

I was originally going to just call this piece the five ways James Patterson can kiss my ass.  But to be fair, I've never met the man and don't think I need to spew the anger that far.  He may well be a decent guy who tips the shoe-shine boy and volunteers at his Knights of Columbus chapter.

But his opinion is a different story altogether.

I like writers.  All kinds of writers.  I also like meeting all kinds of new people (i.e. non-writers, atheists, Fortune 500 CEOs, NASCAR fans, Satanists, and former supporters of Lyndon LaRouche), and meeting all of them at least from the relative safety of my computer monitor.  Which is why I rarely take critical stances against another writer's thoughts, feelings, inclinations, and so forth.

By Blaues Sofa [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

But a few days ago, noted bestselling author James Patterson essentially called out e-book writers and Amazon's Jeff Bezos for initiating "the biggest quality drought in the history of novel writing."  In an article posted on CNN's Opinion page here, Patterson bemoans the pricing schemes and market dilution of what was once, to him, a well-oiled machine.

See, there was a "long-term, sensitive ecosystem" in place.  Hardbacks are responsible for the agents getting their bigger office and heftier signing bonuses.  Everything from the copy editor's new PS4 to being able to finance junior's braces before basketball season is upon them, it's been on our shoulders all this time.  We just had no idea of this delicate framework.  And the balance must be restored to that "dusty old world" for the sake of all those mouths that need feeding and those escrows that need closing.

Anyone can read the article for themselves; I won't belabor or repeat the points he is making and the view he is implying, though it muddles and meanders at times.  Suffice it to say that e-book writers appear to be a pox on the land.  Patterson's view is that e-books have cheapened and commodified the market by being channeled into a "product category" in the "Everything Store."  (Seriously, if Bezos wanted it to be an "everything store," he wouldn't have called it Amazon; he would have called it Ozymandias Now, or maybe the Democratic National Convention).

He defends big publishing, saying that he's been leaning on them and they are getting better, and they even "quaintly" let their employees work half-day Fridays in the summer.

Half-day Fridays! There you go.  I'm sold, man, I'm ready to rip off these digital shackles, slap Jeff Bezos' bald head, and say "See ya, bub!"

Not so fast, Mr. Patterson.  Here are my five little bullets:

Retort # 1:  I started shopping at Amazon.com because they could ship a book to me overnight.  Obscure, hard-to-find titles that my local bookstore didn't stock and couldn't get for me for several days.  I dealt with snot-nosed punk-ass kids and snooty, self-righteous cashiers who didn't care about my reading preferences or that I needed a certain book as a gift for someone like right away, and if they couldn't figure out how to properly search their computer inventory, they just shook their head and said, "We don't carry it."

Amazon.com succeeded because this other sensitive ecosystem you hail didn't value me as a customer.  They were the only game in town for decades, and they knew it.  But even more perniciously, they acted like it.  Those days are gone now, and good riddance.

Rejoinder # 2:  I still shop online for books about half the time because these quaintly publishers encourage it themselves.  The in-store prices at a brick-and-mortar store for a current hardcover remain more expensive than the online sale prices.  And even if I make a purchase from that store's online website, they will still charge me more for an in-store transaction than for an online order of the same physical title (and that may or may not include free shipping, since that's how they sell annual "club" memberships).  All I can get out of the managers about this nasty turn of events is that it's the company's "market model."

Your publishing partners figured out soon after the Amazon.com explosion that they had better get ahead of the curve on digital publishing and online ordering.  They adapted to reality; so should you.

Repartee # 3:  Hachette is the greedy bully on the street that wants to upend the e-book pricing scheme on its head.  That's my view.  And for what?  For the ability to sell e-books for $14.99 and $19.99?  No one, and I mean no one, is going to pay $14.99 for an e-book.  Not when I can wait a year or two and find their physical presence in the remainder section for half that price anyway.  If the true goal of this was to drive the consumers away from e-books and go back to the hardcovers, then what a reprehensible way to alter consumer behavior.  I'm sure the marketing geniuses who majored in Price Theory and Applications are tripping over the rubber plants in the conference room to point fingers at each other on that one.

You also forgot to mention in your article that Hachette was already caught with its hand in the cookie jar to fix e-book prices at a higher ceiling, along with HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster.  Those interested can read more about the settlement here on the Publisher's Weekly website.  (And maybe you can name your next book "Along Came the Department of Justice.")

Riposte # 4:  I don't long for the days of condescending gatekeepers -- neither the agents who made me wait three months so they could reject my submission with a form letter, nor the publishers who increasingly rejected direct submissions and fed the cycle of agency.  Who knows how many promising writers succumbed to the grind and gave up the chase?

I don't long for the days when a publisher would flat out demand changes because the story didn't fit the market, or the genre.  Go read Michel Faber's excellent Under the Skin and tell me if it's a love story, a science fiction story, or a study of the human condition.  Because Faber has seamlessly intertwined all three into one with that fine work.  The big houses would have told Faber, "What's with all this driving around?  I'm thinking shopping malls, connect with the tweens, you know?"

J. A. Konrath is a successful writer and folk hero of indie self-publishing with an excellent blog at http://jakonrath.blogspot.com.  (Go check out his recent blog posts for his very incisive take on the whole Hachette controversy).  Konrath waded through twelve years -- twelve motherfucking years -- of almost 500 rejection slips for his first nine novels.  Hats off to Konrath, because I would have likely quit after the third or fourth novel.  Anyone who has invested serious time in a novel knows how much of your energy and commitment it uses up.  It's time not spent living with loved ones, pursuing happiness in other ways, and all that.  You would have us return to this system, Mr. Patterson, while you sipped cognac from a glass by the fireplace and listened to the dirty unwashed pounding at the gates?

By J. A. Konrath (self-timer) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Reply # 5:  My last thought is one that you referenced yourself, Mr. Patterson.  So you championed for "at least a half dozen titles" to your executives, did you?  Well, all due respect, I don't want to need a James Patterson to champion my book.  Because for every Kazuo Ishiguro who was recognized for his talent, there must have been a thousand others of equal talent who didn't have you cheering on the front lines, or even on the sidelines.  For every Remains of the Day, there were thousands of other works which deserved to be read, everything from That Summer in Newport to Zombie Biker Bitches Come Undone, which might not have been your cup of tea, but they might have found an audience nonetheless.

Just say it out loud already: You were part of an elite reading club, and you chose who got to tug at the brass ring next.  Those days, and that so-called ecosystem of yours, belong in the history books.  Why do you think Hollywood is mining the rich creative content of comic books and fiction that bends and challenges genres?  Is it because audiences want more stories about lawyers and reporters and retired FBI agents on the verge of breaking a shocking conspiracy?

I'm not an Amazon.com cheerleader.  I'm not saying that their system is perfect, or that it's the right fit for what all writers are looking for.  But while you want to compare revenue streams, remember that Jeff Bezos -- not Simon & Schuster or HarperCollins -- is the new kid on the block, and he achieved his revenue stream the way every entrepreneur does it: find out what the consumers want and deliver it.  Amazon.com challenged the traditional delivery systems of bookselling and made the old guard wince and take note, and then start scrambling to catch up.  And now?  Now the mudslinging, right?

So whatever, dude.  Every editor worth his or her salt readily agrees that there are no days numbered for traditional book publishing, only that consumer behavior has changed to accomodate e-books.  The bottom line is that money saved is money saved.  I don't question the business decisions of brick-and-mortar shops selling me all the stories that only fit into their categories, but I certainly don't let them talk me into spending extra dough just because they're offering free WiFi in their Starbucks section, and I won't let a multi-billion-dollar media conglomerate tell me that $14.99 e-books are the new black.

Edge of Tomorrow and the Fifty Shades of Time

Anyone writing science fiction has likely already run into two vexing problems: gravity aboard interstellar ships (because there is none according to our current science); and theories of how to go back in time -- troublesome at best, even if theoretically possible according to the great physicist Albert Einstein.

Photo courtesy NASA image archives

So the latter came to mind as I watched Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt in the latest box-office film Edge of Tomorrow.  After the credits started their lazy scroll, I found myself thinking about the ramifications of what the film's central conceit was suggesting.  Now, if you haven't seen the movie yet, here is where you need to disembark, because I am venturing deep into spoiler territory now.  Okay?  We're all good?  All right.  You have been warned.

The movie has Cruise's character, Major Bill Cage, repeating the final hours (why only hours, though?) of his death before he is killed by alien invaders and ends up covered in weird blue alien blood that mixes with his human blood.  See, the alien blood contains some time-traveling properties that allow Cage to relive the past, over and over, Groundhog Day-style, and thus empowers him, and anyone he can convince to join him in his efforts, to tweak future conditions so that the outcome is different in each newly relived reality.

This is the grand attraction of the plot: imagine being able to shuttle back and forth in time to a particular moment, just to see how a specific scenario will play out.  Great special effects take a front seat in this movie, but unfortunately the initial characterizations limit the experience and the film comes off as a series of been-there, seen-that setpiece props: the nervous, untested combat virgin; the seasoned, tough-as-nails veteran; the jaded and unwelcoming infantry squad.  We've seen those story elements before, and to quote the eminent editor and writer Gardner Dozois, that's usually the problem with a majority of science fiction fare.

Now, there's a functional limit to Cage's time-travel ability -- first he has to die, and then he returns to the moments roughly 12 hours prior to his very first combat mission.  The alien hive mind, meanwhile, has the ability to detect Cage's time-tripping jaunts and will eventually zero in on his ass and smoke him before he can do any lasting damage.  Cage is summarily told by Blunt's character, Sergeant Vrataski, that when he stops seeing "visions" of the alien hive, he then loses the ability to reset his personal time-loop, and his next dance with death will be his last.  This portion of the story holds more originality, but it is never fully explained and becomes the pea under the mattress that threatens to unhinge the whole experience.

I'm leaving out a lot of plot details but you get the essential drift of the story: Cage can reset time when he dies and alter future conditions to bring about a different outcome, one that prolongs or even avoids his death.  So many questions flew out of my brain when I pondered the idea.  The main problem, however, is the central-timeline theory, that there is a single, universal time-flow and in changing it, everyone in our known plane of reality is affected.  This is different from what I see as more popular versions of time; namely, that each timeline can have its own universe based on the outcomes.  It certainly makes for more entertaining fiction, anyway.

Which outcomes, though?  And if we have only one outcome, for an alien species to be able to use time travel against us, wouldn't they have the ability to see far into the future and prevent Cage's meddling in the first place?  Would time even be so delicately arranged in this way, subject to the most minor tamperings?  I mean, seriously, one dude on one planet in one solar system can cause this kind of havoc to the universal time-stream?  Physicists can probably assert with authority that the universe's timeline behaves according to rigid rules; otherwise, what a pushover time would turn out to be.

But back to the movie.  Cage is not alone in his efforts to stop the time-hopping aliens with some time-hopping of his own.  Soon after getting zapped back in time, he again sees the Angel of Verdun still alive, getting PR'd to death as the Full Metal Bitch (a nod to Stanley Kubrick's classic war movie Full Metal Jacket).  Blunt's character, Sergeant Rita Vrataski, typifies the popular subgenre of the physically fit female ass-kicker, and Blunt's later scenes serve to breathe some three-dimensional life into what starts off as a character archetype.  Blunt's facial expressions and poise make her character believable, however, which is honestly an amazing transformation considering her prior work as the snooty personal assistant of her breakout role in The Devil Wears Prada.  In this movie, she essentially occupies the role of Cage's mentor and combat instructor, and the scenes where she repeatedly executes Cage to reset the time and get him into shape for the mission of their lives are among the most entertaining of the entire film.

I didn't get to read the book, which was written by Hiroshi Sakurazaka and which was the source for the film.  I would like to imagine that there are some more complex ideas in the book that didn't translate to the big screen for the usual reasons of running time and the producers' or director's preferences for final cut.  However, Sakurazaka's novel was written for the Japanese young adult market in what Japanese publishing calls a wasei-eigo, or "light novel" in Western parlance, and in that market it is pretty much the decedent of pulp fiction in the 40,000- to 50,000-word range.  So maybe the whole time thing wasn't intended to be a fully developed concept in the first place.  If accurate, that is a shame.

And that is what hamstrings the film.  One comes away with the sense that director Doug Liman intended to elevate this movie with deeper meaning which in the end just wasn't there.  Why did the aliens choose to attack Europe first?  Why do they want Earth in the first place?  Are the attacking aliens merely an invading infantry force with a hierarchy of higher-level aliens directing them from elsewhere, or are they just a massive enclave of extraterrestrial Huns?  So what happens when an alien dies?  Whose time loop are we resetting there, and wouldn't that alone suggest a multiverse rather than a universe for the purposes of time?  And seriously, what kind of military service are the major characters in that allows them to wear their hair past regulation length, despite the haircuts of their surrounding cast?  (OK, that last one is a pet peeve).

The idea as presented in Edge of Tomorrow serves as a decent plot device, but without answers to some pretty basic "wait a minute" questions, it sort of bangs its head on the ceiling of the above musings and limits its storytelling power.  Science fiction is about blowing your mind away with new ideas that make you look at the world with a different perspective.  The first science fiction stories were mechanisms that transported us to a different time and place in order to look back at the present and effectively criticize the social and political strictures of the day.  Sometimes asking a question is enough, but when it sprouts more questions that only exist to confound rather that coax a happy contemplation, the story loses some steam.  In the case of this movie, I was certainly entertained but not exactly blown away by it.

There is a suggestion in the movie that the size of the alien creatures with this time-travel blood have an effect on the temporal distance that this time-loop reset can achieve, but it is only a hint.  When Cage finally manages to kill the hive-brain (think of it as an alien regional headquarters), he gets his reset moment pushed all the way back to two days before his combat drop, and well ahead of his meeting with General Brigham, which is where his predicament started in the first place.  It's not really a criticism, since I enjoyed the movie, but it raises larger questions that don't get answers.  I just wished there had been more meat in the whole time-travel sandwich than this film offered.  Liman already knows how to choreograph his set-pieces to build suspense and drive the story forward, and these traits are on full display in this movie, with action creating the momentum that story logic tends to drag down if you think about it too much.

But for us creative types, a final question: how much time (no pun intended) should a writer invest in working out his/her own theory of time, in those stories where time travel is used?  Want to know how bad it gets?  Google up theories of time and get into the whole A-theory and B-theory shit, and it will make your head spin.  Maybe, like Cage in the movie, this is all we can afford to know right now.  Whatever "now" is, of course.

It's All Good: Writing and Designing

Ten years ago, the world was different.  E-book publishing hadn't made that peculiar splash yet, Amazon hadn't produced the Kindle, and the New York publishing giants were still driving the market and pushing their stable of favorites.  The new breed of up-and-comers wasn't here yet, the J.A. Konraths and whoever else that found the keys to the e-publishing kingdoms (there are many kingdoms now, not just one -- another big secret).

Today there is literally nothing stopping you, or anyone, from putting out a book on Amazon or Smashwords or through any book packaging service.  Those poems you used to write to your dog and kept hidden in a drawer all these years?  Get them out there if you like.  Those scribblings on white construction paper that your daughter thought would make a great illustrated children's book?  Go for it.  Gone are the gatekeepers, that elite priesthood of publishers and agents who demanded and paid for the next big hit, and when that big hit came they paid and demanded more of the same.  Vampires are big?  Give us more of those dashing, fanged bloodsuckers.  Books about witches are delivering audiences to advertisers?  Put a broomstick on that cover, quick.  Dan Brown wrote The Da Vinci Code and today, years later, at the bookstore I found at least ten books that seem to cover the same story elements (secret societies, shady history, globe-trotting adventurers).

City Lights Books in San Francisco
Photo credit: LandsEnd

The problem when you self-publish is that your marketing team is gone.  Your promotion guys moved to Madison Avenue, your ad department was fired, and that nice lady who arranged your book tours has been downsized and she had to take a job in the suburbs working for a mid-sized accounting firm or an insurance company.  Hell, maybe she finally got her real estate license and now she's showing houses.  The point is you are on your own.

The new writer fresh on the scene may bemoan this.  After all, our writing forebears had but to apply the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair, as Ernest Hemingway once passed on as advice.  We had our Underwoods and Remingtons and IBM Selectric IIIs with ball elements (mine was a nice Brother AX-15 from Montgomery Ward with a daisy wheel cartridge ((Thanks Mom and Dad!)).  Beyond the basic equipment, there was the craft itself to learn.  Most of us early writers simply learned by reading.  I didn't pick up books on techniques until I was about fourteen or fifteen years old, and it took me even longer to turn sound advice into solid practice.

But in the maddening new digitalsphere we occupy, the modern (self-published) writer must contend with (1) learning the craft, (2) writing the book/short story/poetry, (3) acquiring a design for the cover, (4) acquiring rights to any and all images, photos or illustrations used in the work, (5) formatting the work for the e-book markets, and last but assuredly not least, (6) marketing the product.  It was hard enough in the old days to churn out narrative on a consistent basis.  The new digitalsphere demands much more of individual writers than just a good yarn.

It's all good, though, because ultimately it means that, save for the first public postings about "Hast Thou Seen Thy Queen's Pig?" rolled off the Gutenberg presses, writers are in complete control of their product more than at any other time in history.  Don't like the cover?  Make a new one (or pay for another one).  Want to put a circus strongman milking a goat into the middle of a bank robbery scene?  Your call.

You can even swap out content or add new material after your work has sallied forth and hiked up its digital skirt, a practice reminiscent of the halcyon days of science fiction magazines like Astounding, where short stories which first appeared there later made the transition to novel length with some tweaking.  Damon Knight criticized A. E. Van Vogt for doing so with his story The World of null-A, although to be honest, Knight didn't like Van Vogt as a writer all that much to begin with.  But the practice of modifying already published works exists even today.  Lawrence Block wrote in his fiction column for Writer's Digest many years ago about his short story in Playboy titled "When the Sacred Ginmill Closes," and how he ultimately turned it into a longer novel version of the same name (a great story too, by the way).  You are free to try this yourself these days.  You are the only editor now, the final approval department, the ultimate critic.  The final judgements will come from your readership.

All this control goes out the window the moment you sign with an established publisher, of course.  But by then you've hit the big time, you can afford to take a little break and concentrate on the craft of writing and let someone else worry about the promotional push.  You may retain the habit of being hands-on and you may or may not get it at that point.  You may ask for and not get book jacket approval written into your publishing contract, but the contract in itself is the brass ring.  You'll be a made author then.  And you'll have an entirely new caste of authors to contend with for sales and shelf space in brick-and-mortar bookstores (themselves a vanishing species).

But for now, you're not.  You toil away at it all: story elements, narrative content, book presentation, scouring for public-domain images for your book cover, or for a book cover designer who won't break your bank, esoteric treatises on HTML, cascading style sheets, wondering if you should get Adobe InDesign, the works.  You open up tabs for the Smashwords website and forget to close them.  You send emails to bloggers asking for reviews, you get a Facebook author page, you get Twitter even though you have no clue how to even start a Twitter promo.

You do it all because you will be in complete control.  Enjoy it now, because as soon as you start making some real money off your work, you will see that control start to fade.

Writing and Perseverance: Martin Cruz Smith

I've been a fan of Martin Cruz Smith's novels for a long time.  Nightwing, Wolves Eat Dogs, Stalin's Ghost, Three Stations.  He just gets better and better with each novel, and his stories are compelling and powerful.  And I'd go so far as to say that as a writer, Smith has achieved that elusive zenith -- the ability to write what he wants, how he wants, whenever he wants.

Of course, not every practitioner of the trade will consider that to be the watermark for success.  As writers, that definition is wholly self-styled anyway, and what the writer determines of it depends on a conglomeration of factors, attitudes, life-learning conclusions, etc.  But when I read Polar Star, Smith's follow-up to Gorky Park, I was spellbound by his eye for selective detail and the claustrophobic sense of place.  It was a locked-room mystery on a Russian factory ship, and at the time that it was written, I could think of few real-world scenarios so daunting as that one.  Smith pulled it off in spades.

To read Smith's books, especially his historical thrillers, is to step into the living past, to revel in the little details, and to meet characters with depth and clarity.  It's watching a master blacksmith toiling at his trade with obvious artistry.  Some of that talent must have to do with the fact that Smith used to sketch scenes, to look at a place that he was researching with a painter's eye.

Martin Cruz Smith at 2011 Left Coast Crime convention
Photo credit: Martin Cruz Smith/Mark Coggins

Here I have to pause:  When I was writing this the first time, the sentence that started this paragraph was: "I don't mean to suggest that writing comes easily to Smith, although by now he probably feels a natural fluidity to his narrative drive."  In November 2013, however, Smith revealed that he had been adapting to writing with Parkinson's disease, with which he had been diagnosed over ten years ago.  It's incredible to consider that despite such challenges, Smith presses on with dedication and guts.  According to various articles, he also receives incredible support from his wife, both professional and personal.  My admiration for these people is huge.

In a series of three early interviews, which for some inexplicable reason I was able to find and download as MP3s, Smith revealed that he spent many years honing his craft under various pen names for different publishers.  By the time his breakout novel, Nightwing, came around, he was already a veteran storyteller.  And those novels were before his debut story featuring the Moscow investigator Arkady Renko in the unique international thriller, Gorky Park.  Seeing him develop his writing skill to such fine quality over the years has been a real pleasure for his legion of readers, myself included.

His latest novel, Tatiana, does not disappoint.  The titular character is a journalist enmeshed in political intrigue which culminates in her murder, one that the government would rather not investigate with great thoroughness.  In this volume are characters who have grown with the fans of Arkady Renko's exploits: his blunt, boorish partner, Victor Orlov; his apathetic boss, and his estranged adopted son, Zhenya.  All of these recurring characters occupy an orbit that gives Arkady his momentum to see a case to its conclusion, though often these characters don't necessarily appreciate the role they play in each other's lives and motivations.

To any fan, by now these characters are like an extended family of Arkady's.  The character is not romantic, trapped instead in a job that no one wants him to do, viewing his existence through a haze of melancholy cynicism, and witnessing events bleak enough that occasionally he considers suicide (in the book Havana Bay, he actually tried it).  He is not quite an anti-hero so much as a non-hero, an everyman who searches his sense of common decency and stays alive by wits and guile rather than by gun and strong-arm.

Which isn't to say Arkady Renko is a weakling.  The collective fight scenes across various novels have depicted him using his police training to subdue the ordinary foe, although it's the extraordinary ones who manage to kick his ass every once in a while.  He struggles, he pushes back, he falls down and gets back up.  Dogged resilience is the expression that comes to mind when thinking about the character of Arkady Renko.  And that stubbornness just draws us deeper into that character's circle.

Perhaps it's a resilience shared by character and creator alike.  And maybe it's a resilience that we can all try to emulate when we stare at the blank page and think that writing the next word is the hardest thing to do.  There are harder things out there still, and Smith has learned to overcome even those.