Thrillergal

Thrillerguy has recently read several thrillers written by women. This is fairly rare, maybe three or four out of a hundred are written by women. Usually these books are indistinguishable from those written by men. A good example of the latter is the work of Stella Rimington who was the first female director of Britain's MI5. After retirement, she's written three thrillers, perfectly good books one supposes, though TG has only read and reviewed the second, Secret Asset. The point is, this book, and most of the other thrillers written by women, could just as easily been written by men. Even though the protagonist is usually a woman.

Not so Intelligence, a debut effort by Susan Hasler. Hasler went to work for the CIA in 1983 and stayed for 21 years. This makes her an insider, and as any reader of this blog knows, TG hates (usually) insider writers. Except in Hasler's case. Somehow, against all odds, she's that complete rarity: a female writer working a traditionally male field who not only dominates the traditional tropes but is able to put a female slant on the writing and story that makes it different from that of the usual male vantage point. And different in a good way. Hasler uses her insider knowledge in a way TG has never read in any other CIA thriller. She uses terms and categories that sound absolutely authentic, even though TG (whose knowledge of the genre is encyclopedic) was taken by surprise. This is surely the way the CIA is organized, the way they speak, the way they think. If it isn't, TG doesn't want to hear about it. TG is a believer in Susan Hasler's world.

Why aren't there more thrillers written with this special slant? Not the insider terminology, but the insider knowledge of being a woman. Books, thrillers that are written from a female POV. Because TG feels that these days that anyone who still thinks that men and women are essentially alike is a moron. Grow up. The sixties, (though oh how TG loved the Sixties) are over. TG says read Susan Hasler's Intelligence because it's good and it's different. In a world of fiction where one book seeks to copy another, any other successful book in the hope that that book will then become successful, is a world that TG is heartily sick of. (of which TG is heartily sick.) Please, no more Dan Brown copies. No more CIA thrillers just like all the other CIA thrillers. Let's have more women being smart, being tough, being women for Christ's sake. And all that implies.

As always, TG will try and contact Susan Hasler for a signed copy of Intelligence, one that will go this time to the first woman commenter. And if there are no women commenters, then a lucky guy will get the book. Trust me, this is good stuff.

The Killer

Back when Thriller Guy was writing movie scripts he read an interesting piece of advice on how to craft a good action/adventure film. Scripts are short (each page equals one minute of screen time, hence around 100 to 120 pages) and they are traditionally divided up into three acts. To understand this soon-to-be-revealed piece of advice, you should know the screenwriting definition of the word “whammie.” A whammie is anything exciting, usually an explosion, car chase, gunfight, anything that gets the viewer's blood pumping. Here's the advice on how to structure your script:

Act One: Whammies.

Act Two: More Whammies.

Act Three: All Whammies.

With his recently published The Killers, Tom Hinshelwood has written a thriller that is all whammies.

The primary elements are not all that unusual – a CIA traitor, hired killer, beautiful agency operative, Russian spies, and an espionage coup of invaluable proportion, betrayals and double crosses – but what he does with them is a steely, joy to read: a thriller that kicks ass from beginning to end without any sag in the middle, no fussy romantic entanglements, no cliched backstory that attempts to explain the psychological origins behind the ongoing mayhem. This book slams into gear from the first pages and roars along till it smashes into the end. Terrific.

Victor is a hired killer who is coldly efficient. He's doing a hit on a Latvian national, killing the man and retrieving a small flash drive. When Victor heads back to his hotel he has to fight his way through a gang that suddenly attacks him. From then on legions of other hit men try to take his life, eventually culminating in an assassins duel between Victor and another hired killer, Reed, who may or may not be his equal.

There's a scene soon after Reed is introduced where he is attacked, randomly, by a gang of street punks. Thriller Guy loves these scenes which are often found in thrillers. The street gang shows up, hones in on the professional, and you just know what is going to happen. Here, the leader of the punks demands that Reed hand over his wallet, phone and watch:

     Reed's expression remained blank. “Why?”

     “Say what?”

     In that moment when confusion combined with anxiety, Reed grabbed the outstretched arm before him, wrapping his left hand around the wrist and pulling the kid forward sharply, directing the gun away to the side. He took hold of the kid's triceps with his free hand and twisted the wrist in his grip, locking the arm. He wrenched it downward, hard – against the joint – snapping the arm at the elbow and into an inverted V.

     The gun clattered on the asphalt and the awful wail momentarily stunned the others. Reed released the wrist and the kid collapsed. Among the screams he managed to find his voice.

     “FUCKING KILL HIM.”

     Reed sprang forward toward the other drawn gun, knocked the weapon aside as it was raised to fire, using his forward impetus to multiply the force of the elbow he sent into the kid's face. His head snapped backward, blood splashing from his mouth and the kid went down heavy, out cold, jaw broken.

     The other youth armed with a gun backed off, palms showing, eyes wide, head shaking. Reed ignored him, heard the click of a switchblade opening, turned, sidestepped as his attacker lunged and overextended himself into empty air, stumbling, completely off balance, arms flailing.

     The next one came from behind, his feet scraping on the ground. Reed whipped round, threw the edge of his hand into the guy's throat. He fell down convulsing.

     Two more attacked at the same time, one wielding a hunting knife with a four-inch blade, the other a crowbar. The crowbar came at him first, from the left, swinging for his head. Reed caught it and the attacker's hand together, redirected it downward, using the kid's momentum against him to twist the bar from his fingers and into Reed's own.

     He smashed an elbow into the youth's side, knocking him backward, as the youth gasped, ribs cracked. Reed followed through with the crowbar, backhanding it into the side of his attacker's skull. Blood splashed on faces in the crowd.

     The hunting knife passed within inches of Reed's face, a wild swing, clumsy. Reed dodged backward, waiting for the next attack, used his forearm as a shield to turn the blade aside and the crowbar to sweep his attacker's feet out from under him and drove it down into the kid's face, exploding his nose across his cheeks.

     The small youth with the switchblade recovered and yelled as he attacked again, a frenzied stab. Reed dodged, invited another attack, and brought the crowbar down hard on the youth's exposed arm, shattering bones. He screamed and dropped the knife, wrist and hand hanging limply from mid-forearm. Reed reversed his grip on the crowbar, swung it upward, cracking the youth under the jaw, the force lifting him off his feet and dropping him back to the ground in a silent heap.

     It was all over in less than seven seconds.

This is pretty much just a throwaway scene, tossed in for the sheer, exuberant love of havoc. Hinshelwood cranks this stuff out by the ream, making it look easy when TG can assure all you writers, published and unpublished, out there, it isn't. It's damn hard to do a few times, much less over and over the course of the entire book. And without repeating himself, without, dare I say it, becoming gratuitous. Whenever an ass kicking comes, it is always well deserved and functions to move the plot forward. The point of the above scene: don't screw around with Reed. If you do he will kill you.

TG will contact Hinshelwood and see if he'll donate a signed book to the first one of TG's readers who requests a copy. Maybe TG will do a small interview and find out where the man learned to write and to kick butt. So let TG know if you want a copy. And remember, all you Thriller Writers:

Whammies.

In the end, it's all about the whammies.

Into the Bottle, Once Again

An aside: In the last two weeks Thriller Guy has read and reviewed three books with some form of the word “betrayal” in the title. Enough, publishers, let's use a little imagination!

OK, back to the topic under discussion.
When TG was just growing into manhood, his father took him aside to offer the following advice. “There are two rules our family has about drinking: 1. We take our iced tea without sugar;  2. We drink our liquor straight. Now get the hell out of here.”

Damn good advice; words of wisdom that TG has followed down these many long years. Old dad drank scotch, so that's what TG learned on, as it was the only liquor in the house to steal. TG and his pals would pour off some of whatever booze their parents had, not enough for it to be immediately noticeable, and then meet up of an evening in the city park where we would dump it all into one bottle (that would be scotch, sweet wine, bourbon, rye or anything else, all mixed together) and drink it until we were pretty high; then we would shoot each other with guns. My friend Steve Widemeyer had a derringer he stole from his father. It was a .30 caliber, but Steve found if you loaded it with a .22 shell with a matchstick jammed under it, the gun would fire just fine. We'd get sort of drunk and then Steve would shout “Run!” and everyone would take off in all directions and he'd shoot one of us. The bullet came out kind of rattling around at less than full speed, but it would hit you in the back and it would hurt like hell. How's that for stupid?

There is a current rage in TG's writers group, Squatting Toad, (see earlier entry about this group) for drinking chocolate vodka. Yes, it tastes good, but TG feels that this is less than a manly drink, maybe OK for mystery writers and hack poets, but Thriller Writers? No. Back when TG was with the “Boats” if that was your drink of choice you'd have gone to bed in your rack and awakened head-first in the latrine, dumped there by your buddies. And TG's daddy would have approved. Those boys drank beer and whiskey and didn't mix candy bars into the equation.

TG does love a great scotch and the newish single malt bourbons in this country are excellent libations. But until some astute publisher decides to pick up one of TG's novels currently being flacked by his agent, (those interested can contact TG through his alter ego or his first-class, really smart, very cool agent.) TG will have to stick to gin. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Gin has a long and esteemed pedigree and in eighteenth century England enjoyed a period of popularity that threatened to, at least according to the government, destroy society, at least among the lower classes. In 1743 the people of England were drinking 2.2 gallons of gin per head. Contrast that with American drinking of all spirits at .73 gallons per capita. (2007 data) We've become a nation of namby-pamby teetotalers. Wake up, America. For an interesting look at the 18^th Century gin craze, click here.

TG believes, and this is after years of dedicated research, that the finest gin in the world, at least that's easily available in this country, is Hendricks. TG has long been a Tanqueray man, but after recently working his way through a giant bottle of Hendricks he now declares it his favorite. The problem is, it's expensive. Once this current bottle is empty (it was a birthday present from TG's excellent son) it's back to the cheap stuff. TG feels that it's easy to buy a superior product of anything if you throw enough money at it, but the real trick is finding something inexpensive that still remains of real value. So, as promised in an earlier blog, (insert drum roll) the winner of the Best Cheap Gin In America is... Burnett's. It's hard to get much, or any cheaper, than this gin, and yet the quality is high. Or at least high enough. It's usually found on the bottom shelf of your local liquor store, down with the real rot gut, in the clear green bottle. The convenient plastic bottle is just fine; when it slips out of your drunken grasp there's no chance of breakage. It runs around $15.00 or less for a half gallon, which makes it affordable to writers everywhere.

Give it a try. In the spirit of hewing to some modicum of responsibility, TG asks once again that you drink heavily only when you are in the throes of Writer Hell, unable to solve that difficult plot problem, title search, structural conundrum or any other problemo that faces real writers every time they sit down at the word machine. See the entry directly below for instructions on that particular process.

So how about it all you Real Writers out there? Any suggestions on types of or specific brands of liquor employed either for general enjoyment or particularly in the service of solving stubborn writerly problems? TG is here to learn.

Alcohol and the Writer, Part Two

The above photo was taken by Thriller Guy's daughter as she and TG were tucked into the Lee Street Lounge in Charleston, WV, a cozy neighborhood bar suggested by TG's brother-in-law, Francis Fisher.

Part Two.

One of the troubles with blogs is they live life backwards. Thriller Guy is presently caught in the throes of explaining why drinking (alcohol) can be helpful to your writing. So if you are new to the blog, or at least new to this thread, take the time and read the entry directly below this one. The rest of us will wait while you do so. (Sound of fingers drumming impatiently on tabletop.) OK, TG is tired of waiting any longer.

Lawrence Kasdan, the screenwriter, (Body Heat, The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark) once said, “Being a writer is like having homework for the rest of your life.” Absolutely true. It is one hell of a lot of work. Writing is much more (though civilians don't understand this) than just putting a story down on paper. The structure of what one is attempting to write is at least as important as the characters, the voice is all important, the damn title is crucial. As you work your way through a 500 page manuscript, the plot must, and will, shift and break out in directions you never envisioned, at least at the beginning. There are scores, no, hundreds of decisions to be made and problems that have to be solved along the way. And no one is there to help you work through them. You're on your own, Bunky, so shut up and start writing.

But first, maybe it's time for a drink.

Here's TG's take on the situation: A writer's mind never stops working, (remember having homework for the rest of your life?) at least while you are actively banging away on a novel or even thinking up a novel. When TG is immersed in the process, he is up and down at least a couple of times every night, getting out of bed to write down stray bits of prose or solutions to problems that have arisen during the day. But sometimes TG gets stuck, and no matter how hard he thinks, he can't come up with an answer. Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) used to say that whenever he would finish writing a novel, he was empty. That he could not write another word. He had no ideas about what he would write next, no creative thoughts whatsoever. But if he waited a night, a day, a week, the “well” (his creativity) would fill back up and before he knew it, he was back working on his next project. TG has found, over the years, that sometimes the solution to thornier problems involves just STOPPING his brain from working, taking a break from the constant barrage of problem-solving and word creation. At least for one night. And the best way to do this, at least for TG, is by drinking. (Twain was a great drinker. He left his wife written instructions that she was to, everyday without fail, put a shot glass filled with whiskey on his bathroom sink so that in the morning he could brush his teeth then down the shot of whiskey so his day would start out in the right direction. This is not something TG has ever tried, but, the man was one of our greatest writers. Maybe he was on to something.)

Sigh. TG is going to get so much grief from suggesting this problem-solving method. Let's all try and remember such drunks such as John Cheever, Dylan Thomas, Raymond Carver, Edgar Allen Poe, Ernest Hemingway and a host of others, all alcoholic, all doomed by their alcoholism at least to some degree. For more on the perils of the bottle, go to this article, which is titled Writers and Alcohol and appeared some years ago in The Washington Post. It contains the authoritative statement, “ More writers die of cirrosis of the liver, a disease associated with alcoholism, than people in other occupations.” so Be Warned. Please, do not take TG's suggestions here as license to drink to excess, to sink into the slough of alcoholism thinking you are just working out your plot. Use your head, people.

Here's the deal: say you've got a problem that you can't figure out – your character has been captured by an evil CEO and Our Hero is imprisoned in a laboratory where the resident mad scientist and his minions are threatening to suck the very essence out of his body. (Think Neo in The Matrix) How is Our Hero going to escape? TG can tell you from long experience, if you don't know how to get your man (or woman) out of this pickle when you head into this scene, the answer is probably not going to just jump into your head. Trying to hammer out a solution to a problem like this can drive you nuts. What you need to do is to stop trying to figure out the answer, and let your subconscious come up with a solution. To do this you need to stop your brain from working so hard, to let the well fill up, by itself. Send the kiddies off to bed (if there are any kiddies) kiss the wife goodnight, (if there is a wife) pour yourself a stiff drink and settle into your chair. Then have a couple of more drinks. You can noodle away at the problem while you're sitting there, but only in a general way. Drink too much, stagger off to bed, and go to sleep. And if you're lucky, the next morning, when you go back to work, the answer will pop into your head. Almost unbidden. Ditto if you're trying to come up with a title, solve a plot problem, searching for a “voice” to tell your story, a structure on which to build your novel. You need to stop trying to sove the problem, and let your writer's brain solve the conundrum on its own. This is actually one of the few thrilling moments when being a writer seems almost like magic.

So...when the Little Ones gather at TG's knee and ask such questions as, “Please, sir, I don't know how my story is going to end, how will I ever know?' TG tells them, relax, just write your book, the answer will come if you just let it alone, if you just stop trying so hard. And if it doesn't, have a drink. Or two, or more. And it will come to you as if in a dream.

Trust me.

Stay tuned for Alcohol, Part Three.

And here's another photo of the Lee Street Lounge.

When You Find Yourself in Times of Trouble...Alcohol, Drinking and the Siren Song

Part One

When the Little Ones gather around Thriller Guys' knees, book proposals and sample chapters clutched in their tiny fists, one of their oft repeated questions is, “Tell us, TG, what do you do when you come face to face with one of any number of writing problems such as conjuring up with a new idea for a book, solving a particularly thorny plot problem, figuring out how a book is going to end, or thinking up a great title?” Well, Little Ones, after 30 years in the business TG is no stranger to any and all of these difficulties, and more, plenty more. When these questions rear their ugly heads, TG turns to that Well of Inspiration, the Healing Waters of Creation, his Constant Companion, the Writer's Best Friend:

Gin.

“Why gin, sir? Why not scotch or good burbon whisky?”

Because it's cheap, Little Ones, and it gets the job done. Thriller Guy has lots of problems, not just writing difficulties, and sometimes these problems require large quantities of alcohol for their solution. TG has lots of writer friends and all of them drink and most of them drink too much, though that particular category gets a little fuzzy, especially after a few hours in one's favorite watering hole. The old cliché of the tortured writer as a drunk has been around for millennia for good reason, or rather a number of very good reasons. Let TG explain the pleasures, percentages and pitfalls of alcohol and how you can use its amazing qualities to further your writing career.

Some poor reasons writers drink:

Writers drink to ease the pain of life. Sorry, TG thinks that's a crappy excuse. TG has never been one to find that getting drunk ever made his general life existence any better. And it never allowed him to forget, even while in his cups, that his advances were too low, he was driving a beat-up car, the next tuition payment was coming up and the nineteenth publisher just turned down his latest novel. If you drink to wipe such difficulties from your mind, you're probably already a drunk or on your way to being one and TG can't help you. We have to put that reason up on the Alcohol Abuse shelf.

Writers are Creative Types, more susceptible to the slings and arrows of normal existence and need the numbing effects of alcohol to ease what normal folk endure without complaint. Please, writers are certainly creative, but it's just this sort of mollycoddling that produces all that precious writing from effete types who can never finish a novel, who refer to their work as their “craft” and who are forever yammering on and on about the “joys” of writing. TG says shut your pie holes and get to work like the rest of us real writers. Or go get drunk, but do it on the other side of the barroom because TG does not want to hear your pitiful mewlings.

On the other hand, some pretty good reasons writers drink:

Writers like to get together to bitch about the Writing Life. Misery loves company. In the course of these sessions, after a certain level of inebriation has been reached, a number of Great Ideas will be hatched, scribbled down on bar napkins and coasters. The next day these notes will reveal valuable ideas that can be mined for new books. Not. (As the kids used to say.) It hardly ever turns out any of the ideas are worth anything, even if you can decipher them. Bar ideas are just that, best hatched in the bar and left unrecorded. Better to fondly half remember the next day what was surely a fabulous million dollar idea than actually see written down what, in the cold harsh light of day, would never work in a million years and would take far too much effort anyway.

Congratulations, you've just made it through another day of writing. After a hard day of putting fingers to keyboard and cranking out an honest number of pages (at least two, five is better) it feels good to open up a bottle of the good stuff and have a satisfying, congratulatory tipple. Most regular people will never understand why this seemingly small output for such painful amount of labor amounts to anything in the real world, and it probably doesn't, but sometimes the work is good and no amount of gainsaying and ridicule will change that fact. Go ahead, have a drink of the good stuff. Your family may not understand, but we, your fellow scribes, do. Cheers.

Go ahead, you deserve it. Let's say you've just spent, oh, maybe a year writing a crafty thriller that's ripped from todays' headlines, one that your wife and friends agree could be your big breakthrough. You've sent it off to a publisher, or rather your agent has and after a couple of months you receive that classic reply, “We think this is an excellent story, and that (fill in your name) is a whale of a storyteller, but it just isn't quite right for us. We have no doubt that you will easily place it elsewhere.” Translation: It sucks. Time to hit the gin bottle! Go ahead, brother. You won't give up. The book will go somewhere new, continue to make its rounds, but TG understands your pain. Drink up.

Some really good reasons writers drink:

It seems that TG has run out of room in this installment. Stay tuned for Part Two, when TG will explain how to harness the powers of Gin or other spirits for the good of your writing, unveil the name of the Best Really Cheap Gin in the World, and put up the recipe for his own invention, The Gin Salad: A healthful meal in a glass.

TG would really be remiss if he didn't tack on a health advisory to the entry: Beware the seductive qualities of alcohol. Addiction has ridden far better writers than TG into the hell of alcoholism.

On that note, here's a Margaret Atwood poem titled Siren Song.

http://www.wayward-volvo.org/xanthe/atwood.html

Hurtin' Heroes

All right, quick quiz: who's the prolific, (180 books) manly, adventurer/author pictured above? If you guessed Thriller Guy you're forgiven, it's an understandable mistake, but you're wrong. That's Lester Dent, author of the Doc Savage series, books that were also made into a radio show, movies and comic books. And which are still available today.

TG recently finished reading and reviewing an excellent thriller (sorry, contractually I cannot name this book for several months), where the hero had by page 67 been badly beaten up three times, stabbed and generally mistreated by friend and foe alike. After finishing the book, TG realized that these days most heroes are getting off pretty light when it comes to being on the receiving end of physical mayhem. Sure, there are exceptions like Ray Banks' characters and a few others, but most big-name authors are letting their guys off easy. They might pick up a flesh wound toward the end of a book, but generally they win all their fist fights and escape relatively unscathed after other attempts are made on their lives. It was not always thus.

When the young folk gather at TG's knee and ask for help with their cute little novels, TG always counsels: “Make the best possible characters and then do the worst possible things to them.” Actually, TG thinks he stole that line from John Irving, but John will never notice this little blog and he wouldn't care anyway. Actually, many years ago, John slept with one of TG's old girlfriends, but that's another story and TG never carries a grudge. (Big shout-out to John -- Still living in New Hampshire and writing about bears?)

Anyway, until recently heroes had to work hard and take a lot of punishment to come out on top of the villains. Lester Dent knew that, and Doc Savage, while fabulously tough and smart, took his lumps and more with every adventure. Note the torn shirt, which was de rigeur on all of this series' pulp covers. Doc wasn't a superhero, but, well, let's let Wikipedia do the explaining...

“Doc Savage's real name was Clark Savage, Jr.. He was a physician, surgeon, scientist, adventurer, inventor, explorer, researcher, and, as revealed in The Polar Treasure, a musician. A team of scientists assembled by his father deliberately trained his mind and body to near-superhuman abilities almost from birth, giving him great strength and endurance, a photographic memory, a mastery of the martial arts, and vast knowledge of the sciences. Doc is also a master of disguise and an excellent imitator of voices. "He rights wrongs and punishes evildoers." Dent described the hero as a mix of Sherlock Holmes' deductive abilities, Tarzan's outstanding physical abilities, Craig Kennedy's scientific education, and Abraham Lincoln's goodness. Dent described Doc Savage as manifesting "Christliness." Doc's character and world-view is displayed in his oath, which goes as follows:

“Let me strive every moment of my life to make myself better and better, to the best of my ability, that all may profit by it. Let me think of the right and lend all my assistance to those who need it, with no regard for anything but justice. Let me take what comes with a smile, without loss of courage. Let me be considerate of my country, of my fellow citizens and my associates in everything I say and do. Let me do right to all, and wrong no man.”

At this point, you may be saying to yourself, That's a very fine credo, but what the hell is the point here, TG? Sorry. The point is that Lester Dent wrote an instructive short essay on how to plot a 6000 word short story. It's a useful instruction for not just short story writers, but novelists as well. Perspective authors and professional authors alike would do well to read the essay and apply its lessons to their own writing, particularly Dent's repeated instructions on how to treat your hero: “Introduce the hero and swat him with a fistful of trouble.” “Shovel more grief onto the hero.” “A surprising plot twist in which the hero preferably gets it in the neck bad.” and again: “Shovel the difficulties more thickly upon the hero.”

So let's get with it, thriller writers; time to start beating the crap out of your heroes.

Insiders; Guns

Wasn't it Lenin who famously said, “Whenever I hear the word 'culture' I reach for my gun.”? Well, whenever Thriller Guy reads a press release or jacket copy that blares, “Written by the ultimate insider!!," or, "Only an insider could...” TG reaches for his gun. Actually, all of TG's guns are locked up in the gun safe, far from the hands of curious kiddies, except the one he keeps in the bedside table, locked and loaded for when the Bad Guy creeps in, (Cue sound of window breaking downstairs) bent on revenge for that day long ago when TG put him down or away. But those are other stories from the distant past.

You wouldn't believe how many books TG receives for review that are penned by government, agency, spy, military, whatever, Insiders!

Warning bells always go off when inserted publisher's material promises that the page-turner TG is about to read has been penned by the “ultimate insider” and is filled with never-before-seen details of some secret government agency. The problem, with a few exceptions, is that most of these books just aren't very good, that the newcomer insiders don't really know much about thrillers or the writing of thrillers, which results in poor structure, broken genre rules and just plain bad writing. I believe the scenario probably goes something like this:

Top level, usually government employee retires, having risen to the top of his/her field after a long professional life. Someone, a friend, spouse, family member, agent, random person at a cocktail/dinner party, says to the retiree, “You really know a lot about (fill in the field of expertise), I'll bet you could write a great thriller. You could make a lot of money. Tom Clancy did it, and he was only an insurance guy. You must have a million stories you could tell!”

The retiree thinks, Tom Clancy, he made a ton of money. How hard could it be? I'm as smart as any writer. And I do know a million stories. Besides, I can always hire someone to help me if I get stuck.

TG is one of the guys who is in the business of ghosting these books, the guy who is hired on when the Insider gets stuck. And they always get stuck. (Contact TG through his Alter Ego's website, www.appelworks.com for competitive rates).

TG was once asked to a meeting by a literary agent to talk to a female Secret Service agent who had “A hell of a tale to tell.” TG was perfectly willing to take the meeting, especially since it was being held at an old Washington landmark restaurant, The Guards. From experience stretching back over many drunken years, TG knew that The Guards sells perhaps the finest blue cheese burger in Washington. And excellent martinis. And the agent was buying.

TG arrives at the restaurant. The Secret Service Agent was obviously getting along in her career, but still seemed mildly attractive and fit. The first thing they, the agent was there as well, told TG, after he had ordered his usual Tanqueray martini, (with a twist) was that the agent was carrying a gun in her purse, which was prominently placed on the table. TG assumes that he was supposed to be impressed. Please.

“She's going to retire in a year or two. She's got a ton of great stories,” the agent says. “Funny stuff. Really, fabulous stuff. It's going to make a great book.”

How many times has every professional writer heard this line? Usually it's at a party of some sort, a guy leans over and says something like, “You're a writer? I worked for the gas company for thirty years! I got a million great stories. Tell you what, I'll tell you the stories, you write 'em up and we'll split the money fifty-fifty.” Hey, whatta deal!

TG is drinking his martini, (OK, he's on his second martini) the literary agent keeps yakking away, the Secret Service lady just sort of sits there, nodding, looking kind of sad. Every once in awhile she cracks a tiny smile.

By now TG is tucked into his cheeseburger. “Tell me a funny story,” he says, around a mouthful of blue cheese and beef.

“One time,” the Secret Service lady begins, solemnly, “Early in my career, I show up for work in the morning at Secret Service headquarters (wherever the hell that is) and on my desk, open to the centerfold, is a Playboy magazine. I look around the room, which is full of guys, and no one is looking at me. I pick up the magazine and throw it in the wastebasket and start my day as if nothing had happened.” At this point the agent is laughing, semi-hysterically, “Great story,” she crows, slapping her meaty thigh, “Really great. You showed those guys.”

TG finishes his burger and has another drink. There were more stories, but TG can't remember any of them. They weren't any better than the first one. Truth be told, TG was pretty drunk by then. Things just sort of petered out. The agent paid the bill. TG left, promising to think about an angle for a possible book.

The next day TG sat in front of his computer trying to put some sort of a good face on the meeting, but it was not easy. Make no mistake, TG is perfectly willing to whore in his ghost personae, particularly if there's the hope of decent money. But there wasn't anything on which to hang a proposal. The SS agent wasn't the first female in the service. It sure didn't sound like she had been seriously harassed by her male counterparts. (Excepting the horrendous Playboy centerfold incident.) Her years in service sounded routine and fairly boring. The point is, just because you work someplace interesting doesn't mean you are interesting. Even if you carry a gun. And it sure doesn't mean you have a story to tell, or the imagination to spin your knowledge into fiction, or the ability to write it in any format. Even if you've hired a ghost to do the heavy lifting.

TG doesn't tell this story because it's the exception; in fact it is the rule. Every professional writer has been through some version.

Oh, TG was going to report on the latest Insider thriller he has reviewed. Actually, it was damned good.

Stay tuned.