Blurbs... Liar Liar Pants on Fire

Blurb. What a stupid word. Recently, Thriller Guy was forced to think about blurbs, which he never reads before reviewing a book. But in this instance a couple of them struck his eye after finishing a book he really disliked. TG hates reviewing bad books, but it comes with the territory. So after reading the bad book, (TG can’t say the name, contractually he can’t discuss books in this blog that he reviews) he actually read the blurbs to see what others had to say. Among those who raved about this book were Lee Child and Joe Finder. Reading these laudatory words by Child and Finder left TG with a sick feeling. (You never knew TG was so delicate, did you?)  Why did these fellows give what was a patently a bad book great blurbs? Of course one can never know, and as TG is forever telling his wife, one never knows what goes on behind closed doors, but TG thinks the answer is… because Child and Finder are known as some of the nicest guys in the publishing business.

TG doesn’t know Child beyond what he reads in the trades, (Lee Child is One of the Nicest Guys in Publishing!) and he has given a few Reacher novels excellent reviews, (because the Reacher books are excellent books) but he has reviewed Finder and interviewed him and found him maybe the second nicest guy in the business. (Maybe the first, TG will let the two of them fight that one out.) The thing is, neither of them should have given this book a rave. TG wonders if they even read it. And if so, how can they square the rave with what was the obvious crappy quality? These are smart guys, guys know what’s good and what’s shit.

Yes, yes, TG understands that blurbs are just part of the business and shouldn’t be taken seriously. Stephen King (a man who blurbs to the point that no one takes him seriously, blurbwise, any more) said recently that Robert Parker (now conveniently dead) said, “Never blurb a book you’ve read, and never read a book you’ve blurbed.” This is probably good advice for writers, but little help to book buyers who are standing in a bookstore holding a book, reading the blurbs from their favorite writers and deciding whether or not to buy.

In this case, the case of the crappy book, the woman writer was good-looking, sort of famous and undoubtedly a sterling individual who everyone in the industry thinks is a really great person, but, seriously, dudes, that’s no reason to give her a rave blurb. Trust me, the book was embarrassing to read.

TG has blurbed some books, but he only did so after reading them and liking them. Some of TG’s books have been blurbed, but only by running cut lines from good reviews. And TG knows the business, oh how he knows the business, knows the insular elements, the us-against-them attitude that makes authors circle the wagons and band together to fight for the written word, but really, guys, this is no excuse.

I guess this entry will piss these guys off. Not that they read the Thriller Guy. And pissing them off means the next time TG publishes a book he’d better not ask them for a blurb. You know what? To hell with it. The book sucked. And they carved away some of their honesty, sincerity, intelligence and good will when they said it was great.

Just bein’ honest, guys. Keepin’ it real.

Blurb. What a stupid word.

The Coolest Guy Around

Thriller Guy first became acquainted with Robert Masello’s work when he was assigned the author’s sixth book. Blood and Ice to review.  TG loved the book and gave it a starred review. Briefly, it’s the story of a writer who goes to the Antarctic to write an article about a research station and while there stumbles on an incredible discovery, the bodies of a man and a woman chained together and frozen deep within the ice. The POV switches back and forth between the present and the 1850s where we learn about the man and woman, Lt. Sinclair Copley of the 17^th Lancers and Eleanor Ames, a nurse. Of course the bodies slowly thaw, and of course they come back to life. Who could wish for it to be any other way? From then on, it’s all action and thrills with echoes of The Thing and the ending of Frankenstein. TG recommends this book to all readers of supernatural thrillers.

TG interviewed Masello, and found him funny, smart and extremely knowledgeable about the craft and work of writing, which resulted in several blog entries centering around Masello’s excellent book, Robert’s Rules of Writing.

Out in paperback now is Masello’s The Medusa Amulet, an ancient artifact, race-against-time thriller that incorporates supernatural elements and high-level, Da Vinci Code puzzles, with fascinating historical mysteries and plenty of action.

Here’s the deal: TG values intelligence above all in a thriller, and the one thread that runs through all of Masello’s work is how smart he is. He’s an excellent writer, plotter, characterizer and researcher, but he puts it all together in clever unexpected ways that make other thriller writers seem dull and uninspired. TG believes if the stars had been aligned only slightly differently, Masello would have occupied Dan Brown’s Da Vinci space and Dan Brown would have been just another thriller writer lost in the scrum.

Medusa is grounded in the work of Renaissance artist Benvenuto Cellini. Cellini is an absolutely fascinating historical figure. TG read his autobiography many years ago and recommends it highly to anyone who has an interest in Italian or any other art history. Cellini was, besides being a brilliant artist, a total rogue. He tells of killing a number of his enemies with his dagger and was officially accused or charged at least three times of the crime of sodomy with men, and on one occasion with a woman. Cellini fashions an amulet that has the power to bestow eternal life. In the present, art historian David Franco must find the amulet to save his sister who is dying of cancer. The search races around the world and includes a wide cast of historical characters, one of who is the last person in history the civilized world would want to have eternal life.

If you like this genre, let me know and the first person who does so will receive a signed copy of the book. If I can convince Masello to send one on. But, he’s a softy, so I think this is a done deal. 

Oh Death, Where Art Thou?

All around us, evidently. Thriller Guy and his alter ego, Allen Appel, recently wrote of the death of Harry Crews. (See below) Since then there have been so many, Carlos Fuentes, Chuck Brown, that guy from Swamp People who toppled over in his boat and died, and now Ray Bradbury. You could be forgiven if you thought that Bradbury was already dead, he was 91. But he was a seminal figure and meant much to those of my generation who dreamed of places and times and people who were beyond ourselves.

When I was a lad, I read and read and read. Raised in West Virginia, I was handed down books from my mother and older sister, inappropriate books, probably, but we all read to escape, even though life was neither brutish nor unkind. The Carnegie Library was a place of refuge, entertainment, comfort.

I can't remember how I came across Ray Bradbury. I remember paperback books. I read The Martian Chronicles and marveled at that book, but it was Dandelion Wine and Golden Apples of the Sun that changed me. It was not the books themselves. I was a freshman in high school, 1960, and I was in the band room (in my high school, band was the kick-ass sport, TG will write about that one of these days) and I saw someone was reading Golden Apples of the Sun. I asked about the book (As I remember it was a clarinet player, a guy who was a senior and considered really cool) who told me that, yes, he thought the stories were wonderful.

At that moment I realized that I was not alone, not some strange mutant hybrid from a family who read books, unlike those I saw around me. Books that were passed down from your mother, for God’s sake. It was that moment of connection that was so important to me. Maybe I wasn’t a freak? Well, I probably was, but there were others who read the same books that I did.

Here are some things the Ray Bradbury said. They’re not necessarily the nice things that others have put in their eulogies. TG isn’t nice. Here’s the real Ray Bradbury.

“If you’re not careful in tragedy, one extra rape, one extra incest, one extra murder and it’s hoo-haw time all of a sudden.

“But a novel has all kinds of pitfalls because it takes longer and you are around people, and if you’re not careful you will talk about it. The novel is also hard to write in terms of keeping your love intense. It’s hard to stay erect for two hundred days. So, get the big truth first. If you get the big truth, the small truths will accumulate around it. Let them be magnetized to it, drawn to it, and then cling to it. 

“You can’t write for other people. You can’t write for the left or the right, this religion or that religion, or this belief or that belief. You have to write the way you see things. I tell people, Make a list of ten things you hate and tear them down in a short story or poem. Make a list of ten things you love and celebrate them. When I wrote Fahrenheit 451 I hated book burners and I loved libraries. So there you are. 

From an interview…

Do you write outlines?

BRADBURY

No, never. You can’t do that. It’s just like you can’t plot tomorrow or next year or ten years from now. When you plot books you take all the energy and vitality out. There’s no blood. You have to live it from day to day and let your characters do things.

Action is hope. At the end of each day, when you’ve done your work, you lie there and think, Well, I’ll be damned, I did this today. It doesn’t matter how good it is, or how bad—you did it. At the end of the week you’ll have a certain amount of accumulation. At the end of a year, you look back and say, I’ll be damned, it’s been a good year.

Work is the only answer. I have three rules to live by. One, get your work done. If that doesn’t work, shut up and drink your gin. And when all else fails, run like hell!

Mr. Electrico was a beautiful man, see, because he knew that he had a little weird kid there who was twelve years old and wanted lots of things. We walked along the shore of Lake Michigan and he treated me like a grown-up. I talked my big philosophies and he talked his little ones. Then we went out and sat on the dunes near the lake and all of a sudden he leaned over and said, I’m glad you’re back in my life. I said, What do you mean? I don’t know you. He said, You were my best friend outside of Paris in 1918. You were wounded in the Ardennes and you died in my arms there. I’m glad you’re back in the world. You have a different face, a different name, but the soul shining out of your face is the same as my friend. Welcome back.

Now why did he say that? Explain that to me, why? Maybe he had a dead son, maybe he had no sons, maybe he was lonely, maybe he was an ironical jokester. Who knows? It could be that he saw the intensity with which I live. Every once in a while at a book signing I see young boys and girls who are so full of fire that it shines out of their face and you pay more attention to that. Maybe that’s what attracted him.

When I left the carnival that day I stood by the carousel and I watched the horses running around and around to the music of “Beautiful Ohio,” and I cried. Tears streamed down my cheeks. I knew something important had happened to me that day because of Mr. Electrico. I felt changed. He gave me importance, immortality, a mystical gift. My life was turned around completely. It makes me cold all over to think about it, but I went home and within days I started to write. I’ve never stopped.

Seventy-seven years ago, and I’ve remembered it perfectly. I went back and saw him that night. He sat in the chair with his sword, they pulled the switch, and his hair stood up. He reached out with his sword and touched everyone in the front row, boys and girls, men and women, with the electricity that sizzled from the sword. When he came to me, he touched me on the brow, and on the nose, and on the chin, and he said to me, in a whisper, “Live forever.” And I decided to.

 Thriller Guy. 

 So shut up, and drink your gin....

Back Again

Yes, Thriller Guy has returned. And where has TG been? Earning a living, if you can call it a living. In the last month or so, TG has helped judge a couple of national novel writing contests, written a ton of reviews and done some work on his own stuff. He's got three new stories in the can, two of them novelettes. Right now you are probably asking, what's a novelette? Here's the scoop on nomenclature, Little Ones.

First there's the short story. Poe said the length of a short story should be how long it takes to read the story in one sitting. Thriller Guy says a short story should be from one to nine thousand words, maybe more. Less than a thousand words gets you into Flash Fiction territory.

A novelette, is around 7500 to 17,000 words. You don't hear the word novelette much these days, maybe it sounds too wimpy or French or something, but TG kind of likes it.

A novella is 17,000 to 40,000 words. Anything longer is a novel. A short novel would be from 40,000 to 75,000 words and a “regular” novel, according to all the publishing contracts TG has signed, and that's a bunch of them, is around 100,000 words.

So in the last months, TG has written two novelettes to go with a novella, all of which are new and unpublished. All three pieces of fiction are about chickens. That's right, chickens. And right now, TG is not even going to explain why this is so. Maybe later. Maybe never.

One of the novel contests TG judged was interesting, in that TG had to read 10 books in ten days, and review each of them. This reading overload was no one's fault but his own, letting the deadline creep up on him the way deadlines tend to do. By the end of the ten days, TG's eyes were weeping blood and he was forced to remain in a dark room with cooling washcloths over his eyes and fevered brow for several days. The problem was, each of the ten books was interesting in its own right, so TG couldn't just toss any of them aside and say they were crappy and never going to win anyway. Plus, TG has a ridiculous sense of honor when it comes to reading and reviewing, which keeps him from ever shortchanging any author, at least as far as putting in the necessary reading as required.

At any rate, TG is back in harness, and he thanks all of you who wrote to ask what had happened to the blog. Was TG all right? When could they see a new entry? Actually, there were damn few of you who wrote asking these questions, but that's OK, TG is sure you all have very busy lives.

So what's coming up? TG will be writing about Robert Massello's The Medusa Amulet, which he thinks is a damn near perfect example of the Da Vinci Code type thriller; he'll turn the blog over to his alter ego, Allen Appel, who will continue the riveting account of his experiences after publishing his first book, and he will put out more fabulous writing tips for those who want to write and publish novels while at the same time trying to disabuse as many of you as possible who still think that writing is actually a career and a worthwhile endeavor.

So stay tuned, Little Ones, TG is back in harness.

Sad News

Harry Crews, a great writer, died on Wednesday. Long ago in Washington we would hand Harry Crews novels around like we were passing the grail. You would read a Harry Crews novel and you would be stunned by the experience. I would be afraid to suggest that anyone who does not know these books should read them, or if you loved them as I did that you should read them again. I fear that they would be dated, relics of a time unknowable unless you were actually there. Look him up on Amazon here. If I were to recommend one I'd say start with The Gospel Singer, maybe A Feast of Snakes. and go on from there. His autobiography, A Childhood, is also great.

Here are some Harry Crews quotes, some about writing, some not.

“Alcohol whipped me. Alcohol and I had many, many marvelous times together. We laughed, we talked, we danced at the party together; then one day I woke up and the band had gone home and I was lying in the broken glass with a shirt full of puke and I said, 'Hey, man, the ball game's up'.”

“If you wait until you got time to write a novel, or time to write a story, or time to read the hundred thousands of books you should have already read - if you wait for the time, you will never do it. ‘Cause there ain’t no time; world don’t want you to do that. World wants you to go to the zoo and eat cotton candy, preferably seven days a week.”

“I first became fascinated with the Sears catalogue because all the people in its pages were perfect. Nearly everybody I knew had something missing, a finger cut off, a toe split, an ear half-chewed away, an eye clouded with blindness from a glancing fence staple. And if they didn't have something missing, they were carrying scars from barbed wire, or knives, or fishhooks. But the people in the catalogue had no such hurts. They were not only whole, had all their arms and legs and eyes on their unscarred bodies, but they were also beautiful.”

“Writers spend all their time preoccupied with just the things that their fellow men and women spend their time trying to avoid thinking about. ... It takes great courage to look where you have to look, which is in yourself, in your experience, in your relationship with fellow beings, your relationship to the earth, to the spirit or to the first cause—to look at them and make something of them.”

"I decided a long time ago—very long time ago—that getting up at four o’clock to start work works best for me. I like that. Some people don’t like to get up in the morning. I like to get up in the morning. And there’s no place to go at four o’clock in the morning, and nobody’s gonna call you, and you can’t call anybody. Back when I was a drunk, at least in this little town, there’s no place to go buy anything to drink."

“Then I come home, eat a light lunch, then just go straight back to the thing. I might work till three o’clock . . . there comes a time of diminishing returns. You’re just jerking yourself off thinking you’re doing some good work, then you go back to it the next day and you think, ‘Oh, my God,’ and you have to throw away two or three pages. But the way I do it—I don’t believe I’ve ever heard of anyone doin’ it quite this way. I write on a great big square board. sit in a big overstuffed chair with this board on my lap, put a legal pad on top of that and write long hand. After that’s done, at some point I run it through a typewriter that’s older than I am—but it’s a beautiful machine, great action, huge keys, I love it—and then when I get through with that, I put it through the computer to revise, which is the only thing . . . I dunno . . . the only thing a computer is good for is to revise. Because, as you very well know, none of us need to go faster, we all need to go slower. I first among them. But the computer is a godsend for revisions. I don’t quite understand how we did it before we had the computer. I seem to remember a lot of tape and scissors.”

“Graham Greene—you’ve probably heard me quote before, because god knows, it’s true—“The writer is doomed to live in an atmosphere of perpetual failure.” There it is. There it is. Nah, you write things and write things—write a book for instance—and write and write and write and write and write, and you know, it’s not—every writer writes with the knowledge that nothing he writes is as good as it could be. Paul Valery: “A poem’s never finished, only abandoned.” The same thing with a novel. It’s never finished, only abandoned. I’ve had any number of novels where I’ve just at some point said to myself, well, unless you’re going to make the career out of this book—spend the rest of your goddamn life chewing on it—you might as well just package it up and send it on to New York. Go on to something else. Because between conception and execution there is a void, an abyss, that inevitably fucks up the conception. The conception never gets translated to the page. It just doesn’t. I don’t think it ever does. I think [Gustave] Flaubert kept Madame Bovary for nine years. Took him nine years to write it, well, he didn’t write it all in nine years. He could have written it in nineteen years, and he would still have felt the way he felt, and that was that it was a fine piece of work, but it was not as good as it could be. Same old same old."

Here's Harry. This will give you some idea of the power of the man.

Geezing

OK, Thriller Guy here, gimme my damn blog back for a minute.

TG was scrolling through the channels on the tube tonight and stumbled on NPR which was having pledge week, Oh, how TG hates pledge week. When TG was young and a stay-at-home dad, because writing fiction didn't pay shit then just like it doesn't pay shit now, and his sweet wife worked full time to support the family, he depended on the public channel to run Sesame Street every day so he could park his three year old daughter in front of the set and try to squeeze in an hour of writing. But whenever Pledge Week was on, there went TG's writing time. TG's daughter, Leah, (TGDL) used to see that bank of idiots on the TV screen, the ones who volunteer their time sitting in those phone banks, and she would immediately burst into tears, knowing that her show was not going to come on as long as these dopes were answering the ringing phones. Besides, she knew that daddy would be going nuts. Oh, how TG remembers the day, Leah crying, when TG, furious, called the pledge number and watched on the television as some minion answered the phone and TG screamed, “Twenty bucks, no, fifty bucks! If you assholes will stop this bullshit and just put Sesame Street on where it's supposed to be! Right now! You're making my daughter cry! If you don't put her show on right now I'm going to come down there and kick every one of your pussy asses.” Yeah, well, that was one call they didn't broadcast over the air.

Anyway, TG scrolled onto pledge week tonight and there was Peter. Paul and Mary (if you don't know who they were/are, just go away from this site right now) and he was reminded of a moment from the dim past. It was 1964, and TG, a college student at West Virginia University, was sitting on a stone retaining wall out in front of a fraternity house smoking a cigar when a aging Buick coasted up and ground to a stop. Peter, Paul and Mary, then pretty much totally unknown, got out of the car and said to TG that they had been in town for a concert, (who knew?) and they had a check for $2,000.00 from the university but absolutely no cash money for gasoline. Would I loan them $20.00 to get out of town? $20.00? TG was a poor student, he worked in kitchens for food, his parents sent him $5.00 a week for spending money. Which meant beer money. But these three looked even poorer than he was. That was back when Peter and Paul had hair. At the time, TG figured the $2,000.00 check thing was bullshit.

But Mary was hot. Long blond hair, great body, big white teeth in a land where a missing tooth was de rigueur for females of that age, (OK, maybe it wasn't that bad). Anyhow, they seemed like nice people, so TG hopped off the wall, pulled his only five dollar bill out and gave it to Mary. So long to buying a beer for the next week. “It's a loan,” she said, smiling with those pretty teeth.

”Right,” TG said, with all the cool he could muster.

“And could I have one of those cigars?” Mary asked.

It was a Marsh Wheeling, made right there in West Virginia, the one with the wooden holder you could clamp down on with your teeth, if you had teeth. TG had an extra, so he gave it to her. She smiled and said, "Thanks, I owe you." Was there a little something extra there in that smile? TG could have said, "How bout I ride along with you?" Hey, those were the days. She could have easily said, "Climb in, we're going to New York." Things would have been different. No regrets. But she did have one pretty smile.

They drove off in a cloud of exahust fumes, the tailpipe dragging on the ground. Of course they went on to mega fame, a steller career with a few bumps along the way. In many ways they were the sound track of TG's generation.

Flash forward 48 years and TG is watching PP&M in a 1986 concert during pledge week on MTV. Mary is dead. Has been for four years. Leukemia.

It's OK, Mary, forget it. The five bucks, the cigar.

You and the guys sang a lot of cool songs.

We're even.

Tie After Time Continued...

Thriller Guy has gone on vacation. He says he'll be back when Appel is done using, or abusing, his blog.

For the long version of the story of the writing of my first published book, read the previous two blog entries.

Time After Time, now available as a Kindle book.

So I wrote three chapters and an outline as a proposal for Time After Time, and Kent Carroll, of Carroll and Graf Publishers, using the chapters and outline, sold the paperback rights for the book to Dell for $20,000.00. He gave me half as an advance to write the book while he kept half to pay for the printing of the book, or to just go into the Carroll and Graf coffers in general. This was back in 1985 when such a deal was possible. Those were the good old days. Today, you'd never get that kind of money, which was considered paltry back then. Lots of folks I knew were getting $45,000 and $50,000 advances as a matter of course. In these recession times a fiction writer, much less a first time fiction writer, is lucky to get $5,000.00 for an advance. And unless you have an established track record as a decent selling novelist and you're dealing with a publisher who knows you and who has published your books before, you are never going to sell a piece of fiction on sample chapters and an outline. You have to write the whole book before you can even get an agent to look at it, much less a publisher. The writing business, particularly the novel writing business, has become much worse place for writers than it was 25 years ago.

But I was happy to write a book for $10,000. I really liked Kent and he was willing to help me along in the process. Sort of the way Thriller Guy works with writers. So I wrote the first of the Pastmaster series, Time After Time. The experience of writing my first book, Cross, taught me how to write dialogue and exposition at the same time and incorporate backstory and a sense of place. All part of what it takes to write a successful novel. I was writing like a regular writer. I wasn't particularly good, but I wasn't shooting for good. I was shooting for a term that I have always favored: workmanlike. As in several reviews I received in the early days, “Mr. Appel's writing never rises much above workmanlike, but he's given us an exciting read.” Really, what's wrong with that? Especially since I know from experience as a reviewer for the last decade or so, in at least 25% of bestselling books by household name writers the quality of the writing doesn't even rise to the level of workmanlike. So here's a tip: you don't have to be particularly good to write a bestselling book. (What do you have to be? Well, many things can make it happen. Luck is foremost, and appealing to popular taste is right up there as well. Having a great idea is your best bet. Keep reading Thriller Guy's blog, and you'll eventually learn all the secrets.)

I wrote the book, working from my outline which I diverged from as often as I stuck to. But the outline gave me a place to start every morning when I got up to write. In those days I wrote at a white heat. I could bang out ten even twenty pages a day. Were they good. Nope. They weren't even workmanlike. But at the end of the day they were done. Here's the big lesson: write. You can always rewrite.

After six months I had finished the book. I rewrote it a few times and sent it to Kent. He went over it line by line, wrote notes all over the pages, sent it back to me, I rewrote it according to his notes. He would call me and we would go over the rewrites. Then I rewrote it by myself a couple of more times. After all of this we had ourselves a book. It was done. It went into the production pipeline, and I began planning the next book in the series, Twice Upon a Time.

Next: The UPS guy tosses a box of the just-printed Time After Time onto my driveway.

Number Two in the series of erotica covers done for Carroll and Graph. (See previous entry)