Facebook

It is now accepted as gospel that no popular author can sell books without having at least a Facebook page, and better, a Twitter account as well. Several months ago,TG set out to find how many popular bestselling authors were actually on Facebook. He was surprised to find that the answer was, pretty much all of them. And not only were they on Facebook, they actually managed their own page and dealt with their “friends” personally. A few had reps who fielded the questions and answers, but most were on-site, hard at work in the evenings and weekends interacting with their fans. Here's a list of some of the authors TG contacted and who got back to him quickly: Jeffery Deaver, Brad Thor, Richard North Patterson, Eric Van Lustbader, Jeff Abbott, Keith Thomson, Alex Kava, Dale Brown, Charles Cummings, Daniel Silva and many others. TG is sure you will recognize these names as some of the biggest in the business, writers who you would think were far too lofty and busy to be putting in the hours on social media chatting with fans. But there they were.

Example: Jeffery Deaver. Deaver turns out at least one book a year and in June his version of the latest James Bond hit the shelves. His Facebook page is an Author page which is run by his website administrator, but he stays in very close contact with anyone who writes to him. TG sent him a message on this page and sure enough, a couple of hours later TG was corresponding by email with him. When asked about social media he responded: “I have this mental image of someone in the Middle Ages sitting in a pub and saying, 'Blimey, you hear about this chap Gutenberg? He's making books that don't have to be written by a monk, by hand.' And I picture his mate saying, “Forgedaboutit. That's high-tech garbage... it'll never catch on.” (one wonders if Deaver has seen the very funny YouTube bit about the two monks discussing just this scenario.) Deaver goes on, “Technology and story telling have always gone hand in hand. Yes, I have a Facebook page, I Twitter and I have a number of videos on YouTube. I write at least a book a year, usually 550 manuscript pages, and that keeps me busy about 8 to 10 hours a day. But I absolutely believe in connecting to readers via the social networking sites; it's the wave of the future.”

One thing no one seemed to really know was if Facebooking, etc. resulted in increased sales. Publishers insist on it, and if an author is big enough to resist on a personal level (i.e. Tom Clancy) they, the publishers, or even the writer's fans, will put up a page on their own. Most authors responded to TG's questions by saying that it gives them increased ability to connect with readers and advertise upcoming books, but beyond that no one had any facts or real figures.

And what does Thriller Guy think? Actually, no one really cares about what TG thinks, but if he was in the position of these writers he would probably be right in there flacking his product. Come to think of it, TG has already done so, berating one and all to buy Allen Appel's Kindle book, Abraham Lincoln: Detective on Appel's Facebook page. (Heads up: Appel's first time travel book, Time After Time will soon be available as a Kindle book at a cut-rate price) So, yeah, Deaver has 69,803 people on his Facebook page, and Appel has 142 friends, so the comparison is not really apt, but the point is, even the lowliest writer probably has to join in and start Friending if he/she is going to get anywhere at all.

So here's the question: if everyone reading here goes to Appel's Facebook page and Friends him and if he sells enough of those Lincoln Kindle books, will he be asked to write the next James Bond book?

No?

Hey, it's the Internet; anything is possible.

Cooking a Book

The other day Thriller Guy was arguing with his wife, which is not an uncommon occurrence. Regular readers of this blog will know that TG is more than a mite tetchy, although he struggles to control this unfortunate bent to his personality. Anyway, the subject of argument was some dinner that TG had cooked and his wife asked if he had a recipe for this dish, and, if so, what was that recipe? This annoyed TG, even though most folks would see this as a perfectly reasonable request. Unfortunately, that's not the way TG's brain works. So a minor scuffle ensued. Later that day, TG tried to figure out why the question, innocuous enough, annoyed him so. The answer came in a flash of insight: because TG cooks the same way he writes.

TG is a fairly accomplished home cook (and the father of a professional chef). He has cooked virtually all the meals his family has eaten at home for the last 28 years. Why? because being a professional writer often means working at home, and if one's spouse, partner or other, works away from the house the cooking chores almost always fall upon the one at home. Unfair? Probably. But practical. TG has written before in these pages about the various realities of the stay-at-home writer and this is just one of them. Suffice it to say, after all these years TG has acquired a pretty fair knowledge of the basics and beyond of cooking. Those same 28 years have been spent churning out thousands of pages of novels, stories, articles and non-fiction books. TG hopes that along the way he has acquired a pretty fair knowledge of the basics of the writing craft as well.

By now, you may be asking yourself, what's the point here, TG, where do these two skills cross? And, more to the point, why the hell does it annoy you when your beloved wife asks you a simple question about a damn recipe.

Here's how TG writes... First an idea appears, usually while driving, showering, while asleep, at the beach, at the gym or while having lunch with his pal Larry. TG has written on the phenomenon of creativity in earlier pages of this blog. First, there is the Idea. If the Idea sticks around for a few hours, TG will do a bit of basic research on the Internet. Not only to see if the Idea has been done, but if it looks as if there might be interesting material to inform the basic thought. If this seems likely, the Idea is put away in a mental drawer where it should percolate on it's own for a few days or better, up to a week. It can be peeked at from time to time, but the intention is to just leave it the hell alone. As TG's writing guru Bill G. suggests, if it pops back up, push it back down again and try to pay no attention. (If you're worried you are going to forget the Idea, write it down in one sentence and put it in a real drawer. But if the Idea is any good, you won't forget it, and if it isn't, it's no loss if you do.) I believe the proper term for this Idea procedure would be gestation.

After a week, TG does some more research and starts a file on his computer. Now things are getting more serious. As time goes by, he spends a little of each day working on a broad outline, trying to put together some notion of a beginning and an end. After more time passes, TG will suddenly realize that the idea is good and that he's worked up a decent plan of action, that he's constructed an outline that will work as the scaffolding for a better outline and he's ready to try an opening. So he begins writing.

But first, be warned, and TG cannot stress this enough: TG never talks to anyone about his Idea! The natural impulse is to drag in all number of people and tell them the cool idea you've come up with so you can get feedback and, more importantly, some sort of approval (yes! This is a great idea! It's smart to devote the next several weeks, months or years writing it!) This is always a mistake. First of all, if one talks about an Idea, it bleeds away any power it might have. TG has no idea why or how this happens, but it's true. Secondly, one seldom gets the sort of approbation that you think the idea is going to elicit. The impulse is to believe that your wife, spouse or other is going to pat you on the back and tell you how smart and clever you are, and how this Idea is going to make you a million bucks. Maybe in the early days of your relationship this would happen, but as you age, harsh reality rears its ugly head and the truth is, in the vast majority of cases, your writing really isn't bringing in that much money. And probably won't in the future. So fabulous ideas, to wive's, spouse's or others, begin to sound a little thin. TG, and you, should understand that fame and fortune probably are not the natural, inevitable outcome from your Idea. But TG, and you, must believe that it will be. Otherwise why would you drive yourself half mad by subjecting yourself to the perilous writing process. And don't tell TG it's because you must write, that you are driven to do so because the creative urge forces you to the keyboard. Bah. Horseshit.

Keep it to yourself. Do not talk about your Idea. Do not talk about what you will do, simply do it.

Note: all of the above is a solitary endeavor. Writers, with few exceptions, create alone. Writers are responsible for their product. There is no one else to blame if the product is not good, and very few to thank if it works out well, besides what one may think in the face of the modern day, multi-page acknowledgements sections of novels.

Moving on...

Here's how TG cooks... First an idea for a meal appears – while reading the food section of the newspaper, from a picture in a magazine, while looking at a restaurant menu, in the shower, on the beach or the bus, or, more usually, while standing in front of some section in the grocery store, the meat counter or the produce section. Or an idea will just pop into TG's head: (“Let's see, pork shoulder is on sale, oh, the leeks look great today, do they go together? Why not?”) Leeks and pork are purchased.

Home. Unpack groceries, sit down at the computer, Google: recipe, leek and pork. Yes! There's a bunch of them. The first up is pork loin with leeks, which essentially says you saute the leeks for a few minutes, brown the pork loin and toss them together and cook for a couple of hours. Great. That's all TG wants. He doesn't even look at any other recipes. All he wants from this round of searching is to know that something is possible.

Chop the pork up into one inch chunks, (in this case pork shoulder, a far more succulent cut, and cheaper, than loin) slice the leeks longways, throw away the really tough top parts, put the deep green section into the broth bag (more on that later) in the freezer, wash the leeks well, (look out for sand) cut them into half inch slices and toss them into a frying pan with a nice chunk of butter and cook until they're translucent and maybe just a tiny bit brown. Careful, leeks burn if you don't pay them constant attention. Take the leeks out of the pan, put in the chunks of pork, brown, put the leeks back in, toss in a bottle of beer or maybe some wine, any variety, salt and pepper, bring to a boil, cover and put it on the burner for a couple of hours or until the pork is fall-apart tender. Serve over rice with a side of greens: mustard, kale, collards, whatever looks good at the market. Dinner. (Warning: TG has not actually cooked this meal, he has simply thought it. It is here for the purposes of illustration. If you cook it, send TG a comment and tell him how it turned out.)

Note: At all points in this process, TG is alone. Yes, at any point there could have been collaboration. TG is sure there are many couples who cook together, who wrangle companionably over details, recipes, and cooking methods. TG wishes these couples the best. But for TG, cooking, like writing, is best done alone.

Understand, that cooking one meal is not akin to writing a novel, it is akin to writing one scene in a novel. Maybe one day's worth of writing. Cooking a major meal, say a dinner party for eight is a longer and more intensive procedure, maybe like writing a chapter. But the basic rules of cooking food, the recipes, all the practical aspects of the endeavor, are not all that different than cooking a book. TG intends to expand on this thought in further blogs. Maybe he'll throw in some of his more successful recipes.

Just don't ask him to talk about it beforehand.

A lack of Imagination?

In a recent post about Matthew Dunn's book, Spycatcher, commenter Jack states that he feels that the cover art is kind of "cheesy." Thriller Guy had not given this much thought, he generally doesn't pay much attention to the covers of the books he reviews, but on thinking about it, a small bell began to jingle in the back of his mind. So he looked at the ever-growing mound of books that sit near his desk and just mining the top layer of the most recent books turned up the following. Is it just TG, or do these covers not illustrate a paucity of imagination on the part of the editors and art departments in the world of publishing? In all but one the color scheme is the orange at the top with darker colors at the bottom, except in the case of the Grippando where it is reversed. TG bets that a trip to the bookstore would turn up even more examples. And yes, it is true, book cover styles tend to go in cycles with styles going in and out of fashion, but really...


Perhaps TG can summon his pal Bhob Stewart, who knows about these things. Bhob has an excellent Blog about the history of comics, Potrzebie that is well worth a gander for those who are interested in that sort of thing. Bhob, oh Bhob, are you out there?


But first...


Here's the Dunn...

And here are some others

Adventures Redux

Jack, one of the followers of this blog, asks if anything more has happened with the robbery that occurred at casa TG a few months ago. Well, Jack, not a hell of a lot. To refresh the story, (see several blogs earlier) TG had used the reverse phone book and found the address of the criminal, Juan, (the perp) who seems to reside not far from where TG lives. There are two Juans listed, which TG assumes are father and son. It's unclear if they are any kin to the lady, Ms Cash, who seems to be renting the townhouse where they all reside. For the first several weeks after the robbery, the local detective answered all of TG's phone calls, and after TG gave him the names and address of the perp, promised “to go by with a couple of uniforms and see what they have to say.” After a couple of weeks, TG called again and the detective said that he went by twice and the woman who rents the house said there was no Juan living there. Which is bullshit, because TG has been driving by the house most days of the week and the guy who must be the Juan the father is often outside standing around. But no sign of the younger Juan.

The detective tells TG that there's nothing more he can do at this point. That he can't get a warrant to get into the house, so he's going to leave it to TG to get a look at the young Juan, at which point the detective will bring some books over and if TG can ID the kid then the detective will have reason to go in and get him. Or something.

This all sounds pretty thin to TG. But he understands. TG lives in a county right outside Washington DC that is known for its crime. In the last month there have been four robberies and an assault at his local metro station alone, to say nothing of the almost daily murders and other assorted crimes. TG himself was attacked one night at the subway station when coming into the parking garage after a night out with his writer's group. TG fought his way out of that situation, (the transit cop said, when TG reported it, “That was really stupid, buddy, next time just throw them your wallet and get the hell out of there.” Goods words of advice which TG intends to follow. Next time. Well, probably not. TG's point is, he understands that the detective doesn't really have the time to investigate and pursue a $300.00 crime which very well may have been committed by TG's next door neighbor. So TG rides by the perp's house every day or two, but has never seen the kid. Someday he will. Then we'll see what happens. And TG is not going to throw his wallet at the kid and run.

Dunn, continued

TG is taking some heat for giving Matthew Dunn's book, Spycatcher a good, if qualified, review. TG's wife (TGW) read it and took great pleasure in reading aloud the clunkier sections of dialogue while making noises of great disgust. Others have written to say that TG is an idiot. Oh well, it's not the first time.

Almost everyone (checkout the slams on http://Amazon.co.uk/) starts off by mentioning a scene right at the beginning of the novel where Dunn's hero, Will Chochrane, takes three slugs to the gut during a firefight in Central Park. A couple of days later and Will is on an airplane headed for London with barely a complaint about any medical difficulties. Readers are crying foul. Impossible! Ridiculous! Totally unrealistic! Yes, TG would agree wholeheartedly. When TG read that, he thought much the same thing, but where most readers found this a fatal flaw, TG just thought, “Oh, so that's the sort of book this is: a superhero spy who will do near superhero deeds.” Indeed, TG was looking for a scene late in the book where Will's extraordinary physical abilities are shown to be of biomedical or some other fantastical property. In other words, TG decided at that point to just strap in and go along for the ride where many (most) others decided that they weren't having any of it. These are both perfectly reasonable responses.

One of the dangers publishers face is over-touting an author's background and capabilities. Much was made in the business about Dunn's five years as an MI6 professional with 70 missions, which was announced on the back cover of the book. Right away, that seems to be an inflated number, averaging out to be more than one a month. Or perhaps some were just mini-missions? The reader certainly doesn't know. And then after a few pages into the book one reads of Will's serious wounding with little noticeable result. It's too much, too quickly for most folks, so they complained bitterly.

TG wonders, though, if readers are sometimes unfair this way. Most thriller readers, especially of the military/spy variety, are quite willing to read through innumerable scenes where the hero is able to dispatch legions of evildoers in the most fantastic ways. These readers not only don't question these supernormal abilities, but relish them. Incredible feats of strength, endurance, marksmanship, stealth and man-killing go by with nary a quibble. But a guy gets shot and these same readers expect the author to take his hero through three months of medical procedures and rehab before the story can get back on track? All in the sake of realism? So why, you might argue, have the hero shot at all? Because that's what happens to heroes, they get shot because they shoot a lot of people, and you figure at least every once in awhile one of them has got to get hit. After all, are you looking for realism or not?

TG thinks this disconnect may come because of the way readers think as real human beings. They know they have no abilities when it comes to man killing and performing feats of daring, but they know what it feels like to get hurt. You fall down and you hurt yourself, you get a damn paper cut and it hurts, you twist your back weeding the lawn, bang your head on the car door, all of these things hurt. So what must it be like to get shot? It's your everyday hurt multiplied a gazillian times. The point being, we can relate enough from a small hurt to imagine what we would feel like with a gigantic hurt and we know that if we have to lie down and rest after a hard day working on the lawn that we sure as hell aren't going to be on a plane three days after taking not one but three to the midsection. So it's OK for the hero to perform extraordinary feats of physical prowess except when it comes to physical damage? That's the point where the reader feels justified, and even smug in crying foul? Maybe, but it seems a little ingenuous to TG.

But TG is probably over-thinking this. Readers say they want realism in their fiction all the time. We conveniently overlook the fact that 99% of spying is sitting in cars, standing on street corners, drinking in bars and chatting up people at cocktail parties, to say nothing of listening to thousands of hours of phone recordings and untold hours of reading the Internet. Only the biggest blockhead would want to read that sort of realism.

So maybe TG cut Dunn too much slack. Is he a great writer? Not by a long shot. He gets the job done while using more than his fair share of cliches and awkward dialogue. So do a hell of a lot of other writers, many of them best sellers. His hero's romantic moments are sometimes silly, his background is needlessly tortured, the villains are absurdly villainous. All the same “sins” perpetrated by legions of the same bestseller writers. Trust TG, he reads more thrillers in a year than any reader of this blog, and he knows how bad this stuff can be. And yet many of the same books TG reads sell in the hundreds of thousands and millions of copies. So do thriller readers really care about realism, much less good writing? They seem to when it comes to details about the hero's medical maladies. But they're also able to swallow any number of other absurdities for the author's they love.

Here's the lesson, Matthew Dunn: you can make your hero able to leap tall buildings, but beware of having him bleed. At least excessively. TG may let you slide, but your Amazon reviewers are taking you to task.

Spycatcher

Several months ago, the Washington Post reviewed Spycatcher, by Matthew Dunn. (Review here)

Thriller Guy also reviewed the book, favorably, and also interviewed Dunn. The author is a veteran of Britain's intelligence agency MI6, having led more than 70 missions around the world. He is now retired and living in London. Faithful readers of this blog will know TG's opinion of “insiders” who turn to thriller writing in their retirement: he doesn't like them, as a rule. They usually seem primarily motivated by the possibility of making vast sums of money off their expertise, and driven by the thinking, hey, what's so hard about writing a thriller anyway? The results are usually clunky at best, and generally show the authors have no working knowledge of the rules and regulations of writing a thriller. TG says to hell with these opportunists, and they usually get a bad review.

But Dunn is different. Spycatcher is a solid debut. TG has a question for you, gentle blog readers, but it will come at the end of this piece, so hang in with TG here.

Dunn's MI6 agent, Will Cochrane, code name Spartan, is in New York City on a mission involving an Iranian intelligence source. The mission goes bad, as these things are wont to do, and Will is shot a number of times. After a brief (very brief) stay in a secret hospital, he is assigned a new operation whose goal is to find the mastermind leader of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, known as Meggido, who is planning a massive terrorist attack. Will tracks down Lana Beseisu, a freelance journalist now living in Paris and rumored to be the one-time lover of the terrorist leader. Will and Lana form an alliance and an instant attraction, though Will knows he has to keep his hands off this beauty until the mission is successful. When Will learns that the Iranian terrorist was responsible for the death of his own father, revenge adds impetuous to the search. The stage is set for the inevitable clash between the super terrorist and the super agent.

It's not exactly a novel plot as these things go, but Dunn's book is redeemed by his knowledge of the spy world and the dark arts therein. The writing is good, the pace assured and the structure hews to the standard rules of the genre. The man seems to have done his homework and even to have read within the genre. This is good, honest craftsmanship and TG always enjoys seeing someone new whose first book promises more good things to come. If TG has a quibble with the book, and TG always has a quibble, Dunn struggles a bit with the romance between Will and Lana, making Will too susceptible to Lana's charms, too juvenile in general for a guy who is supposed to be this hard core. This is a common mistake in many thrillers and TG thinks this happens because the authors want to show that their heroes are “human.” Bullshit, heroes aren't supposed to be human and vulnerable. Here's TG's advice to all thriller writers: if you've simply got to have a romance, make it low key, or better yet, don't do it at all. It's a cliché the way most of you are handling it, at worst laughable and at best, usually only a bit less laughable.

But the Washington Post had another beef, which raises the question TG wishes to pose to his blog readers. Here's an excerpt from the Post review...

“But while building this compelling storyline, Dunn falls into some unnecessary exaggeration. Not just a special agent, Cochrane has to be a super agent — the sole member of a top-secret Spartan program. As one handler tells him: “You are the ultimate killer of killers, the man who terrifies his enemies and allies, the man who can start wars and end them, the man who is the West’s deadliest and most secret weapon.” Similarly hyperbolic, Megiddo’s plot promises “a huge massacre the likes of which the world has never seen before,” and Megiddo himself is cast as some dark overlord: “Not one major terror act against Western or Western-allied targets can take place without his implicit or explicit authorization. Even groups that are the sworn enemy of the regime of Iran find themselves working for him, usually without knowing they’re doing so.”

That unevenness — stark realism meets cartoonish excess, male fantasy mars persuasive credibility — undermines what otherwise stands as a stylish and assured debut.”

Hmmm, it seems that TG has blathered on and run out of space. Rather than continue the discussion now, TG will make this entry a two-parter and ask his question in the next issue. Meanwhile, if anyone wants to read Dunn's book, TG will send the first person who asks for it a crisp new hardback. Send your request as a comment.

Free Book!

Listen up, out there. TG has been telling you in these pages the secrets of how Big Time writers crank out their boatloads of thrillers, year after year. Yes, much of it is crap, but like the old saying goes, much of everything is crap. As a man who has read more than anyone's fair share of thrillers, TG can reduce the formula for success to a couple of sentences: What readers want in a thriller or pretty much any genre novel, is a story that follows the rules of the genre, and adds something different. Easy, no?

The first part, following the rules, can be learned easily enough. You just have to read long and hard into the genre you intend on working. But you'd be surprised how many writers sound like unoriginal dopes because they don't bother doing their homework and turn out novels that have all the elements that have been done to death. TG has found that the most egregious sinners here are European writers who get published in this country by swinish publishers trying to ride on a European best seller and reader be damned if it's a copy of what's already been done in the US, or by stupid publishers who are trying to capitalize on the thriller genre's successes in recent years. For whatever reason, TG always, always, gives these boring, copycat thrillers a shit review. So beware, publishers. These unoriginal books are also often written by “insiders' who are ex-spies or worked at NSA or some other government organization, now retired. Publishers are suckers for these people and pay them chests of money for the possibility of something new, and 95% of the time the result is, yes, you guessed it, just more of the aforementioned crap. Why? Because there are no more editors who actually edit, rather than just acquire. But don't get me started, that's another blog for another time.

Then there are the writers who get it right. TG recently reviewed Sanctus, by Simon Toyne. Billed as the first in a trilogy, TG found it perfectly fine as it dealt with all the familiar elements of the religious artifact thriller. Set in the fictional city of Ruin in modern day Turkey, within the ancient halls of a church called the Citadel, carved out of a mountain, inhabited by cowled monks, blah blah blah, a young woman who comes to the church to find her long lost brother, a secret that will change the world, blah blah blah, yes, yes, fine, just get to the damn secret that's going to change the world. You see, there's always a secret that's going to change the world.

Here's the thing. If a book promises one of these world-changing secrets or weapons, or villains, then TG had better be surprised when the big reveal is, well, revealed. TG has read them all. TG knows that right now, even as we speak, someone is penning another thriller, probably in France, where it's going to turn out that there's evidence that Jesus Christ was just a regular guy who didn't really rise from the dead, didn't cure the lame and the halt, and didn't rise up to heaven in a blast of glorious trumpets, and of course the Catholic Church has to suppress this evidence, so they send some coldly efficient madman who whips himself with scourges, pokes holes in his hands, wears wires around his balls or some other nutty religious nonsense, to kill the hero and his girlfriend. And what always happens is this nutter is defeated by the hero and then here comes a landslide or a flood or an avalanche and the evidence is lost forever. Snore. Wake me when the last page is turned. And this is just one of the many tropes that have been written over and over by people -- TG hesitates to call them writers -- who are attempting so suck off some of Dan Brown's money. They are legion, and TG curses their names.

So, OK, TG is reading along in Sanctus, having a pretty good time, Toyne is staying in the thriller boundaries and the writing is good, when he gets to his big reveal. When it comes, well, picture one of those comic book illustrations of surprise where the character's jaw drops to the ground and the eyes bug out like they're on springs. Yup, that's TG to a T. The surprise, the Big Secret in Sanctus, was something the jaded, seen-it-all writer and reviewer known as Thriller Guy has NEVER thought of and COULD NEVER have thought of. Yes, TG is aware that he's shouting. That's how surprised he was. Enough to even employ an exclamation point, and you know how TG feels about exclamation points.

YOW! TG gulped. He sure didn't see that one coming.

So here's the deal. The publisher has slung a free hardback copy of the book TG's way and he's now going to send it to one of you lucky readers out there in blogreaderland. For the first person who gets me a new follower, (those are the gang of folks on the right hand side of the blog,) TG is going to send a copy of Sanctus. Then they can write in and tell us if they were as surprised as TG was. Or they can tell us that TG is full of crap and doesn't know shit from Shinola. (Do folks out there even know what Shinola was?) So sign someone up and let TG know. When the little ticker over the Follower section goes up by one, we'll have our winner. If there's a tie, I've actually got a couple of these books. So keep checking in on the Comment section under this blog. Let me know when you've signed someone up, TG will respond in the Comments and then you can send him your address in an email.

What a deal, a 26.95 book. Who sez TG doesn't love ya?