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)

Rejection Dejection

Tony Hillerman’s agent told him, ‘Get rid of the Indian stuff.’”

Number of times various books were rejected...

Harry Potter (12)

Carrie, Stephen King (30)

Diary of Anne Frank (16)

Dune, Frank Herbert (23)

Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell (38)

M*A*S*H, Richard Hooker (17)

And the all time winner, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (104)

How would you like to be one of the 12 dumb asses who rejected Harry Potter?

Thriller Guy is still letting Allen Appel write the posts...

As outlined in the last blog, my famous agent sent out Cross, my novel about a human/chimpanzee child/creature. The rejections began to come in, and they were pretty much all the same. I have learned, after writing a dozen or so more novels, many of which have earned their own fair share of rejections, that these things all follow the same formula.

“Mr. Appel is one whale of a storyteller! Not quite right for us.”

“The Catholic church is going to hate this one! Not quite right for us.”

“Wow! What a story! I'm sure someone will pick this up, though it's...”

You guessed it, “Not quite right for us.” After about 10 of these rejections, the agent gave up. I gave up as well and went back to what I was doing, which was being a photographer and illustrator. I wasn't bothered by the rejections, I just figured that it was sort of cool to have a big time agent and sort of fun to have had all these places reject me. Hey, I was young, what did I know?

So, an ex-girlfriend of mine was dating a small independent publisher in New York, Kent Carroll, who had his own company, Carroll and Graf Publishers. Kent had come up with a great idea: he was publishing reprints of famous old pornographic books, stuff written so long ago that the copyright had run out. These books sold well, (remember, this was around the mid-eighties, Internet porn wasn't really widespread yet) well enough that he took the money and used it to publish more literary stuff. He also had a line of Luis L'Amour westerns that had slipped out of copyright (he got sued on those and eventually gave them up) that he made money on. Kent asked me if I would do the covers for his line of porn, and I said sure. The pay was crappy, but I needed the money, and I certainly didn't have any scruples about porn. Still don't.

While doing the porn books, I told Kent about my foray into publishing with Cross. He asked to see it, I sent it to him, he liked it, but wasn't willing to take it on (hey, wait a minute, you do porn but you can do Chimpanzee/human sex?) So he asked me, would I be willing to write three chapters and an outline for an idea he had? What's the idea? I asked.

One night while he was riding home on the train to his house on Long Island he was thinking about where he'd like to go on vacation. He'd been all around the world, pretty much everywhere, and he thought where he'd really like to go was Russia in the year 1918. So he asked me, could I write a novel about a guy like him time traveling back to that place and time.

Why not? What did I know?

So I wrote three chapters about a guy Kent's age who was a history professor at the New School who goes back in time. Kent takes the pages, and goes to Dell and sells them the paperback rights for $20,000.00, gives me $10,000.00 and uses the other $10,000.00 to pay the production costs on the hardback when I finished the book. Time After Time and a series was born. The point here is, you never know how things are going to turn out when you write a book. I wrote one, it was rejected by a lot of folks, but it showed another publisher that I had the skills needed to write a novel, in particular the novel that publisher wanted written.

Kent Carroll was a genius. Eventually, I'll get to the story of why we broke up our publishing relationship, but I loved the guy then and had a great time writing what became a series of four books with Carroll and Graf.

Meanwhile, here's one of the C&G porn book covers I did.

Time After Time by Allen Appel

Thriller Guy has turned the blog over to me this week. I asked him to put in a plug for my latest endeavor and he muttered something to the effect of “Do it your effing self,” so here it is.

I have put Time After Time up as a Kindle book, the first in my series of time travel books known as the Pastmaster series, featuring Alex Balfour, a mild mannered history professor who lives in New York City. Even though the books have been out of print for many years, I still receive weekly, if not monthly, kind letters from readers who read the books long ago or have stumbled upon them recently in libraries and used bookstores. There are four published books in the series, and one unpublished; I intend to eventually get all of them up as Kindles. Because many of Thriller Guy's readers are writers or are trying to be writers, I thought I would outline how the book, and the series, came to be. I have written some of this in earlier blogs.

In the mid '80s I was working as a free lance illustrator for the Washington Post, specifically the Post Magazine. I was pals with many of the writers there and eventually met my present wife who worked in the Style section. An agent from New York had come to Washington and signed up a lot of these folks to write books and for several months it seemed like everyone had scored a book deal. I remember sitting in the magazine offices one day and looking around and thinking, none of these people are any smarter than I am, all they know how to do that I don't is how to structure a book. I'm a good storyteller, why can't I do this? And so, armored with my own naiveté and fueled with clueless energy, I pitched right in and began to write.

I had an idea. I have always read lots of science books and had been reading about the early days of genetics. I knew that the genetic similarity between human and chimpanzee was very close. And so was born (pardon the pun) Cross, the story of a human/chimpanzee creature born in the African jungle. Truth be told, I can't remember much of this book, but there's a copy of it around here somewhere.

I quickly found that I had a facility with dialogue, so I wrote the entire first draft in dialogue with only a few sketchy passages about setting. I wrote in a white heat and finished the first draft in a couple of months. After resting up for a few days, I looked at what I'd done and realized I was far from anything approaching a novel. I started reading, almost at random, other successful novels to see how it was done. I quickly figured out the way you established a scene then worked within that scene. The physical aspects of moving characters around. I ripped through another draft in another couple of months. This draft was closer to a real book, but still not there. I read more, paying attention to how the authors created real characters. Another several months went by as I gave my characters backstories, hopes, dreams and lives. This time when I finished and read it over I realized I was getting closer to something that resembled a real novel. But even though I had the basic elements in place it needed to be smoothed over, it needed to flow from one page to the next and it needed a subtext, it needed ideas, it needed heart. So I rewrote it again.

And again.

And again.

And again.

A year had gone by, and after seven complete drafts I had a novel, and it was pretty good. Not knowing any better, I sent it off to one of the biggest agents in New York. And it was accepted. And she began to send it out.

And thus began my life as a novelist. Born in the simple notion that I was just as smart as everyone else, fueled by the energy of youth and buoyed by hope, which as we all know, springs eternal.

"I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter." James Michener

Nest week: The rejections.

No Blood, No Guts, No Problem

Sometimes Thriller Guy puts down one of the books he's reviewing and has to go take a shower to get the blood and brain matter off his splattered person. Not that he's complaining, bloody violence is pretty much a given when it comes to thrillers. But recently TG read an excellent book, indeed a thriller, where only a few deaths occurred and those were off the page.

Before I tell you about the book, let me repeat my standard assertion about my recommendations. First of all, they aren't recommendations, I'm just here to tell you what I thought was good or bad. Repeat: what I thought was good or bad. Me. I. Thriller Guy. Your milage may certainly vary. So don't write me and tell me I'm a dumbass because I recommended a certain book, you went out and bought it, read it and thought that it sucked. Please. Thanks.

Trigger Point, by Matthew Glass. Glass writes what I can only classify as economic/environmental/political thrillers. Ultimatum (2009) is about environmental disaster with China as the enemy, in End Game (2011) the US and China face off in a naval battle off the Horn of Africa.

In Trigger Point, the Republican President of the US decides that a recent atrocity against American citizens in Uganda cannot go unpunished. Not only is taking action the morally correct thing to do, doing so will go a long way to burnish the president's image and give a boost to his approval ratings. Meanwhile, over on Wall Street, a hedge fund manager, Ed Grey, gets a tiny piece of insider information from a guy who works for him. Ed thinks they could use the info and earn some quick cash by shorting a bank. The bank, Fidelian, is actually in financial difficulties and the shorting causes even more difficulties. At the same time, the Chinese government is pissed at the US because they have interests not only in Uganda but in the Fidelian bank. Pretty quickly the dominoes start to fall, and it becomes more and more clear that when the last one goes over, the world will be facing a nuclear war.

That description doesn't do justice to this exciting, intelligent book. It's sort of like a cross between Seven Days in May and Dr. Strangelove. You see the action unfolding from all the separate points of view, which allows you, the reader, to understand how each point of view can be based on a complete error but how those closely involved can't see where the mistakes are because they lack certain information, because of cultural differences, or because there are differing goals at stake. It shows how Wall Street guys and politicians can be the bad guys and, at the same time, be the good guys.

It's fascinating to watch Glass take the emerging pieces of a very complex puzzle and fit them together to create a chilling picture of a coming disaster. It's a real nail-biter.

TG has to wonder if people in power -- in this case in the world's capitals and economic power centers -- ever read thrillers. They could learn a lot from not only this book, but lots of others that TG reads as well. The point is, Trigger Point is a fascinating read. It will scare the bejeezus out of you and the only blood involved is that which is hemorrhaging out of the stock market.

So if anyone out there knows the president or leader of some other country, tell them they should add perusing The Thriller Guy to their regular pile of required reading. Who knows, doing so just might save the world.

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.