First Offenders

Hold all calls, Polly... I'm gonna go break the hottest story this city has ever seen!

By Alison

I'm not going to a lot of conferences this year. But one of the few I AM going to is Murder 203 , which is taking place in fabulous Connecticut on April 18-19. I'll be on two panels, one of which I'm moderating. And I'm damn glad to be moderating the one I'm moderating because it's a topic near and dear to my heart: Reporters in Crime Fiction. The panelists: Hank Phillippi Ryan, Jan Brogan, Toni L.P. Kelner and of course Karen E. Olson have all, like me, had some journalism experience -- newspaper, broadcast, magazine, college newspaper, SOMETHING. So as a result, their reporter protagonists are realistic and act more or less the way real-life reporters do (except for the whole frequently-stumbling-upon-brutal-murder thing. But hey, that's the genre.)

It adds to my enjoyment of their writing because, let me tell you, nothing takes me out of a book more than thinking, "a real reporter would never do that." Because my experience has largely been in the world of magazines, it's the inaccurate magazine portrayals that get me the most. You know what I'm talking about. They mostly occur in the chick lit mysteries, where magazine writer/reporters all seem to work in fabulous offices and wear designer clothes and spend their whole days lunching in stilleto heels and never actually have to type a word and have assistants fetching them coffee... oh man do those books piss me off...

I've had hard news reporter friends tell me similar things about certain newspaper-set mysteries, which feature reporters acting more like superhero crime fighters than, you know... nerds with steno pads.  And it's really made me wonder. We all catch such hell if we get the gauge of a shotgun wrong, or if we mention some street in a real town as being one-way when it's actually not... There are even certain protagonists' professions -- D.A. or cop, for instance -- where inaccurate portrayals can earn a writer some seriously bad reviews, not to mention hate mail. But a junior magazine writer can go jetting off to Malta with her personal assistant on her company's dime and no one says boo about it???  

I'm not saying you actually have to have worked a job to be able to write about it. But if I'm going to suspend my disbelief about the whole frequently-stumbling-upon-brutal-murder-thing, I'd like to see at least the basics of my own profession portrayed the way they really are.

Is your job portrayed accurately in the books you read? Does it bug the hell out of you if it isn't?

The Post In Which I Say All The Things I'm Not Supposed To Say

I’m back where I started.

When Killer Swell came out in the summer of 2005, I thought I had it all figured out.

I had great relationships with my editor and agent. The reviews of the book were better than I could’ve hoped for. I’d done my homework on getting the word out, spending countless hours on publicity and marketing, trying to build a small, but solid fan base for future books. The publishers were doing what they could to get a first time author into the market. I knew there were obstacles that I had no control over, but I was cautiously optimistic.

When Wicked Break hit shelves in the summer of 2006, the tide began to shift. My editor left the business and I went through two different editors during the production process of the book. (Both were exceedingly nice and professional, by the way. If they were pissed or burdened about my being handed off to them, they never showed it and treated me very, very well.) My agent was sounding the warning bells about small sales numbers. The reviews were okay, but nowhere near the high level of the first. The print run shrunk significantly, as did orders prior to publication. And while I kept plugging away, never turning down an invitation to speak or sign anywhere in the country on my dime, the book was essentially dead on arrival.

Fuck.

I’d written the third in the series, but we knew it was a long shot to attempt to place the third in a series that hadn’t performed up to expectations elsewhere. So I rewrote it as a standalone and we sent it out.

No takers. Still not sure whether it was the book or the fact that my name was attached to it was the reason. Probably a bit of both.

So I wrote another standalone, a book that, to be as honest as I can, sucked big time. I wrote it under pressure, pressure I’d placed on myself because I could feel the wheels of my career coming to a standstill. It just wasn’t very good because I hadn’t written it for the right reasons. And all of that showed.

I made the decision to leave my agent, an agent that I am still enormously grateful to and would refer the right author to in a heartbeat. But we’d done a year of hit and miss and after four years, the relationship had run out of steam and we were both sort of out of ideas. I needed to make a change. She understood and we are still friends.

I took a couple of months off before beginning the search for a new agent, working on a book that was completely unlike anything I’d ever written. It was smaller, cozier, sillier, a book that was making me laugh out loud when I was feeling pretty down about my career. But there was no pressure to write the book. I was writing it because I wanted to and because it was fun.

Near the end of 2007, I started sending the book out. Friends gave me referrals, I went through old contacts I’d made, I sent out cold queries. I spent close to a year trying to find someone to rep this book that I love.

Nada. Some very nice rejections, some very polite rejections and some folks I never heard from again. Nothing new here. That’s just the way it works. It hurt, but that's publishing.

But I couldn’t give up on this one, this small, silly, funny story. Enough people that would’ve told me otherwise if warranted told me it was a good book. I wasn’t being completely delusional. It was the right book for me, just the wrong book at the wrong time for the publishing world.

And now, there’s a glimmer of hope.

No, this isn’t where I tell you that I have a new agent and a big fat contract on my desk. That hasn’t happened and probably won’t with this book.

But I couldn’t leave it alone and I entered it in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest.

I debated for a number of nights about whether to do this. Even though I had published two novels, this book was eligible because it had never been under contract. But my ego was saying “Dude. You’ve published a couple of novels. You were in the game. What the hell are you doing entering a book in a contest for? That’s what you used to do before you were published, before you had an agent, before you had a contract. Isn’t that a step backwards?”

Hell if I know.

And, yeah, I know. I’m not supposed to admit ANY of this. You’re not supposed to say out loud that you’re without an agent, that you’re without a contract, that you don’t have a book coming out, as if saying it out loud somehow makes it more real. Taboo, of some sort. Well, folks, if you’ve been following along and you see that my last book came out in the summer of 2006 and you also own a calendar and are aware that this year is 2009, it is probably not new knowledge to you that I am a free agent.

So fuck the taboos and fuck ego and back to that glimmer of hope.

Stay At Home Dead is now a quarterfinalist in this Amazon deal. Whittled down from 10,000 entries, it is now one of the remaining 500 novels in the contest. The book is a 65,000 word humorous mystery that features stay at home dad Deuce Winters as he attempts to prove himself innocent of the murder of an old high school rival found in the backseat of Deuce's minivan. In order to do that, he must navigate the small town machinations of Rose Petal, Texas, which include an ornery group of mothers at his daughter's pre-school, an Elvis look-alike who wants to build a children's recreation facility that features a shooting range and a fedora wearing private detective who is infatuated with Deuce's wife. And the fedora wearing private detective is a midget. Because midgets are funny. You can check out the first 30 pages and leave your thoughts about it right here if you are so inclined.

Is it gonna win? Probably not. Was it the right thing to do to enter? I have no clue.

But being back where I started doesn’t feel as bad as I thought it might.
Jeff

WASHING MY MOUTH OUT...WITH DIRTY WATER

Earlier today, I was trying to think of really awful dirty words: "Gutfuck", "Shitblood", "Ass Cheeser", "Squishfucking", "Cuntboiler", you know.  I mean, how far can we push dirty language?  And why the hell does it make so many people mad?  "Polite" is just a fragile mask everyone's forced to wear.  Is it a bad thing that the bleeps on TV have gotten so short that you can tell what the words are anyway (especially since we usually hear the first and last letters)?  I don't think so.

Anyway, it's just something I thought about to piss off the people who say, "You don't have to use such terrible language to tell a great story!" But here's the deal: one person's "terrible" is another person's "magical".

As a writer, there are many times I want to inhabit a voice.  Screw writing.  I just want to hear someone talking to me. Telling me a story.  As a reader, I want to forget I'm being written at because the voice is so compelling.  It's getting harder to do because I teach creative writing.  What gets in the way of that?

A writer trying to be too smart, too polite, or too scared.  They back off the bad words because some people won't like it (well, I'm not writing for those people).  They raise the level of vocabulary because they want to audience to admire their sentences (but what really happens is that every line drips with condescension, kind of like Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons, and the audience is woken from what John Gardner calls "the waking dream" of the story).  They worry about all the people who might be offended by their beliefs or by the gore.  They say "I don't want people confusing me with the characters" so they turn the heat down and serve it lukewarm...and we know what happens to lukewarm water, right?

Gets spewed the fuck out.

There are plenty of people writing about crime because they like nice tidy endings.  Well, maybe that's the best possible hope, but it usually takes much longer and unexpected paths.  So what I'm more interested in as a crime writer are the terrible things people do to each other, and the consequences thereof.  Also, how much shit are we willing to put up with from others?  What's our shifting moral compass look like?  I read fiction because I want to see how we act when we're at our worst.  Mainly because it's interesting to see how people justify that behavior, and how they try to atone for it.

It's interesting.  It's heartbreaking.  It's why I read and write crime fiction.  Even if I never have the experiences those characters struggle through, I'd like the story to convey some sort of idea of what it must feel like.

People fuck.  People swear.  People hurt the ones they love.  And those are the stories that stick around the longest, to remind us just how bad it can feel.

Oh, I thought of another dirty word: "Boring".

So, why do you read crime fiction?

--Neil

Friday Bonus Music Video:

Not Quite Dead Yet - killing Sir Spamalot

Lori here~

Know what I love about having fans? Having them send me rockin' cool videos like this one because it reminds them of me...and of my characters...and my attitude.

So while you're watching this video, FOFO's, imagine the spammers who've been hitting ye old FO blog of late, causing us to have to install word verification and comment moderation. And yes, I liken spammers to someone trying to break into your house. You weren't invited, stay the fuck out or I'll take action.

Watch it all the way to the end, peeps. I say kill 'em all.

Did your school projects suck this bad?

It’s that time of year again. School projects. My daughter has two: a report and poster about the rainforest for science class and something to do with the ancient Greeks for social studies. A suggestion was to read and act out a part of The Iliad. Imagine her surprise when I pulled my copy off the shelf and pointed to the sections I’d noted and marked in college. I tried to tell her that no one else would do this. And she promptly told me she wouldn’t, either. Instead, she’s planning to make a diorama portraying the myth of Helen of Troy, complete with the Greek gods, Helen, and an army with a Trojan horse.

She’s on her own.

I lived in fear of projects like this in school. Not that I’m not creative, but I was never able to carry out to any degree the project that I’d visualized.

Case in point: In seventh grade, for the science fair, I decided to make a miniature replica of an Indonesian hut. I went out to the back yard and collected twigs and grass and clumsily put together a sad little hut that would fit quite nicely in a Third World Country. It was lopsided, shed grass like my cat sheds his fur in spring, and I prayed it would stay together at least through the fair. I knew it sucked.

But I didn’t know how bad it sucked until I saw where the teacher had put it.

Right next to the mammoth Taj Mahal created entirely out of sugar cubes.

Now I knew even then that kid didn’t actually make that thing himself. But it was spectacular. And while in India, you have such disparity between classes that a structure like the Taj Mahal would be the backdrop for the poverty-ridden huts, it didn’t matter to me then. I felt like such a loser. Because I’d made such a loser project.

What about you? Tell us about your best or worst school project.

Karen

Way down inside, woman you need it....

By Alison

Our daughter had a last-minute sleepover at a friend's house on Saturday night. So my husband and I did what any self-respecting couple would do upon discovering that they were suddenly childless for an entire weekend evening. We had a few drinks... and headed out to see a Led Zeppelin tribute band.

Black Dog, for godsakes. Been a Long Time Since I Rock and Rolled. Freakin' Stairway to Freakin' Heaven. What's not to love about that??

First let me say the band was great. The guitarist had the double-necked twelve-string, just like Jimmy Page and he WAILED on it. The lead singer looked sort of like my old accountant (only with a white satin shirt and super-tight pants) but he sounded exactly like Robert Plant. They didn't play Cashmire, but I think that requires like a whole string section anyway, and they did all the rest of our favorites and it was a really good time. But the one thing that sticks in my mind was not the band. It was a woman in the front row.

Actually, saying she was IN the front row is kind of misleading... Seeing as there were only about 20 of us in the entire theater, this woman pretty much WAS the front row -- still she would have drawn just as much attention had the place been packed. Outside of the lead singer with the puffy shirt, everyone in the place, including us, was dressed way down -- jeans, t-shirts, maybe a crappy looking sweater with cat hair all over it... The kind of stuff you throw when you decide at the last minute to haul your sorry ass out of the house rather than spend the whole night sitting on the couch watching TV like a loser.

But not this woman. She wore a filmy white minidress with big sleeves like angel wings and silver stiletto heels -- and since she was quite tall and built exactly like an R. Crumb drawing, she really stood out. Plus, she was dancing. By herself. Very theatrically. To every single song. When she waved and blew kisses at the drummer and the basist, and they waved back, I decided I had it figured it out. She was a groupie -- a lone groupie for a Led Zeppelin tribute band in Upstate New York. Maybe she wasn't really. Maybe she was one of their girlfriends or wives or just some amazingly over-dressed person having a good time at a bar. But in my mind, she lived for the Led Zeppelin Experience.... And man, did I ever want to put her in a book.

I've since invented a whole life for her, an apartment filled with concert photos and bootlegged tapes, a necklace made of faux Jimmy Page's old guitar pics, a passion for a tribute band that is boundless and a teenage daughter and ex-husband who will never, ever understand. And she's going in my book. I just hope she doesn't steal it from my heroine.

Did you ever meet or see someone you considered a perfect character for a book? And if you're a writer, did you ever put them in yours?

The Soundtrack of My Life

I tried Twitter.  It was all right, I guess.  But then some other Twitterers made Twitter unbearable and I had to go through this "Do I block them or not?" bullshit that ultimately made me decide to dump Twitter completely from my barely-breathing promotional "platform".

But Twitter with tunes?  I'm so there.

Here's my profile on blip.fm, which is exactly as I described--Twits with a song tacked on.  Just like we've always wanted.  Our own personal film soundtrack for our everyday lives.  Kind of like this:

Although actually, for me, it's probably more like:

Still, it's pretty cool.  Especially when I'm trying to achieve a "mood" for a novel that's still festering and expanding in my head.  I can string together a bunch of songs, then go back and listen to them to get back into the groove while I'm writing.

And then again, other people just use it to find every bizarre cover song in the universe.

I can see the potential for abuse already, as I guess there's some competition among people without much going on in their day to day lives to somehow become "stars" on blip.fm simply based on number of songs posted (so they just fill it up, one after the other, for hours), number of "props" given to them by other listeners, and number of "reblips"--when another DJ replays one of their choices and gives them credit for it, which is so totally a mindfuck when you consider 1) how easy it is to search for the damn song yourself, and 2) how it wasn't actually their song to being with, so why should they give a fuck if someone gives them credit for "choosing" it first???  It's like a radio station saying, "Hey, we played that Kelly Clarkson hit about ten minutes ago!  Those guys owe us credit for making them think about it."

As long as I find it useful for the writing process, I'll keep "blipping", but I can't imagine it will in any way make anyone pick up one of my books.  But I guess sometimes, not everythingin life is about forcing people to buy one of my books.  Nor should I obsess so endlessly on it that I pretty much become a shill machine who'll stop at nothing to get one of my fluffy entertainments into the hands of as many folks with disposable income as possible. 

I'll put it this way: I want the people who would really like the types of books I write to find them and try them.  I want to help do all I can to find those people and let them know about these novels, but I don't plan on changing the stuff I want to write about solely to sell more.  I write the stories that "get to me" most.  Period. 

Therefore, I'll blog some because I like doing it.  I'll do the Virtual Motorcycle Rally in May because it's a fun thing to do, and it'll tell some people more about Hogdoggin'. I'll try to get people to notice the book, but if it's not their sort of book, cool.  And I'll grow vegetables in my backyard and play alt-country/hair metal guitar and watch lots of TV (Breaking Bad! Lost! Hell's Kitchen! So many awesome options!) and blip up some tunes because not every goddamned moment in life is about being a writer.

Only about 96% is.

And I'm delusional enough to think I need my own soundtrack, too.  Next, I'm going to need a cinematographer for the ride to work.

So, what's your theme song?  Your "love scene" song?  Your "fight scene" song?  Your "tragic end" song? (And stick to one song per category!  We don't want your whole fucking playlist here!)

Til next week,
Neil

Bonus Friday Music Video:

Welcome Guest Blogger - JA Konrath!

JA Konrath's Blog

My name is JA Konrath. I write thrillers about a cop named Jack Daniels. They're funny, but have scary parts.

Recently, I wrote a book under the name Jack Kilborn called Afraid. It's a horror novel, with all scary parts, and no funny parts at all. It comes out March 31.

So I'm on this blog tour, trying to visit a different blog every day in March, and Lori Armstrong graciously invited me to fill in for her today.

I like this blog, and lurk here often, occasionally commenting, if only to help Shelby make fun of Jim Born. One of the things I like most is how much the First Offenders ask questions of their blog audience.

So today I have a question for all of you. But first, some set-up is needed.

One of the points of my blog tour is, obviously, to broaden my fanbase and talk about my books to new audiences.

But there are reciprocal benefits. I'm sending my blog readers to other people's blogs, and these blogs are reporting big spikes in their traffic.

Win-win.

Last week I sent out a newsletter to 8500 people who signed up for it. In it, I linked to a novella that I wrote with my friend, thriller author Henry Perez. On Henry's site (www.henryperezbooks.com), there is a link to buy the novella (in a anthology called MISSING) on Amazon.

When I emailed the newsletter, Henry's numbers for his book spiked, and numbers for Missing spiked.

All because I recommended it and included a link.

So why the heck aren't more authors recommending more books in their newsletters?

I know we all jealously guard our mailing lists, and promise those who sign up we shall never give their addresses to anyone else under penalty of death.

But, as authors, we also have the power to recommend books. That's why we blurb each other, and those blurbs are proudly displayed on book jackets and websites.

When I do a newsletter, I usually recommend several of my friends novels. Not only because it's a smart thing to do in a karmic sort of way, but because readers who sign up for author newsletters are REAL readers.

These are the uber fans, the voracious collectors who devour everything they can find by certain authors. They love books.

Why not recommend your favorite books and author friends to them?

My inbox is full of generic, boring-as-hell author newsletters. Usually they're expensive-looking HTML with plenty of graphics and a big splash of the latest book covers that takes a while to load. There's always text about when the book will be released, what the author is working on next, and tour dates and locations.

Why don't they just send TV commercials? We all know how much people love TV commercials. That's why we never skip the commercials when we Tivo our favorite shows.

Not.

My point? I've sent out about a dozen newsletters over the years, and I try to make them fun. They aren't ads. They include freebies, and contests, and the standard "this is my next book" schtick is kept to a minimum and done in an amusing way.

I also mention books I like, and ask my readers to check them out.

What if all of your author friends, when they mailed out newsletters to their fans, also mentioned your book and a list of others they enjoyed? How quickly could we help spread the word if we weren't so selfish, focused only on Buy Me, Buy Me!

Newsflash: No reader on earth only reads one author. Readers like many different books and authors. And if a reader likes your books, chances are they'd also like some of the authors you recommend. In fact, they might be grateful for getting those recommendations. Most of us write one or two books a year. These REAL readers go through two books a week, or more.

So next time you send out a newsletter to your fans, recommend some of your peers.

And if you mention me, I'll be happy to return the favor.

Which brings me to my question for the day: If any of the First Offenders were to recommend a book to you, their loyal blog readers, would you take their advice?

Gimme that fish

I’ve always been envious of people who have quirky talents. I’ve got a good friend who can do something with her cheek so it sounds like water dripping. I’ve got another friend who does a kick ass impression of Michael Bolton—although Michael Bolton when he had long hair. My daughter can twist her lips all up so she looks like a fish.

And I’ve just discovered that I have a new talent. I can do a pretty good imitation of this fish:




What’s your quirky talent? Or if you don’t have one, tell us about someone you know who has one.

Karen

How tweet it is...

By Alison

So after succumbing to still more cyber-peer pressure, I'm now on Twitter. I just got on -- I'm following like three people. I haven't made my page yet, but my screenname is alisongaylin, and if you would like to Tweet at me or whatever it is you're supposed to do on Twitter, tweet away... I don't get it yet, but I know these things take time and I've been told you need to have like 100 followers or something for Twitter to work the way it's supposed to, so for now, the jury is still out...

Regardless, this makes a total of four social networking sites I've now dutifully joined -- Myspace, Facebook, Linkedin and now Twitter. It's amazing to me, actually, how many of these things are popping up, and the people I've gotten back in contact with as a result -- co-workers from ten years ago, friends from grade-school, even a reader or two. But the weird thing that's happening now is they're all getting to know each other. It happens on Facebook, where, as I've mentioned before, you post status updates, ie "Alison just joined Twitter." or "Alison is on too many social networking sites." More and more, people have been posting comments on my updates, and then talking to each other about the comments they posted, until it feels like II'm hosting a big, weird cocktail party in the ethos -- in one such thread, a friend from work exchanged a few lines with someone I met ten years ago in Mexico, and then a fellow writer, who knows neither of them, LOLed. In another, a debate ensued between one of my best friends from college, a fellow mystery writer and someone who was in a workshop with me 15 years ago.... I forget what the status update was that inspired this debate, but it was still cool.

Anyway, I do think these social networking sites are pretty great -- the antidote to that isolated feeling you can get as a writer -- provided you don't get sucked into an endless hole of cocktail party-hosting and never get any actual WORK done. Which is always a danger.

What do you think of social networking sites? And if you like them, do you have a favorite?