Don’t Tinker Too Long

By
Scott D. Parker

When you’re an indie author, you have to tinker. Sometimes, you have to fix your website. Other days you’ll spend hours finding the perfect—or near perfect—piece of stock image you can use for a cover. Moreover, when new trends manifest themselves—like Amazon ads—you’ll have to spend some time learning, researching, and then implementing.

Here’s the big caveat: Don’t Tinker Too Long

After awhile, the tinkering becomes the thing you do more of rather than the activity that got you to where you are: writing. I suppose that’s true for traditionally published writers as well, but it’s a big deal for indies.

Case in point: As of 1 May, I have re-branded my westerns under the “S. D. Parker” pen name. At the first part of the month, I worked on my main website and created a separate area for the western material. Both names are present, even though the “Scott Dennis Parker” is on the masthead. The more I thought about it, however, the more I liked the idea of a completely separate entity for the western stuff. Slowly, over a period of days pondering the pros and the cons, I decided to redraft my existing blogspot blog into one that exclusively focuses on the S.D. Parker - Western Author presence on the web.

But I needed some education on how to fix it so that it resembled a traditional webpage vs. A blog page. That took some doing, I have to tell you. And lots of trial and error and google searches to determine why the site didn’t look the correct way.

But I got it done.

The thing was, during this process, I got to where I enjoyed the tinkering. Instead of completing the existing western story, I’d tinker with the website, doing first this tweak then that one.

I enjoyed it.

But I enjoy writing more.

If you are in the same boat as me, know that you have to tinker sometimes. And the tinkering time can be all-consuming. But have an end date in mind. Know when you’ve tinkered enough and set aside all the other stuff that isn’t writing.

I’ve reached that place now. The new site is nifty, and readers who discover “S. D. Parker” will now have a place to go that isn’t confusing. If you want to check out the end result, here’s the link.

Until next week…

On Reading

I'm tired. It's been a hell of a week, and as I write this, it's not quite over. Like many of you, I feel bombarded by a news cycle that's moving too fast, end of the school year activities, and life in general. Squeezing out time to read and write has been a challenge this week - but I've made it happen (we must make it happen). Rather than making it all about me, let's talk what I'm reading.

When I got to know Danny Gardner I was immediately happy to know him. Now I'm really happy to be reading his novel, A Negro and an Ofay. I'm not far in, but I'm loving it so far. I'm eager to get to the end and sing it's praises.

(Buy it)

I'm also listening to Liane Moriarty's The Husband's Secret. I really enjoyed the TV adaptation of Big Little Lies and while this isn't quite as enthralling, there's something really delicious about stories that are simultaneously incredibly domestic (all the leads are groups of suburban moms) and so goddamn dark and noir.

Any number of authors more successful than I am have said if you don't read, you can't write. Here's to making some headway on the TBR, enjoying good stories, and still getting to call it "work."

The Jon McGoran Interview

By Steve Weddle

Jon McGoran, known for his own novels -- Drift, Dead Out, and Dust Up -- recently published a tie-in novel for the show The Blacklist.

This Blacklist novel is about a group called The Dead Ring, as is as fast-paced and suspenseful novel as I've read in a while.

Raymond “Red” Reddington voluntarily surrenders to the FBI after eluding capture for decades. He has a list of the most dangerous criminals in the world and is willing to guide FBI operations in exchange for immunity. However, he insists on exclusively working with a rookie profiler by the name of Elizabeth Keen. A tragic warehouse fire in Turkey, a mine collapse in South Africa, a capsized ferry disaster in Indonesia: devastating mishaps, or something more sinister? Red knows these were collateral damage in a highly lucrative and deadly game known as the Dead Ring–anything but accidental. The only way to stop the ring is to destroy it from within. Keen must go undercover and play the game, knowing that in the Dead Ring there can only be one survivor.

I was curious about the idea of tie-in novels in general and with Jon's work here in particular. 

Steve Weddle: How familiar with the show were you?

Jon McGoran: I was very familiar with the show. I had watched most of the first season and a good part of the second, but I still got to binge watch a bunch more when I was approached about doing the book, so that was a lot of fun. 

SW: Did they give you a “bible” and what was that like? Were there limits to what you could do?

JM: They did not have a bible, which made things a little tricky—especially with a show that revels in the wild plot twists and swings in some of the character relationships. There are always limits, and it really does help to have them spelled out for you, at least in broad strokes. Having watched the show, I had a pretty good idea of what those limits would be. I will say that there are some amazing fan-based Wikis out there, which can be hugely useful late at night when you are wondering about some obscure aspect of a character’s back story.

SW: How many stories did you pitch and did you have one you liked but didn’t get used?

JM: This was an unusual project in that Jon Bokenkamp, the show runner, had a very specific story idea in mind. So they gave me that kernel of an idea, and I had to pitch back three or four iterations of that idea, and then we went back and forth a few times as I fleshed it out so that it was detailed enough so they could be comfortable that it did what they wanted to do and didn’t do what they didn’t want it to do. 

SW: How long did it take to write?

JM: We spent several months going back and forth on the outlines, but by the time the final outline was approved, I had two months to write the book. I’m a big outliner by nature, but in order to get approval the outline had to be even more detailed than what I usually write. With such a short window of time to write, I was very glad to have that outline.

SW: Are you doing more TV show tie-books?

JM: I don’t have anything lined up right now, but I’d certainly be open to it. Obviously, my first love is writing my own stuff, but I do enjoy playing in other sandboxes. In fact, I am honored to have just been nominated for a Scribe Award, from the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers, for a short story I wrote called Drive Time, for an anthology of X-Files stories, The Truth Is Out There. The winner will be announced at San Diego ComicCon.

SW: What are you working on next?

JM: I have a couple of short stories coming out, including a horror story for an anthology called Hardboiled Horror, and one for Joe Ledger: Unstoppable, an anthology of stories featuring Jonathan Maberry’s Joe Ledger character. Jonathan asked me for a story pairing Joe Ledger with my Doyle Carrick protagonist, so that was big fun to write. But I’m most excited about my next book, Spliced, a near-future SF thriller for young adults and all adults, coming Sept. 5 from Holiday House Books. I’ve also been working with on a podcast with some of my fellow Liars Club members, the Liars Club Oddcast, from Project Entertainment Network. It’s also available on iTunes, Stitcher, and iheartradio. That’s been a huge amount of fun.

Get Yours: The Blacklist - The Dead Ring No. 166

No.

I won't be posting today.

See you in two weeks.

A Day of Surrender

I rarely get sick, but I seem to have come down with a case of strep throat, and the result is that I've already let my job know I'm staying home on Tuesday.  My son will be at school and my wife out of the house in the afternoon, and with my energy level low, I plan to spend the day in bed reading and watching stuff.  It's not so unpleasant to feel less than stellar but not altogether miserable, and I'm looking forward to what will be a day of book and movie indulgence.

So what's on the agenda?  Well, before I get to that, let me tell you the attitude that I will not be taking.

I know he's an easy target, but let's just say I will not be taking the perspective of one Jonathan Franzen.  Why even bring that guy up? Because for some reason now, whenever I get sick and have to stay home, I think of the introduction he wrote to the Martin Beck novel, The Laughing Policeman, by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo.  You might not expect Franzen to have written the intro to a "mere" crime novel, but he did, though of course, his admiration for the book comes with a caveat.

As he says (admittedly a little tongue in cheek at the beginning of this excerpt), "An actual Swedish person, my college roommate Ekstrom, introduced me to this book...This was in 1979.  I was exclusively reading great literature (Shakespeare, Kafka, Goethe), and although I could forgive Ekstrom for not understanding what a serious person I'd become, I had zero interest in opening a book with such a lurid cover...It wasn't until several years later, on a morning when I was sick in bed and too weak to face the likes of Faulkner or Henry James, that I happened to pick up the little paperback again.  And how perfectly comforting The Laughing Policeman turned out to be!  Once I'd made the acquaintance of Inspector Martin Beck, I was never again so afraid of colds...There were ten Martin Beck mysteries altogether, each of them readable cover-to-cover on the worst day of a sore throat."

I've only read five of the Martin Beck mysteries so far, and I managed to read them all when I was in the full bloom of health.  I'd call them excellent, and often funny, though not exactly "comforting". I get what Franzen means when he says he may not want to tax his brain when he's feeling ill and listless, but come on!  But what the hell, it's Jonathan Franzen, and I'm sure he's not alone in thinking like this. 

What's funny is that to this day, I remember a specific winter weekend in college when I came down with a severe cold, one of the worst I've ever had, and read a book as difficult as any I've ever read.  I was living alone and off campus and felt terrible with my cold, and for the lit class I was taking, we were reading William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!  It's the ne plus ultra of Faulkner novels, with sentences that run on for pages and pages - parentheses within parentheses - and its hallucinatory action, not to mention its many characters and extensive time span.   Faulkner's hardest novel to get through, I'd venture, and I'm a Faulkner fan who's read a bunch of his novels.  In any event, I recall stocking up on food, juice, and tea on Friday, in frigid weather, then rushing home as I sneezed and coughed.  After that, I changed into my pajamas and got into bed, and I didn't leave my apartment for three days. Somewhat delirious, repeatedly dozing and then waking up to read, I tore through Absalom, and I daresay being sick allowed me to let go and float along with those incredibly long convoluted sentences.  I was too weakened to stop and analyze them.  The book gave me a kind of high, though that feeling, in all honesty, could also have come in part from the medication I was taking.  The point is, I loved Absalom, Absalom!, and as a matter of fact, it's my favorite Faulkner novel, a book I still put in my all time top ten favorite novels.  I've never dared go back and try to re-read it, though; I fear that if I do, not sick, I won't have the same blissful experience. I could try reading it again when I am sick, but what's the point of that, really, and anyway, I'm not alone in my living situation and able to devote myself to a book for days on end like I once could. That particular read was a one time thing, but it serves as the exact opposite of the Franzen "oh let me read a mere crime novel when ill" approach.

So what about the current sick day?  What to read, what to watch? Simple: I'll continue with the book I've been reading - Sara Gran's Claire DeWitt and The Bohemian Highway.  I read the first Claire DeWitt book a few months back, and I'm about halfway through the second.  I'm enjoying it.  Maybe on my day off from work, lying in bed, I'll be able to finish it.  

I'll also be watching episodes three and four of Twin Peaks: The Return, and I can't wait for that.  That's for the afternoon. As I say, my son will be at school and my wife out of the house, and I'll be able to lie in utter darkness before the big flat screen TV and give myself over to the entrancing pleasures of David Lynch.

I need rest and antibiotics for strep throat, no medicine that will reduce my alertness.  And that's a good thing. Between Sara Gran and David Lynch, between all the intoxicants Claire DeWitt takes and the intoxication that David Lynch's images provoke, who needs to ingest anything else?  (Well, besides coffee for Twin Peaks).   These are both the sort of spacey but lucid works to which you just surrender yourself. You let them lead you through their mysteries and take you wherever they happen to go.  

It's going to be a restful day, but trippy.

Word Power

There's been a lot of talk in my Facebook feed over the past few weeks that's had a common underlying theme. It started with the latest 'cultural appropriation' brouhaha, which resulted in opinion after opinion after opinion after opinion after opinion about the subject, and this is a subject that's been discussed at length many times before.

One old commentary of note began:

A few months ago, I read “The Orphan’s Tales” by Catherynne Valente. The fantasy novel draws on myths and folklore from many cultures, including, to my delight, fairy tales from my Russian childhood. Curious about the author, I looked her up online and was startled to find several social-media discussions bashing her for “cultural appropriation.”

There was a post sneering at “how she totally gets a pass to write about Slavic cultures because her husband is Russian,” with a response noting that her spouse isn’t even a proper Russian, because he has lived in the United States since age 10.**

This article produced a multi-page thread on Snopes discussing the issue.

To the new culture cops, everything is appropriation

Welcome to the new war on cultural appropriation. At one time, such critiques were leveled against truly offensive art — work that trafficked in demeaning caricatures, such as blackface, 19th-century minstrel shows or ethnological expositions, which literally put indigenous people on display, often in cages. But these accusations have become a common attack against any artist or artwork that incorporates ideas from another culture, no matter how thoughtfully or positively.

A work can reinvent the material or even serve as a tribute, but no matter. If artists dabble outside their own cultural experiences, they’ve committed a creative sin.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/poste...appropriation/

And the recent brouhaha spawned a number of responses and dissections of the issues, but one of note comes from Jesse Wente, and others who are members of the First Nations community.

An editorial introducing the concept of an “appropriation prize” for the author who can best embody the cultural experience of a minority group in Canada comes off as an attempt to steal one of the few things Indigenous people in Canada have left — their story, according to one Indigenous author.

“We’ve lost our land, we’ve lost our languages and almost the last thing we have left are our stories and our voices,” said D.A. Lockhart, a member of the Moravian of the Thames First Nation in Chatham-Kent.

“To have somebody come in and say we’ll tell those better than you … is sort of a painful kick while you’re already down.” 

I respect the fact that there may be some within different ethnic communities who felt hurt by the original offending editorial. I'm not sure the editorial intended that. The writer may have had a genuinely good intent - to prompt writers to stop writing about mirror images of themselves and embrace minorities and other cultures in their writing - and conveyed it poorly. Or perhaps that's the intent I wanted him to have. Either way, the reality is that if we don't clearly convey our meaning then we're at fault for some of the interpretation and response that follows.

However, I have been bothered by the whole cultural appropriation discussion, because of how the subject becomes misinterpreted, twisted and perverted for - in some cases - personal reasons. In the course of discussion after discussion, I saw some people shifting the meaning towards the criticisms leveled at Valente referenced in the above quote from 2015. In other words, if you aren't from a specific ethnicity, you don't get to write about it.

That's an interpretation I take issue with. A writer's job is to step outside their frame of experience and present characters who are more than caricatures, who feel real. Would it be real for me to write about strictly white women in a white world? No. Why is is that we have no issue with women writing about male characters and men writing about female characters? Why do we have no issue with older people writing about younger people, and vice versa? As long as the author does their job of fleshing out the character and presenting them in a way that makes them real to the reader, what's the problem? Nobody flipped out over Shakespeare writing a Danish tragedy. I'm fairly certain that 99.9% of the population has had no interaction with aliens from outer space, and I don't protest ET. I mean, for all we know, on a planet far, far away, a bunch of aliens are sitting down with their version of popcorn, watching V and wondering about the batshit crazy Earthlings who've gotten aliens so wrong.

Part of the reason I'm bothered by the way that the discussion gets twisted is because nothing changes; the same points are recycled every few years, and we're no further ahead.

Another reason I'm concerned is because some writers may fear the backlash and actually shy away from incorporating ethnic minorities into their writing for fear of accusations.

And the subject makes me nervous because I worry about overstating our claims to content of any nature. One person's experience of growing up with a bipolar parent isn't necessarily the same as another person's experience of growing up with a bipolar parent. One person's experience at a private boarding school isn't necessarily the same as another's. And it may come as a shock to some, but one person's experience of being white isn't necessarily the same as another person's experience of being white. I mean, I'll be the first to tell you that when I hear some of the extreme feminists who seem to think that they're better than men, what goes through my mind is, "You don't speak for me."

I have Aboriginal characters. I spent a number of years living barely more than a stone's throw from the Penelakut First Nations reserve. (And even as I typed that, I questioned if we still use that term. Yes, I found an article today that referred to Canada's 'Indian' reserves and I'm perplexed. A few years ago, Aboriginal became the proper term... How can 'Indian' still be generally used?) I had friends who lived there. I had a lot of interaction with people from the tribe over the years.

I wanted to attack some of the stereotypes that are leveled against Aboriginals. I created an RCMP officer who was Aboriginal; one of the RCMP officers who helped me with research was part Aboriginal, part French. I gave Tain a terrible personal wound; his daughter had died after he failed to get custody of her, because he was a man and Aboriginal. The courts sided with the white mother, who was ultimately responsible for the abuse leading to their daughter's death. (You want to take about prejudice, don't even get me started on the blanket assumptions that all mothers know what's best for their kids and dads don't matter.)

I don't see myself as stealing anyone's story, and I certainly don't think that I'm asserting I can tell it better. What I am doing is incorporating my own perspective, that Aboriginal people have faced discrimination in society that has been devastating, and that it is wrong to make determinations about people based solely on their gender, religion, skin color or heritage. In order to write a book that's authentically based in Canada, within the scope of what I write about and the settings for those particular books, I think that's very important. After all, how do you write about crime fiction in British Columbia without addressing the indifference shown to Aboriginal victims?

This morning, I did a silly Facebook quiz and it produced my sarcastic one-liner.

And it felt very timely, because words matter. Words can hurt. Words can move us to tears, and they can motivate us to act. They can impart understanding, and they can cut through us like a knife. We may have all sung the childhood verse sticks and stones can break my bones but names with never hurt me at one time or another, but the proof that it isn't true comes in the next line; call me this, call me that, call yourself a dirty rat.

Why would we respond to name calling with more name calling if we didn't think it would hurt someone? The truth is, it does.

The recent focus on words on Facebook that's been filling my feed started with cultural appropriation, and has moved on to discussions about political correctness and the use of disparaging terms. I don't want to say too much about that, though, because one thing I'm not going to do is try to figure out whose Facebook posts are full public and whose are private, and I don't want to violate anyone's preferences by citing them without permission.

The specifics aren't relevant. If you aren't concerned with the possibility of offending others, not much can be said to convey why some terms should be abolished from our speech. You won't get why I'm questioning the 'Indian reserve' term still being in use. And if you are a person of consideration, then you will likely already be aware of the power your words have, and choose your words carefully.

What writers draw from this discussion can shape their works in the future. One of my biggest fears as an editor is tied to some of the reaction I've seen to this discussion. Write what you know. Please don't 'write what you know' or feel you have to stay in your lane. Make sure you do appropriate research and treat the people you write about with respect and make them real to the reader. That's your job. Please don't retreat into a monochromatic mindset that conveys a world that doesn't exist.

You want to know what the fastest way to get a rejection letter from me is? It isn't a quirk in the formatting that needs to be corrected. It isn't a typo. It's boring me to tears. If you're going to limit yourself to 'write what you know' then you better have an extraordinary life. As I've been going through Spinetingler submissions I've identified what must be the common themes assigned to people of specific genders at specific ages. I'll say no more about what those are, but it's become my primary turn-off. By god, give me something original. Something with flavor. Something more than typical twenty-something or forty-something angst.

The words surrounding the discussion of cultural appropriation have power. Unfortunately, they've put the emphasis on appropriation in literature, while the real problem is with how people of different cultural groups are treated within society. If characters within stories can highlight those issues, isn't that a good thing?

Words matter. They have power. Use it wisely.




 Did Fargo get it right? Does Hanzee feel like a stereotype, or like an authentic character who'd been discriminated against because of his ethnicity and pushed to the point where he wasn't willing to take that kind of discrimination anymore?

**Included because in the course of discussion elsewhere, I was asked to provide sources to prove that people were connecting the idea that writers shouldn't write about people from different cultural groups as part of cultural appropriation discussion. I walked away from the discussion after that.  Beyond what's in your own Facebook feed, if you can't do a google search and establish that reality within 10-20 seconds, as I easily did, then to ask me for proof means either you're lazy or you think I'm a liar, and there didn't seem to be much point trying to have an intelligent conversation with anyone who falls into either category. There is a lot of material to read on this particular subject, if you really want to be an authority, and it doesn't take long to establish that there's a range of interpretations about the term and what it means for writers. To discuss it without clarifying your specific interpretation and position is the dangerous ground many walk on; I found that a lot of people were discussing the subject without having read the recent editorial, the articles and editorial responses to it, or the interviews related to the subject, so the discussion risked operating solely off presumptions. And I considered not writing my thoughts here, because it's hard to do this topic justice within a blog post, and even what I've written feels a little simplistic. However, the subsequent discussion about the 'r' word underscored how people were so willing to defend using a term to offensively define people of specific community... and left me wondering if those same people walk around using the 'n' word, too. All of that reiterated to me that our words do matter, and whatever our intent, which we can question on the part of the writer of the original editorial in this recent brouhaha, the response demonstrates that we must choose our words carefully, or risk facing an avalanche of criticism as a result.

UnCHARTed Waters

By Claire Booth

Amazon has just thrown another rock in the pond of bookselling. 

It announced this week that it will begin publishing a weekly list of bestselling titles. Sound familiar?

Publishing bestseller lists since Rip Van Winkle was young.

Amazon will chart its top twenty bestsellers in fiction and nonfiction. This sounds similar to the NYT, or USA Today, or other such lists. But Amazon has a whole other level of data at its dot-com fingertips. It’s “Most Sold” list will include titles purchased or pre-ordered through Amazon.com, Audible.com, and Amazon physical bookstores, as well as titles borrowed through Prime Kindle, Kindle Unlimited, and Audible. That’s a heck of a lot more sales points than what other bestseller lists have access to.

But that’s not all. Amazon also will have a “Most Read” list, that tallies the average number of daily Kindle readers and Audible listeners for that week. Yeah. Back to that whole other level of data. No one else can compile that. Not even close.

This is particularly interesting to me in terms of pre-orders. Authors are told that pre-orders are extremely important – they gauge advance interest in the book. Now here’s something that will, theoretically, tell the world in real time (well, weekly time) how those pre-orders are coming along. This raises some questions for me. If a book that hasn’t even come out yet generates enough pre-orders, will it sail to the top of the list, thereby bumping off a hardworking, already released title? Will those books, likely by big-name authors with good name recognition, now gobble up list spots before and after they’re released, instead of just afterward, like with the already existing lists? Or will more bestseller real estate mean more spots for everyone? My cynic’s heart tends to think the former, but we’ll have to wait and see.

The New York Times recently eliminated its mass market bestseller list, which disproportionately impacts certain genres, like cozy mysteries and romances, that are published primarily in that format. No matter how many an author sells – oftentimes a lot more than a hardcover title – there’s no getting on the NYT any more. So will Amazon’s new Charts be a chance for those kinds of books to regain a bestseller crown?

Only time will tell. I, for one, will be watching closely.