All Entertainment Starts with the Writing

One of my nephews is a comedian. He makes funny faces, has a battery of jokes, has a unique take on the world. He doesn’t get paid, and most of his schtick is on social media.

Over the years, he has held several non-comedic jobs. Delivering pizza back in the day, working at Best Buy, working at GameStop (he loves video games) and other video and gaming stores.

Whereas I built a life in corporate America as a journalist. Scripps-Howard (as it was known back in the day), Media General (again, back in the day), Tribune Company (same). They all made for a nice 401(k) rollover when I left that life in 2011.

My beloved nephew, a funny man in his own right. (Credit: Sean McMahon)

But his path and mine, then and now, for what we want, is not all that different when it comes to how to get it done.

It’s in the writing.

All Entertainment Starts with Writing

Newspapers and books, of course, are about writing. Comedy is writing. Movies start with a script — writing. Plays start with the written word. Anything that involves performing usually involves planning . . . and writing.

I wish high school English teachers would impart this on their students. People who can write are assets to whatever organization they join. And they’re valuable to themselves.

Also, this: You don’t have to be a great speller. You really don’t. We didn’t have software for this when I was in school, but it turns out it didn’t matter then, either. I’ve seen raw copy from GREAT writers who couldn’t spell (and often misspelled people’s names. This, dear friends, is what editors are for.)

You don’t have to be the best grammarian. It helps to be good at it, but again: editors.

What you must do is show up, preferably every day, and put down on a blank page. Digital or paper — what are you thinking about? What are you creating? You must translate a story, an anecdote, a joke, from your brain through your fingers to the page.

Learn from Jerry Seinfeld

Where the magic happens is after you tell the story you want to tell on paper. Because the process has only just begun.

Invariably, that story/joke has value. You almost certainly can punch it up to have more value. And punch it up again to gain maximum value.

This is the creative process.

I’m reminded of three successful people here: Jerry Seinfeld, Taylor Tomlinson and John Sandford. You won’t have to look hard to find other examples, however.

No matter what you think of him, his humor and his place in our culture, Seinfeld is having a small resurgence these days because of his recent Amazon stand-up special or because of his production role in The Pop-Tart movie.

If you go on social media, you can run into multiple Seinfeld-centric accounts, some of which show snippets of his comedy routines, some of which show famous funny scenes from Seinfeld, some of which push out Seinfeld memes, etc.

If you’ve paid attention and listened to Seinfeld on talk shows, podcasts and interviews, he’s pretty much honest about one thing (that I know of): he doesn’t enjoy talking to people unless they are comedians. He has lived in a comedian’s world for 40-plus years, and it’s what he enjoys.

He also likes talking about his creative process. He is a master of it, in fact. He writes jokes on legal pads and hones them. Over weeks. Months. Years. Decades even. He reportedly has stacks of legal pads that have the progression of his jokes.

If memory serves, he won’t trot out an unfinished joke to an audience. But he might try one out that he thinks is close — and then polish it a bit more until he really likes it.

He once told a reporter: “I sit down with a yellow legal pad and my writing technique is just: You can’t do anything else. You don’t have to write, but you can’t do anything else.”

“That sounds torturous,” the interviewer replied. “It is,” Seinfeld said. “But you know what? Your blessing in life is when you find the torture you’re comfortable with.”

Learn from Taylor Tomlinson and John Sandford

Another example of this is Tomlinson, who has risen from club performer to Netflix specials to host of “After Midnight.” Tomlinson recently permitted The New York Times to document how she workshopped and polished the closing joke for her most recent Netflix special.

Her process is like that of Seinfeld’s. Ultimately, you stop polishing when you think you’ve milked the best reaction to your presentation.

As legendary football coach Nick Saban likes to say, “It’s a process. It’s a process. It’s a process.”

You find what works for you, and you repeat. It’s making a cake: mix exactly, stir correctly, bake at the right temperature for the right time. Then repeat.

The ingredients are all yours. The blend is what you decide. G-rated or R-rated? What tone? What volume? What kind of delivery?

Several years ago, I attended ThrillerFest in New York City. John Sandford was among the many crime writers who taught a class as CraftFest that year, and his topic was about rewriting. The point he drove home: writing is engineering.

For storytellers, he’s right.

A Finished Anything Is a Process

You can write the book you want to tell, developing certain characters and relationships within, pushing to a satisfying conclusion. But in that story, ask yourself if you just produced the best version? (The answer is no, but you do you, sport.)

You watch someone like Margaret Cho, Nate Bargatze or Tom Papa perform and you marvel at their seamless stories about family and life on this planet. (Yes, and some other stuff. Cho is a tad bit more risqué. Just a touch.)

The one thing they have in common is that whatever jokes they’re telling in front of an audience were written, performed, rewritten, reworked on stage, tweaked, and then put in the correct order for the final performance. As Sandford would say, you perfect every joke, and you go about building the act, joke by joke. It’s constructed — engineered.

You write it down. You set it aside. You re-read it and rework it, if needed. At some point, you must let someone else experience your creation. And give you feedback. And you need real, honest feedback, not something your best friend or mom will tell you.

Boiled down to the creation’s essence, you have to take it seriously if your goal is to move it from a hobby to a passion to something that sustains you. It’s part of you. Sometimes, the biggest part.  

Seinfeld, Tomlinson, Sandford, Papa, Cho, and many, many others have one thing in common. They get it done every day. It’s what they love. It’s what they DO — sometimes on days when they don’t want to do it.

You can’t get to the end if you don’t make progress. All you have to do is walk one step a day.

Here’s to making progress today.

Time to Surrender My Title at Citrus Crime Writers

As 2023 turned to 2024, my two-year term as an officer and board member for Citrus Crime Writers came to an end.

I was ready.

Citrus Crime Writers is the local (Central Florida) chapter of Sisters in Crime, a national collection of authors and others who advance the craft and profession of writing crime fiction in all its sub-genres and writing true crime. And, yes, the sisters allow misters into its membership.

Sometime in 2021, I was asked to “run” for CCW vice president. As the only nominee, I was summarily elected, along with our new president, Martha Geaney, and our longtime secretary and treasurer, Ruth Owen.

My predecessor, Bess Carnan, informed me that one of my most important duties was to recruit speakers for our monthly meetings. This was a daunting ask. Having been in the chapter for a few years and having recently re-engaged with it, I knew Bess had done a lot of work finding interesting speakers for us. Each month brought someone new and interesting:

·        The self-dubbed Poison Lady, who enthralled us with the many deadly traits of plants, chemicals and pharmaceuticals

·        A local mortician

·        An author publicist (who’s now an acquiring editor!)

·        Multiple successful crime novelists

Reaching a High Bar

Bess set a high bar. The chapter, like everyone else in the world, was still in the heavy wake of the early pandemic, and we had turned to Zoom for our monthly meetings. Which meant finding speakers from afar was very much on the table.

So I started making a list of all the writers, agents, publicists, author coaches, craft specialists, and others that I had seen and listened to during 2020 and 2021 when we were all stuck at home in front of our laptops. To that list I added people I had met or listened to previously at writer conferences, many of them in Florida. In all, my list was a healthy one.

Then I started emailing my pitch.

To my utter surprise, I had an 80-percent success rate. This is the thing about writers: we’re generous to a fault. Either that, or the people I emailed welcomed the opportunity to spend an hour hovering in the profession without having the responsibility . . . to write. I mean, there’s not an author alive who hasn’t found a good reason to be distracted from the page.

Ah, but I’ll stick with the first explanation. Authors are mostly generous people. Given the author panel on Imposter Syndrome that I sat in on last year, it’s also possible that many people who have a published novel are still so excited about that fact that they want to share with others how they did it — and that they did it!

The Gift of Service

My role as chapter VP was one of service, but it was also a gift. It enabled — allowed — me to connect with some talented authors and smart people about what they do and how they do it. It gave me a reason to pick their brains for 15 to 30 minutes on a Zoom several weeks before their presentation, letting me see behind the curtain at all the good stuff going on. Did I mention these people were all generous?

Because they’re all entrenched in the author world, I didn’t have to explain how a man came to be a chapter officer in a sub-group of Sisters in Crime. They knew. And they didn’t care, even though I was self-conscious and mostly hushed about my gender in an overwhelmingly female national organization.

What was gratifying was how well they all delivered. To a person, each of them killed. Within days after a meeting, I would get feedback from attendees about how appreciative they were to have time with this presenter or that speaker. This is when you know your prep and work has paid off, and people logged off with a smile.

Other CCW Leaders

The other gift from my service was getting to know other chapter members better, particularly the leaders. Martha is an absolute force. Lucille Ponte, who serves in an unelected post as chapter publicist, web guru and social media director, gives so much passion to our membership. So does Ruth and one of our former presidents, Charlotte Hunter, now our membership chair.

All of them remain are tightly connected with a group that, only a few years ago, had shrunk and was endangered. Charlotte, Ruth, and Lu were the resurrectors. Martha was the flux capacitor, driving us to the future with a vengeance. I will forever value their insights and what they taught.

Next Up: Nancy Cohen

Because Bess ended her tenure with several future speakers already in place for me, my goal was to do the same for my successor, Nancy Cohen so that she didn’t have to find 12 presenters for 2024. That I was able to accomplish.

So, in 2024, I look forward to getting on Zoom on the second Sunday afternoon of each month and being delighted by someone new to teach me something about writing crime fiction novels. This time, I’ll just be an attendee. Can’t wait.

Remembering Tim Dorsey – There Was No One Like Him

Tim Dorsey and one of his Florida author dress shirts. (Chris O'Meara, AP)

It feels wrong to let 2023 roll over into a new year without acknowledging the passing last month of novelist Tim Dorsey. I started writing this post four weeks ago, right after Tim died following a brief health battle. But describing Tim isn’t easy — and never was.

There was no one like him.

He fancied two established authors as heroes: Kurt Vonnegut and Hunter S. Thompson. That’s a clue to understanding Tim’s personality.

He was purpose-driven and rarely took his eye off the long-term prize, which for him was being a rollicking full-time author and all that encompassed: writing, rewriting, plotting, promoting, selling, meeting readers, and entertaining anyone in front of him.

Reporter, Editor, Author

I got to know him in the newsroom of The Alabama Journal, where we both cut our journalism teeth. He covered cops and courts. I covered sports, including events at his alma mater, Auburn. But he was clear about his career goal of writing novels.

Few of us realized Tim had already written a first novel. The manuscript was in his home office somewhere, shelved. He was already working on his next one.

The Journal, an afternoon paper when such entities existed, had a small staff that embraced happy hours and parties. Tim was always front and center. It’s not fair to call him the life of the party, but he was the heartbeat. He was smart and anxious and funny and obsessed and talented and willing to dive head-first into any story our dynamic managing editor wanted. Nothing about him was routine.

The parties were memorable at Winter Place in Montgomery.

First, Tim and his housemate, Michael Sznajderman, lived in a historic Montgomery home called Winter Place. Constructed of stone and block, it had old, dark wood floors and odd rooms, nooks, crannies and entrances. In short, a perfect place for parties. Tim and Michael threw fantastically wild parties.

This was when Miami Vice and all that show and culture encompassed was popular. Use your imagination, double that, and that’s what a party was like at Winter Place.

Second, I’d led a boring, mostly sheltered life throughout school, including college, and these parties were the highlight of my non-work life. I still tell stories about them. Anyone who worked in The Journal’s newsroom does, too.

Red Sox fan Tim Dorsey shows off a front-page story from The Alabama Journal.

Those days are long-gone. The paper folded in 1993, a few years after winning a Pulitzer Prize. I left after 18 months for a job at the Orlando Sentinel. Tim followed the Journal’s managing editor to the Tampa Tribune in 1987 as a general assignment reporter.

Introducing Serge Storms

A chronic bad back removed him from the grind of daily reporting, so he started editing. Eventually, he worked from home. In bed. On his back. It was in that position he wrote the first novel starring Serge A. Storms as his protagonist. Florida Roadkill debuted in 1999 as the first of 26 novels starring Serge and his drug-addled sidekick, Coleman.

Tim later said he dashed into the book world by sending the manuscript to a publisher, bypassing agent queries, with a short pitch letter: “I’ve written a book I think you’ll want to publish.”

“I didn’t know it then, but I heard later you weren’t supposed to query like that,” he said. “But that’s the way I felt.”

His prose, as always, worked.

Tim was a metro editor when he left the Tribune in 1999 as his dream of being a full-time author came true. We stayed in touch as email pals over the years, and a few times I’d see him at a book signing when he had a gig around Orlando.

When I started the serious work of my first novel, I called him for advice. Among his comments: “If you can, create a character in your book you can put on a t-shirt.”

He revealed how he and his wife were running a small Serge Storms merchandise business out of their garage, which had bins full of hats and shirts. “It’s not nothing,” he said.

Tim Dorsey on the Road

In 2014, I served on a planning committee for the Adult Literacy League in Orlando, a non-profit that promotes and teaches reading and writing skills for adults. The group holds an annual fundraiser, Reading Between the Wines, at which an established author talks for an hour, meets fans and readers, and sells a few books.

Tim, who by then had multiple best-selling Serge novels in print, graciously agreed to headline the 2015 event. Wearing his trademark loud Hawaiian shirt, he rolled up that evening in an old, blue four-door Cadillac. He said he’d be staying the night at a small, non-descript hotel nearby in a room just big enough to sit and write. He no longer had to lie on his back.

When he went on stage that night at the Orlando Science Center, he started the way he always started reader events: he took a picture of the audience. No selfie, just the people who came to listen to him. He posted all these photos on his Facebook page, another thrill for all who showed up.

Dorsey Live and In Person

Then came the presentation — presentation in quotes. The agreed-upon format for the event was for him to deliver a 20- to 30-minute talk, followed by 15 minutes of questions from the paying audience. But again, this was Tim. He talked for five minutes and then turned to the schtick he preferred: answering questions.

The former political reporter liked to turn public appearances into press conferences, where he showed he’d learned from the best. When someone asked questions he couldn’t answer or didn’t want to, he changed the subject because he had a funnier story to tell.

Oh, he would talk about his star protagonist, Serge, an obsessed and psychopathic serial killer and Serge’s sidekick, marijuana-loving Coleman.

And he would have a yarn about how he decided to kill off characters in his book through yet another strange method. No guns and knives for Serge. Creativity kills, you know.

Public appearances for him were pseudo comedy routines.

He showed up that spring driving an old four-door Cadillac, his official tour-mobile. He had a trunk filled with books, shirts, caps, and other Serge- and Florida-based swag.

That night, he ran out of books to sign. So, he trekked across the street to the garage, pulled more books from the trunk, and sold those.

Afterward, he said, “You know who Serge is, right?”

I said, “There’s an awful lot of you in him. Except for the killing part.”

“See, you know me,” he said.

You Couldn’t Make Up Tim Dorsey

In the years after, Tim dug harder into his career. He traveled Florida and the Southeast on self-coordinated book tours after a book release, driving from town to town with a trunkful of books and swag.

You couldn’t make this guy up. Tim’s humor and humanity are what I’ll miss most. But he was so much more, especially to those who knew him better.

All of us feel awful knowing that Tim’s death adds to other sorrow. Tim’s surviving daughters lost their mother in a hit-and-run accident in 2021.

Personally, I’m comforted that Tim lived his dream. He loved his books and his characters and the readers who loved them the same way. He loved telling stories on the page and in person.

What a nice legacy.

Moments Make Memories and a Life

Moments. Small and large, added together, they make a life. But some are the fabric and others are the color. It’s fun to remember the color. It’s even more fun to blend it, however real it is, into a piece of fiction.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend and I caught a Jason Isbell concert in St. Augustine, Florida. I’d secured the tickets, but I’d forgotten the upgrade for decent parking.

Bud Tower (left) and Drew Ramsey and talk about song writing at Killer Nashville. (credit: David Ryan)

We ended up driving to the hinterlands of a nearby state park, a spot that necessitated a shuttle ride to the night’s amphitheater. Hours later, when the show ended, we huddled on an over-filled shuttle bus, which creakily made its way back to the faraway parking lot.

Filled with tired and mostly inebriated passengers, the bus was dark and quiet until the shuttle driver’s playlist hit the sound system. On came Stevie Nicks’ ballad version of “Landslide.” A woman up front, her friend and another couple women in the back simultaneously sang the second line: “I climbed a mountain and I turned around . . .”

Then, everyone else on the bus chimed in: “And I saw my reflection in the snow-covered hills . . .”

And off we went, a bus full of strangers rocking and bumping along with an impromptu, melodic karaoke.

For me, this was no isolated incident. It took me back to an evening in Tuscany, Italy, more than a decade earlier. That full-moon night, my wife and I were part of a large group touring Italy by bus. We’d left Florence for a morning visit to the town square in Florence, an afternoon walk through San Gimignano and then a dinner in the countryside.

As anyone knows who has been on such a tour, especially of Italy, such dinners come with copious amounts of food and drink. Sated and drunk, we collapsed into our bus seats for the two-hour ride back to Florence.

Armed with her trusty microphone, our tour guide, a delightful middle-age Italian woman named Vickey, told stories from the front of the bus. Then it was open mic night for anyone with a joke. After a doctor from New England delivers an off-color punchline, the comedy club closed, and Vickey turned on the music to let us sleep.

Then two things happened.

First, we made a sweeping turn on a country road — and gazed out the front window at a fat orange full moon.

“Look-a, look-a, everybody,” Vickey said in her Italian accent. “It’s a full-a moon-a! We must-a howl-a at the moon-a!”

And we did. The entire bus, with Vickey leading the way, howled and howled again. God knows what the local farmers heard that night.

Then a few minutes later, “Hotel California” hit the sound system.

Within seconds, everyone on the bus was singing with Don Henley, “On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair . . .”

That song also ended with a group self-applause.

Funny, the memories you take away from the world. Of all the things we saw and did in Italy — the Colosseum, the Vatican, the Sisteen Chapel, the canals of Venice — howling at the moon and delivering a rousing off-key version of “Hotel California” are two of my favorites.

I write about these slivers of my life because they say something about me. I don’t know what they say, but I know they provide a bit of background and color to whatever else is on my resume and in my background.

A flashback of the singing bus rides came during a recent few days at Killer Nashville, a crime author conference. If you’ve never been to a fiction-writing conference, know that over the course of a few days you’re almost certain to hear one of a handful of writing tenants:

·        Somebody has to die in Chapter 1.

·        Don’t drop a full backstory.

·        When you bring a new character into the story, don’t bring him or her in alone.

·        Don’t head-hop.

·        Show, don’t tell.

·        Scenes matter, chapters don’t.

And on and on.

But this year’s Killer Nashville featured one session I’d never seen at a crime-writing conference: Writing & Selling Storytelling Songs & Lyrics, presented by novelist and songwriter Bud Tower and Emmy-nominated songwriter Drew Ramsey. Much of the 50-minute session revolved around Ramsey’s process for writing an Emmy-nominated song on the soundtrack of the Mel Gibson movie, “We Were Soldiers.”

Drew Ramsey’s take on the state of songwriting. (credit: David Ryan)

Ramsey and Tower enlightened a small group of authors about the need to collaborate, the necessity of internal rhymes and, when telling a story in a song, the ability to tell it fast and leave a memorable ending.

“You only have three-and-a-half minutes to say what you want to say,” Ramsey said.

And then it struck me. Almost every famous song, no matter the genre, runs for less than four minutes. And yet the good ones . . . grab us and keep us. When we get taken in by the music, we learn the lyrics and we never forget them. They’re with us for life. We all have books that we read a second time before we realize we’ve read it before. But we instantly know when we’ve heard a song before.

That song, whatever it is, is a moment, part of the fabric of our life.

Back in St. Augustine, the shuttle bus arrived at its parking lot destination, and the driver threw on the parking brake. But there was a problem: Stevie Nicks hadn’t finished her song.

“We have to finish!” someone cried out.

We all laughed . . . and finished the song. And then we applauded for giving ourselves a moment.

Want to Write a Novel? Be Like Mike and Do the Work Every Day

A couple weeks ago at the monthly Zoom meeting of Citrus Crime Writers, noir author Michael Wiley dazzled the group by leading a discussion about the craft of writing dialogue. As always, lessons were to be learned.

One takeaway, even after years of writing commercial fiction, is that you can almost always have at least one takeaway from a conversation. I think Michael gave us a dozen.

But it was the run-up to his presentation that reminded me that process makes all.

One of my duties as current chapter vice president is coordinating the visits of our monthly speakers. That is, finding them, getting them locked in and making sure everything runs smoothly. Which, in the case of Michael, meant offering him the opportunity over the summer to speak, hammering out a date and a topic and then, a month prior to the big day, having a one-on-one chat to educate him more about our group and its likes and dislikes.

Award-winning author Michael Wiley. Credit: Michael Wiley

We’d met a decade earlier at a writer’s conference at which he was up for an award. Seated at the same lunch table – he was slumming – he graciously educated a newcomer about the strange ways of the book publishing business: agents, editors, publishers, etc.

That slim history, combined with the fact I had spent more than 20 years as a working reporter and editor, was enough to make me feel comfortable walking him through the typical CCW chapter meeting and listening to his proposed presentation.

Do Your Work: Write

It was during that 20-minute prep Zoom that it became clear why he remains in the crime fiction game. He’s passionate about it, and he works at it. Every day. No matter what.

As Stephen King has said: “Your job is to make sure the muse knows where you’re going to be every day from nine ‘til noon.”

A novel starts and gets completed with a butt in the chair.

The world is filled with people who say they want to write a book. Everyone wants to write a book. Damn few do.

Since starting my first novel in 2007, I’ve met a healthy number of young writers already on their writing journey. Like most people who say they want to write a book, some of these writers have a notion that writing is a peaceful, blissful, creative endeavor. It is that . . . about 5 percent of the time.

The rest of the journey, as sports columnist Red Smith once said, is as easy as opening up a vein and bleeding on the page.

Creative Writing Mostly Isn’t Creative

Yes, OK, writing fiction is creative. But it’s not gentle. It’s aggressively trying to put your brain into your fingers, transfer it to the keyboard, and get it into a cogent form so that when you re-read it tomorrow, it makes sense.

And then doing it again the next day. And the day after that.

Once the first draft is done, the next round of hard work begins: the engineering. You have to make sure the scene order is correct, that you aren’t repeating things, that you’re capably and subtly guiding the reason to the exact place you want them to be.

For those of us in the mystery, suspense and thriller game, you have to place your clues in the right places. You have to make sure pace and plot connect and that characters are developed enough to engage readers enough to keep them coming back. Or, as some authors attest, you at least have to please your agent or your publisher.

The bottom line is, you have to do the work.

Books don’t write themselves. They never have. Writers who publish – writers who become authors – get their names on a book cover and spine because they refused NOT to write. Refused not to finish. Refused not to finish the story.

Having talked to Michael Wiley and other authors like Reed Farrel Coleman, a decorated author who is keeping the Jesse Stone series alive for Robert B. Parker as he continues writing his own novels, the message is this: you can’t call yourself a writer if you don’t write every day. It doesn’t have to be a scene. (Fiction, like movie or television scripts, is written in scenes, not chapters.)

But every day, you must advance the story. Or edit the story. Or polish the story.

In short: Be like Mike.

Bright Side of the Pandemic

When the pandemic first arrived in March 2020, my second novel was foundering. I had 20,000 words or so after about a year of writing. And suddenly, the drive to the office was reduced to a walk from the bedroom, and the structure of the day was changed completely.

Everyone in my orbit was scared: of Covid-19, of a job layoff, of running out of toilet paper or food, of other people who were belligerent about not wearing masks. It was a time to buckle down and focus.

Turns out a little fear brings the muse out of hiding. By October, I had added more than 80,000 words to the story, and it was in fine shape.

Two years later, I’m at 116,000 words. That’s right, you can read between the lines: the muse went away. Or, rather, I stopped getting in the chair until just a couple months ago.

Today, the is too long by at least 21,000 words. The story isn’t quite done. Almost. But doing the work every day is back to being a habit. Now, to finish.

And then it’s onto the second draft.

The Oxford Comma and Other Grammarly Events

During a recent Saturday morning drive, I happened upon a discussion between Scott Simon and Ellen Jovin on his “Weekend Edition” show.

Jovin is a grammar expert, and she takes to the road from time to time to give her advice on how to use — and not use — the English language. But she does not, she said, take a stand on the Oxford comma.

“I don’t actually care whether people use it,” she said. “I currently use it, but I have gone through life stages without it, and I’ve been perfectly happy either way.”

Of course, whether to employ the Oxford comma is a debate that rages from deep in the hearts of those who swear by it and equally as passionately from those who despise it.

I’ve had the good fortune to live in both worlds and in some in-between ones. What I can tell you is this: The Oxford comma doesn’t matter nearly as much as either side would have you believe.

The reason why is unfortunate, and it’s this: Most of America doesn’t know what the Oxford comma is. And all 100 percent of them don’t care.

Even people who know what it is, most don’t care.

Rules of style, it seems, depend fully upon the person who owns the medium. Their decision is the only one that matters, and all rules flow from there.

Credit: WalMart

AP Style

I spent more than a generation working at newspapers. And the style guide of choice for them all is — or was — The Associated Press Style Book. Or, as it is commonly referred to in newsrooms, AP Style.

And AP style means . . . no Oxford commas.

When I left newspapers for a gig running a couple business-related websites, the style was AP style, except when we wanted to change something and have our own little bit of style mixed in. And when we did that . . . nobody cared.

In fact, when you leave the world of professional wordsmithing in any capacity, you discover that there are many people — as it, almost everyone — who not only don’t give a hoot about whether to use a comma before the last element in a series, they also don’t care if someone uses no punctuation. Many people don’t care about typos unless the typo happens to be in their name.

What Is the Oxford Comma?

The Oxford comma is the comma that sits between the last two elements in a series of them. Take this example: The colors of the American flag are red, white, and blue.

The Oxford comma is the comma paired with the word “white.”

With AP style, the sentence would be: The colors of the America flag are red, white and blue.

That’s right: no comma after white.

But people who support the use of the Oxford comma are devout and diligent. There are many, many memes and shirts dedicated to its promotion. Such as: You can have my Oxford comma when you pry it from my cold, dead, and lifeless hands.

This debate largely ignores the other debate that rages, which is the lack of use of any commas. Such as these examples:

“Let’s eat kids,” vs. “Let’s eat, kids.” The punchline: “Punctuation saves lives.”

The Style for Writing Books

The Chicago Manual of Style, all 900-plus pages.

If you move from any form of writing to one of writing books, your style guide changes. When it comes to books, the bible is The Chicago Manual of Style.

It is a behemoth of a book, nearly 1,000 pages, and its keepers price it accordingly. The style book costs at least $50 no matter where you look, although the good news is that if you buy it, you should only need one copy for your writing lifetime. Yes, editors published updated versions every two to five years. But still . . .

In the Chicago Manual of Style, the Oxford comma is alive and well: Chapter 6, section 6.19, “Series and the Serial Comma.”

6.19       Comma needed. Items in a series are normally separated by commas. . . . When a conjunction joins the last two elements in a series, a comma — known as the serial or series comma or the Oxford comma — should appears before the conjunction. Chicago strongly recommends this widely practiced usage . . .

My advice to any would-be author is to heed Section 6.19. If you submit a manuscript that neglects the Oxford comma, you’re going to gain a swift rejection letter just for ignoring a rule editors and publishers take to heart.

I wrote multiple drafts of Dead Odds with no Oxford comma, realizing at some point that I would have to do (at least) one full edit of a polished manuscript to ensure I made the changes. I think that was edit No. 10 of nearly two dozen.

All that matters, though, is that it got done before my hired editor got his hands on it.

More Style Disagreements

Another style issue that journalists turned authors must confront is that of numbers. Both AP Style and Chicago Manual of Style have simple, but different, preferences. Here is the same sentence in both styles:

• AP Style: The woman ordered a $15 martini, a 12-piece shrimp cocktail and change for a $100 bill.

• Chicago Style: The woman ordered a fifteen-dollar martini, a twelve-piece shrimp cocktail, and change for a hundred-dollar bill.

(The sentence also has the Oxford comma/no Oxford comma example as well.)

I can’t explain why the Chicago editors, and publishing houses around the world, prefer to spell out so many numbers. It’s rooted in history, I’m sure, but I didn’t grow up in that world, so I don’t know background.

For the AP editors, the rationale that was explained to me in journalism school had everything to do with saving money by saving type, saving space and therefore saving money.

I suppose there’s something to be said for spelling out numbers and other elements in a book so that they are digested as text. When it comes to numbers, though, I’d happily adopt a style that doesn’t officially exist. That is, no numbers get spelled out. All of them get written as pure numbers.

For example:

• AP style: He ordered two hamburgers, two hotdogs and four Cokes.

• Non-existent style: He ordered 2 hamburgers, 2 hot dogs and 4 Cokes.

I say I’d adopt it, but I haven’t. Remember what I said about the owner a medium or platform making their own style decisions? I could go with the pure numbers change, but that’s a radical change for someone who is only a moderate rebel.

Another style issue is that of em-dashes. These are the longish dashes that many non-authors use as an appositive.

An example is: Most football fans acknowledge Tom Brady — the NFL quarterback with seven Super Bowl rings — as the great quarterback of all time.

The dashes contain a descriptor.

Notice how the dashes don’t touch on either side. That’s pretty standard. But in books, Chicago style dictates that not only do the dashes touch something, but they are also used differently. They can be used to “amplify or explain,” as above, but they also indicate sudden breaks, such as an interruption during a conversation. Such as:

“At first I thought you were going to tell me you’re moving—”

“I’d never leave here,” she said.

Notice that Chicago style has the dashes mashed up against other words. That’s another difference.

Given that that the Chicago Manual of Style is so long and so detailed, much more so than the AP Stylebook, it has much more detail. And for all you other authors out there, it bears reading and understanding. Otherwise you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage when it comes time to query.

Which is to say this: I learned my lesson learned about style and the manuscript. In the current draft of Dead Sleep, which is close to conclusion, has Oxford commas.

And yet, if you haven’t noticed by now, despite my author bona fides, this blog doesn’t use the Oxford comma.

Sue me.

For Indies, Reviews Are Both Gold and Hard to Obtain

Photo credit: Adrii Zorii

It was one sentence in a half-hour presentation, one of context. Noted mystery and thriller critic and reviewer Oline Cogdill recently spent an hour with the Citrus Crime Writers chapter of Sisters in Crime and acknowledged what most of us probably already guessed

“I don’t review indie novels,” she said.

There it is.

Those of us who are indie authors understand that among the many hurdles to selling gobs of books is that of getting legitimate reviews of any novels we publish. All of us indies work hard to get reader reviews on Amazon, Goodreads, Barnes & Noble and other respected book sales sites.

And securing a review — any review — from someone who freelances for a newspaper syndicate and contributes reviews for Mystery Scene magazine and Publisher’s Weekly, that’s a gold nugget that is almost impossible to attain.

It’s a slice of heaven not just for heavyweights like Tess Gerritsen and John Sandford but also for wannbe-bigger authors like Sandra SG Wong, Michael Wiley, JA Konrath and Hank Phillippi Ryan.

Book critic Oline Cogdill

For indies like myself Ray Flynt, Nancy Cohen and thousands of others, a review from someone like Oline, a respected journalist with a long track record of fairness, not to mention a legion of fans and followers around the globe, would be something we’d use on our book jackets for the rest of time.

But that’s not where we are. Indie publishing is still in its infancy. Although it grows consistently, the number of indie reviewers simply hasn’t kept up with the number of authors who put out their own books.

Funnily enough, though, both indie authors and indie reviewers — bloggers and the like — suffer from the same issue. We’re voices in a vast wilderness, hoping to be heard (read) by anyone. And for that writing to be recommended and passed along.

Don’t mistake this as a whine. It’s not. If nothing else, I’m a realist and a pragmatist. I made my choices with open eyes.

When it came time to peddle the final manuscript of “Dead Odds,” my first novel, I had decisions to make. They were the same choices all new authors have. Traditional, indie or hybrid?

After dancing with a few agents at Thrillerfest in New York and via email for several months thereafter, I finished the last revisions to “Dead Odds” knowing I’d take the indie route. I wasn’t 25 anymore, and I didn’t feel up to waiting years while I searched for a fearless agent and then waiting longer while my agent found a publisher.

I decided to handle it myself. That decision comes with consequences. Chiefly, it means that as an indie author I had to learn eBook publishing, print publishing, book-launching, marketing and business. All of which comes after you learn how to write a tight and interesting novel.

All this in addition to the mountainous task of writing a solid tale of suspense, one worthy of capturing the reader and being a worthwhile purchase as a paperback, eBook or audio book.

“I realized this is a blow to writers who self-publish and puts a lot of pressure on you all to work harder to get reviews.”

— Oline Cogdill

During her Q & A discussion with the Citrus Crime Writers, Oline said that when she was writing reviews for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, she had about 500 colleagues around the country. That is, 500 other book critics working full-time at American newspapers.

We all know what’s happened to the U.S. newspaper industry, a profound victim of greedy corporate ownership (now greedy hedge fund ownership) and the resulting need to maximize revenues and lower costs.

Today, Oline said, there are about 25 working journalists who review books, and many are former full-time critics who are keeping their careers alive as freelancers. I was surprised there will still that many left.

Oline gets picked up by hundreds of papers across the country. There are many, many more papers that not only don’t publish them, they also don’t put any book reviews in the paper — or online. In those cities and towns, it’s as if reading for fun simply vanished. There’s some irony for you.

Instead, third-party book reviewers are now mostly bloggers or website owners. They do what they do because of their passion for a genre (say, romance or Sci-Fi) or because reading and reviewing books is part of who they are. They want to share their new books and authors with the world.

Personally, I’m grateful to anyone who spends time reading and writing about what they’ve read. That is one of the pillars of being an author: having an audience of readers and having someone to help you reach them.

Selling your book blog by blog, as it were.

But first authors must find those bloggers and convince them you have a book worth reading and reviewing. There aren’t many out there, probably much less than 50 covering all genres. Oline estimated there are three to five good ones who review mysteries, suspense and thrillers.

“I realized this is a blow to writers who self-publish and puts a lot of pressure on you all to work harder to get reviews,” she said.

Work, yes. Pressure, no. We don’t have to justify our sales to anyone but ourselves. Although securing reviews is difficult, the real difficulty is morale.

I was fortunate to have paid attention to agents and editors and took their advice not to publish too soon. To publish only after the novel was tight and right. To hire a stellar line editor and a quality cover artist.

I was also lucky that “Dead Odds” turned out to be an award-winning book, capturing first place in the Royal Palms Literary Awards for best novel of suspense that year.

But because I could not — or did not — market the book effectively, it has not sold well in the months after it was published. For you other indies out there, marketing = sales, and don’t let anybody tell you differently.

As always, it starts with, and comes down to, the bit of advice all agents and editors tell would-be authors. Write the best book you can possibly write no matter how long it takes. Quality wins.

Even if the book never reaches a traditional book reviewer’s desk.

Murder on the Beach: A Beloved Bookstore Says Goodbye

A small piece of me died today.

It was expected. Hell, it was planned.

But sadness, wistfulness and a little bit of grief is with the family.

Murder on the Beach (1996-2022) in Delray Beach. (Credit: Murder on the Beach)

In this case, the family is the owners, managers, employees and patrons of Murder on the Beach, a nationally regarded bookstore in Delray Beach, Florida, one that dealt exclusively in thrillers, mysteries and novels of suspense. I humbly suggest the family also includes readers far and wide and an untold number of authors—published and unpublished—who visited the bookstore as buyers, students, mentors, teachers and speakers.

Friday was the final day of operation for the store, which closed after 27 years of bolstering the written word and those to penned/typed them.

Bookstores Everywhere Are Struggling

Now, the death of a beloved bookstore is hardly surprising. Since the reading public accepted e-books as a satisfying way to consumer paragraphs and chapters of any genre, bookstores around the country (world?) have seen sales drop.

There are more closings every year, and there are few replacements in sight. They’re all in an intensive care unit.

For Murder on the Beach, the COVID-19 pandemic was the knife that sliced open the IV bag.

Joanne Sinchuk (credit: Murder on the Beach)

“People are not coming to buy books. My business is down two-thirds since COVID,” Joanne Sinchuk, the bookstore’s manager and former owner, told the Palm Beach Post when the impending closing was announced in February.

But Murder on the Beach was not just a bookstore. It was a community.

Teaching Writers to Become Authors

Led by Sinchuk, who must have been a cheerleader in her youth, the bookstore held countless book signings and author events.

If you’ve read either of John Grisham’s Camino Island books, in which the protagonist is a bookstore owner whose mission in life is to hold multitudes of events at his workplace, it gives you the picture. For those of us near South Florida and for those of us in the mystery game, Murder on the Beach was, simply, a destination. At some point, you had to go.

For many years, it sponsored a summertime series — the Florida Authors Academy — about writing and craft, scheduling authors and subject matter experts to deliver 90- and 120-minute presentations and tutorials.

From some three-and-a-half hours away in Orlando, I’d find classes of interest (they were all good) and make an up-and-back trip to Delray Beach to learn what I did not know. I saw familiar faces, listened diligently and, yes, always bought a few books.

I still have notes from a session taught by the late Steven Brown, a former FBI agent and former private investigator turned author who revealed some very cool tips and tricks of the PI trade.

I remember M.C.V. Egan asking many questions of everyone, soaking up everything as she took the journey from unpublished writer to published author. It was glorious to witness.

In short, Murder on the Beach had an impact. It mattered.

Those who shopped and attended events there felt as if they were part of something bigger. In a world of words where so much gets done in isolation and without consistent feedback or help, having a second-home like that meant something important.

And, yes, I confess: I may only be talking to the niche group of people who, like me, cannot be trusted to have a healthy credit card and to be dropped off at a library or bookstore just to kill some time.

Murder on the Beach was one of six bookstores in American that the Murder & Mahem blog considered to be on the bucket list of any lover of mystery, suspense and thriller fiction. (The others: Murder by the Book in Houston, Once Upon a Crime in Minneapolis, The Cloak and Dagger in Princeton, N.J., Mystery to Me in Madison, Wisc., and Centuries and Sleuths in Forest Park, Ill.)

Murder on the Beach: Since 1996

Sinchuk opened Murder on the Beach in Sunny Isles (North Miami Beach) in 1996 and moved it to Delray Beach six years later. The bookstore changed locations again in 2019, taking a smaller square footage in the Delray Beach Public Library.

And although it was a key part of the South Florida writing community, especially for local members of Mystery Writers of America, Murder on the Beach was a national bookstore.

It was common to stroll into a mystery-themed author or reader conference somewhere and find a makeshift meeting room or two converted into a weekend bookstore. Sinchuk usually ran them, opening early, closing late and tracking everything. Her team helped run conference raffles, then helped drink some wine at night.

Then it was back to South Florida, where another event at the bookstore loomed. She had longtime employers who loved stories and books and authors as much as she did.

Among the authors who came for book launches, book-signings, readings and presentations: James Patterson, Edna Buchanan, Carl Hiaasen, Michael Connelly, Stuart Woods, Tim Dorsey, James Hall, Andrew Gross, Charles Todd, Caroline Todd, Randy Wayne White, Hank Phillip Ryan, Elaine Viets, Victoria Landis, Nancy J. Cohen, Jane Cleland, M.E. Browning and Les Standiford.

The complete list would fill, well, a book.

COVID Killed the Bookstore

But as it did for so many other people and businesses, the pandemic changed everything. Florida Author Academy continued via Zoom, but it wasn’t the same.

After all, in-person events gave the bookstore in-house customers, not viewers on a screen. Customers book books. They couldn’t, or didn’t, buy them over Zoom.

Customers got used to not visiting. When the pandemic lifted, not everyone returned.

Maybe if the bookstore had been able to hold on a bit longer, it would have survived long-term. Who really knows?

What I do know is that the genres that Sinchuk and Murder on the Beach promoted were among the most popular in the reading community falling behind those of romance (and its subgenres) and alongside Sci-Fi/Fantasy (and its subs) and Young Adult.

I also know that those of us who enjoy reading and writing crime, be it fiction or real, have a little hole in our hearts with the passing of this unique piece of our culture.

Alas, the story of Murder on the Beach is written. Unfortunately, it’s not a mystery. It’s history.

But it’s a shame. And it feels a bit criminal.

And as they pose in B-level crime movies, we ask: Who do we see about that?

Talking Characters with the Citrus Crime Writers

One of the benefits of overwriting the first draft of your initial manuscript and then discovering how much work it needs is the necessity to dig into craft.

It was either learn or not publish.

I had to learn—about almost everything.

That learning process, which officially began in the fall of 2011, led to the opportunity to give back. Last week, took a chance and presented details of my author education to one of my favorite groups ever, the Citrus Crime Writers, the Central Florida chapter of Sisters in Crime.

As it happens, late last year I was elected as CCW’s vice president. One of the chief duties of that role is to recruit speakers for the group’s monthly weekend meetings.

A late conflict with the speaker scheduled for March led to a sudden opening. Which meant someone had to fill in the gap.

Which is how I found myself volunteering to present to the group — in our first hybrid meeting, no less — about how to develop fictional characters. Specifically: Building Characters from the Ground Up.

It was a presentation built from the many notes scribbled down while listening to a handful of authors who spoke about character development at author conferences (SleuthFest, ThillerFest, et al). The authors of note: Steve Berry, Lisa Cron, Reed Farrel Coleman and Vic DiGenti.

As is always the case (at least with me) when putting together a presentation like this, I re-learned a few tips and tricks from my notes. I was reminded of the techniques and lessons I needed to have when I started that first manuscript in 2005-06.

That’s the real lesson. Never stop learning.

Live Bodies at Killer Nashville

This year’s ironic Killer Nashville logo.

As with all other life on the planet involving humans, writers conferences went on hiatus -- or Zoom -- in 2020 following the breakout of the COVID-19 pandemic.

By mid-2021, the prevalence of vaccines, combined with people's ability to adapt to masking, social-distancing and other behavior adaptations (don't start coughing in a roomful of people and expect to stay there) turned U.S. culture back in the direction of normal.

And so Killer Nashville returned last week.

In the coming days, I'll put together some thoughts and insights into the highlights that I experienced. The hope is that someone who wasn't able to get to Franklin, Tenn., for Killer Nashville can still learn from afar.

For now, the overriding emotions are gratitude and enlightenment. It would have been understandable had Killer Nashville Founder Clay Stafford shelved the conference for the second year in a row.

Accepting In-Person Health Risks

(In his welcome address, he acknowledged to attendees that he was the last holdout to cancel a conference in 2020, waiting until less than a month before start-time to pull the plug from last August's scheduled event. He also admitted that the emergence and rise of the COVID-19 Delta variant, which is proving to be particularly contagious, especially among unvaccinated individuals, delivered many sleepless nights before opting to press forward with the 2021 conference.)

Everyone in the room understood the bargain. We'd all paid to be there. We sat together in a large ballroom multiple times for larger gatherings and lunches.

We broke off into smaller rooms of various sizes, where (mostly unmasked) speakers and panels of speakers delivered their wisdom. Some in the audience wore masks. Others did not.

We respected distancing and mostly declined handshakes, preferring fist bumps, elbow taps and head nods for, "Hi, great to meet you."

The demographic was the usual for a crime-writers gathering: Most over 50, more women than men, overwhelmingly white.

But we were there. We were live. In person.

Introvert Writers Brave the Crowd

We'd all made the decision to accept whatever health risks there were to be there, and we had to admit one undeniable fact: It was good to meet in person. Check that: It was great to meet in person.

It was wonderful to hear live laughter, groans and in-room commentary. It was nice to take notes on paper, with no computer screen in front, and to see others doing the same.

A joke I heard years ago: What do you call a roomful of introverts praying that no one asks them a question or asks them to speak? A writers conference.

Not every writer on earth, of course, is an introvert. Just most of them.

As a group, we prefer solitude to crowds, quiet to noise, reading and writing to Netflix and social gatherings.

This was true at Killer Nashville. During the multi-day event, many of us sat at round eight-top tables for 40-minute sessions. Sometimes we introduced ourselves, sometimes not. (I'll note that the eight-tops NEVER had the full eight people. We all spread out, and most tables had two to four people, an a few popular sessions had six.)

The point: Our comfort zone is to wander from session to session, sitting where we want, asking questions if we want or just listening if we prefer.

We Need Writers Conferences

As with almost all events in 2020, most writers conferences were cancelled. That was especially true for those that were scheduled for the first half of the year during the initial stages of the pandemic when everything was so scary. (Remember when we were afraid to touch a table top after someone else just had?)

A few events went directly to Zoom. I can't think of a single conference that went on as scheduled last year.

Speaking for myself, we writers need these events. Even though we'd much rather spend time writing than sitting at a big ballroom table eating lunch with a bunch of (mostly) strangers, we need to get out.

That's what sparks ideas. That's what stirs the soul.

I once attended a week-long conference for newspaper editors, and a good piece of advice was doled out at the end of it. "When you go home and go back to work, be humble. You are excited by all the ideas you learned here, but don't take all that energy and excitement to work with you for a while. Remember that your co-workers didn't get the chance to come here, and they're as worn down as you were when you arrived."

Luckily, writing is a mostly solo endeavor. But bottling up the excitement and making it last longer, that's an idea I can get behind.

Killer Nashville Unmasked

It should be noted that not every mystery writer's conference took the approach that Killer Nashville did. Bouchercon, an annual writer-and-reader event of national renown, opted to cancel its 2021 event in New Orleans with the promise of returning to NOLA in 2025. This year's Bouchercon was to start tomorrow.

Killer Nashville opted to soldier on with guests of honor Walter Mosley, Lisa Black and J.T. Ellison. (Black and Ellison were on site. Mosley's two sessions were conducted via Zoom, with Stafford serving as host.)

It wasn't that long ago that the idea of a mostly mask-less conference was acceptable. Then Delta reared its head earlier this summer. Stafford didn't offer it up, but talking to other writers, some of their friends had opted not to attend the event out of health concerns.

The theme of this year's event, then, carried a dose of irony: Killer Nashville Unmasked.

We weren't there yet, but the title fis as a double entendre. As mystery novelists, we all unmask characters all the time.

Everyone's on a Journey

There's also a third unmasking that takes place at these kinds of gatherings. When you first make a commitment to attend a conference like Killer Nashville -- and there are several around the country -- you arrive with a large sense of inferiority. Your inner voice is telling you: "Do I really belong here?" "All these other authors are so famous. Will they even acknowledge me?" "Who can I talk to?"

What you discover is that no matter where you are on your writing journey, others in the room (in every room!) are right there with you, or else they were there not long ago.

You learn that their first drafts suck, too. And that writing a novel is most certainly not about producing the perfect first draft, it's about producing the perfect last draft while mastering the craft in between Draft 1 and Completed Manuscript.

That the phrase "novel writing" is less accurate than "novel rewriting."

That some authors whose books you see at airports once were rejected by multiple agents and publishing houses and sometimes did not have their contracts renewed. Why? Because once upon a time, they had to learn the craft, too.

All those lessons came back at Killer Nashville. It was wonderful to experience them live.

The First Million Words Don’t Count

The first million words don’t count.

That’s the catch-phrase young writers often hear in author circles when they start asking questions about turning manuscripts into movies and books.

I heard it again several weeks ago when I caught up with a friend, fellow indie author Dallas Gorham, and he mentioned it in the course of a chat about the importance of creating a quality back list and not wasting time worrying about what’s already written.

Dallas’s first million are behind him. He’s well on his way to the second million.

The context for the conversation comes from some self-examination about my writing process and progress. It comes from a question: Why did it take so long to get my first novel published?

Words Add Up Draft over Draft

I hadn’t thought about this in a while because I had no reason to. Whatever the reasons, they were in the past. They have nothing to do with the creative process for my under-construction novel, Dead Sleep.

Or do they?

From the time I first starting writing the book that ended up being Dead Odds to the day it first appeared on Kindle was more than 10 years.

Why? Because the first million words don’t count. True? Not true?

What brought this to a fine point wasn’t word count. It was the reality from other authors, nameless in my mind at this point, who shared their stories of success. Many of them include similar anecdotes about how they wrote one, two or more novels when they were in their twenties (and even teens) only to decide (or have someone else decide) that they were not worthy of publishing.

They did what writers do—stuck them in a drawer, never to be read again.

The idea of so much time, energy and creative effort going into producing a manuscript that will never see the printed page or e-reader seemed like a waste. I was determined to do whatever it took to make my manuscript worth publishing.

More than a decade and several thousand dollars invested in editors and author conferences later, I had a book.

I was delighted I did not have a novel tucked away inside a desk.

Or didn’t I?

First Draft a Monument to Overwriting

After the book finally published, I made a decision to clean my writing desk of all things Dead Odds—all printed-out and hand-written notes, all notebooks, everything. Among that everything was a handful of the dozen drafts of the book, including Draft 1, which was buried underneath a pile of other papers.

Draft 1 was a monument to overwritten, underdeveloped drivel. Subsequent drafts were tighter and brighter.

Multiple characters had to go. Their actions had to transfer to others who remained. Or not take place at all.

But the more that got cut (self-edited), the more plot holes and character gaps emerged. At times, writer’s block ensued. That was not an insignificant occurrence.

Weeks, sometimes months, went by without work on the manuscript.

It didn’t dawn on me then, but it has since: That was my novel in the drawer.

And do was Draft 2 and Draft 3. (I think Draft 4 is when the book finally rounded into the story that ended up being Dead Odds.)

About the First Million Words

About those first million words not counting. Others have traced the million-words lineage and derivation of this through the years, including a researched-based investigation on who said it first. (It appears to have stemmed from a letter that sci-fi legend Ray Bradbury penned to a sixteen-year-old aspiring writer in which Bradbury wrote: “Write a thousand words a day and in three years you will be a writer.”

Do the math and you find the young man would have written in excess of more than a million words.

This was translated loosely to mean that it takes one million words to gain writing competency.

The philosophy and sentiment was later adopted by Elmore Leonard, who has strong opinions about writing that include his oft-quoted “10 Rules for Writing.” In 2006, Leonard published a his history and thoughts about becoming a writer. (It is said he published this on his website first, but I am not sure I believe that because the three paragraphs seem more like an excerpt to me.)

In it, he attributes the million words philosophy to legendary crime-fiction author John D. McDonald. It read, in part:

“John D. McDonald said that you had to write a million words before you really knew what you were doing. A million words is ten years. By that time you should have a definite idea of what you want your writing to sound like. That’s the main thing. I don’t think many writers today begin with that goal: to write a certain way that has a definite sound to it."

Million Words Has Multiple Forms

Few of us are Bret Easton Ellis. (Look him up, kids.)

Most of us have to write and write and write, making mistakes along the way and then taking the time to make corrections. Again. And again. And again.

Tradecraft exists in every profession, from automotive repair to website development to governmental intelligence gathering to novel writing. Some of it you can learn from reading, research and from teachers.

The best of it—the parts that you realize you need to improve and the ones that you realize you’re expert at—you have to learn by doing.

The learning and the doing make up the million words and the manuscripts that never reached the book-reading public. And the drafts of a single book that never seem to have a last draft, until they do.

The Moment of The Artist’s Way

Cover of Julia Cameron’s best-selling book designed to eliminate mentally blocking issues for all writers.

I belong to a small Slack group at work that meets every two weeks on Zoom. Together, we are five creatives who love books. Some of us write them. Some of us are working on them. Some of us are progressing toward working on and writing them.

It’s a varied group in every sense. We’re younger and older, male and female, structured and not. Put any topic out there, and the viewpoints are so different that it’s enjoyable just to listen.

I believe in serendipity, and this group somehow pushed a button for me. Within weeks of its creation, I happened upon a podcast by chance: The Moment with Brian Koppelman.

Koppelman is the creator and producer of the iconic film “Rounders,” in which Matt Damon, fresh off the smashing success of “Good Will Hunting,” opens the curtain on poker as a profession. He’s also the co-creator and show runner of Showtime’s smash series “Billions.”

The Moment is much younger than “Rounders” and slightly older than “Billions,” and it is an interview podcast. Koppelman does an hour of Q&A with creatives and other interesting people, and the core of the show is always this question: What was the moment when you realized, this is it?

In other words: "This is what I’ve been seeking. This is what my life is all about. This is what I was meant to do."

If you listen to the podcast regularly, you discover that Koppelman likes his guests to walk him and his listeners through their current creative processes. Koppelman often shares about his, too, and about how he was once blocked creatively and got unblocked by reading Julia Cameron’s book, The Artist’s Way.

Then, this summer, he coaxed Cameron into an appearance on his podcast. I was hooked on the book. I remain so.

The Artist’s Way

I researched Cameron and The Artist’s Way, which recently celebrated its 25thh anniversary in print and is now the heart of workshops that Cameron conducts (or did, before COVID-19). I bought the book, and it has changed my creative production.

I work every day on my latest manuscript. My word counts are as high, day after day, as they ever have been. Even though I am not at the point of re-reading my work with a critical eye, I know that what I’m creating for my second novel is so much . . . better . . . or advanced . . . from the initial draft of Dead Odds.

What more can a writer ask?

The Artist’s Way is not your ordinary “how to write a novel” book. Its subtitle says it all: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity.

In many ways, Cameron’s words read like a modernized version of a 12-step guide.

It asks readers to buy in. It asks them to do perform psychological work on themselves. It’s a 12-chapter, 12-week workbook of sorts.

There are exercises to complete, some fun (list your favorite childhood foods), some taxing (go through s stack of magazines and clip images of things that represent you or your life), and some embarrassing (write a letter to yourself defending your emotions and views and mail it).

Daily Affirmations

It also involves writing daily affirmations. (I know, right? Does the name Stuart Smalley ring a bell?)

Why affirmations? Because people who understand authors and writers – creatives of all types – understand that many of them are their worst critics. No matter what someone else says about their work, they are the most damning.

To paraphrase the man from Animal House, "Constantly criticizing yourself is no way to go through life."

The goal is to identify, in ways that are both direct and subtle, your emotional blocks as a person so that you can unblock your creativity. The two, she believes, are intrinsically related.

Now, I am not halfway through the book, and I’ve gone taken extra time to go through a couple of the chapters. (Some of the weekly "tasks" I did not find fun at all, and it took me time to come to terms with them.)

That said, I’ll finish. I feel I’ll come out the other end better for it.

More to come.

July: The Start of a New Year

Summertime sunset at Anna Maria Island, Florida.

A friend of mine shakes his head when he hears someone set a deadline of December 31 or a start date of January 1.

“The calendar is a man-made creation,” he says. “There’s no reason to wait to start something on January 1 if everything is teed up and ready to go now.”

I’ve thought about that a lot over the past several months. You know, since the coronavirus started circling the globe and pushing an untold number of changes on everyone’s culture and way of life.

Stay at home. Don’t see anyone. Work from home. Disinfect everything. (Remember that?) Wear a mask. Don’t gather in groups larger than 10.

Social distance. Go outside often. If you want to be around people, at least be outside.

My generation didn’t have the Great Depression to deal with. We had its after-effects and those from World War II, because our mothers and fathers grew up during the 1930s and ’40s.

Our defining events were the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, Watergate, AIDS and 9/11.

I’d argue that of those, 9/11 wreaked the most havoc, almost immediately creating the “new normal” that everyone says will exist here. The terrorist attack on the Twin Towers that day nearly 19 years ago robbed us of a sense of security as a nation and brought on a series of sweeping changes that continue to impact American life.

That event immediately delivered a new and most powerful federal agency, the Department of Homeland Security. It brought us the Patriot Act, which led to the most intense in-country spying we’ve ever condoned in this country.

And it gave us the beloved TSA, an arm of Homeland Security that runs the lives of everyone who steps foot in a U.S. airport.

New Defining Moment

Who knows if the coronavirus – OK, COVID-19 – will be that new No. 1 defining moment for our generation? Regardless, the pandemic promises to leave a significant impact on us now and almost certainly later as the virus’s long-term effects become understood.

Like so many other writers – hell, everyone – around me and around the country, I’ve wrestled with the emotional roller coaster that comes with such drastic daily change. One week the news is good: trend lines show a decrease in the virus’s spread. Two weeks later, the spike of infected people seems uncapped here in Florida and in many other states.

There’s also the emotional turmoil of just communicating with and dealing with neighbors, colleagues and the large number of people to whom we’re connected on social media. People dug in on one side of the political aisle or the other. And then came the disease deniers.

Then came the death of George Floyd and others at the hands of overly aggressive law enforcement, and suddenly COVID-19 joined hands with Black Lives Matter, which at this point seems like a damned significant rebirth of the Civil Rights Movement.

We have so much divides in our country today: Black vs. White. Haves vs. Have Nots. The Middle Class vs. Wall Street. Men vs. Women. Red vs. Blue.

We have so many issues that need solving before anyone can rightfully claim that America is as great as we think it should be:

• Universal healthcare (hello: COVID-19)

• Lack of affordable housing/rent in most major cities

• Race and gender inequality

• A foundering Middle Class

• Immigration policies (remember those?)

• Failing schools

• Militarized law enforcement

• Too much money in the political process

Sigh.

Dates Mean Nothing

This is a long-winded way of saying that I am taking my friend’s advice. Dates are arbitrary. Time is a man-made construct.

Yes, the forces of nature, especially life on this rock, are unyielding, and we have to deal with them as they come. But there are times when we can do so on our terms.

My terms include this: July 1 was not the midway point of 2020. It was the beginning of a new year.

Very little on January 1 was the same as it was on July 1. Relationships are different. Authors have found one of two aspects of "quarantine life" is true:

• Authors who live alone or who live with no kids in the house seem to be getting more done. They have as much or more quiet time than ever. John Grisham, for one, says he's so far ahead on his next novel that his publisher will be stunned when he turns in his manuscript.

• Authors who have kids seem to be . . . struggling. Many have found it difficult to lock themselves away for dedicated writing time.

John Grisham (right) on a Zoom broadcast in May to promote his new book, Camino Winds

As for me, I’m home almost every day. I work from home. Obviously I write from home. I journal at home. Meditate at home.

We cook a hell of a lot more than we ever have – and we cooked a lot before now – and we don’t venture out much.

We wave at our neighbors, many of whom are more shut in than even we are. (We confess to having six-person, outside cocktail hours and dinner parties that are socially distanced. But, then, we’re a neighborhood that usually does two block parties a year.)

Live Music Again Please

My wife and I crave the next time we can drive around the corner to one of our favorite bars and listen to a local musician tuning his guitar and taking requests again. It’ll happen.

She found a number of artists from around the country who gave Facebook Live performances when the restaurants and bars were ordered closed. Some were good, some were not.

It wasn’t the same as walking out the door of that bar between songs, waving and dropping a $5 bill in the bucket to say, “Thanks for letting us sing along for a few minutes.”

Over the past three months, I’ve hopped onto Zooms – that is how we refer to these video calls, yes? – featuring authors who had pandemic-era new book releases and others who simply participated in educating the masses. Some of them shared how they feel perfectly normal during the time of stay-at-home and how they are so far ahead on their current writing project because, well, there’s really nothing else to do.

Others say they are behind because they’re emotionally wrung out and anxious. Others are coping with the reality of others in their family being home with them when they usually are not. So now they have to find a way to write with others, you know, around.

New Beginning Is Now

In all these cases, again: This is a beginning. Whatever this new normal is, this is how we’ll define 2020. This is not just where the second half of the year starts, this is where we begin again.

We’ve heard forever that “nothing is guaranteed.” And “live like there’s no tomorrow.” And “every day is a gift.”

(Many days don’t feel like gifts, I must say.)

I’m not sure I know how to live like there’s no tomorrow. What I am sure of is that the past few months have taught me to get going.

Start things and finish them. Work a bit harder, make sure to take time out to enjoy something every day and every week. Create things to look forward to, either tomorrow’s writing session or this weekend’s time with my wife or friends.

I’m not one to suggest whether there’s a bigger meaning to living on earth and doing whatever we do, only that we can believe what is directly in front of us and how we deal with it.

I’d like to make those actions meaningful. It’s past time to start.

Dead Odds Wins Royal Palms Literary Award

One year and one week ago, my debut novel was published. It was the end of a long, confounding, anxiety-ridden and persistent journey.

After years of creating, thinking, writing, rewriting, editing, more rewriting, more editing, and finally several rounds of proof-reading, I felt I had a book worthy of the market, worthy of so many other writers I read and admire. Beta readers liked it. Editors were happy with it.

Dead Odds launched.

One year and one day after publication, Dead Odds collected some hardware – a first-place (gold) medal Royal Palm Literary Award for published thriller or suspense novel. I had been hopeful about some banquet recognition because I’d received notifications that the book had moved through several rounds of judging, first as a semifinalist, then as a finalist in that category and also in the published mystery or crime novel category.

Mostly during the awards banquet, though, I sat in awe of the talent that swelled the ballroom. I had no idea who most of the authors were. But as many of them were announced as winners and their book descriptions were read aloud, it was clear this was a bad-ass collection of writers.

[caption id="attachment_1025" align="alignright" width="300"] So, there were "press" at the awards banquet.[/caption]

The few authors I recognized I knew to be exceedingly strong (and decorated) craftsmen and craftswomen. Micki Browning, whose novel Beached won RLPA gold in 2018 for published mystery and overall book of the year, sat with us. A few minutes into the evening, another author at the table, JC Gatlin, won gold for his published mystery, H_NGM_N (Hangman). (The novel also earned him first-runner-up honors for book of the year.)

And one woman, at 95 years old, won for a memoir she had published. 95!

I feel humbled to have won an award the same year another Central Florida writer, Ken Pelham, picked up three honors for published short story and published blog post or article.

While smiling, I felt more like how Kurt Russell portrayed Herb Brooks after his Team USA hockey team beat the Russians in the movie "Miracle." (Skip to the 1:50 mark.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kp-j6GJJgJ8

One of the most-asked questions at writer/author conferences is, “What’s the best thing I can do for myself after my book is published?” Expecting the answers to be among a group of non-writing tasks such as marketing, going on a blog tour or book-signings, authors get another answer instead. It is: finish your next book.

Marching orders.

Dead Odds Reaches End of Gestation, Beginning of Publication

What a long, strange trip it's been. After nearly a decade, the baby is born. Dead Odds is alive.

I barely believe it. Yet it's true. It's available now on Amazon via eBook and, soon, via paperback.

Hitting "publish" late yesterday was the culmination of about a decade of equal amounts learning and work. Writing and rewriting, then learning and learning more.

I've documented the big parts of that long journey here, along with other thoughts, but looking back there were some definite milestones.

Milestones along the Way

Finishing the way-too-long first draft. Making the hard decision about which characters (first) and scenes (second) to cut. Rewriting from start to finish. Getting feedback from professionals. More rewriting and editing. Committing to a decision about the right beginning to Dead Odds.

That was probably the hardest decision of all, because a novel can go nowhere if readers don't get past the first few chapters. I had to ignore advice from one editor I very much respect because, ultimately, I found myself unable to write a compelling beginning without a dead body at the end of Chapter 1.

There were two critical points separated by many, many months. First was feedback from developmental editor Julie Butcher. She loved an early manuscript and provided two pieces of insightful feedback: she was happy with the "voice" the book but not the first five chapters, which, she said, "stink on ice."

Her commentary came in 2016. I was concerned less about the opening scenes than her enthusiasm. Someone else believed.

Almost two years later to the day, another editor, Jim Thomsen, uncovered a small group of issues to fix but offered a second opinion: Dead Odds had something. (By that time, I'd made the hard call on the beginning to the book, and I was committed.)

Other Important Moments

Away from the keyboard, I attended mystery and other author conferences: the Florida Writers Association's annual conference (multiple times), Sleuthfest, the annual conference of the Florida Chapter of the Mystery Writers Association (multiple times), and ThrillerFest, the annual meeting of the International Thriller Writers (once).

Some wonderful lessons came from the annual summertime authors series put on by Murder on the Beach bookstore in Delray Beach, Fla., and from local MWA and Sisters in Crime Guppies chapter meetings.

I had to make some hard decisions about landing an agent to sell the book. I went through three time periods of querying, targeting specific agents, but they knew then what I didn't realize later. The book wasn't ready. Not for them and not for a publishing house.

By the time it was ready, I'd had another realization. I wasn't willing to query more agents and wait months for answers -- and many more months for publication. I am in my 50s, not my 30s.

A Twitter back and forth with the great Don Winslow.

As I got closer to a finished product, I engaged in a Twitter discussion with one of the country's hottest crime writers, Don Winslow, on the topic of making people pay for your hard work. This was a back and forth about getting paid an advance, which doesn't happen in the the world of self-publishing, and Don's belief that every writer should get a check with several zeros at the end as a sign of belief.

I tweeted back that I wanted to control the rights to my books, my characters, and to collect more royalties from it. Alas, Don is a known quantity and presumably makes a tidy some from his work. In fact, he is in the thick of seeing one of his crime novels being turned into a movie.

Lessons Learned

What do I know now that I didn't know then? I've discussed that here as well, but really that boils down to a short list:

Believe in your story and make decisions about it that you believe are right. You can listen to editors, but ultimately you have to believe that your story is exactly what you want it to be.

I took to heart the areas that agents, editors and publishers said to pay attention to. Invest in editing help. Use proofreaders. Secure a quality cover.

I'm not someone who carries regrets through life, but at some point I'll ponder if I should have queried agents or publishers like Down & Out Books down the road in Tampa.

Until then, I'll try to enjoy the moment. Dead Odds lives.

'Self-Publisher's Legal Handbook' a Must-Read

This is not usually a space for book reviews. That’s not the way blogs function in the world of authors trying to get their work noticed.

Yet in the spirit of Indies helping Indies and pushing the lot of us forward, I can’t help but promote a book I wish I’d discovered long before now.

Fiction and non-fiction author Helen Sedwick recently released the second edition of her Self-Publisher’s Legal Handbook: Updated Guide to Protecting Your Rights and Your Wallet.

I know, I know. It sounds like it might be a slog. It’s not. Yes, the words "author" and "legal" in the same sentence usually trigger paralysis from those of us at a keyboard. Not this time.

Sedwick's book contains information that every author, whether an Indie, DIY or traditional, should have in their knowledge base.

Sedwick: Step by Step Legal Processes

Sedwick, an attorney and an author, writes in easy-to-understand prose and not at all in legalese. She walks reads through the step-by-step process of the most important business touchpoints an Indie author needs to consider when embarking on a publishing career:

• Copyright protections

• Business ABCs

• Contracts

• Pen names

• Spotting scams

• Taxes

• Estate planning

In her second-edition, she added sections about pen names (how and when to choose one, and do you need one), fighting any theft of your writings, how to use images and song lyrics without violating someone else’s rights, and a few more updates based on changes in the industry.

The most valuable sections are ones that were in the first edition – about contracts.

Signing a contract with an agent, publisher or production company (hey, dream big!) is without question the scariest business proposition authors face. All of them have attorneys. Undiscovered authors usually don’t.

Sedwick’s advice: Get one before you sign away rights that you’ll want to keep.

She takes readers through some of the specific language that appears in publishing contracts, the good, bad and ugly.

Another section I found valuable contains her thoughts on how an author can set up their writing business. LLC, corporation or sole proprietorship?

Non-Legal Author Topics

Sedwick covers a number of topics that don’t fall in the legal realm, such as marketing, author branding, and whether to self-publish or to pursue a vanity press (or a small publisher). She also reinforces why all authors, regardless of status, owe it to themselves to build a trusted, reliable team around them to provide help (with editing, designing cover art, formatting, marketing) and honest feedback.

Knowledge is power, and this is an empowering book. It is not the be-all, end-all book about the business and legal dealings an Indie author will face. And it comes with the qualifier that all attorneys deliver at dinner parties when they inevitably get asked about legal matters: This is not privileged communications (between attorney and client), and don’t make any final decisions about legal matters until you consult your own attorney (in your own state).

But in our technology-driven, fast-changing publishing world where new publishing platforms and manuscript-producing/publishing software seem to arise every six months, this is a solid base.

She provides meaningful Do’s and Don’ts all along, and each chapter concludes with a checklist of things to consider (and act on).

This book should be required reading in the Author 101 panel at writing conferences around the country.

Setting Up Your Author Business

When it was my turn to dip a toe in the business waters, I didn’t have this book as a guide. The steps I ended up taking:

• Gaining an EIN from the Internal Revenue Service for an author/publisher business.

• Securing a PO box with the U.S. Post Office.

• Creating a sole proprietorship business with the state of Florida.

• Creating a business bank account.

• Creating a separate author PayPal account and linking that to the new bank account.

• Creating an account with IngramSpark.

• Creating author pages with Amazon, Goodreads and Barnes & Noble.

• And publishing Dead Odds, starting with Amazon, and then linking revenue streams to the new bank account.

From there, it’s a case of monitoring all the systems. That money owed to you funnels into your accounts as scheduled. That you get your mail. And so on.

A quick word about payments from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, IngramSpark and others: They arrive 90 days after the month of sales closes. Your January sales won’t hit your bank account until the end of April.

Crafting a new career as an author remains an exercise in perseverance despite the rise in technology and the ease of getting one’s words out into the mass market.

It’s a marathon riddled with potholes, speed bumps and obstacles along the way. And it takes determination – or plain stubbornness – to get to the end, whatever one’s particular end is.

Those of us who embark on the publishing journey need help along the way. The Self-Publisher’s Legal Handbook provides more than its share of help.

Answering the Question: How’s the Book Selling?

What a cool past eight months.

In the time since the publication of Dead Odds, many readers and friends reached out to pass along their congratulations on the novel and to send their well-wishes about the reception of it, both critically and commercially.

The question eventually comes around.

“How’s it going so far?”

The answer is: Pretty well, but I suppose it could always be better.

Photo credit: Luna Wang

I sent Dead Odds into the world with great anxiety and no set expectations. From attending author conferences, seminars, workshops, book-signing events and book fairs, I connected with a number of mystery and thriller authors as well as authors in other genres (romance, young adult and Sci-Fi, most notably). Some were published, others were on their way.

With the exception of one, Tim Dorsey, who is as brilliant at marketing as he is at crafting entertainingly original tales, they all cautioned me to walk into this world with realistic hopes. Dream big but live in reality. And the reality, they said, is that selling books is harder than writing them. And writing a good book is damned tough. “But, hey, best of luck!”

GOAL 1: MAKE THE BOOK GOOD

My biggest fear about Dead Odds is that readers would think it sucked. Never mind that the editors on the project were optimistic and encouraging.

Guess what? It doesn’t suck. Conrad Keane and Tina Rossi resonate. The plot works. The story captures.

Reviews on Amazon and Goodreads have been kind, and the ratings are good, averaging 4.75 out of 5 stars. (No reviews or ratings on Barnes & Noble yet, which may say more about B&N than the book.)

Last month came more affirmation. Dead Odds is a semifinalist for a Royal Palm Award, given by the Florida Writers Association, for the top mystery from 2018. The FWA announces finalists this summer and winners in October.

Beyond those official words and stars were what some readers, but not reviewers, sent directly to my inbox. Those have touched me. The book grabbed them on some level, and they took time to let me know. That’s awesome, and it makes me happy that I was able to deliver a fun get-away experience to someone else.

I’ve had others reach out to tell me they have the book and they’re waiting to take it on vacation with them. How cool is that?

The sales side of the business hasn’t warmed my heart to the same degree.

THE BOOK SALES STRATEGY

When the e-book hit the market in mid-October, it was only available through Amazon, and it was enrolled in Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program. The cost was $4.99 to readers not participating in KU. For those in KU, Dead Odds was free. For those downloads, I made money from each page that was read.

During Thanksgiving, just before Christmas and just after the New Year, I dropped the price of the book to 99 cents as part of an Amazon-sponsored sale. By the time 2019 came, I’d had more than 600 downloads, most as part of the KU program.

I received sales bumps when the book first came out and each time I dropped the price as part of the sale.

I gained another sales bump when the paperback edition of the novel came out just before Christmas.

In mid-January, I made the decision to “go wide,” the publishing term for ending my exclusivity with Amazon. I published an e-version on Kobo, Barnes & Noble’s platform, and kept the price the same as on Amazon.

Since then, I’ve looked into expanding my publishing platforms: Apple and audio. I opted not to go with Apple, mostly because of the technology involved in getting the book there. Anecdotes from other authors lead me to believe Amazon remains the gorilla and that there simply aren’t many eyeballs for books on Apple. And now all content on Apple products is starting to go through a drastic change. (See the demise if iTunes.)

An audio version of Dead Odds is still on the board. I studied the revenue models for audio books — and the costs involved. A friend, fellow mystery author Ray Flynt, is finishing off his first audio book. My decision is likely to be based on Ray’s experiences, at least for now. Stay tuned.

Almost exactly eight months since Dead Odds found a spot in the crime fiction universe, it hasn’t hit any best-seller lists and hasn’t made the author rich. At least, not financially.

My soul feels like a million bucks.

Guest Blog Post for Pens, Paws and Claws Blog Gets Personal

A few months ago and before the publication of Dead Odds, I agreed to write a guest post for the Pens, Paws and Claws blog.

This one was much different from so many other posts I've written. First, the format is Q&A -- or as the kids prefer today, AMA (Ask Me Anything).

Second, it was much more personal than I've gotten previously. No pain, no gain, right?

As you can tell by the title/them of the blog, there's an animal/pet connection. My wife and I have owned two dogs, both Miniature Schnauzers, over the past two decades. Both of them have left us, sadly, each leaving a hole in our hearts.

Baron does his guard-dog thing, looking for invading squirrels.

Baron was my writing buddy, and he'd sleep in a chair when I'd get up early or stay up late to write. He loved the outdoors, loved chasing squirrels, lizards and cats, although if a cat dared to stand its ground, Baron would leave it alone. He once cornered my sister-in-law's cat under her bed during a visit, and it wasn't pretty. We plucked claws out of his nose and eye that day.

Xena was the Alpha dog, but when she wasn't fierce, she was tender. She loved to cuddle up. Many days she acted more like a cat than a dog.

These days my wife and I are the neighborhood dog-sitters. If we're home and one of the neighbors needs help, we'll usually step up for feedings and walks.

Xena always liked hanging out by the pool.

What does this have to do with writing mysteries and thrillers? Balance, my friends, balance. Animals can bring out the best in us, and getting some exercise and helping out a neighbor can help put you in the right creative frame of mind.

Click on the link above and enjoy the guest post.

Takeaways from SleuthFest 2018

This year's SleuthFest has come and gone. Lessons are in the notebook.

As always, panelists at the annual conference put on by the Florida Mystery Writers of America were gracious, generous and up front. We heard stories of success and stories of struggles.

[caption id="attachment_818" align="alignright" width="300"] Andrew Gross[/caption]

Keynote for this SleuthFest was former James Patterson co-author and now famously re-branded Andrew Gross. Guest of honor was forensic scientist Katherine Ramsland, Ph.D. Guest authors were Hallie Ephron, Kristy Montee (who writes at PJ Parrish), Hank Phillippi Ryan and James R. Benn. And the editor-in-chief was recently retired publishing guru Neil Nyren.

There are always new things to learn. For me, here is this year's list.

Key Takeaways from SleuthFest 2018

1. Audio books are the fastest-growing segment of book sales. Some believe this trend doesn't indicate an uptick in overall sales but merely that audio books are sucking away readers from ebooks and print books. Even though audio books are much more expenses.

2. People who write crime fiction for a living (or as a serious hobby) did not like and do not like the recent success trend marked by "Gone Girl," "Girl on a Train" and [name that book with the word "Gone" in the title]. The structure and styles of those novels, while they may have stricken a cord with readers or with movie-goers turned into readers, seem to have turned this group of crime writers into disbelievers.

3. Lengthy book tours don't work like they used to. Most published authors don't do them anymore.

4. Your publicist doesn't have to like your book to sell it. He or she only has to believe your book has merit in the marketplace.

5. Your publicist may love your book (or books) and decide not to work with you anymore because you A) don't play nice B) have out-sized expectations or C) if you aren't willing to help them do their job by following their advice.

6. What agents and editors want from a new novelist is to be assured they're in good hands. They can tell within the first 1,000 words if a writer knows some of the secrets of how to draw a reader in and keep them enchanted. "I can tell within the first two or three pages if this writer is doing the job. If the answer is no, I pass," Nyren said.

7. The phrase "best-seller" is, in a word, "bullshit." The best-seller lists -- New York Times, USA Today, Amazon, etc. -- calculate their sales in different ways, and very few track every sale.

8. Editors are publishing houses do have their favorite agents. That's because there's typically a track record of success among agent, editor and author, and if the agent gives an editor an exclusive look at a manuscript it's because the agent thinks this is right MS for the right agent and house.

9. When writing a query letter for your first book, don't say it's your first book.

10. At least one South Florida crime-scene investigator, if she needed equipment or staffing help on a scene, would reach out first to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms before she reached out to the FBI. But the FBI is excellent when it comes to things like 2-D and 3-D modeling of crime scenes.

11. Crime-scene investigators are typically one or two people who don't wear powdered gloves and who don't ever draw chalk outlines of dead bodies.

12. The most dangerous post-crime scenes are grow houses. Marijuana fumes can be overwhelming, and the folks who use the house for their illegal business often steal electricity from the power company by re-wiring how it come into the house. That rewire job is not always safe. Oh: And there could also be guard dogs somewhere in the house. (Tempted to ask: Wouldn't the dogs be mellowed out?)

13. Do use the senses, all five of them, in scenes to identify place.

14. Don't worry about the opening of the first scene in your first draft. It's more important to get on with the storytelling. Once you reach the end, you'll know more than enough to rewrite the start.

15. You don't HAVE to have a fantastic opening sentence. It helps, but remember that every sentence builds off of the previous one.

16. Some techniques for appealing to readers' senses:
    Infuse your story with some dread. (Your character is realizing the situation is really, really bad.)
    Put your regular-person character in front of earth-shaking events or seemingly unstoppable forces (think "Independence Day" or "Armageddon").
    Have your character confront time elements they cannot control (ticking bomb, someone else's timeline).

17. Use techniques that help keep your story grounded and real, such as infusing real-life people in them. (The current president, a sports event result that just happened, a major world event).

Author Reminders from SleuthFest

In addition to the new things that came up a the conference, a number of constantly heard (but never-to-forget) things were mentioned. The ones I heard:

1. RUE: Resist the Urge to Explain. Said another way, don't dump a character's backstory on a reader all at once. It'll slow down the pace too much. The real craft is in the slow revealing of the character over the course of a book (or even a series).

2. If you're at the stage where you are querying agents, editors or publishers, make sure your query sets up your manuscript accurate. Don't oversell your story. It won't help you to get in the door if, in the end, your story doesn't match your hype.

3. Writing with an Omniscient POV is not for everyone. In fact, it can be difficult to pull off. Hat-tip to Steve Berry. This is a lesson he teaches again and again (though he was not at SleuthFest).

4. When looking at potential authors as clients or partners, agents, editors and publishing house do look the writer's platform (website, social media presence, etc.).

5. It's not longer enough to write your best book and let it fly away. Even if you're with a major publisher -- and especially if you are not, and particularly if you are an Indie author -- you will have to handle marketing duties. That's the way of the world now.

One final observation. SleuthFest is the perfect place to be if you want to publish novels traditionally. That is, by securing an agent, a small or large publisher and play the game according to the customary publishing rules.

It is NOT optimal for Indie authors. In fact, Indie authors are encouraged, in ways small and large at SleuthFest, not to be Indies.

More on that later.

RIP Gerald Ensley and Bill Crider: Admired Writers, Different Paths

Death, all the evidence suggests, is unavoidable.

There's always a chance, and maybe a pretty good one, that because we can't know what we don't know, that the other side of life has: A) something in store that we haven't thought of; B) something we can't comprehend; or C) something that's just as real as what we have now and we can't see it or know about it from here.

The topic comes to mind now because of two people who lost their mortality, or so we believe, this week. One I knew. One I'd never heard of but now wish that I had - and wish I'd met.

What Gerald Perkins and Bill Crider had in common, aside from the fact they were respected writers among peers and readers in their different worlds, was the admiration of others. Friends and peers appreciated their work and their kind words. They meant something to others. They touched others in their souls. (Although it has to be revealed that Gerald, in his self-written obituary, said he didn't care if his life meant something to somebody else. He wasn't sure it was supposed to.)

Gerald Ensley of the Tallahassee Democrat.

What Gerald and Bill Crider didn't share was the manner in which they left us. Gerald died quickly after suffering a stroke. Crider passed away at the end of a year-and-a-half battle with cancer.

Is There a Good Way to Go?

Confronting the loss of these fine men in a short time span caused something to flash across my mind. Is there really such a thing as a good way to go?

That probably depends on your definition of "good" in this case.

Personally, I prefer the Gerald way. Hit me and take me away. The thought of a lengthy exit filled with doctors, hospital beds and either a lot of pain or a lot of memory loss has no appeal to me.

I've long told friends I think the best way to perish would be in a plane crash. Presumably it would be fast, so fast that it would also be painless. There would be no piling up of medical bills. Everyone would always remember how you went -- and my wife would collect from the resulting lawsuit. (Note: My wife doesn't share ANY of these sentiments.)

The thought of dealing with doctors, nurses, hospitals, procedures and drugs for months or years at a time horrifies me beyond anything Stephen King could dream up. I suppose it does all come down to quality of life -- how well you feel when you're seriously ill.

Bill Crider

A drawn-out death does have some benefits. Although you don't get to pick the day you die (unless you live in the right-to-die state of Oregon), you would get to say a real goodbye to the people you love and the people who loved you. (Most people don't take the time to look up people they hated to give them a good "fuck you" before they kick off. But that's another story.)

Like characters in the suspense and mystery novels I read and write, we mostly don't get to choose how the end comes. Even when confronted with a terminal diagnosis, even when it is doomed to be drawn out, choose not to take matters into our own hands or to pursue the avenue of assisted suicide.

There are all kinds of cultural and familiar pressures brought to bear as well, particularly when the diagnosis involves a disease that doctors have shown success in slowing down with treatment. We're taught to fight, hang in there and keep hope alive.

If you die in a hurry and you want to have those quality endings, you have to have lived in a way that everyone knew how much you loved them. And you'd want to know how much you were valued.

That's not really they way we play it out in American culture, at least in my experience. That's too bad.

But as in our writing, until you publish, there's always a chance to make a change.

Who were Gerald Ensley and Bill Crider?

Gerald Ensley, Journalist

Gerald was a longtime writer for the Tallahassee Democrat. I knew Gerald when he was a general assignment writer, and like all good writers in college towns, he helped out with the big local sports stories. In this case, Florida State University football and basketball.

From journalism school, newspaper reporters are trained not to use the word unique to describe someone or something. That's because the word, the reasoning went, wasn't descriptive enough.

If Gerald wasn't unique, he was certainly different than everybody else. He said things others wouldn't say out loud, in a (mostly) good way. He didn't care if other reporters thought he was too rah-rah when he wrote about the Seminoles.

Although he wasn't the primary beat writer, he said, and no one else could write his perspective the way he could, he said.

I don't want to make it sound like I knew Gerald well. I did not. A few times we broke bread in the press box and had conversations before and after press conferences. We had beer or two over the years, but generally I ran with my crowd and he ran with his.

We respected each other and got along. Our jobs were different, and our paths didn't cross the way mine did with other journalists in Tallahassee those years.

While I moved away from Tallahassee and back to Central Florida, Gerald stayed put in the city that he loved, working for a newspaper that clutched his heart.

Bill Crider, Teacher, Mentor and Mystery Writer

Bill Crider was a mystery author from Texas. I didn't know him at all. In fact, until I read a tweet about his passing this week, I'd never heard of him.

A lot of others did, and that much was evident by the reactions I've been reading about his passing. He was a legend in Texas. As one fellow author wrote: "For me, Bill was the highlight of most Texas cons in the last decade. I miss him like family."

Bill, his friends and peers say, was a generous man who spread help and kindness among fellow authors,\. He encouraged them to get their manuscripts finished and get on with the business of getting published.

By trade, he was a college English professor and, later on, chair of the English and Fine Arts Division. Oh: He also wrote three different mystery series (one about a sheriff, one about a private eye and one about some amateur sleuths (college professors) and a handful of stand-alone mysteries. A few of his books were award-winners.

His impact on others was greater than book sales. People who met him only once or twice have stories about how much he inspired them and how much they were were grateful for his enthusiasm for their work.

He also had a widely appreciated pop culture blog.

RIP, Bill and Gerald. Maybe we'll meet, or meet again. It's impossible for us to know, although you already might.