KN Magazine: Articles
Old Days, New Ways: Self-Publishing / Robert J. Randisi
Killer Nashville 2016’s John Seigenthaler Legends Award recipient Robert J. Randisi has seen his fair share of rejection letters. After all, the road to publishing is never easy, and you don’t publish over 650 books without walking off all kinds of early disappointments. The industry at present, however, makes it seem possible to avoid that painful process through self-publishing. In this week’s guest blog, Randisi takes a hard look at this shortcut, and shares his advice.
Happy reading!
Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Old Days, New Ways
By Robert J. Randisi
Back in the late 1970s, when I was trying to break into the publishing business with private eye fiction, editors were telling me that the Private Eye was dead. But I persevered, and my first novel, The Disappearance of Penny (1980), was a private eye novel. Not long after its publication, I founded the Private Eye Writers of America. Our aim was to honor and further the private eye genre, elevating it to more than just a mystery subgenre, and now that PWA and the Shamus Award are starting their 35th year, I think we managed to succeed. And one of my recent books, The Honky Tonk Big Hoss Boogie (Perfect Crime, 2013) was the first in a new private eye series set in Nashville. The second book, The Last Sweet Song of Hammer Dylan (Perfect Crime), will follow later this year. And on we go…
But reminiscing about the days when I broke into the business makes me think of writers asking me today how to break in. Wow, how things have changed. Back then, I had to mail the manuscripts to editors and wait months for a reply—often a “No,” or “Does not suit our present needs.” I know writers who have collected 400, 500, 600 such rejection slips from publishers, and yet never lost their enthusiasm. Rather, those slips were merit badges, showing that they were paying their dues. Eventually, many of us got that first acceptance letter, and went on to a career.
But there are now countless outlets for authors who don’t want to wait for that acceptance letter: not when they can simply put the books out themselves. Ebook publishing and self-publishing have replaced all those rejection slips. Is this a good thing? Some say yes, some say no. Just look at the proliferation of self-published books on Amazon. Try to read some of them. A good portion are badly written and poorly edited, if they’re edited at all. There are books out there that, after years of rejection, have been published by authors who had the time and excess income to publish the books themselves. (Many of them were not published previously for good reason!)
Now, I’m not making any kind of sweeping statement that self-publishing is bad, or that all self-published books are bad. I’m saying that some writers’ impatience to be published has resulted in badly written, badly edited books making it to the marketplace. And there are books out there by published writers who are finding it difficult to stay published in the current environment, which have also been too hastily rushed to market.
So while I make no sweeping allegation that all self-published books are bad, I do offer these words of advice: BEFORE you send that manuscript out to be formatted and published by Smashwords or Kindle or Createspace, READ it over again and again; BEFORE you publish the book, invest some disposable income in a good editor, to be sure the grammar, sentence structure, and punctuation are correct.
As much as you may feel sure that the book is “fine”, there are many, many good writers out there who are BAD editors. To paraphrase the legal industry, “The author who edits his own book has a fool for an editor.”
Robert J. Randisi is the author of the Miles Jacoby, Nick Delvecchio, Gil & Claire Hunt, Dennis McQueen, Joe Keough, and The Rat Pack mystery series. The Honky Tonk Big Hoss Boogie (Perfect Crime Books), the first book in the Auggie Velez Nashville P.I. series, appeared in 2013. Upon My Soul(Down & Out Books, 2013) is the first book in the “Hitman with a Soul” Trilogy. The second book is Souls of the Dead(2015, Down & Out Books). His recent novel McKenna’s House (Crossroad Press) has been called his best book yet by several reviewers. The 10th book in his Rat Pack series, When Somebody Kills You, was published in Sept. 2015 by Severn House. He is the editor of over 30 anthologies. All told, he is the author of more than 650 novels, many of which have been Westerns.
His Housesitting Detective series appeared from Dagger Books in 2015, with the first book, Dry Stone Walls.
He is the founder of the Private Eye Writers of America, the creator of the Shamus Award, the co-founder of Mystery Scene Magazine and the American Crime Writers League with Ed Gorman, and one of the founders of Western Fictioneers and the Peacemaker Award. He is also the editor of How to Write a P.I. Novel for Writer’s Digest.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
Old Days, New Ways: Self-Publishing / Robert J. Randisi
Killer Nashville 2016’s John Seigenthaler Legends Award recipient Robert J. Randisi has seen his fair share of rejection letters. After all, the road to publishing is never easy, and you don’t publish over 650 books without walking off all kinds of early disappointments. The industry at present, however, makes it seem possible to avoid that painful process through self-publishing. In this week’s guest blog, Randisi takes a hard look at this shortcut, and shares his advice.Happy reading!
Clay StaffordFounder Killer NashvillePublisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Old Days, New Ways
By Robert J. Randisi
Back in the late 1970s, when I was trying to break into the publishing business with private eye fiction, editors were telling me that the Private Eye was dead. But I persevered, and my first novel, The Disappearance of Penny (1980), was a private eye novel. Not long after its publication, I founded the Private Eye Writers of America. Our aim was to honor and further the private eye genre, elevating it to more than just a mystery subgenre, and now that PWA and the Shamus Award are starting their 35th year, I think we managed to succeed. And one of my recent books, The Honky Tonk Big Hoss Boogie (Perfect Crime, 2013) was the first in a new private eye series set in Nashville. The second book, The Last Sweet Song of Hammer Dylan (Perfect Crime), will follow later this year. And on we go…
But reminiscing about the days when I broke into the business makes me think of writers asking me today how to break in. Wow, how things have changed. Back then, I had to mail the manuscripts to editors and wait months for a reply—often a “No,” or “Does not suit our present needs.” I know writers who have collected 400, 500, 600 such rejection slips from publishers, and yet never lost their enthusiasm. Rather, those slips were merit badges, showing that they were paying their dues. Eventually, many of us got that first acceptance letter, and went on to a career.
But there are now countless outlets for authors who don’t want to wait for that acceptance letter: not when they can simply put the books out themselves. Ebook publishing and self-publishing have replaced all those rejection slips. Is this a good thing? Some say yes, some say no. Just look at the proliferation of self-published books on Amazon. Try to read some of them. A good portion are badly written and poorly edited, if they’re edited at all. There are books out there that, after years of rejection, have been published by authors who had the time and excess income to publish the books themselves. (Many of them were not published previously for good reason!)
Now, I’m not making any kind of sweeping statement that self-publishing is bad, or that all self-published books are bad. I’m saying that some writers’ impatience to be published has resulted in badly written, badly edited books making it to the marketplace. And there are books out there by published writers who are finding it difficult to stay published in the current environment, which have also been too hastily rushed to market.
So while I make no sweeping allegation that all self-published books are bad, I do offer these words of advice: BEFORE you send that manuscript out to be formatted and published by Smashwords or Kindle or Createspace, READ it over again and again; BEFORE you publish the book, invest some disposable income in a good editor, to be sure the grammar, sentence structure, and punctuation are correct.
As much as you may feel sure that the book is “fine”, there are many, many good writers out there who are BAD editors. To paraphrase the legal industry, “The author who edits his own book has a fool for an editor.”
Robert J. Randisi is the author of the Miles Jacoby, Nick Delvecchio, Gil & Claire Hunt, Dennis McQueen, Joe Keough, and The Rat Pack mystery series. The Honky Tonk Big Hoss Boogie (Perfect Crime Books), the first book in the Auggie Velez Nashville P.I. series, appeared in 2013. Upon My Soul (Down & Out Books, 2013) is the first book in the “Hitman with a Soul” Trilogy. The second book is Souls of the Dead (2015, Down & Out Books). His recent novel McKenna’s House (Crossroad Press) has been called his best book yet by several reviewers. The 10th book in his Rat Pack series, When Somebody Kills You, was published in Sept. 2015 by Severn House. He is the editor of over 30 anthologies. All told, he is the author of more than 650 novels, many of which have been Westerns.
His Housesitting Detective series appeared from Dagger Books in 2015, with the first book, Dry Stone Walls.
He is the founder of the Private Eye Writers of America, the creator of the Shamus Award, the co-founder of Mystery Scene Magazine and the American Crime Writers League with Ed Gorman, and one of the founders of Western Fictioneers and the Peacemaker Award. He is also the editor of How to Write a P.I. Novel for Writer’s Digest.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
Old Days, New Ways: Self-Publishing / Robert J. Randisi
Killer Nashville 2016’s John Seigenthaler Legends Award recipient Robert J. Randisi has seen his fair share of rejection letters. After all, the road to publishing is never easy, and you don’t publish over 650 books without walking off all kinds of early disappointments. The industry at present, however, makes it seem possible to avoid that painful process through self-publishing. In this week’s guest blog, Randisi takes a hard look at this shortcut, and shares his advice.Happy reading!
Clay StaffordFounder Killer NashvillePublisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Old Days, New Ways
By Robert J. Randisi
Back in the late 1970s, when I was trying to break into the publishing business with private eye fiction, editors were telling me that the Private Eye was dead. But I persevered, and my first novel, The Disappearance of Penny (1980), was a private eye novel. Not long after its publication, I founded the Private Eye Writers of America. Our aim was to honor and further the private eye genre, elevating it to more than just a mystery subgenre, and now that PWA and the Shamus Award are starting their 35th year, I think we managed to succeed. And one of my recent books, The Honky Tonk Big Hoss Boogie (Perfect Crime, 2013) was the first in a new private eye series set in Nashville. The second book, The Last Sweet Song of Hammer Dylan (Perfect Crime), will follow later this year. And on we go…
But reminiscing about the days when I broke into the business makes me think of writers asking me today how to break in. Wow, how things have changed. Back then, I had to mail the manuscripts to editors and wait months for a reply—often a “No,” or “Does not suit our present needs.” I know writers who have collected 400, 500, 600 such rejection slips from publishers, and yet never lost their enthusiasm. Rather, those slips were merit badges, showing that they were paying their dues. Eventually, many of us got that first acceptance letter, and went on to a career.
But there are now countless outlets for authors who don’t want to wait for that acceptance letter: not when they can simply put the books out themselves. Ebook publishing and self-publishing have replaced all those rejection slips. Is this a good thing? Some say yes, some say no. Just look at the proliferation of self-published books on Amazon. Try to read some of them. A good portion are badly written and poorly edited, if they’re edited at all. There are books out there that, after years of rejection, have been published by authors who had the time and excess income to publish the books themselves. (Many of them were not published previously for good reason!)
Now, I’m not making any kind of sweeping statement that self-publishing is bad, or that all self-published books are bad. I’m saying that some writers’ impatience to be published has resulted in badly written, badly edited books making it to the marketplace. And there are books out there by published writers who are finding it difficult to stay published in the current environment, which have also been too hastily rushed to market.
So while I make no sweeping allegation that all self-published books are bad, I do offer these words of advice: BEFORE you send that manuscript out to be formatted and published by Smashwords or Kindle or Createspace, READ it over again and again; BEFORE you publish the book, invest some disposable income in a good editor, to be sure the grammar, sentence structure, and punctuation are correct.
As much as you may feel sure that the book is “fine”, there are many, many good writers out there who are BAD editors. To paraphrase the legal industry, “The author who edits his own book has a fool for an editor.”
Robert J. Randisi is the author of the Miles Jacoby, Nick Delvecchio, Gil & Claire Hunt, Dennis McQueen, Joe Keough, and The Rat Pack mystery series. The Honky Tonk Big Hoss Boogie (Perfect Crime Books), the first book in the Auggie Velez Nashville P.I. series, appeared in 2013. Upon My Soul (Down & Out Books, 2013) is the first book in the “Hitman with a Soul” Trilogy. The second book is Souls of the Dead (2015, Down & Out Books). His recent novel McKenna’s House (Crossroad Press) has been called his best book yet by several reviewers. The 10th book in his Rat Pack series, When Somebody Kills You, was published in Sept. 2015 by Severn House. He is the editor of over 30 anthologies. All told, he is the author of more than 650 novels, many of which have been Westerns.
His Housesitting Detective series appeared from Dagger Books in 2015, with the first book, Dry Stone Walls.
He is the founder of the Private Eye Writers of America, the creator of the Shamus Award, the co-founder of Mystery Scene Magazine and the American Crime Writers League with Ed Gorman, and one of the founders of Western Fictioneers and the Peacemaker Award. He is also the editor of How to Write a P.I. Novel for Writer’s Digest.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
Make Crime Pay—Mining Memories and Other Scar Tissue / Jeffrey B. Burton
Repression’s a pretty useful technique, as far as traumatic memories are concerned. It’d be hard to function if we carried all our baggage around on a daily basis. But those ugly moments do resurface, and it’s difficult to resist the desire to redeem them. Luckily, we writers have one of the most convenient and effective means of repurposing suffering through our power to create. In this week’s guest blog, author Jeffrey B. Burton offers advice on turning pain into gain, by transforming it into the emotional architecture supporting your story.
Happy reading!
Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Make Crime Pay—Mining Memories and Other Scar Tissue
By Jeffrey B. Burton
“Write what you know,” they say. Really? Has Michael Connelly ever captured a serial killer? Has Lee Child ever clobbered five guys in a bar fight? Did Harlan Coben’s college flame disappear for decades only to resurface with earth-shattering revelations?
Not likely.
However, you can develop a riff on that old writers’ adage and mine your real-life experiences—those painful memories—for unique perspectives, some great dialogue, and a rich cataract of emotions.
One example—junior high was the equivalent of gen pop in the Attica prison yard, but I had the system figured out. By loudly insulting a bully, you alert the teacher that trouble was brewing, so said teacher could rush in and separate combatants before any blood was spilled.
Alas, the system failed me in ninth grade when Mr. Hendricks, my algebra teacher, took his time meandering across the classroom to break up a verbal scuffle that morphed instantaneously into my new status as human punching bag. Hendricks stopped to answer a question or two along the way, perhaps clap a few erasers, and possibly plan a trip to Greece before yanking Dave Morton off me.
Two lessons were learned that day. First, getting punched in the face is something to be avoided and, second, I think that devious Hendricks bastard took his own sweet time on purpose. Sure, I may have bruised Morton’s knuckles and gotten blood on his T-shirt; sure, I walked around like an extra from Fight Club that week, but still… not one of my finer moments.
However, it serves as great writing fodder for the maelstrom of mixed sentiments—the overlapping pangs of fear, panic, and terror—involved in any type of physical conflict. I stirred a few of these feelings into The Chessman, where a character reflects back on his challenging adolescence. Of course, my fictional doppelganger equated himself in fisticuffs much better than factual Jeff.
Another example—an eye-catching cook where I washed dishes took a shine to sixteen-year-old me, and in my bumbling amateurish manner I was ginning up the courage to ask her out. I was in that young-dopey-flirty stage and my little heart went pitter-pat as I waltzed out to my car at the end of a late evening shift only to discover that—HOLY SHIT!—there was no car.
So it’s one a.m., and my soon-to-be girlfriend chauffeurs me around the mall’s enormous parking lot, slowly, as though I suffered from Alzheimer’s and had forgotten parking four hundred yards away from the restaurant. From there she drove me to the police station, where I was left with the task of calling my father, waking him, and letting him know that his days of griping about the mileage on his station wagon were over.
As for my budding paramour… Well, she never spoke to me again. I’m hazy to this day about what was actually mentioned in her car that night as she carted me about town, but evidently I muttered every four-letter word in the book, and then some.
Not one iota of fun at the time, but the episode did provide an interesting twist on the three-act structure: Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy also loses the family car. Plus, I’ve placed lost love under the microscope in several of my short stories (High Score, The Mourning, The Reuniting).
A final example—my university-assigned roommate knew a 300-pound Samoan named Clete. Clete carried a lock-knife on his belt and may or may not have been attending college (I’m going to say not). One afternoon after class, I returned to my dorm room to find Clete selling full-length leather jackets to a parade of female students. His inventory of overcoats stacked high atop my bed.
“Where’d you get all these jackets?” I asked.
Clete looked like he wanted to rip my head off. “They fell off a truck.”
I pulled my university-assigned roommate aside for a moment and whispered, “You can’t sell these here. If the cops find out, we’re screwed.”
“You can’t tell anyone,” my university-assigned roommate replied, eyes wide, deadly serious. “Clete will kill us.”
My initial reaction was to check the Greyhound schedule for points south. Instead, I spent that month believing at any moment I would be arrested as part of the notorious Lake Street Leather Gang, or get my throat slashed when Clete inevitably got around to tying up loose ends. Decades later and I’ve yet to place Clete directly in any of my writing, as I’d sure hate to answer the door chime one evening only to find him on the front stoop, lock-knife at the ready. But I’ve certainly utilized that gut-wrenching sense of flight with characters in both The Chessman and The Lynchpin.
So the next time you’re stumped and in search of realistic emotions or character motivations or pithy dialogue, make crime pay by scouring through some of the less-than-pleasant situations you’ve found yourself embroiled in; you know, your memories from hell and other such scar tissue.
As for me, whenever I begin kicking about ideas for a villain, all I need do is sit back and ask… WWCD?
What would Clete do?
Jeffrey B. Burton’s mystery/thriller, The Chessman, came out to some excellent reviews, including a starred one in Publishers Weekly, and went on to sell to publishers in Germany, The Netherlands, Turkey, and the U.K. It comes out in mass media paperback in April of 2016. Jeff’s follow-up thriller, The Lynchpin, came out in 2015. Jeff was born in Long Beach, California, but grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota. He received a BA in journalism at the University of Minnesota. Burton is an active member of International Thriller Writers, Mystery Writers of America, the International Association of Crime Writers, and the Horror Writers Association.
Find more of his work at www.jeffreybburton.com.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
Make Crime Pay—Mining Memories and Other Scar Tissue / Jeffrey B. Burton
Repression’s a pretty useful technique, as far as traumatic memories are concerned. It’d be hard to function if we carried all our baggage around on a daily basis. But those ugly moments do resurface, and it’s difficult to resist the desire to redeem them. Luckily, we writers have one of the most convenient and effective means of repurposing suffering through our power to create. In this week’s guest blog, author Jeffrey B. Burton offers advice on turning pain into gain, by transforming it into the emotional architecture supporting your story.Happy reading!Clay StaffordFounder Killer NashvillePublisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Make Crime Pay—Mining Memories and Other Scar Tissue
By Jeffrey B. Burton
“Write what you know,” they say. Really? Has Michael Connelly ever captured a serial killer? Has Lee Child ever clobbered five guys in a bar fight? Did Harlan Coben’s college flame disappear for decades only to resurface with earth-shattering revelations?
Not likely.
However, you can develop a riff on that old writers’ adage and mine your real-life experiences—those painful memories—for unique perspectives, some great dialogue, and a rich cataract of emotions.
One example—junior high was the equivalent of gen pop in the Attica prison yard, but I had the system figured out. By loudly insulting a bully, you alert the teacher that trouble was brewing, so said teacher could rush in and separate combatants before any blood was spilled.
Alas, the system failed me in ninth grade when Mr. Hendricks, my algebra teacher, took his time meandering across the classroom to break up a verbal scuffle that morphed instantaneously into my new status as human punching bag. Hendricks stopped to answer a question or two along the way, perhaps clap a few erasers, and possibly plan a trip to Greece before yanking Dave Morton off me.
Two lessons were learned that day. First, getting punched in the face is something to be avoided and, second, I think that devious Hendricks bastard took his own sweet time on purpose. Sure, I may have bruised Morton’s knuckles and gotten blood on his T-shirt; sure, I walked around like an extra from Fight Club that week, but still… not one of my finer moments.
However, it serves as great writing fodder for the maelstrom of mixed sentiments—the overlapping pangs of fear, panic, and terror—involved in any type of physical conflict. I stirred a few of these feelings into The Chessman, where a character reflects back on his challenging adolescence. Of course, my fictional doppelganger equated himself in fisticuffs much better than factual Jeff.
Another example—an eye-catching cook where I washed dishes took a shine to sixteen-year-old me, and in my bumbling amateurish manner I was ginning up the courage to ask her out. I was in that young-dopey-flirty stage and my little heart went pitter-pat as I waltzed out to my car at the end of a late evening shift only to discover that—HOLY SHIT!—there was no car.
So it’s one a.m., and my soon-to-be girlfriend chauffeurs me around the mall’s enormous parking lot, slowly, as though I suffered from Alzheimer’s and had forgotten parking four hundred yards away from the restaurant. From there she drove me to the police station, where I was left with the task of calling my father, waking him, and letting him know that his days of griping about the mileage on his station wagon were over.
As for my budding paramour… Well, she never spoke to me again. I’m hazy to this day about what was actually mentioned in her car that night as she carted me about town, but evidently I muttered every four-letter word in the book, and then some.
Not one iota of fun at the time, but the episode did provide an interesting twist on the three-act structure: Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy also loses the family car. Plus, I’ve placed lost love under the microscope in several of my short stories (High Score, The Mourning, The Reuniting).
A final example—my university-assigned roommate knew a 300-pound Samoan named Clete. Clete carried a lock-knife on his belt and may or may not have been attending college (I’m going to say not). One afternoon after class, I returned to my dorm room to find Clete selling full-length leather jackets to a parade of female students. His inventory of overcoats stacked high atop my bed.
“Where’d you get all these jackets?” I asked.
Clete looked like he wanted to rip my head off. “They fell off a truck.”
I pulled my university-assigned roommate aside for a moment and whispered, “You can’t sell these here. If the cops find out, we’re screwed.”
“You can’t tell anyone,” my university-assigned roommate replied, eyes wide, deadly serious. “Clete will kill us.”
My initial reaction was to check the Greyhound schedule for points south. Instead, I spent that month believing at any moment I would be arrested as part of the notorious Lake Street Leather Gang, or get my throat slashed when Clete inevitably got around to tying up loose ends. Decades later and I’ve yet to place Clete directly in any of my writing, as I’d sure hate to answer the door chime one evening only to find him on the front stoop, lock-knife at the ready. But I’ve certainly utilized that gut-wrenching sense of flight with characters in both The Chessman and The Lynchpin.
So the next time you’re stumped and in search of realistic emotions or character motivations or pithy dialogue, make crime pay by scouring through some of the less-than-pleasant situations you’ve found yourself embroiled in; you know, your memories from hell and other such scar tissue.
As for me, whenever I begin kicking about ideas for a villain, all I need do is sit back and ask… WWCD?
What would Clete do?
Jeffrey B. Burton’s mystery/thriller, The Chessman, came out to some excellent reviews, including a starred one in Publishers Weekly, and went on to sell to publishers in Germany, The Netherlands, Turkey, and the U.K. It comes out in mass media paperback in April of 2016. Jeff’s follow-up thriller, The Lynchpin, came out in 2015. Jeff was born in Long Beach, California, but grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota. He received a BA in journalism at the University of Minnesota. Burton is an active member of International Thriller Writers, Mystery Writers of America, the International Association of Crime Writers, and the Horror Writers Association.
Find more of his work at www.jeffreybburton.com.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
Make Crime Pay—Mining Memories and Other Scar Tissue / Jeffrey B. Burton
Repression’s a pretty useful technique, as far as traumatic memories are concerned. It’d be hard to function if we carried all our baggage around on a daily basis. But those ugly moments do resurface, and it’s difficult to resist the desire to redeem them. Luckily, we writers have one of the most convenient and effective means of repurposing suffering through our power to create. In this week’s guest blog, author Jeffrey B. Burton offers advice on turning pain into gain, by transforming it into the emotional architecture supporting your story.Happy reading!Clay StaffordFounder Killer NashvillePublisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Make Crime Pay—Mining Memories and Other Scar Tissue
By Jeffrey B. Burton
“Write what you know,” they say. Really? Has Michael Connelly ever captured a serial killer? Has Lee Child ever clobbered five guys in a bar fight? Did Harlan Coben’s college flame disappear for decades only to resurface with earth-shattering revelations?
Not likely.
However, you can develop a riff on that old writers’ adage and mine your real-life experiences—those painful memories—for unique perspectives, some great dialogue, and a rich cataract of emotions.
One example—junior high was the equivalent of gen pop in the Attica prison yard, but I had the system figured out. By loudly insulting a bully, you alert the teacher that trouble was brewing, so said teacher could rush in and separate combatants before any blood was spilled.
Alas, the system failed me in ninth grade when Mr. Hendricks, my algebra teacher, took his time meandering across the classroom to break up a verbal scuffle that morphed instantaneously into my new status as human punching bag. Hendricks stopped to answer a question or two along the way, perhaps clap a few erasers, and possibly plan a trip to Greece before yanking Dave Morton off me.
Two lessons were learned that day. First, getting punched in the face is something to be avoided and, second, I think that devious Hendricks bastard took his own sweet time on purpose. Sure, I may have bruised Morton’s knuckles and gotten blood on his T-shirt; sure, I walked around like an extra from Fight Club that week, but still… not one of my finer moments.
However, it serves as great writing fodder for the maelstrom of mixed sentiments—the overlapping pangs of fear, panic, and terror—involved in any type of physical conflict. I stirred a few of these feelings into The Chessman, where a character reflects back on his challenging adolescence. Of course, my fictional doppelganger equated himself in fisticuffs much better than factual Jeff.
Another example—an eye-catching cook where I washed dishes took a shine to sixteen-year-old me, and in my bumbling amateurish manner I was ginning up the courage to ask her out. I was in that young-dopey-flirty stage and my little heart went pitter-pat as I waltzed out to my car at the end of a late evening shift only to discover that—HOLY SHIT!—there was no car.
So it’s one a.m., and my soon-to-be girlfriend chauffeurs me around the mall’s enormous parking lot, slowly, as though I suffered from Alzheimer’s and had forgotten parking four hundred yards away from the restaurant. From there she drove me to the police station, where I was left with the task of calling my father, waking him, and letting him know that his days of griping about the mileage on his station wagon were over.
As for my budding paramour… Well, she never spoke to me again. I’m hazy to this day about what was actually mentioned in her car that night as she carted me about town, but evidently I muttered every four-letter word in the book, and then some.
Not one iota of fun at the time, but the episode did provide an interesting twist on the three-act structure: Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy also loses the family car. Plus, I’ve placed lost love under the microscope in several of my short stories (High Score, The Mourning, The Reuniting).
A final example—my university-assigned roommate knew a 300-pound Samoan named Clete. Clete carried a lock-knife on his belt and may or may not have been attending college (I’m going to say not). One afternoon after class, I returned to my dorm room to find Clete selling full-length leather jackets to a parade of female students. His inventory of overcoats stacked high atop my bed.
“Where’d you get all these jackets?” I asked.
Clete looked like he wanted to rip my head off. “They fell off a truck.”
I pulled my university-assigned roommate aside for a moment and whispered, “You can’t sell these here. If the cops find out, we’re screwed.”
“You can’t tell anyone,” my university-assigned roommate replied, eyes wide, deadly serious. “Clete will kill us.”
My initial reaction was to check the Greyhound schedule for points south. Instead, I spent that month believing at any moment I would be arrested as part of the notorious Lake Street Leather Gang, or get my throat slashed when Clete inevitably got around to tying up loose ends. Decades later and I’ve yet to place Clete directly in any of my writing, as I’d sure hate to answer the door chime one evening only to find him on the front stoop, lock-knife at the ready. But I’ve certainly utilized that gut-wrenching sense of flight with characters in both The Chessman and The Lynchpin.
So the next time you’re stumped and in search of realistic emotions or character motivations or pithy dialogue, make crime pay by scouring through some of the less-than-pleasant situations you’ve found yourself embroiled in; you know, your memories from hell and other such scar tissue.
As for me, whenever I begin kicking about ideas for a villain, all I need do is sit back and ask… WWCD?
What would Clete do?
Jeffrey B. Burton’s mystery/thriller, The Chessman, came out to some excellent reviews, including a starred one in Publishers Weekly, and went on to sell to publishers in Germany, The Netherlands, Turkey, and the U.K. It comes out in mass media paperback in April of 2016. Jeff’s follow-up thriller, The Lynchpin, came out in 2015. Jeff was born in Long Beach, California, but grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota. He received a BA in journalism at the University of Minnesota. Burton is an active member of International Thriller Writers, Mystery Writers of America, the International Association of Crime Writers, and the Horror Writers Association.
Find more of his work at www.jeffreybburton.com.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
Overcoming a Writer's Biggest Fear—Marketing and Promotion / DiAnn Mills
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time, or so the saying goes. And for writers, there aren’t many elephant-sized responsibilities more disheartening than the modern-day must of self-promotion. Here to break down the timeline of a standard marketing campaign is this week’s guest blogger DiAnn Mills. She’s already cut your food up for you, authors. It’d be a shame if you left it sitting there.
Happy reading!
Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Overcoming a Writer’s Biggest Fear—Marketing and Promotion
By DiAnn Mills
We writers embrace words, brainstorming sessions, hours of writing, and constructive criticism, but there is one critical aspect of the writer’s life that shakes us to our core...
Marketing and Promotion:
The nightmare of our career.
We think we have the notion,
But can’t move past the fear.
Okay, I’m not a poet—I write suspense. But I’m sure you understand where this is going. We writers must market and promote our stories and our brand. No running or hiding. It’s necessary if we are to be successful in placing our novels into the hearts and hands of readers. So let’s crawl out of our cave mode and discuss ways to approach the scary monster called marketing and promotion. I think you’ll find it can be easy and even enjoyable.
Number one on the list is creating an outstanding book, the kind of suspense novel that marches through the graveyard of those who’ve failed to promote, wielding determination and the sword of skill.
Number two is having an active presence on a highly read blog (yours or a group site), Facebook, and Twitter. We writers deepen our brands through social media to leave a positive image that oozes with professionalism.
Those are the basics. Now this next section of information makes novel promotion simple. I’m a firm believer in organization, and when I write a novel, spreadsheets keep me rooted in reality.
After we sign a contract with a publisher or decide when a novel will be published, the work hovers over us. A writer gets ahead of the marketing and promotion stress by developing a Timeline Task countdown. This is an indicator of what needs to be accomplished approximately a year before a book is released. Some logistics vary depending on whether you are traditionally published or not, but this will give you an idea for creating your own Timeline Task spreadsheet.
12 months out:
Contact online and print publications to arrange for ad and banner placement. Make sure they are in place for the month of the book release.
Recruit your Street Team.
Reach out to prominent authors in your genre for possible endorsements. This allows the endorser to schedule reading the novel.
Write blogs that connect to the novel. Stockpile them—you will be glad later.
9 months out:
Order bookmarks and postcards.
Arrange guest blogs and schedule in your calendar when they will appear. Remember, these have already been written.
Arrange production of book trailer.
Arrange production of author interview video.
Announce to Street Team and brainstorm promo ideas.
6 months out:
Contact TV and radio stations for interviews.
Create contest ideas with giveaways.
Goodreads: update bio, headshot, ask-the-author section, add new release to books, link to blog posts, update page; be active! http://www.goodreads.com/author/guidelines
Design secret Pinterest Boards.
Use postcards to notify libraries of new book
3 months out:
Mail ARCs.
Keep Street Team posted.
Confirm all blog spots, ads, banners, etc.
Seek events to speak and sign.
Check that all online platforms and retail stores have updated bio and photo.
Arrange launch party or signing for big day.
6 weeks out:
Mail author copies or e-copies of book to Street Team.
Mail author copies or e-copies of book to reviewers.
Encourage pre-orders.
Post book trailer and author interviews.
Book release:
E-mail blast
Blogs appear
Constant presence on social media platforms.
Thank those who helped make the release a success.
Small tokens of thanks sent.
Contests announced.
Follow up:
Keep the momentum going by sharing deleted scenes, research, character insight, and behind-the-scenes action.
Party time!
All of the above is fairly easy. But we don’t have time to fashion all those social media posts at a moment’s notice. Here is where a Proactive Marketing and Promotion spreadsheet is used. By using this aid during the proposal and writing phase, a writer keeps her sanity and confidence intact.
At the completion of each scene, fill in a row that contains columns for the following:
Scene #
Blog Ideas
Contest Ideas
Facebook Post
Giveaways
Hashtags
Pinterest Board Ideas
Speaking Topics
Tweetables
Video Ideas
Other/Misc
I recommend keeping track of the various blog sites, the contact person, e-mail address, word length, website, date contacted, date due, date e-mailed, date when the blog appears, and a comment section. The last one is helpful if a giveaway is offered or particular specs needed for the post.
Marketing and promotion organization begins when the idea for a fabulous book enters our minds. As we imagine plot, characters, setting, research, and dialogue, we also envision how our book will reach readers. What is your favorite method of enticing readers?
DiAnn Mills is a bestselling author who believes her readers should expect an adventure. She combines unforgettable characters with unpredictable plots to create action-packed, suspense-filled novels. Her titles have appeared on the CBA and ECPA bestseller lists, won two Christy Awards, and been finalists for the RITA, Daphne Du Maurier, Inspirational Readers’ Choice, and Carol award contests. Library Journal presented her with a Best Books 2014: Genre Fiction award in the Christian Fiction category for Firewall.
DiAnn is a founding board member of the American Christian Fiction Writers; a member of Advanced Writers and Speakers Association, International Thriller Writers, and the Faith, Hope, and Love chapter of Romance Writers of America. She is co-director of The Author Roadmap with social media specialist Edie Melson where she continues her passion of helping other writers be successful. She speaks to various groups and teaches writing workshops around the country. DiAnn has been termed a coffee snob and roasts her own coffee beans.
She’s an avid reader, loves to cook, and believes her grandchildren are the smartest kids in the universe. She and her husband live in sunny Houston, Texas. DiAnn is very active online and would love to connect with readers on any of the social media platforms listed at www.diannmills.com.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
Overcoming a Writer's Biggest Fear—Marketing and Promotion / DiAnn Mills
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time, or so the saying goes. And for writers, there aren’t many elephant-sized responsibilities more disheartening than the modern-day must of self-promotion. Here to break down the timeline of a standard marketing campaign is this week’s guest blogger DiAnn Mills. She’s already cut your food up for you, authors. It’d be a shame if you left it sitting there.Happy reading!Clay StaffordFounder Killer NashvillePublisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Overcoming a Writer’s Biggest Fear—Marketing and Promotion
By DiAnn Mills
We writers embrace words, brainstorming sessions, hours of writing, and constructive criticism, but there is one critical aspect of the writer’s life that shakes us to our core...
Marketing and Promotion:
The nightmare of our career.
We think we have the notion,
But can’t move past the fear.
Okay, I’m not a poet—I write suspense. But I’m sure you understand where this is going. We writers must market and promote our stories and our brand. No running or hiding. It’s necessary if we are to be successful in placing our novels into the hearts and hands of readers. So let’s crawl out of our cave mode and discuss ways to approach the scary monster called marketing and promotion. I think you’ll find it can be easy and even enjoyable.
Number one on the list is creating an outstanding book, the kind of suspense novel that marches through the graveyard of those who’ve failed to promote, wielding determination and the sword of skill.
Number two is having an active presence on a highly read blog (yours or a group site), Facebook, and Twitter. We writers deepen our brands through social media to leave a positive image that oozes with professionalism.
Those are the basics. Now this next section of information makes novel promotion simple. I’m a firm believer in organization, and when I write a novel, spreadsheets keep me rooted in reality.
After we sign a contract with a publisher or decide when a novel will be published, the work hovers over us. A writer gets ahead of the marketing and promotion stress by developing a Timeline Task countdown. This is an indicator of what needs to be accomplished approximately a year before a book is released. Some logistics vary depending on whether you are traditionally published or not, but this will give you an idea for creating your own Timeline Task spreadsheet.
12 months out:
- Contact online and print publications to arrange for ad and banner placement. Make sure they are in place for the month of the book release.
- Recruit your Street Team.
- Reach out to prominent authors in your genre for possible endorsements. This allows the endorser to schedule reading the novel.
- Write blogs that connect to the novel. Stockpile them—you will be glad later.
9 months out:
- Order bookmarks and postcards.
- Arrange guest blogs and schedule in your calendar when they will appear. Remember, these have already been written.
- Arrange production of book trailer.
- Arrange production of author interview video.
- Announce to Street Team and brainstorm promo ideas.
6 months out:
- Contact TV and radio stations for interviews.
- Create contest ideas with giveaways.
- Goodreads: update bio, headshot, ask-the-author section, add new release to books, link to blog posts, update page; be active! http://www.goodreads.com/author/guidelines
- Design secret Pinterest Boards.
- Use postcards to notify libraries of new book
3 months out:
- Mail ARCs.
- Keep Street Team posted.
- Confirm all blog spots, ads, banners, etc.
- Seek events to speak and sign.
- Check that all online platforms and retail stores have updated bio and photo.
- Arrange launch party or signing for big day.
6 weeks out:
- Mail author copies or e-copies of book to Street Team.
- Mail author copies or e-copies of book to reviewers.
- Encourage pre-orders.
- Post book trailer and author interviews.
Book release:
- E-mail blast
- Blogs appear
- Constant presence on social media platforms.
- Thank those who helped make the release a success.
- Small tokens of thanks sent.
- Contests announced.
Follow up:
- Keep the momentum going by sharing deleted scenes, research, character insight, and behind-the-scenes action.
- Party time!
All of the above is fairly easy. But we don’t have time to fashion all those social media posts at a moment’s notice. Here is where a Proactive Marketing and Promotion spreadsheet is used. By using this aid during the proposal and writing phase, a writer keeps her sanity and confidence intact.
At the completion of each scene, fill in a row that contains columns for the following:
Scene #
Blog Ideas
Contest Ideas
Facebook Post
Giveaways
Hashtags
Pinterest Board Ideas
Speaking Topics
Tweetables
Video Ideas
Other/Misc
I recommend keeping track of the various blog sites, the contact person, e-mail address, word length, website, date contacted, date due, date e-mailed, date when the blog appears, and a comment section. The last one is helpful if a giveaway is offered or particular specs needed for the post.
Marketing and promotion organization begins when the idea for a fabulous book enters our minds. As we imagine plot, characters, setting, research, and dialogue, we also envision how our book will reach readers. What is your favorite method of enticing readers?
DiAnn Mills is a bestselling author who believes her readers should expect an adventure. She combines unforgettable characters with unpredictable plots to create action-packed, suspense-filled novels. Her titles have appeared on the CBA and ECPA bestseller lists, won two Christy Awards, and been finalists for the RITA, Daphne Du Maurier, Inspirational Readers’ Choice, and Carol award contests. Library Journal presented her with a Best Books 2014: Genre Fiction award in the Christian Fiction category for Firewall.
DiAnn is a founding board member of the American Christian Fiction Writers; a member of Advanced Writers and Speakers Association, International Thriller Writers, and the Faith, Hope, and Love chapter of Romance Writers of America. She is co-director of The Author Roadmap with social media specialist Edie Melson where she continues her passion of helping other writers be successful. She speaks to various groups and teaches writing workshops around the country. DiAnn has been termed a coffee snob and roasts her own coffee beans.
She’s an avid reader, loves to cook, and believes her grandchildren are the smartest kids in the universe. She and her husband live in sunny Houston, Texas. DiAnn is very active online and would love to connect with readers on any of the social media platforms listed at www.diannmills.com.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
Overcoming a Writer's Biggest Fear—Marketing and Promotion / DiAnn Mills
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time, or so the saying goes. And for writers, there aren’t many elephant-sized responsibilities more disheartening than the modern-day must of self-promotion. Here to break down the timeline of a standard marketing campaign is this week’s guest blogger DiAnn Mills. She’s already cut your food up for you, authors. It’d be a shame if you left it sitting there.Happy reading!Clay StaffordFounder Killer NashvillePublisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Overcoming a Writer’s Biggest Fear—Marketing and Promotion
By DiAnn Mills
We writers embrace words, brainstorming sessions, hours of writing, and constructive criticism, but there is one critical aspect of the writer’s life that shakes us to our core...
Marketing and Promotion:
The nightmare of our career.
We think we have the notion,
But can’t move past the fear.
Okay, I’m not a poet—I write suspense. But I’m sure you understand where this is going. We writers must market and promote our stories and our brand. No running or hiding. It’s necessary if we are to be successful in placing our novels into the hearts and hands of readers. So let’s crawl out of our cave mode and discuss ways to approach the scary monster called marketing and promotion. I think you’ll find it can be easy and even enjoyable.
Number one on the list is creating an outstanding book, the kind of suspense novel that marches through the graveyard of those who’ve failed to promote, wielding determination and the sword of skill.
Number two is having an active presence on a highly read blog (yours or a group site), Facebook, and Twitter. We writers deepen our brands through social media to leave a positive image that oozes with professionalism.
Those are the basics. Now this next section of information makes novel promotion simple. I’m a firm believer in organization, and when I write a novel, spreadsheets keep me rooted in reality.
After we sign a contract with a publisher or decide when a novel will be published, the work hovers over us. A writer gets ahead of the marketing and promotion stress by developing a Timeline Task countdown. This is an indicator of what needs to be accomplished approximately a year before a book is released. Some logistics vary depending on whether you are traditionally published or not, but this will give you an idea for creating your own Timeline Task spreadsheet.
12 months out:
- Contact online and print publications to arrange for ad and banner placement. Make sure they are in place for the month of the book release.
- Recruit your Street Team.
- Reach out to prominent authors in your genre for possible endorsements. This allows the endorser to schedule reading the novel.
- Write blogs that connect to the novel. Stockpile them—you will be glad later.
9 months out:
- Order bookmarks and postcards.
- Arrange guest blogs and schedule in your calendar when they will appear. Remember, these have already been written.
- Arrange production of book trailer.
- Arrange production of author interview video.
- Announce to Street Team and brainstorm promo ideas.
6 months out:
- Contact TV and radio stations for interviews.
- Create contest ideas with giveaways.
- Goodreads: update bio, headshot, ask-the-author section, add new release to books, link to blog posts, update page; be active! http://www.goodreads.com/author/guidelines
- Design secret Pinterest Boards.
- Use postcards to notify libraries of new book
3 months out:
- Mail ARCs.
- Keep Street Team posted.
- Confirm all blog spots, ads, banners, etc.
- Seek events to speak and sign.
- Check that all online platforms and retail stores have updated bio and photo.
- Arrange launch party or signing for big day.
6 weeks out:
- Mail author copies or e-copies of book to Street Team.
- Mail author copies or e-copies of book to reviewers.
- Encourage pre-orders.
- Post book trailer and author interviews.
Book release:
- E-mail blast
- Blogs appear
- Constant presence on social media platforms.
- Thank those who helped make the release a success.
- Small tokens of thanks sent.
- Contests announced.
Follow up:
- Keep the momentum going by sharing deleted scenes, research, character insight, and behind-the-scenes action.
- Party time!
All of the above is fairly easy. But we don’t have time to fashion all those social media posts at a moment’s notice. Here is where a Proactive Marketing and Promotion spreadsheet is used. By using this aid during the proposal and writing phase, a writer keeps her sanity and confidence intact.
At the completion of each scene, fill in a row that contains columns for the following:
Scene #
Blog Ideas
Contest Ideas
Facebook Post
Giveaways
Hashtags
Pinterest Board Ideas
Speaking Topics
Tweetables
Video Ideas
Other/Misc
I recommend keeping track of the various blog sites, the contact person, e-mail address, word length, website, date contacted, date due, date e-mailed, date when the blog appears, and a comment section. The last one is helpful if a giveaway is offered or particular specs needed for the post.
Marketing and promotion organization begins when the idea for a fabulous book enters our minds. As we imagine plot, characters, setting, research, and dialogue, we also envision how our book will reach readers. What is your favorite method of enticing readers?
DiAnn Mills is a bestselling author who believes her readers should expect an adventure. She combines unforgettable characters with unpredictable plots to create action-packed, suspense-filled novels. Her titles have appeared on the CBA and ECPA bestseller lists, won two Christy Awards, and been finalists for the RITA, Daphne Du Maurier, Inspirational Readers’ Choice, and Carol award contests. Library Journal presented her with a Best Books 2014: Genre Fiction award in the Christian Fiction category for Firewall.
DiAnn is a founding board member of the American Christian Fiction Writers; a member of Advanced Writers and Speakers Association, International Thriller Writers, and the Faith, Hope, and Love chapter of Romance Writers of America. She is co-director of The Author Roadmap with social media specialist Edie Melson where she continues her passion of helping other writers be successful. She speaks to various groups and teaches writing workshops around the country. DiAnn has been termed a coffee snob and roasts her own coffee beans.
She’s an avid reader, loves to cook, and believes her grandchildren are the smartest kids in the universe. She and her husband live in sunny Houston, Texas. DiAnn is very active online and would love to connect with readers on any of the social media platforms listed at www.diannmills.com.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
Honk If You Love Stories / Robert Mangeot
A universal formula for the perfect story doesn’t exist. If it did, we’d all be billionaires with a library full of bestsellers apiece—or, perhaps, no one would. But there are critical elements that we must include to give our stories what they need. J. B. Manas’s post a few weeks ago broke several successful thrillers down into three key ingredients. Robert Mangeot’s blog this week continues the conversation on story mechanics with an ambitious single-engine approach.
Happy reading!
Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
HONK IF YOU LOVE STORIES
by Robert Mangeot
Some would call it a bold claim, condensing millennia of storytelling power and purpose into a single word. Seriously, one lousy word for why some stories get retold around the campfire and on the page while others… well, not so much? Yes, only the too-bold would go bumper sticker on so rich a history, which is why I’m too-boldly saying the word rhymes with conch.
Honk.
As in honking. A Big Honking Moment, separating the great and memorable stories from the merely good.
Hang on a second. I don’t mean a story must end in a shoot-out or go purple with melodrama. In fact, the best BHMs may be understated, even fleeting. I mean a pitch-perfect moment, where the lens flips inward and something is lost or gained, and every element that came before gels into a wallop of truth.
Here’s a test: read start-to-finish a few stories by acknowledged masters. Somewhere at or near the end of each piece, I promise, will be a resonant burst the author has driven us toward. With Conan Doyle’s “A Scandal in Bohemia”, it is Holmes asking for a photo of Irene Adler, knowing she has bested him. In Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”, the insane narrator’s dementia finally hounds him into revealing the corpse. Other BHMs might be uplifting, bleak, funny, lyrical, brutal. A whiplash twist or the doom we’ve seen coming from Jump Street.
Which should not confuse a story’s BHM with its climax. Smarter people than I—say, those that don’t use big and honking as terms of literary analysis—define a climax as the height of action. Action, as in when the struggle against external forces is most intense. Our heroine or hero will win or lose that struggle, and from thence comes the internal. Consequences. Knowledge. Newfound strength or sudden regret. If the climax is the height of action, the BHM that follows is the height of resonance.
Take Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”. To oversimplify genius, it is the story of an unlikeable grandmother who manipulates a family road trip into the one she prefers. Her conflicting duplicity and jumbled sense of personal goodness leads to a really unfortunate decision of country lane and a life-but-mostly-death situation. The slam-bang climax, 22 of 23 pages in, is the grandmother’s murder. The BHM slithers into the last few paragraphs, where her killer, the Misfit, then holds forth on life. Without O’Connor grounding things there, her painstaking build-up floats away disconnected, and the murder loses its intended point about morality and moral codes. Too smart for that, O’Connor constructed a moment so honking that it crackles sixty years after first publication.
If a BHM makes or breaks a memorable story, how does one honk up a manuscript? A few lessons learned the hard way:
1. Be intentional.
I’ve come to think of short stories as ending delivery mechanisms. A BHM at the close turns a solid piece into a fiction cruise missile armed with a major warhead. Simply being conscious of a BHM’s potential in the planning stages makes finding one more likely.
2. More is not more.
If one BHM makes a great story, then two or three must be awesomeness itself, right? Wrong. A story has its natural lifts, but only one of them can be the highest. That’s the one to focus on; too much honking risks imbalance and over-emotional noise.
3. Stop the clock.
The BHM marks when the main conflict and character shifts are over. There may be further events to resolve or consolidate things, but after the BHM, a story is all about the finish.
4. Thread it through.
BHMs may arrive by inspiration, but ultimately they are built through sentence-by-sentence lead-up, from the opening passage. The BHM ties up every narrative and character thread that came before into a unified whole. It’s not too bold to guess any loose threads are darlings, and like any darlings, they need to meet your Inner Misfit.
So, if you’re interested in pumping up your storytelling, do what the best storytellers have done for millennia: honk. Bring us a big and honking moment of truth. Make it anything from the subtlest whisper to the hardest hammer blow, anything that delivers the relatable jolt we other folks around the fire came to hear—and to hold onto.
Robert Mangeot lives in Nashville and is the current chapter Vice President for Sisters in Crime Middle Tennessee. His short fiction appears in various anthologies and journals, including Lowestoft Chronicle, Murder Under the Oaks, Mysterical-E, and Mystery Writers of America PresentsIce Cold: Tales of Intrigue from the Cold War. His work has won contests sponsored by the Chattanooga Writers’ Guild, On the Premises, and Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers. His third story for Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine hits newsstands March 2016. Learn more about his writing and his wandering the snack food aisles. Find more of his work at www.robertmangeot.com.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
Honk If You Love Stories / Robert Mangeot
A universal formula for the perfect story doesn’t exist. If it did, we’d all be billionaires with a library full of bestsellers apiece—or, perhaps, no one would. But there are critical elements that we must include to give our stories what they need. J. B. Manas’s post a few weeks ago broke several successful thrillers down into three key ingredients. Robert Mangeot’s blog this week continues the conversation on story mechanics with an ambitious single-engine approach.
Happy reading!
Clay StaffordFounder Killer NashvillePublisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
HONK IF YOU LOVE STORIES
by Robert Mangeot
Some would call it a bold claim, condensing millennia of storytelling power and purpose into a single word. Seriously, one lousy word for why some stories get retold around the campfire and on the page while others… well, not so much? Yes, only the too-bold would go bumper sticker on so rich a history, which is why I’m too-boldly saying the word rhymes with conch.
Honk.
As in honking. A Big Honking Moment, separating the great and memorable stories from the merely good.
Hang on a second. I don’t mean a story must end in a shoot-out or go purple with melodrama. In fact, the best BHMs may be understated, even fleeting. I mean a pitch-perfect moment, where the lens flips inward and something is lost or gained, and every element that came before gels into a wallop of truth.
Here’s a test: read start-to-finish a few stories by acknowledged masters. Somewhere at or near the end of each piece, I promise, will be a resonant burst the author has driven us toward. With Conan Doyle’s “A Scandal in Bohemia”, it is Holmes asking for a photo of Irene Adler, knowing she has bested him. In Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”, the insane narrator’s dementia finally hounds him into revealing the corpse. Other BHMs might be uplifting, bleak, funny, lyrical, brutal. A whiplash twist or the doom we’ve seen coming from Jump Street.
Which should not confuse a story’s BHM with its climax. Smarter people than I—say, those that don’t use big and honking as terms of literary analysis—define a climax as the height of action. Action, as in when the struggle against external forces is most intense. Our heroine or hero will win or lose that struggle, and from thence comes the internal. Consequences. Knowledge. Newfound strength or sudden regret. If the climax is the height of action, the BHM that follows is the height of resonance.
Take Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”. To oversimplify genius, it is the story of an unlikeable grandmother who manipulates a family road trip into the one she prefers. Her conflicting duplicity and jumbled sense of personal goodness leads to a really unfortunate decision of country lane and a life-but-mostly-death situation. The slam-bang climax, 22 of 23 pages in, is the grandmother’s murder. The BHM slithers into the last few paragraphs, where her killer, the Misfit, then holds forth on life. Without O’Connor grounding things there, her painstaking build-up floats away disconnected, and the murder loses its intended point about morality and moral codes. Too smart for that, O’Connor constructed a moment so honking that it crackles sixty years after first publication.
If a BHM makes or breaks a memorable story, how does one honk up a manuscript? A few lessons learned the hard way:
1. Be intentional.
I’ve come to think of short stories as ending delivery mechanisms. A BHM at the close turns a solid piece into a fiction cruise missile armed with a major warhead. Simply being conscious of a BHM’s potential in the planning stages makes finding one more likely.
2. More is not more.
If one BHM makes a great story, then two or three must be awesomeness itself, right? Wrong. A story has its natural lifts, but only one of them can be the highest. That’s the one to focus on; too much honking risks imbalance and over-emotional noise.
3. Stop the clock.
The BHM marks when the main conflict and character shifts are over. There may be further events to resolve or consolidate things, but after the BHM, a story is all about the finish.
4. Thread it through.
BHMs may arrive by inspiration, but ultimately they are built through sentence-by-sentence lead-up, from the opening passage. The BHM ties up every narrative and character thread that came before into a unified whole. It’s not too bold to guess any loose threads are darlings, and like any darlings, they need to meet your Inner Misfit.
So, if you’re interested in pumping up your storytelling, do what the best storytellers have done for millennia: honk. Bring us a big and honking moment of truth. Make it anything from the subtlest whisper to the hardest hammer blow, anything that delivers the relatable jolt we other folks around the fire came to hear—and to hold onto.
Robert Mangeot lives in Nashville and is the current chapter Vice President for Sisters in Crime Middle Tennessee. His short fiction appears in various anthologies and journals, including Lowestoft Chronicle, Murder Under the Oaks, Mysterical-E, and Mystery Writers of America Presents Ice Cold: Tales of Intrigue from the Cold War. His work has won contests sponsored by the Chattanooga Writers’ Guild, On the Premises, and Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers. His third story for Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine hits newsstands March 2016. Learn more about his writing and his wandering the snack food aisles. Find more of his work at www.robertmangeot.com.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
Honk If You Love Stories / Robert Mangeot
A universal formula for the perfect story doesn’t exist. If it did, we’d all be billionaires with a library full of bestsellers apiece—or, perhaps, no one would. But there are critical elements that we must include to give our stories what they need. J. B. Manas’s post a few weeks ago broke several successful thrillers down into three key ingredients. Robert Mangeot’s blog this week continues the conversation on story mechanics with an ambitious single-engine approach.
Happy reading!
Clay StaffordFounder Killer NashvillePublisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
HONK IF YOU LOVE STORIES
by Robert Mangeot
Some would call it a bold claim, condensing millennia of storytelling power and purpose into a single word. Seriously, one lousy word for why some stories get retold around the campfire and on the page while others… well, not so much? Yes, only the too-bold would go bumper sticker on so rich a history, which is why I’m too-boldly saying the word rhymes with conch.
Honk.
As in honking. A Big Honking Moment, separating the great and memorable stories from the merely good.
Hang on a second. I don’t mean a story must end in a shoot-out or go purple with melodrama. In fact, the best BHMs may be understated, even fleeting. I mean a pitch-perfect moment, where the lens flips inward and something is lost or gained, and every element that came before gels into a wallop of truth.
Here’s a test: read start-to-finish a few stories by acknowledged masters. Somewhere at or near the end of each piece, I promise, will be a resonant burst the author has driven us toward. With Conan Doyle’s “A Scandal in Bohemia”, it is Holmes asking for a photo of Irene Adler, knowing she has bested him. In Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”, the insane narrator’s dementia finally hounds him into revealing the corpse. Other BHMs might be uplifting, bleak, funny, lyrical, brutal. A whiplash twist or the doom we’ve seen coming from Jump Street.
Which should not confuse a story’s BHM with its climax. Smarter people than I—say, those that don’t use big and honking as terms of literary analysis—define a climax as the height of action. Action, as in when the struggle against external forces is most intense. Our heroine or hero will win or lose that struggle, and from thence comes the internal. Consequences. Knowledge. Newfound strength or sudden regret. If the climax is the height of action, the BHM that follows is the height of resonance.
Take Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”. To oversimplify genius, it is the story of an unlikeable grandmother who manipulates a family road trip into the one she prefers. Her conflicting duplicity and jumbled sense of personal goodness leads to a really unfortunate decision of country lane and a life-but-mostly-death situation. The slam-bang climax, 22 of 23 pages in, is the grandmother’s murder. The BHM slithers into the last few paragraphs, where her killer, the Misfit, then holds forth on life. Without O’Connor grounding things there, her painstaking build-up floats away disconnected, and the murder loses its intended point about morality and moral codes. Too smart for that, O’Connor constructed a moment so honking that it crackles sixty years after first publication.
If a BHM makes or breaks a memorable story, how does one honk up a manuscript? A few lessons learned the hard way:
1. Be intentional.
I’ve come to think of short stories as ending delivery mechanisms. A BHM at the close turns a solid piece into a fiction cruise missile armed with a major warhead. Simply being conscious of a BHM’s potential in the planning stages makes finding one more likely.
2. More is not more.
If one BHM makes a great story, then two or three must be awesomeness itself, right? Wrong. A story has its natural lifts, but only one of them can be the highest. That’s the one to focus on; too much honking risks imbalance and over-emotional noise.
3. Stop the clock.
The BHM marks when the main conflict and character shifts are over. There may be further events to resolve or consolidate things, but after the BHM, a story is all about the finish.
4. Thread it through.
BHMs may arrive by inspiration, but ultimately they are built through sentence-by-sentence lead-up, from the opening passage. The BHM ties up every narrative and character thread that came before into a unified whole. It’s not too bold to guess any loose threads are darlings, and like any darlings, they need to meet your Inner Misfit.
So, if you’re interested in pumping up your storytelling, do what the best storytellers have done for millennia: honk. Bring us a big and honking moment of truth. Make it anything from the subtlest whisper to the hardest hammer blow, anything that delivers the relatable jolt we other folks around the fire came to hear—and to hold onto.
Robert Mangeot lives in Nashville and is the current chapter Vice President for Sisters in Crime Middle Tennessee. His short fiction appears in various anthologies and journals, including Lowestoft Chronicle, Murder Under the Oaks, Mysterical-E, and Mystery Writers of America Presents Ice Cold: Tales of Intrigue from the Cold War. His work has won contests sponsored by the Chattanooga Writers’ Guild, On the Premises, and Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers. His third story for Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine hits newsstands March 2016. Learn more about his writing and his wandering the snack food aisles. Find more of his work at www.robertmangeot.com.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
Give "Go Set A Watchman" Its Due / Blake Fontenay
In the month since the passing of legendary American author Harper Lee, we have seen a great deal of turmoil, as a nation and as a world. Political unrest and racial tension continue to plague our society to this day, reminding us of the importance of books like To Kill A Mockingbird, which inspire us all to take a stand for what is right.
For many of her fans, Ms. Lee’s controversial Go Set A Watchman failed to live up to the moral caliber of To Kill A Mockingbird, but, as former journalist and Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded author Blake Fontenay examines in this week’s guest blog, there’s important and relevant inspiration to be found in Go Set A Watchman, as well.
Happy reading!
Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Give Go Set A Watchman Its Due
By Blake Fontenay
(Spoiler Alert: If you haven’t yet read Go Set A Watchman but intend to, don’t look at this post until you have.)
When the news broke that a “new” Harper Lee novel had been discovered and was slated for publication, I remember what an uproar it caused.
There were some who worried that the book, Go Set A Watchman, would somehow tarnish the legacy Ms. Lee created for herself when she wrote her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, To Kill A Mockingbird.
Since Ms. Lee’s passing on Feb. 19, I’ve been reflecting on that concern.
First of all, I believe Ms. Lee’s legacy is safe, on the strength of To Kill A Mockingbird alone. Unless we find out later that she was using the literary equivalent of steroids when she wrote that classic, I think her status as a hall of famer is assured.
Having said that, I would also add that I don’t think Go Set A Watchman is as bad a book as many critics have made it out to be.
My initial reaction to Go Set A Watchman was resentful. As a little-known author, I was irritated by the idea that some famous writer could submit to a publisher what was essentially a rough draft and it would immediately become a bestseller.
I thought about how many talented authors work in obscurity while a select few churn out books that the masses snap up in drugstores and airport kiosks.
But there’s no sense crying about that. It is what it is. Big-name authors like John Grisham, Michael Connelly, and Sandra Brown could publish 400 pages of random keystrokes that would sell like ice scrapers in Buffalo.
When I actually got around to reading Go Set A Watchman, I had other issues with the book.
For one, I thought there were way too many flashbacks. The story shifts so abruptly back and forth between the present and the past that I thought I would need to be fitted for a neck brace.
Also, I didn’t find the grown-up Scout to be a very likeable protagonist. Maybe I have some gender bias on this point. I attended a book club discussion about Go Set A Watchman in which the participants, who were primarily women, admiringly described her as spunky or feisty. In the book, Scout looks down her nose at just about everybody from her hometown and toys with the affections of the guy who has worshipped her since childhood. To me, that goes beyond spunkiness into the realm of something far less appealing.
But I’m sure the most controversial aspect of Go Set A Watchman is its depiction of Atticus Finch, Scout’s father, not as the pillar of moral rectitude he was in To Kill A Mockingbird, but as an unapologetic racist.
One of my friends, who loved To Kill A Mockingbird and worshipped Atticus Finch, said Go Set A Watchman was so bad that it ruined her memory of the first book. (I had a similar reaction to Aliens 3, so I can relate.)
Here’s the thing, though: The ending of Go Set A Watchman is what makes the book interesting and thought-provoking. After discovering her father and most of the people she has known all her life are racists, Scout decides against leaving her small Alabama hometown for a more enlightened life in New York City.
That’s not a classic Hollywood ending. However, I think it’s a lot more realistic.
Very few of us get the opportunity in our daily lives to face down an angry mob and show it the error of its ways, as Atticus Finch heroically did in To Kill A Mockingbird. Racism and other forms of bigotry are pervasive in our society, but they manifest themselves in subtle ways.
Most often they come in the form of comments from co-workers, neighbors or even family members. In Go Set A Watchman, Scout faces a similar scenario.
In real life, pulling up stakes and moving to some racial utopia isn’t an option. (Based on my reading of history, Scout’s New York of the 1950s wouldn’t have qualified as such a utopia, anyway.)
When Scout decides to remain in her hometown, she pledges to remain true to her own principles and try to affect change in attitudes wherever she can. And that’s probably the best any of us could hope to do in our own lives.
Go Set A Watchman may have been written more than half a century ago, but it’s very relevant to the times in which we live and the conflicts we must still confront.
In my mind, that doesn’t qualify the book a classic, but it’s not a legacy-spoiler, either.
Blake Fontenay spent more than 25 years as a reporter, columnist and editorial writer for metropolitan daily newspapers—including the Sacramento Bee, (Jacksonville) Florida Times-Union, Orlando Sentinel and (Memphis) Commercial Appeal. He won several awards for editorial writing while at the Commercial Appeal.
Since leaving the newspaper business, he has worked as the communications director for Tennessee’s Comptroller, Treasurer and Secretary of State. He is currently the coordinator for the Tri-Star Chronicles project at the Tennessee State Library and Archives.
His debut novel, The Politics of Barbecue, was published by John F. Blair Publisher in September, 2012. The Politics of Barbecue won the Independent Publishers Book Awards gold medal for fiction in the South region in 2013. Scouts’ Honor, which was released in July 2014, is his second novel.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
Give "Go Set A Watchman" Its Due / Blake Fontenay
In the month since the passing of legendary American author Harper Lee, we have seen a great deal of turmoil, as a nation and as a world. Political unrest and racial tension continue to plague our society to this day, reminding us of the importance of books like To Kill A Mockingbird, which inspire us all to take a stand for what is right.For many of her fans, Ms. Lee’s controversial Go Set A Watchman failed to live up to the moral caliber of To Kill A Mockingbird, but, as former journalist and Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded author Blake Fontenay examines in this week’s guest blog, there’s important and relevant inspiration to be found in Go Set A Watchman, as well.Happy reading!Clay StaffordFounder Killer NashvillePublisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Give Go Set A Watchman Its Due
By Blake Fontenay
(Spoiler Alert: If you haven’t yet read Go Set A Watchman but intend to, don’t look at this post until you have.)
When the news broke that a “new” Harper Lee novel had been discovered and was slated for publication, I remember what an uproar it caused.
There were some who worried that the book, Go Set A Watchman, would somehow tarnish the legacy Ms. Lee created for herself when she wrote her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, To Kill A Mockingbird.
Since Ms. Lee’s passing on Feb. 19, I’ve been reflecting on that concern.
First of all, I believe Ms. Lee’s legacy is safe, on the strength of To Kill A Mockingbird alone. Unless we find out later that she was using the literary equivalent of steroids when she wrote that classic, I think her status as a hall of famer is assured.
Having said that, I would also add that I don’t think Go Set A Watchman is as bad a book as many critics have made it out to be.
My initial reaction to Go Set A Watchman was resentful. As a little-known author, I was irritated by the idea that some famous writer could submit to a publisher what was essentially a rough draft and it would immediately become a bestseller.
I thought about how many talented authors work in obscurity while a select few churn out books that the masses snap up in drugstores and airport kiosks.
But there’s no sense crying about that. It is what it is. Big-name authors like John Grisham, Michael Connelly, and Sandra Brown could publish 400 pages of random keystrokes that would sell like ice scrapers in Buffalo.
When I actually got around to reading Go Set A Watchman, I had other issues with the book.
For one, I thought there were way too many flashbacks. The story shifts so abruptly back and forth between the present and the past that I thought I would need to be fitted for a neck brace.
Also, I didn’t find the grown-up Scout to be a very likeable protagonist. Maybe I have some gender bias on this point. I attended a book club discussion about Go Set A Watchman in which the participants, who were primarily women, admiringly described her as spunky or feisty. In the book, Scout looks down her nose at just about everybody from her hometown and toys with the affections of the guy who has worshipped her since childhood. To me, that goes beyond spunkiness into the realm of something far less appealing.
But I’m sure the most controversial aspect of Go Set A Watchman is its depiction of Atticus Finch, Scout’s father, not as the pillar of moral rectitude he was in To Kill A Mockingbird, but as an unapologetic racist.
One of my friends, who loved To Kill A Mockingbird and worshipped Atticus Finch, said Go Set A Watchman was so bad that it ruined her memory of the first book. (I had a similar reaction to Aliens 3, so I can relate.)
Here’s the thing, though: The ending of Go Set A Watchman is what makes the book interesting and thought-provoking. After discovering her father and most of the people she has known all her life are racists, Scout decides against leaving her small Alabama hometown for a more enlightened life in New York City.
That’s not a classic Hollywood ending. However, I think it’s a lot more realistic.
Very few of us get the opportunity in our daily lives to face down an angry mob and show it the error of its ways, as Atticus Finch heroically did in To Kill A Mockingbird. Racism and other forms of bigotry are pervasive in our society, but they manifest themselves in subtle ways.
Most often they come in the form of comments from co-workers, neighbors or even family members. In Go Set A Watchman, Scout faces a similar scenario.
In real life, pulling up stakes and moving to some racial utopia isn’t an option. (Based on my reading of history, Scout’s New York of the 1950s wouldn’t have qualified as such a utopia, anyway.)
When Scout decides to remain in her hometown, she pledges to remain true to her own principles and try to affect change in attitudes wherever she can. And that’s probably the best any of us could hope to do in our own lives.
Go Set A Watchman may have been written more than half a century ago, but it’s very relevant to the times in which we live and the conflicts we must still confront.
In my mind, that doesn’t qualify the book a classic, but it’s not a legacy-spoiler, either.
Blake Fontenay spent more than 25 years as a reporter, columnist and editorial writer for metropolitan daily newspapers—including the Sacramento Bee, (Jacksonville) Florida Times-Union, Orlando Sentinel and (Memphis) Commercial Appeal. He won several awards for editorial writing while at the Commercial Appeal.
Since leaving the newspaper business, he has worked as the communications director for Tennessee’s Comptroller, Treasurer and Secretary of State. He is currently the coordinator for the Tri-Star Chronicles project at the Tennessee State Library and Archives.
His debut novel, The Politics of Barbecue, was published by John F. Blair Publisher in September, 2012. The Politics of Barbecue won the Independent Publishers Book Awards gold medal for fiction in the South region in 2013. Scouts’ Honor, which was released in July 2014, is his second novel.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
Give "Go Set A Watchman" Its Due / Blake Fontenay
In the month since the passing of legendary American author Harper Lee, we have seen a great deal of turmoil, as a nation and as a world. Political unrest and racial tension continue to plague our society to this day, reminding us of the importance of books like To Kill A Mockingbird, which inspire us all to take a stand for what is right.For many of her fans, Ms. Lee’s controversial Go Set A Watchman failed to live up to the moral caliber of To Kill A Mockingbird, but, as former journalist and Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded author Blake Fontenay examines in this week’s guest blog, there’s important and relevant inspiration to be found in Go Set A Watchman, as well.Happy reading!Clay StaffordFounder Killer NashvillePublisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Give Go Set A Watchman Its Due
By Blake Fontenay
(Spoiler Alert: If you haven’t yet read Go Set A Watchman but intend to, don’t look at this post until you have.)
When the news broke that a “new” Harper Lee novel had been discovered and was slated for publication, I remember what an uproar it caused.
There were some who worried that the book, Go Set A Watchman, would somehow tarnish the legacy Ms. Lee created for herself when she wrote her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, To Kill A Mockingbird.
Since Ms. Lee’s passing on Feb. 19, I’ve been reflecting on that concern.
First of all, I believe Ms. Lee’s legacy is safe, on the strength of To Kill A Mockingbird alone. Unless we find out later that she was using the literary equivalent of steroids when she wrote that classic, I think her status as a hall of famer is assured.
Having said that, I would also add that I don’t think Go Set A Watchman is as bad a book as many critics have made it out to be.
My initial reaction to Go Set A Watchman was resentful. As a little-known author, I was irritated by the idea that some famous writer could submit to a publisher what was essentially a rough draft and it would immediately become a bestseller.
I thought about how many talented authors work in obscurity while a select few churn out books that the masses snap up in drugstores and airport kiosks.
But there’s no sense crying about that. It is what it is. Big-name authors like John Grisham, Michael Connelly, and Sandra Brown could publish 400 pages of random keystrokes that would sell like ice scrapers in Buffalo.
When I actually got around to reading Go Set A Watchman, I had other issues with the book.
For one, I thought there were way too many flashbacks. The story shifts so abruptly back and forth between the present and the past that I thought I would need to be fitted for a neck brace.
Also, I didn’t find the grown-up Scout to be a very likeable protagonist. Maybe I have some gender bias on this point. I attended a book club discussion about Go Set A Watchman in which the participants, who were primarily women, admiringly described her as spunky or feisty. In the book, Scout looks down her nose at just about everybody from her hometown and toys with the affections of the guy who has worshipped her since childhood. To me, that goes beyond spunkiness into the realm of something far less appealing.
But I’m sure the most controversial aspect of Go Set A Watchman is its depiction of Atticus Finch, Scout’s father, not as the pillar of moral rectitude he was in To Kill A Mockingbird, but as an unapologetic racist.
One of my friends, who loved To Kill A Mockingbird and worshipped Atticus Finch, said Go Set A Watchman was so bad that it ruined her memory of the first book. (I had a similar reaction to Aliens 3, so I can relate.)
Here’s the thing, though: The ending of Go Set A Watchman is what makes the book interesting and thought-provoking. After discovering her father and most of the people she has known all her life are racists, Scout decides against leaving her small Alabama hometown for a more enlightened life in New York City.
That’s not a classic Hollywood ending. However, I think it’s a lot more realistic.
Very few of us get the opportunity in our daily lives to face down an angry mob and show it the error of its ways, as Atticus Finch heroically did in To Kill A Mockingbird. Racism and other forms of bigotry are pervasive in our society, but they manifest themselves in subtle ways.
Most often they come in the form of comments from co-workers, neighbors or even family members. In Go Set A Watchman, Scout faces a similar scenario.
In real life, pulling up stakes and moving to some racial utopia isn’t an option. (Based on my reading of history, Scout’s New York of the 1950s wouldn’t have qualified as such a utopia, anyway.)
When Scout decides to remain in her hometown, she pledges to remain true to her own principles and try to affect change in attitudes wherever she can. And that’s probably the best any of us could hope to do in our own lives.
Go Set A Watchman may have been written more than half a century ago, but it’s very relevant to the times in which we live and the conflicts we must still confront.
In my mind, that doesn’t qualify the book a classic, but it’s not a legacy-spoiler, either.
Blake Fontenay spent more than 25 years as a reporter, columnist and editorial writer for metropolitan daily newspapers—including the Sacramento Bee, (Jacksonville) Florida Times-Union, Orlando Sentinel and (Memphis) Commercial Appeal. He won several awards for editorial writing while at the Commercial Appeal.
Since leaving the newspaper business, he has worked as the communications director for Tennessee’s Comptroller, Treasurer and Secretary of State. He is currently the coordinator for the Tri-Star Chronicles project at the Tennessee State Library and Archives.
His debut novel, The Politics of Barbecue, was published by John F. Blair Publisher in September, 2012. The Politics of Barbecue won the Independent Publishers Book Awards gold medal for fiction in the South region in 2013. Scouts’ Honor, which was released in July 2014, is his second novel.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
Turning Your Hobby Into a Mystery–The Basis of a Cozy / Lynn Cahoon
The types of stories you most enjoy are good indicators of the types of stories you’re destined to write. After all, you have no guarantee that anyone else will get a chance to read your masterpiece… might as well make it the kind of book you’d like! This week’s guest blogger Lynn Cahoon waxes eloquent on her greatest love: cozies. Follow her lead, and you just might discover—or reinvigorate—your authorial calling.
Happy reading!
Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Turning Your Hobby Into a Mystery–The Basis of a Cozy
By Lynn Cahoon
I didn’t know what I was reading, but I liked it.
When I moved to Illinois almost ten years ago now, I was unemployed. Reading was my past time as I waited for returned calls from job applications. I kept checking books out of the mystery section at the library. One, I would love. The next, not so much. Turning to the spine, I wondered why the two books that couldn’t be so different had the same sticker: mystery.
Finally, I realized the books I loved were softer, less gritty, and all about the characters. Kind of like the Nancy Drew books I grew up reading. They were cozy mysteries. And when I started writing, that’s where my interests fell.
So why cozy?
The books often circle around a hobby. Knitting, crochet, sewing, and even scrapbooking; they’ve all had series where the main character and her/his friends are involved with said craft. Or they are about food. I like stories where food and food preparation are a big part of the plot. One long-running series just ended—Julie Hyzy with the White House Chef Mysteries. And Laura Bradford is moving from writing about the Amish to launching a dessert food truck mystery this year: Book One of the Emergency Dessert Squad series, Éclair and Present Danger, releases in June.
Most cozy mysteries center around what would have been called in the 70’s “the home arts”. (Yes, I’ll admit to taking Home Ec, Sewing, and even Crafting as high school electives.) There seems to be a resurgence of taking up crafting like knitting or quilting, and not just with women. All you have to do is check out Pinterest. Add in a dog or a cat, and the series is sure to sell.
All kidding aside, the main reason I write and read cozy mysteries is that I love the characters. My Tourist Trap series is set in South Cove, a fictional California tourist town. Writing about my main character Jill Gardner’s adventures in South Cove gives me a chance to catch up with the rest of the gang. What’s going on with Aunt Jackie? Is she still dating the overweight antique dealer, Josh? And who’s Toby, the part-time deputy/barista, with now? Why does Greg’s ex-wife care about who he’s seeing? Okay, maybe only Jill’s wondering about that one.
Yep, I’ve admitted it. I love the gossip. Real or fake, the small town chatter keeps me going back to learn more about my characters and the new ones that wander into South Cove. The fact that the bad guy gets his due at the end is just icing on the cupcake. (I sometimes worry I might be driving away real tourists from the Pacific Coast Highway, writing so many murders in one small central California coast town.)
Truth, justice, and the cozy way. Now that’s my kind of superpower.
For more of Jill’s adventures, check out my new cozy, Murder on Wheels, releasing February 2, 2016, in which robbery, vandalism, and murder sour South Cove’s brand-new food truck craze…
Lynn Cahoon is the author of the New York Times and USA Today bestselling Tourist Trap cozy mystery series. Guidebook to Murder, book 1 of the series won the Reader's Crown for Mystery Fiction in 2015. She's also the author of the soon-to-be-released Cat Latimer series, with the first book, A STORY TO KILL, releasing in mass-market paperback September 2016. She lives in a small town like the ones she loves to write about, with her husband and two fur babies. Sign up for her newsletter at www.lynncahoon.com
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
Turning Your Hobby Into a Mystery–The Basis of a Cozy / Lynn Cahoon
The types of stories you most enjoy are good indicators of the types of stories you’re destined to write. After all, you have no guarantee that anyone else will get a chance to read your masterpiece… might as well make it the kind of book you’d like! This week’s guest blogger Lynn Cahoon waxes eloquent on her greatest love: cozies. Follow her lead, and you just might discover—or reinvigorate—your authorial calling.Happy reading!Clay StaffordFounder Killer NashvillePublisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Turning Your Hobby Into a Mystery–The Basis of a Cozy
By Lynn Cahoon
I didn’t know what I was reading, but I liked it.
When I moved to Illinois almost ten years ago now, I was unemployed. Reading was my past time as I waited for returned calls from job applications. I kept checking books out of the mystery section at the library. One, I would love. The next, not so much. Turning to the spine, I wondered why the two books that couldn’t be so different had the same sticker: mystery.
Finally, I realized the books I loved were softer, less gritty, and all about the characters. Kind of like the Nancy Drew books I grew up reading. They were cozy mysteries. And when I started writing, that’s where my interests fell.
So why cozy?
The books often circle around a hobby. Knitting, crochet, sewing, and even scrapbooking; they’ve all had series where the main character and her/his friends are involved with said craft. Or they are about food. I like stories where food and food preparation are a big part of the plot. One long-running series just ended—Julie Hyzy with the White House Chef Mysteries. And Laura Bradford is moving from writing about the Amish to launching a dessert food truck mystery this year: Book One of the Emergency Dessert Squad series, Éclair and Present Danger, releases in June.
Most cozy mysteries center around what would have been called in the 70’s “the home arts”. (Yes, I’ll admit to taking Home Ec, Sewing, and even Crafting as high school electives.) There seems to be a resurgence of taking up crafting like knitting or quilting, and not just with women. All you have to do is check out Pinterest. Add in a dog or a cat, and the series is sure to sell.
All kidding aside, the main reason I write and read cozy mysteries is that I love the characters. My Tourist Trap series is set in South Cove, a fictional California tourist town. Writing about my main character Jill Gardner’s adventures in South Cove gives me a chance to catch up with the rest of the gang. What’s going on with Aunt Jackie? Is she still dating the overweight antique dealer, Josh? And who’s Toby, the part-time deputy/barista, with now? Why does Greg’s ex-wife care about who he’s seeing? Okay, maybe only Jill’s wondering about that one.
Yep, I’ve admitted it. I love the gossip. Real or fake, the small town chatter keeps me going back to learn more about my characters and the new ones that wander into South Cove. The fact that the bad guy gets his due at the end is just icing on the cupcake. (I sometimes worry I might be driving away real tourists from the Pacific Coast Highway, writing so many murders in one small central California coast town.)
Truth, justice, and the cozy way. Now that’s my kind of superpower.
For more of Jill’s adventures, check out my new cozy, Murder on Wheels, releasing February 2, 2016, in which robbery, vandalism, and murder sour South Cove’s brand-new food truck craze…
Lynn Cahoon is the author of the New York Times and USA Today bestselling Tourist Trap cozy mystery series. Guidebook to Murder, book 1 of the series won the Reader's Crown for Mystery Fiction in 2015. She's also the author of the soon-to-be-released Cat Latimer series, with the first book, A STORY TO KILL, releasing in mass-market paperback September 2016. She lives in a small town like the ones she loves to write about, with her husband and two fur babies. Sign up for her newsletter at www.lynncahoon.com
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
Turning Your Hobby Into a Mystery–The Basis of a Cozy / Lynn Cahoon
The types of stories you most enjoy are good indicators of the types of stories you’re destined to write. After all, you have no guarantee that anyone else will get a chance to read your masterpiece… might as well make it the kind of book you’d like! This week’s guest blogger Lynn Cahoon waxes eloquent on her greatest love: cozies. Follow her lead, and you just might discover—or reinvigorate—your authorial calling.Happy reading!Clay StaffordFounder Killer NashvillePublisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Turning Your Hobby Into a Mystery–The Basis of a Cozy
By Lynn Cahoon
I didn’t know what I was reading, but I liked it.
When I moved to Illinois almost ten years ago now, I was unemployed. Reading was my past time as I waited for returned calls from job applications. I kept checking books out of the mystery section at the library. One, I would love. The next, not so much. Turning to the spine, I wondered why the two books that couldn’t be so different had the same sticker: mystery.
Finally, I realized the books I loved were softer, less gritty, and all about the characters. Kind of like the Nancy Drew books I grew up reading. They were cozy mysteries. And when I started writing, that’s where my interests fell.
So why cozy?
The books often circle around a hobby. Knitting, crochet, sewing, and even scrapbooking; they’ve all had series where the main character and her/his friends are involved with said craft. Or they are about food. I like stories where food and food preparation are a big part of the plot. One long-running series just ended—Julie Hyzy with the White House Chef Mysteries. And Laura Bradford is moving from writing about the Amish to launching a dessert food truck mystery this year: Book One of the Emergency Dessert Squad series, Éclair and Present Danger, releases in June.
Most cozy mysteries center around what would have been called in the 70’s “the home arts”. (Yes, I’ll admit to taking Home Ec, Sewing, and even Crafting as high school electives.) There seems to be a resurgence of taking up crafting like knitting or quilting, and not just with women. All you have to do is check out Pinterest. Add in a dog or a cat, and the series is sure to sell.
All kidding aside, the main reason I write and read cozy mysteries is that I love the characters. My Tourist Trap series is set in South Cove, a fictional California tourist town. Writing about my main character Jill Gardner’s adventures in South Cove gives me a chance to catch up with the rest of the gang. What’s going on with Aunt Jackie? Is she still dating the overweight antique dealer, Josh? And who’s Toby, the part-time deputy/barista, with now? Why does Greg’s ex-wife care about who he’s seeing? Okay, maybe only Jill’s wondering about that one.
Yep, I’ve admitted it. I love the gossip. Real or fake, the small town chatter keeps me going back to learn more about my characters and the new ones that wander into South Cove. The fact that the bad guy gets his due at the end is just icing on the cupcake. (I sometimes worry I might be driving away real tourists from the Pacific Coast Highway, writing so many murders in one small central California coast town.)
Truth, justice, and the cozy way. Now that’s my kind of superpower.
For more of Jill’s adventures, check out my new cozy, Murder on Wheels, releasing February 2, 2016, in which robbery, vandalism, and murder sour South Cove’s brand-new food truck craze…
Lynn Cahoon is the author of the New York Times and USA Today bestselling Tourist Trap cozy mystery series. Guidebook to Murder, book 1 of the series won the Reader's Crown for Mystery Fiction in 2015. She's also the author of the soon-to-be-released Cat Latimer series, with the first book, A STORY TO KILL, releasing in mass-market paperback September 2016. She lives in a small town like the ones she loves to write about, with her husband and two fur babies. Sign up for her newsletter at www.lynncahoon.com
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
Finding the Magic: Three Ingredients for a Memorable Thriller / J. B. Manas
Irony, humor, and catharsis have been helping us tell better stories since Aristotle’s Poetics—and were probably there, instinctually, in the work of the best tale-spinners even before the terms had names. This week’s guest blogger, author J. B. Manas, applies these analytical essentials to successful thrillers to help us all upgrade our stories from “excellent” to “unforgettable”.
Happy reading!
Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Finding the Magic: Three Ingredients for a Memorable Thriller
By J.B. Manas
For many of us, writing comes fairly easy. But giving it that extra, elusive “something” that lifts the story above others of its type? Creating a story that’s buzzworthy, emotionally satisfying, and able to withstand the test of time? That’s the difficult part. I like to call this “finding the magic”.
As I work on my current novel, a sci-fi thriller titled Atticus, I’ve been analyzing what elements it absolutely must have if it is to grip readers and lure potential fans. If we look at some of history’s greatest thrillers and adventure stories in literature and film, what variables elevate them above the crowded sea of mediocrity?
Sure, any good thriller has to have the usual things: compelling characters, snappy dialogue, a lead with a goal, a strong villain, high stakes, mounting conflict; the list goes on and on. While vitally important, these things are merely the staples of writing thriller and adventure stories. They have to be there, or the book will quickly fade into oblivion. But how do you find the magic that takes a thriller from good to great?
I’ve narrowed it down to three special ingredients: irony, humor, and catharsis. Let’s look at each.
1. Isn’t it Ironic?
A touch of irony can often be the missing ingredient that a story needs to take it to another level. For instance, in Jaws, a water-phobic sheriff must stop a great white shark that’s been devouring swimmers in high tourist season at the beach. Not just a sheriff, but a water-phobic one! In Jurassic Park, a paleontologist who hates kids has to spend much of the story rescuing two kids when real live dinosaurs run amok in a theme park. In Silence of the Lambs, to whom does Clarice Starling have to bare her soul in order to catch a serial killer? Why, another serial killer, of course!
When writing my debut novel with co-author Ed Miller, The Kronos Interference, I ruminated on this. In the story, a physicist is called to investigate an unusual deep-sea discovery. It takes him on a time-traveling journey that defies logic and, in some cases, science. So I suggested we start him out as a jaded skeptic who relies on “just the facts”. It was subtle irony, but it was there, and I like to think it made a difference.
2. The Best Medicine
Alfred Hitchcock often spoke about the need to balance tension with humor, and he was certainly a master at it, as evident in North by Northwest, with Cary Grant quipping his way through increasingly dire circumstances. This is also what made the second Star Wars film, The Empire Strikes Back, such a standout, with the witty banter between Han, Luke, and Princess Leia. And think of the scene in Jurassic Park, after a scared young boy barely escapes death when the car he was trapped in plummeted down a tree following a terrifying T-Rex chase. His only words to his rescuer, Alan Grant, are, “I threw up.”
In my current work-in-progress, Atticus, the lead character is a 22-year-old geek girl who works in a comic book shop. So when a falling military craft nearly runs her off the road, and her rescue of a British amnesiac survivor leads them both to be chased by government assassins, on whom does she rely for help? Her geeky ex-boyfriend and his gruff veteran cop uncle. This allows for lots of pop culture references, generation-gap quips, and funny dialogue to offset the tense situations that follow.
3. A Perfect Ending
Silence of the Lambs was an exceptional story for many reasons. But, in the movie version, what made filmgoers exit the theaters with that elusive giddy feeling was not only psychotic cannibal Hannibal Lecter telling rookie FBI agent Clarice Starling, “The world is more interesting with you in it,” but also, his final line, “I do wish we could chat longer, but I’m having an old friend for dinner.”
Not only was this funny AND ironic, but it was a delicious (pardon the pun) way to: (a) leave a final wink at Hannibal Lecter’s relationship with Clarice Starling, (b) offer just desserts (again, pardon the pun) for the corrupt Dr. Chilton, and (c) give a glimpse of Lecter enjoying his hard-earned freedom. This was cathartic on many levels, and I would argue, more powerful than the resolution of the main plot—the rescue of the senator’s daughter and the death of the main antagonist, Buffalo Bill.
In order for a catharsis to be achieved at the end, the groundwork must be laid. Strong character subplots must be put in place—a wish for something, a need for retribution, a relationship in need of healing. It should be over and above the resolution of the main plot. And it’s what I’m focused on now as I refine my current novel beyond its main, twisty plot and its (hopefully) colorful characters. Does your story have a cathartic ending? If not, what could be done to add one? I’d love to hear from you.
J. B. Manas is a Philadelphia-based author of fiction and nonfiction. His debut novel with co-author Edward Miller, The Kronos Interference, was named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best of 2012, and earned a starred review. He is currently working on a sci-fi thriller, Atticus, targeted for release in 2016. His nonfiction books on organizational management and lessons from history have been translated into eight languages and course-adopted in universities worldwide. Manas is an avid movie buff, pop culture maven, popular comic con speaker, art lover, world traveler, songwriter and guitarist, technology geek, wine connoisseur, and an armchair philosopher–all of which make their way into his writing at one time or another. Visit his website at www.jbmanas.com or email him at jb@jbmanas.com.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
Finding the Magic: Three Ingredients for a Memorable Thriller / J. B. Manas
Irony, humor, and catharsis have been helping us tell better stories since Aristotle’s Poetics—and were probably there, instinctually, in the work of the best tale-spinners even before the terms had names. This week’s guest blogger, author J. B. Manas, applies these analytical essentials to successful thrillers to help us all upgrade our stories from “excellent” to “unforgettable”.Happy reading!Clay StaffordFounder Killer NashvillePublisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Finding the Magic: Three Ingredients for a Memorable Thriller
By J.B. Manas
For many of us, writing comes fairly easy. But giving it that extra, elusive “something” that lifts the story above others of its type? Creating a story that’s buzzworthy, emotionally satisfying, and able to withstand the test of time? That’s the difficult part. I like to call this “finding the magic”.
As I work on my current novel, a sci-fi thriller titled Atticus, I’ve been analyzing what elements it absolutely must have if it is to grip readers and lure potential fans. If we look at some of history’s greatest thrillers and adventure stories in literature and film, what variables elevate them above the crowded sea of mediocrity?
Sure, any good thriller has to have the usual things: compelling characters, snappy dialogue, a lead with a goal, a strong villain, high stakes, mounting conflict; the list goes on and on. While vitally important, these things are merely the staples of writing thriller and adventure stories. They have to be there, or the book will quickly fade into oblivion. But how do you find the magic that takes a thriller from good to great?
I’ve narrowed it down to three special ingredients: irony, humor, and catharsis. Let’s look at each.
1. Isn’t it Ironic?
A touch of irony can often be the missing ingredient that a story needs to take it to another level. For instance, in Jaws, a water-phobic sheriff must stop a great white shark that’s been devouring swimmers in high tourist season at the beach. Not just a sheriff, but a water-phobic one! In Jurassic Park, a paleontologist who hates kids has to spend much of the story rescuing two kids when real live dinosaurs run amok in a theme park. In Silence of the Lambs, to whom does Clarice Starling have to bare her soul in order to catch a serial killer? Why, another serial killer, of course!
When writing my debut novel with co-author Ed Miller, The Kronos Interference, I ruminated on this. In the story, a physicist is called to investigate an unusual deep-sea discovery. It takes him on a time-traveling journey that defies logic and, in some cases, science. So I suggested we start him out as a jaded skeptic who relies on “just the facts”. It was subtle irony, but it was there, and I like to think it made a difference.
2. The Best Medicine
Alfred Hitchcock often spoke about the need to balance tension with humor, and he was certainly a master at it, as evident in North by Northwest, with Cary Grant quipping his way through increasingly dire circumstances. This is also what made the second Star Wars film, The Empire Strikes Back, such a standout, with the witty banter between Han, Luke, and Princess Leia. And think of the scene in Jurassic Park, after a scared young boy barely escapes death when the car he was trapped in plummeted down a tree following a terrifying T-Rex chase. His only words to his rescuer, Alan Grant, are, “I threw up.”
In my current work-in-progress, Atticus, the lead character is a 22-year-old geek girl who works in a comic book shop. So when a falling military craft nearly runs her off the road, and her rescue of a British amnesiac survivor leads them both to be chased by government assassins, on whom does she rely for help? Her geeky ex-boyfriend and his gruff veteran cop uncle. This allows for lots of pop culture references, generation-gap quips, and funny dialogue to offset the tense situations that follow.
3. A Perfect Ending
Silence of the Lambs was an exceptional story for many reasons. But, in the movie version, what made filmgoers exit the theaters with that elusive giddy feeling was not only psychotic cannibal Hannibal Lecter telling rookie FBI agent Clarice Starling, “The world is more interesting with you in it,” but also, his final line, “I do wish we could chat longer, but I’m having an old friend for dinner.”
Not only was this funny AND ironic, but it was a delicious (pardon the pun) way to: (a) leave a final wink at Hannibal Lecter’s relationship with Clarice Starling, (b) offer just desserts (again, pardon the pun) for the corrupt Dr. Chilton, and (c) give a glimpse of Lecter enjoying his hard-earned freedom. This was cathartic on many levels, and I would argue, more powerful than the resolution of the main plot—the rescue of the senator’s daughter and the death of the main antagonist, Buffalo Bill.
In order for a catharsis to be achieved at the end, the groundwork must be laid. Strong character subplots must be put in place—a wish for something, a need for retribution, a relationship in need of healing. It should be over and above the resolution of the main plot. And it’s what I’m focused on now as I refine my current novel beyond its main, twisty plot and its (hopefully) colorful characters. Does your story have a cathartic ending? If not, what could be done to add one? I’d love to hear from you.
J. B. Manas is a Philadelphia-based author of fiction and nonfiction. His debut novel with co-author Edward Miller, The Kronos Interference, was named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best of 2012, and earned a starred review. He is currently working on a sci-fi thriller, Atticus, targeted for release in 2016. His nonfiction books on organizational management and lessons from history have been translated into eight languages and course-adopted in universities worldwide. Manas is an avid movie buff, pop culture maven, popular comic con speaker, art lover, world traveler, songwriter and guitarist, technology geek, wine connoisseur, and an armchair philosopher–all of which make their way into his writing at one time or another. Visit his website at www.jbmanas.com or email him at jb@jbmanas.com.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
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