Typing like a Madman

My lack of updates can be attributed to an extended time behind the keyboard actually trying to get some work done. The Rogue Gentleman #2: Mine to Avenge is done, and I think it's a really fun book. I'm also blazing away on the next four adventures in the Wolf series, which I write under the name Dean Breckenridge. I've been surprised by the reception the Breckenridge stories have received; he's selling more than I am! I should be pissed, but since it's no secret than Drake and Breckenridge are the same, I'm able to steer readers to the books under my name too.

Anyway more to come eventually. Meanwhile, enjoy a look at the next set of covers for the Breckenridge stories.

Fantastic Storytelling

There's a nasty virus going round the office and I am the latest victim, so while I'm lounging on the couch pumped full of drugs I have been catching up on a BBC show that I've known about for some time, but never bothered to watch. Doctor Who, a program about a time-traveler who goes on wild adventures through time and space. One minute he's in ancient Egypt, then on a distant planet, then back on Earth, well underground, dealing with lizard creatures. Great stuff. A friend recently discovered that I had never seen an episode, so he sat me down to watch one. "You have to watch at least one," he said, and that one turned out to be the 50th Anniversary Special which was so well done and so well written that I've spent the last few days catching up on every episode the cable system has On Demand. I'm feeling about Doctor Who the same way I felt when I finally discovered Wodehouse--blessed is the one who will always have plenty of books to read, or, in this case, television programs to watch.

My cable system only has seasons 5 through 7 so my "first doctor" is Matt Smith, who currently hold the title, and he does a bang-up job of playing the character. He'll be my Sean Connery--everybody after him (or before, as the case may be) will have big shoes to fill. The stories are action packed, well-written, and funny, and they bring you into a world uniquely its own and allow you to get lost in it. And that, if you don't already know, is the essence of fantastic storytelling. I want to be Doctor Who; failing that, I want to be one of his earthling companions who gets to enjoy the adventure, too.

The best stories do exactly what Doctor Who does, and your story doesn't have to be sci-fi or fantasy in order to accomplish the goal, though most stories I'm thinking of are indeed in that genre because the writer is required to construct a realistic world for his story to take place in (such as Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings). The better comic book movies do what I describe--I'm thinking of The Avengers, specifically--and I think the Bond movies fit the bill, too, because they are clearly set in our reality yet occupy a different reality of their own, and tap into one's imagination to the extent that men want to be Bond and women want to be with him (at least the older ones, forget the recent efforts). That's good storytelling, too. I would rather be Bond than anybody in a Frederick Forsyth or John le Carre or Len Deighton novel, where the daily drudgery of the spy business is highlighted more often than anything exciting.

Fantastic storytelling is something writers should all aspire to, but unfortunately I have no idea to prove whether or not we actually create what I describe. How can we judge? The best we can hope for is for a reader to tell us where we took him or her, if our story provided a hypnotic effect, and that's a fine way to judge, isn't it?

Now please excuse me. The Doctor is about to save the Earth again....he's in 1969 and rubbing shoulders with President Nixon and there are aliens about!

Wolf Goes Live

Back before the Earth cooled, I mentioned on this blog that I had a pen name I was planning to use, Dean Breckenridge. My idea was to use that name to do shorter, punchier, much more hard-boiledier (yes, I made that up) stories than I'm doing under my own name, and crank them out on a regular basis. The first two, THE KILL FEVER and THE DARK, are available, with Episode #3 on the way. Please take a look.

They've been a lot of fun to write. Just plain story. No fancy themes or sentimental slop, just rock 'em, sock 'em, shoot 'em, kick 'em action. Basically, it's "Have Gun, Will Travel" set in the inner city, featuring a vigilante hero named Wolf, and they're short, not more than 100 pages in manuscript form. Read 'em on the bus, the train, on the deck, at the beach, wherever--it won't take you long, and I promise a terrific ride.

In THE KILLER FEVER, Wolf must stop a gang war from exploding, the roots of which grow from one man's desire for revenge.

In THE DARK, Wolf takes on kidnappers who aren't the usual suspects, and he has to turn up the heat in order to shake 'em from hiding.

Thanks for looking!

Surviving the Deadline

My silence on this blog lately has not been due to laziness, but racing to meet a deadline. Earlier this year mystery author Paul Bishop asked me to contribute a volume to his Fight Card series, which I thought would be a terrific opportunity to do a story that didn't feature blondes, bombs, and quasi-Bonds for a change. However, I was not at all prepared for the genuine challenge such a story posed. Paul's instructions to me was that the story could be about anything, but boxing had to be at the center of the conflict, and he gave me a December deadline. OK. I did a bunch of research, watched fights, developed what I thought was a pretty good story, and started to write. And then it all screeched to a halt.

When I say halt, I mean almost that....it eeeked along on dry bearings. The writing was hard, the characters wouldn't talk, nothing seemed to make sense, and I swore I would never take another assignment ever again, ever, ever, never. I work from detailed outlines, and I kept going back to the outline, scratching my head, wondering why what seemed to work in that form did not at all work on the actual page.

Did I mention I started this project 30 days before the deadline?

I'm a masochist, you see. But I also wanted to prove that if a writer puts his butt in a chair and produces pages, he can meet a deadline in a short period of time. Maybe even beat it.

The outline assured me I had a good story. I decided to put my faith in my outline and forged ahead. But, wow, what a slog. I would up, at some points during the project, doing as little as one page a day. It was that hard to put together. I have never worked this hard on a book before, nor wanted to quit so many times in the middle.

In the end, I think my Fight Card book will be a worthy entry. It's funny that by the time I reached the end, it all seemed to magically come together. Reading it through for fine-tuning, I can't find that parts that I thought needed fixing, and it all seems to flow along. I think part of the problem was a hectic work schedule that, basically, had me working 30 days in a row at the same time, without any time off, so, luckily, I had my outline to guide me instead of having to sit at the computer each day and figure out what happens next.

I beat the deadline by four days, by the way.

So let that be a lesson to you. Writing + butt in chair = produced pages = 100 page manuscript in less than 30 days = a happy Paul Bishop because I don't have to tell him he has a blank spot in his 2014 schedule.

You're welcome.

Now my Fight Card book, still untitled, gets edited by Paul and his people and then by me again and, anyway, I think it will be out late in 2014.

What I hope I take from this experience and bring to my independent work is the same sense of discipline, the "write every day" approach. I am sooooo guilty of not doing that, and taking a year to do a 200 page manuscript which, according to this project, I could have turned out in two months.

Marvel's Agents of S.U.C.K.

I'm trying really hard to like Marvel's Agents of SHIELD but the show isn't helping. Aside from Clark Gregg, the cast is populated with white-bread soap-opera rejects (the Asian master ninja / expert pilot / constant brooder notwithstanding) who have all the believably of a unicorn. I'm supposed to accept that Agent Ward, a Ken Doll who looks younger than ME, is supposed to be a super-secret-agent-master-assassin? When he talks about The Job, his totally-cereal dialogue is a recycled riff from a Z-grade commando movie. How he delivers the lines with a straight face I do not understand. Don't get me started on the hottie "hacktivist" with her smart cracks who seems to only be a place-holder or the teenyboppers playing the scientists who are referred to as one person, which is appropriate, because I can't tell which one is which and I've watched three goddamn episodes already.

While the characters are faceless ciphers, the show has a bigger problem. The show's problem is Joss Whedon (everybody get out your guns and point them at me; I'm about to kill a sacred cow). I know Whedon isn't writing every single episode, but his mark is on each script. Whedon seems to revel in writing smart cracks that subvert genre dialogue cliches and that's okay....when it works. Those imitating his style are only creating cliches of their own, and they aren't funny, and they don't work. I'm not even sure when Whedon does it that it's funny or in any way interesting anymore (though The Avengers had some smart cracks), because it's been imitated to death

So I'm watching basically the show because Tosh.0 hasn't rolled out any new episodes yet and I can't spend all day drinking. Plus the hacktivist looked great coming out of the pool in Ep. 3 with her dress clinging to her curves. Yum. Give her boobs an Emmy.

But I digress.

Oh, and ZombieCoulson? Gag me. Either he's dead or he's alive but don't give me any of this magical rejuvenation whatchamacallit that will probably not even be addressed in the series. They're going to save all of the big reveals for the Avengers movies, don't you worry. Only Tony Stark will get the full explanation of what happened, and RDJ is too good for television. Sure, Samuel L. Jackson made a cameo, but Jackson is the new Michael Caine: a good actor who will slum for a paycheck.

So long, Tom

Too bad about Tom Clancy, especially after we recently lost Elmore Leonard and Vince Flynn. I was never a huge Clancy fan. I thought his work was too long and too overblown with "gee whiz" description that could have been trimmed to tell a better story. I never liked how he presented himself during interviews. He gave off a "I'm better than you" vibe but I think he was more comfortable with gadgets than talking to people, or talking on television. In other words, he wasn't a favorite, but you cannot deny his contribution to the thriller genre.

I picked up The Hunt for Red October while on a trip to Disneyland back in 1986 or '87, and I remember enjoying it, but nothing about the book stands out for me today. He wrote so steadily that I would get the new Clancy every year for Christmas, because somebody in the family thought I was a huge fan; most of the books went unread or half read and ultimately turned into the used bookstore. Seriously, after The Cardinal of the Kremlin, I gave up. There was just too much story and too many details to keep track of. Heck, I was a teenager. Maybe if I read him now I'd appreciate his work more. Maybe I'll be struck with a fit of nostalgia and pick up Red October again sometime.

The Great Gatsby

I first read The Great Gatsby in high school, of course, and because it was forced on me I did not pay great attention to it. Only later in life when I started studying Hemingway did Fitzgerald's name come up again, and I decided to read the book all the way through. It was the only Fitzgerald novel I was familiar with, so I figured it was a safe bet. Low and behold the story, the characters, the cynicism and the sense of hopelessness that lives in the book swept me away. I wasn't reading about America in the '20s. I wasn't reading about the excess of the Jazz Age. I was reading about my time, my friends, and me. I'm Gatsby. I'm also Nick Carroway. Reading Gatsby is like looking into a mirror, or, as Hammett described in the Flitcraft parable, lifting the lid off of life and getting a look at the works.

It's hard not to identify with Nick Carroway, struggling to find a place in the world only to discover your plug may be in the wrong socket, and what do you do when you learn that? We like to say today that if you don't like something, change it. But bumper sticker slogans don't take genuine human behavior into account. It's hard to change once you've started on a path, invested years of effort, and thought you had made the right choice. It's hard to let go of a dream. It's tougher to find a new one, because they don't appear out of thin air. What about  the connections you've made? It's hard to walk out on people when you're not sure you'll find others to fill the space.

And then there's Jay Gatsby himself. There's a guy who couldn't find a new dream, who stayed attached to the old one, and spent his life trying to recapture something that was never his to begin with. His tragic ending robbed us of seeing his story through to the very end, a happy ending, perhaps. Instead of cynicism of the age--coming to terms with the shock of WWI, dealing with the excess that only caused more emptiness, the "what do we do with this thing called life"--fulfilled its role in the process, showing that what's left in the past truly belongs there and we have no chance of recapturing it. If you could see how that very story line is playing out in my life right now, in real time, the impact of that observation would carry even more weight. In other words, I lost my Daisy too. Like Gatsby, I live near her (a wild coincidence I didn't notice at first), separated by a range of hills, which may very well stand for the invisible walls that separate us now. If I may borrow from Dokken, in my dreams she's still here, and it's the same as it used to be. I understand Gatsby.

I'm more than ready to declare Fitzgerlad better than Hemingway, not because of his tight writing and minimalist style, one actually tighter than Hemingway and more coherent and to the point, but because nothing Ernest has written has had the impact of Gatsby. No other literary work has lived so long in my head after reading.

I will say the same of the 2013 film starring Leonardo DeCaprio as Gatsby. While the film is too busy and too colorful from the visual standpoint, the film captured
the heart of the story perfectly and I will say it is the best interpretation of the film ever done. I hated it during the first few minutes when they jettisoned the greatest opening lines of a story ever written, and instead substituted something with less impact, but they used, verbatim, the last monologue of the book to great effect. It was mesmerizing.

Fitzgerald and I were actually born in the same city, albeit many years apart, so in a way I feel a connection to him. We both did some drinking to cover up problems only to find they never went away but were, in fact, intensified, because you can't escape your subconscious. And while he said that there are no second acts in America, I can't help but argue with that. Dreams may not be easy to find, but they're out there, like a carrot on a stick, and if you run fast enough maybe you stand a chance of grabbing one.