Monthly Archives: August 2008

Bad Villains…and not in a good way

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Michelle Gagnon

Kicking things off today, I’m thrilled (no pun intended—sorry) to announce a SUPER DUPER BRAND NEW CONTEST. We’re holding a giveaway this week:
Comment on our posts from now through next Wednesday, and we here at The Kill Zone will toss your name in the hat for a $50 gas card. I know, that’ll buy you what, roughly 2 gallons? Hey, don’t blame us. We’re not the ones gouging, just a loveable group of writers trying to give your wallet a break…

And now, on to…BAD VILLAINS

We’ve all seen them. Those beady-eyed little guys wringing their hands as they chortle (ever notice that? Heroes never, ever chortle. The minute a character does that you just know he’s evil). They generally want to take over the world, but might be willing to settle for killing someone in a particularly terrible way. And they’d just love to tell you all about it first. One classic bad villain trait is that they live to hear themselves talk. In my humble opinion what made the Austin Powers films so funny was the “Dr Evil,” character, who epitomized every bad villain cliché. (Remember the group therapy scene with his son? “My childhood was typical. Summers in Rangoon, luge lessons. In the spring we’d make meat helmets. If I was insolent, I was placed in a burlap bag and beaten with reeds. Pretty standard, really.”) Hannibal Lecter was scary, sure, but the ultimate villain has to be Dr. Evil. Who else could come up with an “evil petting zoo?”

For me at least, villains are the most difficult characters to create. The heroes and heroines, laughable/loveable sidekicks, and victims are easy, I could practically write those in my sleep (well, not really. But you know what I mean).

But a villain that comes off as frightening and not comical is a far different beast. It’s all too easy to slip into mwa-ha-ha mode. Worse yet is to have them engage in “monologue-ing,” explaining monotonously why they’re doing what they’re doing, and how they’ll get away with it (when of course, that discourse inevitably leads to their downfall).

It’s harder still to avoid clichés. After all, since the beginning of recorded time nearly every story has featured a villain, from Medusa to Iago to Mr. Hyde. Joe’s post yesterday noted how many classic villains are fairly interchangeable. And that’s precisely the problem: how do you make your villain new and unique, not just another Hannibal-esque hybrid?

In my latest book, Boneyard, I had a particularly hard time. One of my villains came to life easily. I added some traits to him in successive drafts, but felt like I nailed him down without too much trouble.

And then there was the other guy. Man, he was a problem (serves me right for having two bad guys, I suppose). I had done voluminous research on serial killers in an attempt to make him as believable as possible, but kept encountering the same pitfalls. I felt at times like I was making villain soup, adding a pinch of Bundy and a dash of Dahmer, but he still seemed bland. Up until the final draft I cast him as a religious fanatic, quoting scripture to explain his motivation. But every time I read over his dialogue I found myself squirming. It felt very forced and contrived, never a good thing.

Someone once said, “the villain is the hero of his own story.” It’s an important thing to remember. We’ve all known people who have been able to justify terrible acts to themselves. They did it for the greater good, or they didn’t have a choice. To me, those are believable villains.

So I slashed away with my red pen, leaving far more of his motivations to the reader’s imagination. In the end, I was happy with him. But with every book the problem must be freshly confronted. I’m wrestling with a different guy now, a real slimeball who’s motivated both by greed and hatred. Yet at the moment he’s more whiny than scary, not a good thing. And he keeps pulling at his handlebar moustache and asking about the rent, which is just annoying. Ah well. Hopefully I’ll get him by the line edits…

So, dear reader, what say you? Who’s your favorite “bad villain,” and why? Remember: comment and your car might thank you for it later. Tune in next Thursday when I announce the winner and ponder why Second Life avatars only seem to come in one breast size.

The Best of the Worst–Villainy Week continues

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By Joe Moore

As villains week continues in the Kill Zone, it’s time to discuss some of our favorite villains and what motivated them to be so villainy. Before we get to my list of favorites, let’s start with a review of some well-known rogues and scallywags. Of the books and movies we’ve all read or seen, which villains remain in our memory as truly great? Some obvious names come to mind:

norman-bates Dr. Hannibal Lecter. If he says he’d like to have you for dinner, have some reservations.

Norman Bates. He and his mother will shower you with attention.

Dexter Morgan. You don’t want him working on your case.

Darth Vader. Anyone that sounds like James Earl Jones with asthma can’t be all bad.

Count Dracula. What a pain in the neck.

dracula1Freddy Krueger. Maybe he’s just fashion challenged.

Lex Luthor. It takes guts to match wits with the “S” man.

These are some of the more memorable villains, but there are many others that may not immediately pop into your mind. Yet when you think about it, they are every bit as worthy of mention. They all have one thing in common–they scared us.

Here’s my honorable mention list along with their motivations:

Wicked Witch of the West. She was frightening enough, but her flying monkeys did me in. Like other great villains, she was out for revenge.

hal HAL-9000. “Open the pod-bay door, Hal.” Dave had enough to worry about. Add a computer with a mind of its own in outer space and you’ve got a really bad situation. Of course, HAL was just trying to protect himself. Self-preservation is a great motivator.

The Queen (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs). Here’s a classic case of jealously. There can be only one “fairest of them all”.

jaws The Alien (Alien) and the Shark (Jaws). These two are pretty much the same character in different environments. What’s scary about them both is that they’re just doing what comes natural, but they’re doing it to survive in their world. In reality, the humans were the invaders.

Martians (War of the Worlds). Here’s another case of self-preservation. Their planet has gone down the toilet and they need a new neighborhood to homestead. First item on the invasion agenda: kill all the earthlings. BTW, other than the flaming passenger train scene, I thought the remake of this movie was not very scary. But when I saw the original version as a child, it had me cowering under my theater seat, especially during the basement scene.

Bonnie Parker & Clyde Barrow. Here’s a good example of anti-heroes. Yes we knew that B&C were bad. Yes, they robbed banks. Yes, they shot people. Yes, Clyde had E.D. But they were so lovable, you just had to sit back and watch them self-destruct. Sort of like a car wreck you pass on the highway.

myers Jason Vorhees (Friday the 13th) and Michael Myers (Halloween). These two guys are also one and the same, just different masks. Both are out for revenge, although Michael’s hard drive has definitely crashed. I think they’re memorable because, unlike most villains, there’s no reasoning with either one of them. It’s like talking to a block of ice only with less response.

The Blair Witch. I know, most people thought this movie with its shaky-cam and cheesy documentary style was really lame. But if you got beyond the hype, it was built on the tried-and-true “haunted house” scenario that had some very scary undertones. Again, a case of self-preservation. And how many villains can you remember that frightened their victims to death without ever making an appearance?

frankenstein The Frankenstein Monster. The ultimate anti-hero villain. The creature was created out of different human body parts justifying his extreme mood swings. Brilliant.

We can’t have a good story without conflict between the hero and the villain. Whether the villain is a person, place or thing, it must be compelling, three-dimensional, and driven by a motivational factor of which we can all relate. And in some dark recess of our mind, the villain must reach down, grab our fear, and expose it like a raw nerve. Otherwise, we might as well be watching Saturday morning cartoons.

Final thought from the master villain, Dr. Lecter, “A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.”

Did I miss any of your favorite villains?

Villain week, continued: What I love about bad guys

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By Kathryn Lilley

Yesterday Clare asked us to describe our notion of the ‘ideal’ villain in fiction.

I’ll be honest—when I pick up a thriller, I want the slayer to be super-sized. My killer’s got to be so cold and bad-ass, he’s doing the Monster Mash all over the page, leaving behind a trail of bloody footprints.

Fiction-wise, that makes Hannibal Lecter my kind of evil doer. Also Dexter Morgan of Darkly Dreaming Dexter—and Dexter’s actually likeable as he plunges the blade into his victims.

I don’t know why I prefer to read about fictional villains who are larger than life. Maybe it’s because I came of age in the seventies, an era when serial killers seemed to be stalking the nation’s youth as well as our collective psyche via the nightly news. Ted Bundy, David Berkowitz, John Wayne Gacy, and later the BTK Killer—each psycho’s saga chilled me to the bone. I started to dwell on all the ways I could possibly die at the hands of a cold sociopath. I probably got way too carried away with my projections, to the point that I’d scan the faces of charming, needy young men and smiling clowns, searching for signs of a hidden killer within.

It’s the recreation of that goose-bump factor that gets my reader’s juices flowing these days. But I also know that there’s no lack of chill potential in “everyday” murders. To do some research for today’s blog post, this morning I pulled a book off my shelf called Scene of the Crime, Photographs from the LAPD Archive. It’s a picture book filled with vintage images of murder victims and crime scenes.

One photo and its caption from 1951 haunted me all day. A platinum blonde is shown slumped in the passenger seat of an automobile. A black rivulet of blood streams from one ear. According to the caption,her name was Libby. She’d been shot four times by her boyfriend, who’d left a message written on the back of a check:

“She died instantly,” her sweetheart killer wrote. “…painlessly and mercifully, happy with joyous thoughts that could never be brought to reality…The back of her head faced me. I looked at her beautiful new silver blonde hair and I squeezed the trigger…I have no beliefs other than that the end fully justifies the means. And a few paltry dollars made her so happy!”

Now that’s chilling.

Breaking News: Last week’s winner of DYING TO BE THIN

Seanchai won last week’s contest for a copy of DYING TO BE THIN over at the Kill Zone!

Seanchai, send me your mailing address and I’ll mail you a signed copy this week! (I tried to post a notification to your blog but I couldn’t get it to post). Best, Kathryn

Villain week, continued: What I love about bad guys

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By Kathryn Lilley

Yesterday Clare asked us to describe our notion of the ‘ideal’ villain in fiction.

I’ll be honest—when I pick up a thriller, I want the slayer to be super-sized. My killer’s got to be so cold and bad-ass, he’s doing the Monster Mash all over the page, leaving behind a trail of bloody footprints.

Fiction-wise, that makes Hannibal Lecter my kind of evil doer. Also Dexter Morgan of Darkly Dreaming Dexter—and Dexter’s actually likeable as he plunges the blade into his victims.

I don’t know why I prefer to read about fictional villains who are larger than life. Maybe it’s because I came of age in the seventies, an era when serial killers seemed to be stalking the nation’s youth as well as our collective psyche via the nightly news. Ted Bundy, David Berkowitz, John Wayne Gacy, and later the BTK Killer—each psycho’s saga chilled me to the bone. I started to dwell on all the ways I could possibly die at the hands of a cold sociopath. I probably got way too carried away with my projections, to the point that I’d scan the faces of charming, needy young men and smiling clowns, searching for signs of a hidden killer within.

It’s the recreation of that goose-bump factor that gets my reader’s juices flowing these days. But I also know that there’s no lack of chill potential in “everyday” murders. To do some research for today’s blog post, this morning I pulled a book off my shelf called Scene of the Crime, Photographs from the LAPD Archive. It’s a picture book filled with vintage images of murder victims and crime scenes.

One photo and its caption from 1951 haunted me all day. A platinum blonde is shown slumped in the passenger seat of an automobile. A black rivulet of blood streams from one ear. According to the caption,her name was Libby. She’d been shot four times by her boyfriend, who’d left a message written on the back of a check:

“She died instantly,” her sweetheart killer wrote. “…painlessly and mercifully, happy with joyous thoughts that could never be brought to reality…The back of her head faced me. I looked at her beautiful new silver blonde hair and I squeezed the trigger…I have no beliefs other than that the end fully justifies the means. And a few paltry dollars made her so happy!”

Now that’s chilling.

Breaking News: Last week’s winner of DYING TO BE THIN

Seanchai won last week’s contest for a copy of DYING TO BE THIN over at the Kill Zone!

Seanchai, send me your mailing address and I’ll mail you a signed copy this week! (I tried to post a notification to your blog but I couldn’t get it to post). Best, Kathryn

The Ideal (Fictitious) Villain

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By Clare Langley-Hawthorne
www.clarelangleyhawthorne.com

John Mortimer, creator of Rumpole, wrote that “most of the interest and part of the terror of great crime are not due to what is abnormal, but to what is normal in it; what we have in common with the criminal rather than the subtle insanity which differentiates him from us.” I couldn’t agree more – for me, it is the commonality rather than the abnormality that makes a villain truly villainous.

Take Doctor Crippen – an unremarkable man in real life, the least likely man perhaps to have poisoned and dismembered his wife or to have been pursued across the Atlantic with a young mistress in tow disguised as a boy. Part of the fascination with this case is the sheer ordinariness of the supposed murderer – and now, with DNA evidence casting doubt on whether the woman whose body was found was that of Doctor Crippen’s wife, Cora, the mystery of what actually happened may never be solved.

In fiction of course, some of the most fantastical crimes that occur in real life can never be used simply because readers would never believe them. Take for example the man who murdered his wife over an affair that happened 40 years before and then left her body as a gift beneath the Christmas tree. Writers have to walk a fine line with villains too, making them both believable as well as intriguing. Are they merely the flip side of the protagonist? Are they an ordinary person pushed to the brink? Or does some deep psychological wound create the monster within?

As a historical mystery writer and fan, I have a preference for the enigmatic ‘villain or not’ character. I still recall the terror I felt as a twelve year old reading Daphne DuMaurier’s Rebecca late one night when I realized Maxim de Winter may have murdered his wife.
Part of the pleasure of reading Dickens, for me, is his rendition of such memorably odious characters as Mr. Murdstone, Uriah Heep and Steerforth (and that’s just in David Copperfield!)

As for female villains, I love Annie Wilson in Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy Night. Even though no murder is committed her vitriolic outburst and her ability to mask her hatred beneath sheer ordinariness and subservience made her a perfect villainess in my book. Then of course there’s Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca and that other Annie in Stephen King’s Misery…now they’re just downright bloody terrifying.

So what makes the ideal ‘fictitious’ villain for you?
Please also join me as I guest blog at Good Girls Kill for Money where I discuss what makes the ideal ‘fictitious’ husband…which is in no way inspired by my musings on villainy…

THE OLD PYRAMID STANDING ON ITS HEAD STORY

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John Ramsey Miller

We all hear people say that everybody has a book in them. That may well be true, but, if they were actually written, the vast majority of those books would be just awful. When I speak about writing to groups, I always talk about that age old pyramid that’s standing on its tip. The base is the of the millions of books that are started each year followed ¾ ’s of the way down by the small fraction of those that will be completed in some fashion. Of the finished books, (we’re getting right down to the tip now) only a small percentage will find an agent to represent them. Of the agent-represented books, only a small percentage will be purchased for publication. Of all of those books only a handful will be commercially successful. The final category, the best selling books comprise the very point where the two outside lines touch. So the odds are very much against any writer becoming John Grisham, Stephen King, James Patterson, or JK Rowling. But we authors who are able to make a good living with words kept going despite the odds.

Late one night, just after my first novel was published, an uncle of mine called out of the blue to say that I should write a book about his amazingly interesting life. I explained that I only wrote fiction, (My first published book was a biography and the neutron bomb of publishing) and that I couldn’t get a biography published, even if I wanted to write one, and it was about the life of someone as utterly fascinating as I knew he was. That got me off the hook, but I’m fairly certain he believed that I was keeping the world from learning how interesting he was.

If you do write a book that gets published, you’ll quickly discover that everybody who knows somebody you know will magically materialize and ask you to introduce them to your agent, or at a minimum, ask you to read a book they (or a friend or relative) have written. If you can figure out a way to say no graciously, you can save yourself a lot of grief. Rarely will accepting a manuscript submitted for your opinion do you, or the author any good.

In my experience, (and it includes accepting dozens of unsolicited manuscripts), after you read the novel (or as much of it as you can stand) you’ll discover one of several things. The book is awful–and ninety-eight percent will fall into this category– and you have to tell the author something other than the truth. You don’t want to encourage them, because the encouragement may mean they will keep writing thinking they might actually have some talent or a shot at being the next Dan Brown, but you don’t want to be cruel and dash their hopes.

Like a blind pig foraging, there will be an occasional acorn in the pile. Once in a blue moon you will read a manuscript that is good, maybe even very good. This has happened to me twice. I referred both of those manuscripts to my agent and she immediately didn‘t take them on. Not because they weren’t good, but because she didn’t think she could sell them. Maybe she was just being nice to me.

And there are a lot of people out there who should write books and have them published. I have a close friend who has a great storytelling ability, a great sense of humor, she reads mysteries voraciously, and I know she can write with the best of them. She just finished her first cozy, and I read it and I was correct. She can write, and I have no doubt that she will write several books and with luck and determination, she may just find an agent, a publisher and an audience. She develops great characters, gives great description, knows how to create a setting, and she’s funny. I hope she succeeds, and she’s certainly got the determination one needs. And she doesn’t write thinking she’ll get rich, she writes because she loves it and has discovered how difficult our trade is. All of us should encourage people like my friend.

People on the outside think what we do is easy. Once at a cocktail party a dermatologist came up to me and said when he retired from his practice he was going to write novels. I told him that I’ve always thought that when I retired from writing I’d become a physician. He looked at me like I’d dropped road kill into his lap. He said writing could hardly be compared to being a physician. I told him I’d bet him five hundred dollars that I could put on a white coat and freeze off a wart with an hours instruction, but he couldn’t write a publishable novel in two years.

I’ve been successful in that I’ve supported my family for twenty years by stacking words into stories. I never cared if I made a lot of money. All I ever hoped for was that I could entertain people with my stories and make a living at the thing I most love and feel compelled to do. So far, I have, I should say, because you are only as good as your last book. I’ve never minded the hard work, long hours, the solitude, the deadlines, the insecurity, the anxiety, or all the other things we authors go through to bring an our ideas into manuscript form. Making your living doing something you love is heaven. But almost anybody who becomes an author thinking it is a quick and easy way to get rich is a fool, and that person is more than likely wasting perfectly good time and energy they could be devoting to some criminal enterprise like lawyering or banking.

Like most things, writing is only hard work if you do it right.

The Power of the Pen

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by John Gilstrap

I knew from an early age that I was something of a dork, even though we didn’t really have “dorks” in the ’60s and ’70s. Come to think of it, I’m not sure what the label was back then, but we did have a “popular” crowd, and I was smart enough to know that it would forever thrive without me. Even at the time, I was cool with that because, armed with a talent to write stories, the slights of the real world were merely launching places for the victories of my imagination.

An undeniable symptom of my latent dorkdom was—and continues to be—my love of pens. It started with the old reliable clear-barreled Bic. The one with the blue cap (never black; no sir, not on paper with my handwriting), and the little blue plug on the ass end. The one with the little air hole halfway down the barrel so you could get the clear plastic filler in and out. You with me?

Did you know that if you look at the nose of the cap from a shallow angle, just off from head-on, you’ve got a perfect replica of a fighter jet’s canopy? Think Vietnam-era F4 Phantom. On the nose itself, there’s a little nib that is in fact a cannon that the F4 never had in real life yet always had when little Johnny Gilstrap was at the controls. If you take the cap off entirely, you’ve got a rocket ship.

If your fingernails were long enough (mine rarely were), and you had enough patience, you could work that plug out of the back of the barrel to create the kind of whistle that will drive a teacher crazy. If you pull the filler out completely, the pen’s barrel becomes a perfect spitball gun; but only if you blow into the narrow end. If you do it the other way, you risk a jam. Of course, you could avoid the jam entirely if you make really tiny spit balls, but the sacrifice in mass is directly reflected in impact velocity, and who’d want to make that kind of sacrifice? And remember to cover the air hole before you blow.

The filler itself was of limited use, in my experience, although it was mildly amusing to use the pen barrel as a rolling pin down the length of the flexible plastic ink tube. Those little things hold an astonishing amount of ink. Oh, and hats off to whoever designed the dye used in the red Bic pen; it’s an excellent stand-in for blood when your GI Joe takes a bullet for his men. Note to children everywhere: If you leave a bunch of red ink-soaked Kleenexes in your bathroom trash can, you will have a discussion with your mother. I’ve learned, so you don’t have to.

Have you ever watched a ballpoint pen do its job? I mean, have you ever really watched it? Next time you find yourself with a pen and a magnifying glass—and who among us has not?—take a 3X gander at the way the ball spreads the ink. It just doesn’t get cooler than that.

I believe I was in fourth grade when I wrote with my first fountain pen. Actually, by way of full disclosure, it was a cartridge pen—Papermate, I think—with a silver cap and a translucent blue barrel which screwed off of the nib. What I remember most about that pen—apart from the fact that the nib assembly looked an awful lot like a microphone for a Man From U.N.C.L.E. spy radio (“Open channel D Please”)—was the first assignment on which I got to use it.

I had the hots for Mrs. Lippincott as it was, and the fact that she liked students who liked to write made her even hotter. She was always looking for ways to inspire me to write stories. (I suppose it’s possible she was trying to inspire all of us, but I always preferred to think she was speaking directly—and only—to me.) At Halloween that year, she arranged our desks in groups of four, turned off the lights, pulled the blinds and put a single candle in the middle of each square of desks. Our assignment was to write a scary story.

I wrote like a madman (madkid?). Words flew from the nib of that old-fashioned pen. In my mind, I had something in common with Edgar Allen Poe and Charles Dickens as action and characters spilled from the pen like so much blood from a wound. I entered my first writing “zone” that day. I don’t remember the events of the story, but I remember like it was yesterday the opportunity to read my imagination to the class. I remember the silence as my words captured them. I remember feeling that for once, I had an edge on kids whose greatest gift was the ability to throw a ball.

I don’t want to go all weird here, but I believe that all good art carries with it an element of its creator’s soul. That’s the X-Factor the seals an emotional connection with the audience. For me, the computer keyboard takes me where I need to go 95% of the time. For the remaining 5% of the writing I still resort to my secret weapon—the fountain pen. It might propel me for three pages, or maybe for thirty, but my pen has never let me down.

Summer Movie Wrap-Up

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Business first: congrats to Lexi, who won a signed edition of THE TUNNELS last week! Afraid I’ve got nothing for you today, but stay tuned: next week, we here at The Kill Zone will be giving away a slew of freebies…

Obviously the summer blockbuster season has not yet drawn to a close, so this post is slightly premature. However, I just returned from a week’s stay at my parent’s house (read: free babysitting). My parents live in a town where everything closes around 8PM (seriously, there’s practically a curfew) and I was jet-lagged enough that a 10PM showtime was within the realm of possibility. So I’m proud to say that I broke my own record for most films seen in a single week (and mind you, this was around the same time all those Olympic records were being broken in Beijing. Coincidence?)

Since I wrote posts earlier this summer on worst blockbusters I’ve ever seen and films I’ve enjoyed so far, I thought I’d post a round-up of the latest offerings. So grab your popcorn and pull up a chair for…

MICHELLE’S EXTREMELY BIASED AND JUDGEMENTAL MOVIE REVIEWS

With any luck, this will become a regular thing (but no promises—do you have any idea what movie tickets cost in San Francisco?!)

WALL-E
Loved this one. Sweet story told with all the wry humor and killer cinematography that Pixar is known for. Nice little save-the-planet-and-beware-corporate-monoliths message tucked in between nods to classics like 2001: A Space Odyssey. I love it when G-rated films factor in adult audiences. Definitely worth seeing on the big screen, the animation is phenomenal.

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
I liked Rachel Weisz before, and my respect for her went up exponentially after seeing this film—brilliantly, she decided against participating in it. Smart career move. Brendan Fraser tends to be a lot of fun to watch, but even he couldn’t save this mess. Maria Bello stumbles along with a barely-passable accent and a bewildered expression on her face throughout, as if she’s not quite sure how she landed in this role (a question I harbored myself). And the son from the last film has morphed from a cute little British boy to a man that now (inexplicably) has a Southie accent and is way too old to be the child of Bello and Fraser. Who cast this dreck? Jet Li has the best part, and he barely speaks and spends most of the film as a CGI clay figurine. Even if you’re trapped on a plane and the choice is between watching this or staring at the seat in front of you, stare at the seat. Seriously, it’s that bad.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army
I was leery of this one, but had foolishly allowed my husband to choose the night’s entertainment. I thought the first installment was just silly, despite Ron Perlman’s likeable performance as the main character. But I buckled down, gritted my teeth…and was pleasantly surprised. The story was much darker and more based on myth than traditional comic book tales, and director Guillermo Del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth) brought just as many quirky characters to play here. I also liked that the CGI was involved but didn’t dominate, and even though the story was light on substance, the settings were incredible and visually astonishing. Much better than the first (although I still find Selma Blair annoying).

Hancock
I was also not that excited for this one, despite the fact that Will Smith is a reliable summer movie action star. But again, I’m happy to report that I was pleasantly surprised. This film presented an interesting twist on traditional superhero fare, which gave it more depth than you generally see in these films. Though it was short (about 90 minutes, by my reckoning) it felt like the perfect length for the story it had to tell. Not a must-see, but definitely worth renting.

The Dark Knight
I snuck into a matinee of this a few weeks ago when I should have been working—and man, am I happy I did. I loved this movie—for me it’s neck and neck with Ironman for my favorite of the summer (although with Tropic Thunder on the horizon, all bets are off). Christian Bales was great, poor Heath Ledger did an incredible job with his incarnation of The Joker, and it was such a relief to see Maggie Gyllenhaal in the role that Katie Holmes almost ruined in Batman Begins. Critics have complained that it was dark for a blockbuster, but that was precisely what I liked, that it didn’t shy away from that. Highly recommended.

So I’d love to hear what you’ve seen this summer, and whether you agree/disagree with my assessment. As always, questions/comments/unwavering support are welcome.

A Killer Confession

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By Joe Moore

missile2 I’ve killed a lot of people. Along with my accomplice co-author, Lynn Sholes, I’ve shot down a fully loaded commercial airliner, set Moscow on fire, infected thousands with an ancient retrovirus, massacred an archeological dig team in the Peruvian Andes, assassinated a Venatori agent, killed a senior cardinal along with a Vatican diplomatic delegation, murdered the British royal family, and even brought down the International Space Station. I know I’m responsible for more deaths–I just can’t remember them all.

kremlin1 So I confess, I’m a killer.

It’s not always easy. Some of these people I really cared about. The dig team members were likable folks except for the chief archeologist who got on my nerves. I didn’t mind seeing him bite the dust. I really grew to like the Venatori agent, but he wasn’t doing what I wanted him to do, so he “slipped in the shower”. And the British Royals? Well, they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. peru But being a killer comes with the territory when writing suspense thrillers.

In real life, death is serious. Whether it’s by natural causes or violence, it’s not to be taken lightly. If the deceased is a loved one or friend, the emotional impact can be staggering, even debilitating.

But there’s a different level of death that we all come in contact with every day that rarely causes us a second thought: Long distance death.

Several hundred passengers drown in a ferry accident off the coast of India. Thousands are trapped in an earthquake in China. Millions starve in Darfur. A Columbian jet crash kills all on board.

buckinghamDo we care? Of course we do, but unless those victims were family or friends–unless we have an emotional connection with them–we only care for as long as it takes to turn the page of the morning paper or switch channels.

In developing our main fictional characters, it’s vital that the reader care about them enough to show emotion. Whether they’re heroes or villains, the reader must love or hate them. Neutral is no good.

And that’s a problem I see all too often in books, movies and TV shows. Sometimes I just give up reading or watching because I don’t care enough to care. The characters may be interesting but they get buried in the plot (or CGI effects) to the point that it doesn’t matter to me if they win or lose, live or die. And that’s the kiss of death for a writer. The wheels come off the story and the book winds up in the ditch.

We utilize long distant deaths in our books because we write high concept thrillers that span the globe–what my buddy David Hewson calls telescope stories rather than microscope stories like his. We need long distance deaths to support the big threat. But when it comes to the main characters, they better be worth caring about or the wheels just might come off.