Monthly Archives: October 2008

When Does License Give Way to Responsibility?

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By John Gilstrap
http://www.johngilstrap.com/

When Six Minutes to Freedom was published in 2006, I was shocked and, frankly, dismayed by the number of fans who told me that they couldn’t wait till my next novel came out because they don’t read non-fiction. But SixMin is a thriller, I told them; it just happens to be true. Some took a chance, most didn’t, and that’s fine. People obviously have the right to read whatever suits their fancy. I’ve turned my back on non-fiction anyway. It’s too hard. In writing non-fiction, you’re constrained by what actually happened, without regard to the development of the most intriguing story arc.

Fiction is about drama; non-fiction is about reality. At least that’s the way it’s supposed to be. But in these hyper-political times, where it seems that everyone on every street corner has proclaimed him or herself to be either a rabid Republican or a rabid Democrat or rabid Something Else Entirely, I’m wondering if a little non-fiction might be in order.

McCain says that Obama voted against funding the war in Iraq. Well, not really. He voted against a bill that funded the war without setting a date for early withdrawal. Without addressing the wisdom of the vote itself, I’m dismayed that the sound bite omits the qualifier. On the other side, Obama asserts that McCain likewise voted against a bill to fund the war, but he omits the extenuation that McCain’s objection reflected the presence of a hard date for withdrawal.

Why, then, don’t they publicly argue the real issue, which is the wisdom of announcing a withdrawal date? I think it’s because that argument is a complex one, and complex arguments can’t be conveyed in a sound bite—which has become the attention span of far too many voters. I hate to let my cynicism show so clearly, but I’ll bet bucks to buttons that of every ten people who blame the worldwide financial woes on Democrats or Republicans, not two of them could cogently articulate what, exactly, their alleged culprit did wrong. I’m sorry, but the laying of blame on “Wall Street’s corporate greed” is so hyper-simplified as to be meaningless.

Does the sound bite drive the news because of viewers’ demands, I wonder, or really because the sound bite represents the depth of knowledge of the average news reader? Clearly, that’s not my call. My bag is the entertainment business. I make stuff up for a living. And if I do my job really, really well, I can create global crises that seem very plausible, even though they’re built entirely of my imagination. It’s a cool job.

But I wonder sometimes where my license to entertain ends and where my responsibility as a citizen begins. For years, I’ve been sitting on this really terrific, terrifyingly plausible terrorist plot because I worry about giving the bad guys a new idea. We’re a nation at war, and I deeply and genuinely worry about writing anything that might bring additional danger to people in harm’s way. I worry about making our nation and our leaders look worse than they already do to the rest of the world, because I believe that everything that weakens those leaders internally empowers our enemies abroad. Empowered enemies, in turn, shoot at people I love.

Now, let me state for the record: I in no way favor any form of government-imposed censorship. Ever. Never in any case, period.

But is a little voluntary restraint out of the question?

Remember a few years ago when Oliver Stone released his movie JFK? It was a complete and total fabrication of events surrounding the assassination of President Kennedy, and to his credit, Stone never represented it as anything but. Still, a recent poll showed that an astonishing majority of Americans believe that the film represents a historical record. Next week, Oliver Stone will release W, his “biography” of President Bush—a man whose politics Stone openly loathes. He confesses that the movie is likewise fiction, but surely he knows—as we all know—that a substantial majority of Americans will not bother to do the independent research to find the reality within the fiction, and will therefore accept his fiction as truth.

Intellectually, I understand and accept and would even defend that there’s nothing wrong with that. But deep inside where that little whirly-gig tells you what’s really right and wrong, I wonder about all those young men and women in harm’s way who will face a newly re-empowered enemy.

Ghosts of Bouchercon Past

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I’m heading back east this week for Bouchercon, the conference that is de rigeur for crime writers and fans. This year’s event takes place in Baltimore, burial site of Edgar Allan Poe, and there are a staggering number of people attending. Which got me thinking about my first experience, lo those many years ago…

Not really. I was one of the happy few who braved the cold (and, apparently, the Russians) for the conference in Anchorage, Alaska last year. The ringing refrain appeared to be, “This isn’t a normal Bouchercon, no one’s here!”
But it was my first, and having nothing to compare it to, I had a rip roaring good time. Sure, the panels weren’t necessarily packed, but how could you complain when sidewalk vendors sold reindeer sausages, there was a late night Karaoke bar directly across the street from the hotel, and at least two “police actions” occurred nightly within a three block radius? For better or worse Anchorage appeared closer to “Deadwood” than “Northern Exposure.” So I thought I’d take advantage of this post to reflect on the high- (and low-) lights of Bouchercon 2007, aka “Bearly Alive.”

-Wandering down the streets at night looking for the next publishing party that featured an open bar (which seemed to consume a good chunk of every evening,) we ran into a drag queen in full Wonder Woman regalia. Here in San Francisco, that would mark an ordinary stroll, but in Anchorage?! Kudos to her for braving the cold, those wrist bracelets couldn’t have been doing much to keep her warm.

-Brian Thornton bringing down the house with his rendition of AC/DC’s “Back in Black.” I’m starting a petition to get Brian on American Idol, he was a giant among ants that evening.

-Apparently the Anchorage zoning laws mandate that every block have ten bars, ten gift stores selling virtually identical souvenirs, and one run-down restaurant with the ubiquitous reindeer sausage. God help you if you need a pharmacy, although considering that number of assaults and stabbings that occurred during our stay there, a pharmacy would seem to be a valuable addition to downtown.

-Why was I one of the only people who didn’t manage to see a moose? To hear others tell it, they were tripping over them every time they left the hotel. I suspect they were confusing moose with drag queens in superhero attire.

-Alexandra Sokoloff, Jason Starr, and I badly mangling Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing.” What Brian Thornton did to elevate the art of Karaoke, we erased with a few verses. I blame a lethal combination of reindeer sausage and whiskey, which combined to convey the delusion that we, too, might be able to sing. We couldn’t, as it turned out. Seriously, it was grim.

-Best panel: the one with the drug sniffing dog chasing David Corbett out of the hall (that didn’t really happen, but wouldn’t it have been funnier if it had?)

-Best author 30 minute slot: Declan Hughes. There’s a man who puts on a show when he’s reading. And there was juggling at the beginning. A tough act to follow.

-2nd Best author 30 minute slot: Rumor had it that Laura Lippman took everyone who showed up for her session out for drinks. Classy. And again, tough act to follow (I’m raising this argument with my publisher to explain why I need a bigger advance next time. How else am I supposed to buy rounds?)

-Worst 30 minute author slot: mine. My flight arrived late, and I didn’t receive the programming schedule until breakfast the following morning. At which point I discovered that I had been enlisted to spend 30 minutes entertaining strangers, and I had to be there in five minutes. I killed five minutes reading the paper with them, them mumbled for the duration. Awful. I promise to do better this year.

-Lukas Ortiz, Alex Sokoloff, Jason Starr, and I managed to get completely lost on a bike ride that began as a three-hour tour of the shoreline and concluded with us pedaling onto the tarmac at the Ted Stevens International Airport. And still, no moose.

Like I said, a rip roaring good time. I can hardly wait to see what happens during “Charmed to Death 2008.” Baltimore is going to have a tough act to follow, at least in my book. Perhaps they should import some drag queens, and maybe a moose…

PS: if you’re attending the conference, here’s where you’ll be able to subject yourself to more of my non sequiturs:

10:30AM Thursday: Author Karaoke with fellow kill Zone authors Kathryn Lilley and Clare Langley-Hawthorne. We WILL NOT SING, this I promise you. We will discuss book blog tours. And we might juggle.

11:30AM Thursday, Int’l E: I CAN’T STAND UP FOR FALLING DOWN: Booze, hootch & firewater in crime fiction. Ali Karim(M), Ken Bruen, Michelle Gagnon, Con Lehane, Elizabeth Zelvin

11:30AM Saturday, Int’l D: PSYCHO KILLER: Why are we so fascinated by serial killers? Brian Lindmuth(M), Mark Billingham, Michelle Gagnon, Jonathan Hayes, Alan Jacobson

PPS: For truly brave souls…
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A KILLER WORKOUT is out today in bookstores!

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Today marks the official debut of A KILLER WORKOUT in bookstores across the country. It’s a brand new adventure for the series heroine, Kate Gallagher. In this story, our intrepid reporter heads for a boot-camp style exercise retreat to do a little downsizing on her butt, only to wind up sugar-crashing it in the middle of a gruesome crime scene. She soon discovers that exercise can really be murder!

To celebrate the launch, I’ll be at Bouchercon this weekend, meeting and greeting readers and booksellers. I’ll also be teaming up with my fellow Kill Zone authors Michelle and Clare for an author’s karaoke event on Saturday morning at 10:30 a.m. But don’t worry, we won’t be singing (that would really be a crime, at least in my case!). We’ll discuss all aspects of a blog tour, from brainstorming niche blogs that might serve as hosts, to tailoring content, to building traffic that translates into sales. A few members from the audience can present their elevator pitch and we’ll help them craft some ideas.

Oh, and by the way, if you’re in the general Santa Barbara region today, Tuesday, you can catch me on the radio at 8:47 a.m. on KZSB Radio, AM 1290. My host will be the wonderful Baron Ron Herron.

Stay tuned!

LUST

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By Clare Langley-Hawthorne
www.clarelangleyhawthorne.com

Did that get your attention? In my latest book, The Serpent and The Scorpion, lust plays a pivotal role. Lust for power that is. Set in 1912, the book takes place against a backdrop of an increasing arms race between England and Germany. England, determined to retain its naval superiority, is focusing on building the famous Dreadnaughts so Britannia really can rule the waves. One of the main characters in The Serpent and The Scorpion is an arms dealer – like the real Basil Zaharoff – one of the so called ‘merchants of death’ blamed for escalating tensions between the world superpowers at the time and fomenting war. Behind this is a lust for power of a more patriotic kind – the lust for maintaining the power of the British Empire at a time when she was beleaguered on many fronts.

The Serpent and The Scorpion starts in Egypt (occupied at the time by the British) amid growing unrest and increasing nationalism. Indeed the first murder, that of the wife of a wealthy Jewish financier, Katya Vilensky, is blamed on political extremists hell bent on destabilizing British power. Having researched both the nascent nationalist and feminist movements in Egypt I found it fascinating to juxtapose their struggles with that of the British suffragettes. By 1912 members of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) had ramped up their militancy, smashing windows and calling for further attacks on private property against those who opposed granting the vote to women. This is also the year of the great schism in the WSPU and many believe this was symptomatic of the Pankhursts’ (Specifically Emmeline and her daughter Christabel) lust to maintain absolute control and power over the union. So as you can see, lust is a powerful motivator in The Serpent and the Scorpion.

Ursula Marlow of course is hardly immune but she fights a different kind of lust – the kind that will cause scandal and notoriety. She is not one to conform to Edwardian standards of propriety and her refusal to marry, in her quest to be recognized as an independent businesswoman, unsettles and disturbs those around her (particularly the man who asked her to marry him!) And of course there’s the return of her ex-lover, Alexei who has returned to England from exile on the continent. A Bolshevik and supporter of Lenin, he has his own lust – not just for Ursula but for revolution.

Those who think history is boring need look no further than the real life characters whose lust for power define the Edwardian period to prove them wrong…and of course my fictional characters cannot help but take their cue from them. So who is your favorite historical person (and let’s keep this in the past boys and girls before we all get into hot water!) whose lust for power defines their time – though, come to think of it what period of history isn’t defined by someone’s lust for power?…

Civilization collapsing is great material.

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John Ramsey Miller

I think Cormac McCarthy has already written the best end-of-the world book I’ve ever read. But in the future I may write something about the end of the world from my own perspective. It won’t be about a meteor striking the earth, which I personally believe was the cause of the state of the earth in THE ROAD. Looking into the future with accuracy is impossible, of course, but it doesn’t take a psychic, just an ability to look at the present and imagine what the consequences of our actions might lead to something ten times worse. We’re living in a world where every country with the money is developing nukes, or will buy them from Iran, Russia, or North Korea. Once all of the countries who can beg, borrow, or buy them, have them, it’s just a matter of time before they use them the way they use IEDs or AK-47s. If you’ve been paying attention to world affairs, and not living on an Emu farm, you know that’s not merely possible, but highly likely. So there are a thousand end-of time plots not involving meteors striking Florida.

When I was in Great Britain I went through The Tower, and I visited several museums and galleries because I love art and because studying the masters by looking at the actual pieces is a spiritual experience. One overcast afternoon in March my wife and I walked out of the Royal Gallery and looking down at Trafalgar Square I had a vision of something that could be happening in that very location in the future. My flash was of bearded men in robes who were taking the paintings from the museum and feeding a giant fire with the art. I imagined marble statues being shattered by men using sledgehammers, and bronzes being cut into pieces using cutting torches. I could imagined the streets as far as I could see filled with Brits who had lost control of their country and could only stand by as watch as their history was being destroyed due to a decree from the Islamic British Government who were radicalized after having taken over in stages and were ridding Britain of its graven images. This was only after they had killed the animals in the zoos and turned Windsor Palace into a goat ranch. Great background for a thriller. It may not be so far out as I read the other day that there is now Sharia-based court in London ruling on Moslem disputes. I have no idea where it gets its legal authority, but if it’s Moslems on Moslems, I’m sure (as long as there are no executions), most Brits will let it go on. If radical Islamic extremists have their way, it could happen someday, and someday is coming soon in the Netherlands, France, and Great Britain.

I think about the future a lot these days and how systems can break down, and how that might impact me and those I love. It’s smart to prepare for contingencies as though they could become realities, because they certainly can. For instance for the past two weeks there has been a serious gasoline shortage in the Southeast, and finding gas has been a challenge. The closest station to me hasn’t had gasoline since Hurricane Ike, three weeks ago. There are no five gallon gas cans for sale anywhere.

I have the ability to grow food on my land, and have chickens and guns and the bullets for them and I have the mindset to use them if necessary. It’s dumb to think the police can protect you and your loved ones, any time, but if the system is under strain, forget it. You have the right and the duty to protect yourself from outside forces using whatever force that requires. If you are anti-gun you I guess you’ll have to wait however long it takes for the cops to come shovel up your corpse. I have several friends who believe people should not be able to own handguns, and every time there is a story in the news about some wing-nut shooting innocents they join the herd of people who think the killer would have been peaceable had they not had access to guns. In Jamaica more people are killed with machetes than guns, because it’s hard to get a gun, and they are expensive. I believe everybody is free to believe what they like, even if it’s unrealistic and they end up being a victim.

My books are about violent people, and about people who are touched by violence and react in order to survive, sometimes by employing violent means. My protagonists are not by nature violent people, but to stand around and let violent people do them harm without trying to save themselves or others by whatever means are at their disposal is out of the question. My readers wouldn’t enjoy my stories if evil people ever won. I understand that my personal feelings come through my writing. My feeling (in case you care) are that if someone comes to my home, or approaches me seeking to do me harm, odds are better than 50/50 that they will not succeed because I am not a pacifist and, if I decide I have to draw my gun, I will have already decided to shoot to kill, and I will do that. I have trained with a handgun for most of my adult life. I was trained first in the 1970s by the training officer for SWAT teams. I have carried a badge, and I have had concealed carry permits for decades. So as often as not I often go out onto the world with a handgun concealed on my person.

So, in my end-of-the-world book, many will die, but only the bad guys and gals, and there will be hope that the good guys can start over and succeed, which in the real world may be a fiction-dream. I hope the end of the world isn’t around the corner, and I hope it looks nothing like Cormac McCarthy’s.

Beginning A Series

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by John Gilstrap
http://www.johngilstrap.com/

On Wednesday, Joe wrote of the trauma of ending a series. He likened it to a death in the family, and that seemed apt to me. I think that’s also the way fans feel when they know that a series is coming to an end. I confess to feeling a certain melancholy when J.K. Rowling placed the final period on the Harry Potter series. There was a sadness to the conclusion of the saga, of course, but for me it was more than that. I had come to look forward to my annual or biannual journey into the story. It was a passion and a pastime that I could share not just with my son over those years, but also with people on the subway.

Remember Jack Ryan? In the early ’90s, you couldn’t board an airplane without noticing that 80% of the male travelers had their noses buried in one of the Tom Clancy novels. Personally, I lost interest in Jack Ryan’s saga toward the end, but during the time he was important to me, he was very important to me.

Steve Hunter’s Bob Lee Swagger, Bob Crais’s Elvis Cole and John Miller’s Winter Massey are more literary friends with whom I love to spend time. Oh, and Jeff Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme, too. Sneaky Pie Brown not so much, but then I’m not much of a cat person in real life. Once they start talking, my powers to suspend disbelief fail me. That said, I’d walk a mile to hear her friend Rita Mae give a speech. I heard her once at Magna Cum Murder in Muncie, and she was a hoot. More recently, I’ve bonded seriously with Dean Koontz’s Odd Thomas.

In June, I launch a series of my own, and I confess that I’m worried. I’ve always written stand-alones in the past, and I find the prospect of this long-term relationship with Jonathan Grave and his friends to be a bit daunting. In the early draft–all 750 pages of it!–I found myself developing so much fodder for future books that the main story for Grave Secrets (the first installment of the series) became hopelessly bogged down. I fixed it, and now the story is really tight, and I’m thrilled with it; but now I have to write another one. Same characters, different story.

And more pressure. It’s one thing when fans buy your books because they like your writing–that’s the main (only?) dynamic in stand-alones–but now some percentage of fans are going to buy the next book because they like the characters to whom they were introduced in the first. That’s a good thing, of course, but it adds a whole new dimension to crafting the story. The last thing I want to do is disappoint readers, and it seems to me that by creating a new series, I’m increasing the likelihood of doing that. Remember when Clarice Starling fell in love with Hannibal Lecter at the end of Hannibal?

Okay, I could never disappoint readers that badly, but I still worry.

“It’s Chinatown, Jake…”

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by Michelle Gagnon

Promising to “bring to life the tales of San Francisco Chinatown’s supernatural past and present,” The San Francisco Chinatown Ghost Tour features a meandering walk through Chinatown’s alleyways just after nightfall. Our local Sisters in Crime chapter has been holding semi-quarterly “field trips,” and chose this as one of them, both for research and for fun. Not necessarily as much fun as holding a loaded weapon (our previous excursion was to a shooting range), but really, what can compete with that?

We met at Kan’s restaurant, where our hostess (Empress Yee) got us appropriately spooked by inviting us to share our own personal ghost stories and offering a brief discussion of Chinese astrology. She also showed us a family heirloom, a key that apparently flipped of its own accord. Whether it was just a parlor trick or not, it set the mood for the evening.

From there, we did indeed wander those alleyways. Along with a few scattered stories, some of which are local legend, others related to things her own family members experienced, we learned the origins of the term “hooker” and “Shanghied.” (Prostitutes on the upper floors of a building used fishing hooks to snag passing men’s hats. Apparently once a man has climbed three flights of stairs for his hat, he’s easily convinced to pay for sex. Perhaps because he’s worked up an appetite?)

That alone made it worth the $25 for me (plus we stopped in at the city’s own mom and pop fortune cookie factory. Very cool, and included free samples).

It was also fascinating to learn why residents of apartment buildings whose rooms face open alleyways hang eight-sided Bagua mirrors above their windows. I lived a few blocks from Chinatown for a few years, and noticed these little mirrors everywhere; at the time I simply figured it was some sort of strange decorating fad. Little did I realize it’s actually part of the practice of Feng Shui, designed to fend off bad energies from your home (and everyone knows, bad things come down alleys, both spiritually and otherwise).

I have to say, we definitely went through parts of Chinatown that I wouldn’t have been comfortable going through alone at night. Not due to any sense of heightened danger, but mainly because I wouldn’t necessarily be welcome. This is definitely a section of San Francisco where once the sun sets and the tourists have retreated to the restaurants bridging the main thoroughfares from here to North Beach, the alleys assume a life of their own. We strolled past sweatshops that afterhours converted to mah jong gambling houses, the clink of the tiles and light spilling out of open doorways. Our guide tipped us off as to which buildings housed the “real” Chinese mob, and gave us a brief history of the local family associations/tongs. She’s also a frequent consultant on films shot in San Francisco, and sprinkled the tour with everything from leftover sets from Nash Bridges (apparently the locals liked it so much, they asked that it remain after shooting) to showing us buildings set so close together the Jackie Chan happily climbed up the space between them doing stunts for one of his films. And along the way, we exploded lots of “poppers,” both to scare off any ghosts that might want to tag along and to provide some general giddy entertainment..

Good times, all. I head to Baltimore next week, and a tour of Quantico that I’m positively giddy about. I’ll tell you all about it when I return. In the meantime, a question for you: name your Chinese astrological sign, and whether or not it suits you (aka, “What’s your sign, babe?”)

The journey of Cotten Stone

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By Joe Moore

facebook-731 October marks the publication of The 731 Legacy, the fourth (and final) installment in the Cotten Stone series. My co-author, Lynn Sholes, and I have lived with our main character for over 7 years and have grown to know and care for her very much. Ending a series is almost like a death in the family—someone you have become close to has passed on. But like real life, it’s inevitable.

Cotten’s journey began over a decade ago when Lynn and I were members of a local writer’s critique group. Writing under the name Lynn Armistead McKee, she was the only published author in the group with six books in print. One evening she mentioned an article she’d read in Discover Magazine about an archaeologist who unearthed a well-preserved relic at a dig site in Jerusalem that he believed was the cup used by Christ at the Last Supper. Tradition holds that the cup was also used to collect Christ’s blood at the Crucifixion and became know as the Holy Grail. Traces of human blood were found inside the relic and the archaeologist believed it to be the blood of Christ.

Based on the article, Lynn proposed her idea for a book: What if someone used the DNA in the Grail to clone Christ. Someone evil.

I was blown away by the idea and encouraged her to write it. But she was reluctant and felt it might be too ambitious a task for her to take on. Her style was more lyrical with romantic undertones. This was a “high concept” thriller that she didn’t feel comfortable undertaking.

I was so intrigued with her premise that after waiting a couple of years, I finally threatened her that if she didn’t write the book, I would steal the idea and write it myself. We compromised and decided to work on it together. We felt that the areas I was weak in she had strength, and vise versa. We spent a summer constructing tgcan extensive outline and then began drafting the first chapters. Our collaboration could only be described as a train wreck. Everyone that read our first chapters could tell who wrote what. It was a mess. But we didn’t give up. And the thing that probably saved us from abandoning the project was the 10 years we had spent in our critique group. We knew our strengths and weaknesses, our styles, and our voices. So we put our egos aside and maintained a solid respect for each other’s skills while plowing forward until we completed what became The Grail Conspiracy three years later.

Lynn’s agent shopped the manuscript around and quickly got us a contract. Within a year, our book was named ForeWord Magazine’s Book-Of-The-Year, got translated into over 23 languages, and became an international bestseller. Cotten Stone’s journey had begun.

We had no idea that the publisher wanted a series until we noticed it said “A Cotten Stone Mystery” on the proposed cover. They wanted more? Apparently so.

tlsSo we came up with the concept of The Last Secret. Like TGC which combined cutting edge science (human cloning) with an ancient relic (the Grail), we continued this scheme with Cotten’s next adventure. The science was quantum physics and the relic was a 5000-year-old crystal tablet that predicted the Great Flood and held the key to surviving Armageddon along with revealing the path to the Kingdom of Heaven. Cotten’s journey took her on a race to find the tablet before it could be destroyed by the same group that wanted to clone Christ.

thpBook 3 was The Hades Project, again combining science (quantum mechanics) and a relic (The Spear of Destiny). The Forces of Evil were back, this time about to reek havoc with the world’s first quantum computer. To complete their project, they needed the rarest element on earth to power the computer, and the Spear just happened to be made out of it. The race was on.

That brings us to The 731 Legacy and the discovery that the remnants of an ancient killer retrovirus are scattered across the human genome. The Forces of Evil figured out a way to reassemble the virus and create a new generation of suicide bombers that can kill selected targets with something as innocent as a cough on a crowded bus or a sneeze in church. Like the previous chapters of her journey, Cotten had a tough time dealing with this one and came close to tumbling off the edge of the abyss into Darkness.

The Cotten Stone journey has been great fun to write. And many have told us equally good fun to read. Lynn and I have watched Cotten grow from a rookie network reporter who rejected her special calling in life to senior investigative correspondent for the Satellite News Network and the full acceptance of her “special” legacy. She learned a lot along the way and so did we. And despite the fact that the journey has probably ended, at least on paper, the good news is that in the end, Cotten and her fans finally got what they’ve been asking for all along the way. What was it? You’ll just have to read The 731 Legacy.