By John Gilstrap

Close to a year ago, when I presented my short story, “All Revved Up and No Place to Go,” to the Rumpus Writers, the critique group of which I’ve been a member for roughly 15 years, the ten or fifteen seconds following the final passage were dominated by a heavy silence. I believe it was Ellen Crosby who spoke for the group when she said, “Oh, my God, I hate everybody in this story.”

To which I replied, “Thank you.”

“All Revved . . .” is, hands down, the darkest story I’ve ever written. You can find it in the recently published anthology, Bat Out Of Hell, edited by Don Bruns, and the story is inspired by the title of one of the songs on the famous Meat Loaf album from the 1970s. The story tells the tale of Ace Spade, an off-duty firefighter and search and rescue operator who’s trying to impress a young lady with his four-wheeling skills in the back woods of West Virginia when things go terribly wrong. After he wrecks his Jeep in the middle of nowhere, the man who they think is there to lend assistance turns out to be a killer who wants to hunt them down and kill them.

As regular Killzoners know, I don’t outline, so even I was surprised by the lengths to which our characters would go to stay alive. I don’t want to give to much away, but let’s just say that in the end, everyone acts in his or her best interests.

As a writer who’s carved a niche for myself by writing stories with moral clarity where good triumphs over evil, it was kind of refreshing to clean the creative pipes with a story where there really are no good guys–just . . . survivors.

Here’s my take on short stories: They’re not really part of an author’s permanent record, in the sense that I think they don’t necessarily reflect their true storytelling sensibilities. In a short story, I can feel free to kill a cat or cavort with vampires. I could even write a romance–even though I don’t think I’m actually capable of doing that.

This is why I cringe when I hear writerly advice given to newbies that they should cut their teeth writing short stories before they take on the burden of a novel. To me, that’s like telling a budding cook that they need to perfect the art of scrambling eggs before they bake Thanksgiving turkey. One has nothing to do with the other–or where the skill cross, the intersection is so tangential as to be meaningless.

It’s equally important to note that novel-writing skills can get you in trouble when crafting a short story. I was fortunate that submission rules asked for an approximate submission length of 8,000 words for Bat Out of Hell. If I’d had to turn in flash fiction, or anything under, say, 3,000 words, I would have considered myself unqualified from the start.

What say you, TKZ family? Are you a fan of short stories? Do you like to read them? Write them? Where do you go to find them?

By John Gilstrap

I posted here a few weeks ago that I am recovering from surgery on my lumbar spine–a two-level hemilaminectomy. (I just like the way the word sounds.) The surgery was successful, but like any invasion of one’s musculature and nervous system, recovery takes time. For me, that means resuming normal activity with one big asterisk: If what I’m doing at any time, whether walking, doing yard work, or shooting at the range, if the activity starts to hurt too much, I am to stop. There is no glory to be gained by pushing through the pain. Doing so today will just make tomorrow suck.

This advice occurred to me the other day as I was reading a piece posted on Medium entitled, “Write Like the Rent Is Due Next Week” by Felicia C. Sullivan. The piece begins,

My rent is due on Monday. I’ve listed four maxi dresses while shoveling down buttered pasta for breakfast. Refreshed my eBay store at least seven times in the past hour. I scan my home like a thief. What else can I sell?

The fascinating, extraordinarily well-written piece goes on at length to tell us that Felicia was “born to tell stories” while lamenting that “the romantic writer life” was a sham unless you had parents folding fat bills into your hands.” No one

 told me how far you’ll have to hustle to live with integrity. If I didn’t take the fancy marketing gigs, I’d have to hustle like my life depended on it. . . . I’d draft first lines while praying the ache in my mouth I’ve been ignoring won’t turn into another $3,000 root canal.

And then there’s this:

Creating art in the barbaric slaughterhouse that is late-stage capitalism, while you’re wondering how far and wide you can stretch a single dollar — it’s not romantic or noble, it’s messy, often erratic, and filled with crippling self-doubt.

Truly artistic writers, we learn, can no longer make a living, in large measure due to:

dwindling attention spans and an audience seal-clapping for simple prose. Easy stories. Happy endings.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen of the Readerverse, your selfish desire to be entertained by what you read is forcing some navel-gazing Bohemian aspirants into the position where they must consider the horror of, you know, getting a job outside their own minds and interact with three-dimensional people who exist beyond their laptops.

Want to make money off of your writing?

Dear writers and musicians and artists of all stripes: Get over your precious selves. I am 100% with you when you claim that the thing you create is art–even if it’s ugly or I don’t understand it. The imagination superhighway has no lanes. Let your colors and your chords and your characters run wherever they take you. That’s the beauty of art. It literally has no bounds, no definition.

The instant you put a price tag on it, though, and try to sell it to me, your art becomes a product, and you’ve surrendered the command chair to everyone else but you. If your masterpiece is a self-indulgent, depressing expose of your inner demons and you don’t care about “seal-clapping” readers, good on you. Just expect to sell fewer copies than the author who considers himself and entertainer and writes a potboiler targeting the largest possible audience.

This shouldn’t hurt.

When I read the angst inherent to Ms. Sullivan’s prose, which is amplified severalfold by some of the comments, I find myself confused. If it all hurts that much, why do it? Why not take a break from it? To posit that she’s “born” to inflict this kind of emotional pain on herself makes no more sense to me than to posit that one can be born to pull one’s fingernails out.

Precious few writers ply their craft full time, and one who’s very close to me chose to go back to a day job just to break the claustrophobia of fulltime writing.

Life is about priorities.

I cannot imagine a circumstance where writing would ever be the first priority in my life. That slot belongs to family, always and forever. And you can’t take care of your family if you can’t pay the rent. If you can’t pay the rent without having a day job, well, I guess that day job needs to be pretty high on the priority list, doesn’t it?

By way of shameless self-promotion, I’ve reactivated my YouTube channel, A Writer’s View of Writing and Publishing, with an episode focused on the very topic of Setting Your Priorities As A Writer. I invite you to give it a look if you get a chance.

By John Gilstrap

During my 35 years as a firefighter and safety engineer, I conducted a great deal of training to professionals whose products and services I did not fully understand. That lack of understanding could become a problem only if I let that happen because let’s face it: the safety and reporting requirements for a degreaser are largely the same whether you’re degreasing razor blades or gun barrels.

To streamline the teaching process, I created the generic franistans and fornasteins to serve my purposes as I needed them. The two items were always incompatible. If it was an electrical safety class, they’d be of different voltages (or different continents), if they were bits of fire apparatus, the threads wouldn’t line up. And in a hazmat class, god forbid that you store franistan chloride next fornastein sulfate, lest you create a cloud of methyl-ethyl badsh*t.

As an aside, a blithwhap is any item that is not a hammer yet is used as a hammer.

It occurs to me that franistans and fornasteins form the basis of a great deal of science fiction and fantasy. Just because a thing or a planet or a people aren’t real doesn’t mean that they can’t be assigned characteristics that make them real. That’s what this fiction gig is all about. In the case of fantasy in particular, it’s a personal bugaboo of mine that if I cannot pronounce a word in my head, I cannot read the story, and as a result, I know I’m being ejected from a lot of really good storytelling.

Want to know what you got wrong?

I was at a party the other night when the hostess told me how much her husband loves my books, but how he makes notes on details that I get wrong. “He won’t share them if you won’t ask for them, though.”

Hell shall freeze over. And here’s why: 1) her husband is a good friend and he’s got a fully functioning voice box with which he could ask me himself if he wanted to share his insights; 2) the book is already out and the damage already done; and 3) I probably won’t care.

<cue organ chord>

It’s not that I won’t care care, but that the areas of this friend’s expertise are very high-tech, and I will therefore always get things wrong, and the mistakes are of a nature that only he and a dozen other people on the planet would notice. This is the wondrous element of fiction: it’s mostly made up.

If your story needs a bajillion millimeter bombinator to launch a thousand-ton projectile to Mars from Bikini Atoll, I say go for it, but be very careful of the point of view from which you report the launch. If it’s from the POV of a kid on the playground, it’s probably just a big loud rocket ship. If it’s from the POV of launch control, well, you’ve got some serious explaining to do. Start with the chemistry and physics. At its heart, though, the bombinator is just a cousin of the franistan.

I set Burned Bridges, the first in my new Irene River thriller series, in Jenkins County, West Virginia, which might as well be Franistania, West Virginia. Set in the Eastern Panhandle, Jenkins County physically resembles the actual Berkeley, Jefferson, and Morgan Counties that define the Panhandle, but it’s got an entirely different political structure. It’s a fictional nonfiction place.

We all know that guns will get you in trouble when you write about them. The average mystery fan is probably fine knowing that Detective Jones is carrying a pistol. The average thriller fan will want to know that he’s carrying a Glock. My fans will know that he’s carrying a chambered Glock 19 in a Kydex holster on his right side with two spare 17-round magazines on his left.

The point here is to write for the audience you most care about, and accept that someone will always be a little disappointed.

By John Gilstrap

About 25 years ago (and at least that many books ago), I was in Hollywood at the Warner Brothers lot, writing a script for a film called Young Men And Fire, which I foolishly thought would be an adaptation of the wonderful Norman McLean book of the same name, but turned out to be something different.

My boss at the time was Len Amato, then a producer for Baltimore/Spring Creek Pictures, and more recently president of HBO Films. Len was a great guy to work for–very patient and a solid mentor to young and inexperienced screenwriters. I remember turning in a scene I’d written in the script that had some really cool, innovative stuff going on. If I recall properly, it was about secondary characters doing the cool stuff to rescue the lead character, who would be listed as the “star” of the picture. Len read it, said some complimentary things, then smacked me with one of the great lightbulb moments of my writing career:

“John, remember that the star gets to do all the cool stuff.”

Extrapolating out, this means that the star (main character) should own every scene in which he or she is present. Because they’re the ones driving the story, they should also be the ones driving their scenes.

I was reminded of Len Amato’s mentorship a week or so ago, when my editor at Kensington, the wonderful Michaela Hamilton, sent me her editorial letter on the manuscript for Scorched Earth, the next Jonathan Grave thriller, due out next spring. In it, I presented scenes where the bad guys were setting up their bad guy stuff in active ways, while Jonathan and his team spent most of the first third of the book researching databases and connecting dots. They really don’t do much of anything. If Scorched Earth were a mystery, then the quiet sleuthing would be fine.

But my fans are not looking for a mystery from me. They’re looking for a thriller, and in thrillers, the main character (the star) makes things happen. Plots points are revealed kinetically, the results of the star’s actions.

I’d forgotten Len Amato’s Dictum.

And heres’ the thing: While I was and still am very proud of the story, I knew something was wrong with it. I told my wife that the story’s heartbeat didn’t seem quite right. For the life of me, though, I couldn’t see what was wrong.

But Michaela Hamilton did. This is the wonder of a long relationship with a fantastic editor. Once she showed my how in the first act, Jonathan processes and acts on information that is provided to him, rather than hunting down and finding the information himself.

Well, crap. I don’t mean to sound un-humble, but it’s been decades since I’ve been compelled to a massive rewrite of a manuscript because of editorial input. More than a few of my books have required no change at all beyond copy edits.

At their face, the changes I’m making affect only the first act. In reality, because my plots are tightly woven and fairly intricate, there’s no such thing as a first act change that doesn’t have impact on some scene or line of dialogue later in the book.

It’s my own fault. I’ve been wildly distracted by various life events in the past 12 months, and in retrospect, I tried to get away with a shortcut that didn’t work. I didn’t do it intentionally, but if I’d been 100% mentally in the game, I’d be on to my next project by now, not causing stress for myself and the entire production team by stopping forward progress and working backwards to fix a problem that never should have existed.

I think it’s important to understand that every observation made by my editor–and the changes they triggered–were all presented as merely suggestions. They were willing to publish the book exactly as I had written it, but “maybe it would be better if . . .”

There’s no maybe about it. I’ve given myself two weeks to make the changes.

By John Gilstrap

By John Gilstrap

You don’t work in this business for very long before you’re hit with what I consider to be the largely unanswerable question: Where do your ideas come from? Generally, my truthful answer is, “I have no idea.” They just somehow arrive when I need one.

But with the upcoming release of Burned Bridges, the first entry in my new Irene Rivers thriller series (launched yesterday!), I finally have an answer.

But first, let me share a little bit about the premise of the series. For those who are not familiar with my Jonathan Grave series, Irene Rivers serves as the director of the FBI in each book. At the conclusion of Zero Sum, Irene torpedoes the presidential administration of Tony Darmond, a corrupt, largely incompetent criminal who uses the clout of the federal government for his own personal gain. (He’s been president since I started writing the series in 2007, so don’t read present-day politics into the narrative.) The blowback on Irene is enormous. She resigns her position and intends to escape the madness and corruption of Washington by moving to family land in Jenkins County, West Virginia.

I loved the idea when I pitched it and Kensington bought it, but then I was left with the challenge of hanging a plot onto the premise. That’s always the challenge. But while the Irene books are thrillers, they’re different than the Grave books. I didn’t want to merely create a female Jonathan Grave.

One late autumn afternoon, as I was walking around our property in West Virginia in the company of Kimber, my 22-pound protector and watchdog, I was squeezing my brain to hatch an idea that felt right. I wanted it to be West Virginia-centric, but in the way that C.J. Box’s works are Wyoming-centric.

About midway through the walk, Kimber became fascinated with one of the many limestone caves we have around here. She was pulling on her leash to go into the hole (that’s the Boston terrier in her). As I pulled her back, I said, “Whatever’s in there, you don’t want to meet it. It will ruin your day.”

Ding ding! There it was. The beginning spot to begin building my story.

It’s hard to see, but that hole is the entry to a cave that I will never explore.

Suppose one of Irene’s kids discovered the skeletal remains of a body stuffed into a cave somewhere on her property. Clearly it’s a murder victim, an adolescent male.

Who killed him? Because I write thrillers, the killer has to be someone local.

Suppose the murder happened over 30 years ago. There’s no statute of limitations on murder, so to what lengths will the murderer go to protect his secret?

Now suppose the murderer is an established member of the community–part of a family who’s lived here for hundreds of years. What will the reaction be from the locals when this interloper from Washington, DC, starts uncovering secrets that have long been buried?

Meanwhile, how about Irene’s kids? They’ve been forced to move from the bustling DC suburbs to the middle of nowhere. How are they going to take the move?  One of her kids is a teen, the other a tween, and they have to make their way through new schools where most of their classmates have known each other since kindergarten. How does that go for them?

This is how I “pants” my way through the writing process. Every question needs an answer, but to keep things interesting, each answer needs to trigger a new question. I’m very excited about this book. I love the characters, and I love the twists in the plot.

So, what about you, TKZ family? Can you articulate where your ideas come from?

By John Gilstrap

My natural storytelling instinct for my books leans exclusively to third person, shifting points of view. I’ll write an occasional short story in first person, but those are rare, as well. I don’t know why that is, and as with so much else as a self-taught writer, I try not to dwell too much on the whys of my process for fear that if I think too hard I screw something up–much as my one and only golf lesson did to my golf game. Once you start thinking about every movement, no movement feels natural anymore.

Over the course of writing the past few books, I’ve run into an interesting challenge, where the timeline of one groups of characters, and the events of their lives is unfolding weeks earlier than those of my primary characters. Ultimately, the two groups will come together in a tumultuous manner in the same time and place, but the journey to get them there bears a high risk of confusing the reader.

The problem is even more challenging because the separation consists only of weeks, not years. It would be easy to drop in slug lines like 1847 versus 2026, because readers can keep track of those. I don’t think you can say the same about May 14 versus May 5. Readers would be compelled to flip back and forth just to keep up.

My upcoming thriller, Burned Bridges (May 27), begins:

Chapter One

Thirty-Five years ago

Then chapter one shows two teenagers disposing of the body of a third teenager in the opening of a limestone cave. Truth be told, I could legitimately have written that chapter as a prologue, but I have a visceral dislike of prologues. Then, the second chapter begins:

Chapter Two

Present day

In this chapter, we meet my protagonist, Irene Rivers, and her family, and discover that her nephew has discovered a body that had been stuffed in a cave on their property. And then the story remains exclusively in the present day, so I don’t use any more time stamps.

In my Victoria Emerson trilogy, I figured that after a nuclear holocaust, all time would be tracked relative to Hell Day–the date of the attack, so as I moved from one timeline to another, I used Hell Day as the anchor at the top of each chapter:

Hell Day Plus 22

Where events spanned consecutive chapters, or where I was shifting the point of view on a single event, I’d make sure not to lose to the reader by putting a slug like this at the top of the chapter:

Hell Day Plus 22 (Same Day)

I’m currently putting the finishing touches on Scorched Earth, #18 in the Jonathan Grave thriller series, and I’m wrestling with a new twist on the timeline problem. In this case, the other timeline is presenting essential backstory, lived out in real time for the reader, but I’m finding it hard not to squander the big “organ chord” reveal sooner than I want the reader to know it.

I know that in a conference setting or in an academic setting, many of us like to express this thing we do in term of art. But sometimes, it feel more like carpentry–making those pieces you cut wrong somehow join together anyway.

Y’all got any tricks for writing conflicting or parallel timelines? Anybody else had an instructor ruin your ugly yet perfectly passable golf game and turn you into a worm burner?

By John Gilstrap

As most of you know by now, I am an unapologetic gun guy. I own a few, and I train with them regularly. I enjoy the process of taking them apart and cleaning them and then putting them back together again. The aroma of Hoppes cleaning solvent mixed with gun oil is perfume. I belong to a shooting club that’s populated by the nicest, down-to-earth folks you’d ever want to know. But it would be unwise to break into their homes or mess with their families.

Weaver Stance

As with any other bit of hardware, trends come and go. In the video above, from the SHOT Show, I am shooting a suppressed Glock 19, using a modified Weaver stance, with my body bladed to the target and my right foot behind my left. Think of it as a natural fighting stance. It’s the stance I was first taught a thousand years ago, and it makes the most sense to me. Most fights don’t start with guns, they start with fists, and the Weaver stance mimics a boxer’s stance.

Isosceles Stance

Nowadays, the Weaver stance is considered outdated, and for the last eight years or so, every range instructor I’ve encountered has scolded me for using it. The new trend in shooters stances is the Isosceles stance. In this one, you square your body to the target, with arms completely outstretched. In your fiction, if you’ve got a rookie cop, this is the stance that they will acquire when they shoot, because in stressful situations, people revert back to their training. Among gun folk, there’s a raging debate over the relative wisdom of the two stances.

Personally, the Isosceles stance makes no sense to me. You present a bigger target and by extending your arms out so far, you make it easy for a bad guy to disarm in close quarters confrontations.

Everything changed when that jerk was foolish enough to kill John Wick’s dog, Daisy, and the world was introduced to an established, effective, but until that movie, a little known set of gun handling techniques called Center Axis Relock.

This technique embraces the fact that gunfights are often intimate affairs, conducted within bad breath distance. From the instant the pistol is drawn, it’s ready to join the fight. At the draw, your body is severely bladed toward the target, such that your elbow is pointing at the bad guy’s center of mass. In close quarters, your elbow acts as a front sight and allows you to get shots on close-in targets instantly.

When it’s time to deal with targets beyond, say, 7 yards, you bring the pistol up to the position shown in the picture by Keanu Reeves. This grip and stance is tough to master, and even in the picture, Keanu isn’t doing it quite right. The difficult elements are to keep your wrist straight in line with your forearm (Keanu’s great on that), but he needs to have the gun canted over further to aim only with his left eye–otherwise at that distance, he’ll see two front sights.

The downsides to this stance, I think, are pretty severe outside of a fight for your life–which a day at the range is not. The report of the gunshot will be much louder, you’ll be more susceptible to powder spray from the ejection port, and anytime you’re pulling triggers close to your body, you’re upping the likelihood of shooting yourself.

Your protagonist, however, has no fear of any such outcomes.

Comments and questions are welcome.

And now, by way of shameless self promotion . . .

Here’s the press release for BURNED BRIDGES, the first book of my new Irene Rivers thriller series.

By John Gilstrap

I enjoy speaking to crowds. I like the immediacy of it, the direct interaction with the audience. I’ve previously shared tips and insights on how to deliver more memorable presentations (memorable in a good way–not the way we remember Uncle Henny’s drunken wedding toast). Today, I want to address a specific and mostly painful corner of every author’s public speaking life: the live reading.

Personally, I don’t get the attraction of readings. As a consumer of books, I’m much more interested in learning about the author and his process than I am in hearing him give what is almost always a bad performance of words that I’m going to read for myself anyway.

Said bad performances fall into two major categories for me:

1. The dreadful, droning monotone of an author who seems somehow surprised by the words he’s projecting to either his feet or his lap. If he’s been given a microphone, he’s holding it in the hand that is also holding the book, rendering it useless. If they’re only moderately bad, they’ll be done in 10 minutes, but because Murphy rules the world, the really bad ones will mumble on for 20-25 minutes. When they’re done, the always polite bookstore audience will reward them with a golf clap.
2. The pretentious literary author who took elocution lessons from Henry Higgins himself and over-enunciates every syllable of his golden prose that may or may not tell an actual story. When he’s done, his students in the audience will reward him with cheers and a standing O.

There’s a fundamental difference between delivering a speech vs. delivering a live reading.

When I deliver a speech or teach a workshop, I get to be myself. As the subject matter expert for the duration of the gig, I deliver my information my way. The only role I play is myself.

Live readings of fiction require a level of acting which I don’t possess. I feel silly raising my voice to sound like a woman or a child. Acting and writing are related yet entirely different skill sets. Given that this is the entertainment business, nothing makes an audience more uncomfortable than an uncomfortable performer.

When the game doesn’t suit you, cheat.

Remember Kobayashi Maru? In the Star Trek universe, Star Fleet cadets are faced with an unwinnable simulation called the Kobayashi Maru test, in which the cadet has to choose between risking near certain death to rescue the crew of a fuel ship, or leaving the fuel ship crew to die. Captain James T. Kirk made history by being the first cadet ever to solve the dilemma. He did it by changing the program. He cheated because he didn’t accept the inevitability of losing. I always admired that about him.

When I am left with no choice but to read from my book, I do not, in fact, read from my book. Instead, I read an original work that is closely based on my book. That means never reading from Page One. If I did that, people in the audience who already had a book in their hand would be confused as they tried to read along, and they’d miss everything I was presenting.

My specially prepared piece is engineered to be 5 minutes long, give or take ten seconds, and it will end with a cliff hanger. The piece will include within the text all the introductory information needed to know who the characters are, and I will have excised all elements of backstory, and all unnecessary foreshadowing. It’s a stand-alone performance piece that parallels the book’s events and hopefully whets the appetites of potential readers who are on the fence about buying the book.

Because it will be the same piece every time I read for that particular book, I’ll have it largely memorized, so I’ll be able to make eye contact with the audience. Even if I can’t do the acting, I’m still communicating.

What about you folks? What are your secrets to surviving the live read-aloud?

Don’t miss the launch of Burned Bridges–the first book in my brand new thriller series!

By John Gilstrap

On March 20, less than two weeks ago as I write this, I received the following email out of the blue:

Dear John,

Last week, your name and “Zero Sum” came up in a staff meeting…

It was the strong opinion of our award-winning Branding / P.R. firm that you are entitled to and would benefit from a significantly greater visibility in the modern world.

We have a new low-cost, high-impact plan that I sense might be perfect for you. Here is our Wikipedia page for your review: [redacted]

Can we arrange a convenient time to discuss this, John?

Warmly,

[President of a well-established, high-powered public relations firm in California]

Yeah, right. I know a scam when I see it. Some fraudster expects me to believe that a firm that represents some really well-known folks is talking about my paperback original that dropped over nine months ago? I might live in West Virginia, but I’m no rube.

Funny thing though. The address for the incoming email matched the email address on the company website. And the Better Business Bureau. I decided maybe it was a mistake to ignore this email completely.

I went stealthy. I went to the company website and filled out the general interest form that anyone from the general public would fill out. That form includes my phone number, and in the comments section, I referenced the email I had received from the president. Then I replied to the original email thusly:

Dear XXX,

 

Lovely to hear from you. These being the awkward times that they are, I have sent a note back through your website seeking authentication of this email. Please feel free to call me on the phone number I left on that inquiry. I look forward to speaking with you.

 

Best,

 

John Gilstrap

To which he promptly replied,

Dear John:

Yes, it’s me, and to be open, I could weep over the seeming necessity of your note.

Warmly,

He called me later that evening and we had a very nice chat about author branding and what he and his firm could do to help me. The details aren’t important here, but they resonated with me. They come with a price tag, of course–significant, but not bank breaking, and hey, I just got a movie deal.

After laying out the general elements of the plan, he closed by saying he didn’t want me to make a decision right then. There are things I need to do to make this work, so there’s an element of commitment. He urged me to think it over for a day or two, but no longer than that. In his experience, after two days, a maybe should be a no, even if the client talks himself into a yes.

I sent him an email the next morning telling him I was ready to go.

A lot of career elements seem to be aligning for me these days. In addition to the SixMin movie deal, Kensington is repackaging the Grave backlist and changing the format of the Grave front list to trade paper, all while launching the new Irene Rivers thriller series.

For this public relations opportunity to arrive as it did and when it did somehow feels right. So I’m rolling the dice and writing some checks.

The John Gilstrap Brand

When it comes to marketing and publicity, I don’t know what sells books and what doesn’t. I don’t think anyone does. But I know that I can work a crowd well and that I deliver a pretty decent speech and workshop, and that a higher profile generally is better for sales than a lower profile.

Enter the John Gilstrap brand–similar to yet different than yours truly. Yes, it makes me uncomfortable because I don’t fully understand all of it yet, and because I do know that it comes with a level of self aggrandizement that will make me uncomfortable. Somehow, if all goes as planned, with the help of my new best friends on the Left Coast, the world is going to see a freshly packaged new breed of author who’s politically conservative, carries a pistol, drinks martinis and lives in the woods of West Virginia.

How they do that without pissing off half of the reading public is a mystery for the future.