John Ramsey Miller

This past week I drove to Mississippi from North Carolina and returned a few days later. I did the same thing two weeks ago to hunt (if you are keeping up with this clap-trap). The round trip is roughly 1500 miles and I make it five or more times a year. I truly enjoy the eleven-hour drive through the mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee, but the trip would be mostly tedium were it not for the books I listen to. I sometimes get books from our library, but if I don’t make it to the library, I stop at Cracker Barrel. This past trip I listened to Dean Koontz’s THE HOUSE OF THUNDER, and for the most part I enjoyed the story even though I found it dated. In fairness it was written in 1991. Koontz is a master at setting up a nice box of normal and having something unsettling slip into it and it’s done convincingly. I also listed to SMALL FAVOR by Jim Butcher. That is the first of his books I’ve had the pleasure of reading (listening to) and I intend to go back and read them all in order. I often wonder how many great authors are out there that I haven’t had the pleasure of reading.

My pet peeve with audio books is how many of them don’t bother to add what I believe is a detail of great importance, and courtesy to the listener. How much trouble could it possibly be to add the words, “This is the end of disk one. To continue put in disk number two.” On each disk. I hate to be listening to a chapter and when it ends the narrator goes right back to the start of the disk I just listened to. My own unabridged CD set for SMOKE & MIRRORS doesn’t have those crucial words at the end of those disks either. “They” usually don’t ask my opinion on such matters. I like to think there wasn’t room at the end of the disk for all those words. But maybe those words are copywrite protected like LET’S GET READY TO RUMBLE! in the first published audiotape and anyone using the words since has to pay.

I once wanted to use the e.e. cummings poem, BUFFALO BILL’s DEFUNCT, in my first book coming in dialog from my antagonist, and it turned out that e.e.’s estate wanted five thousand dollars to let me use it. The publisher and I agreed I could change the scene by omitting the poem, and the book suffered in my view. In fact, before I had to take that poem out I was a shoe-in for an Edgar, A Booker, A Penn Faulkner and the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Christmas is coming and I’m ready to be with my family over the holidays. By the way, I have a new book out December the 30th. THE LAST DAY.

Here’s the cover:
http://i200.photobucket.com/albums/aa107/JRMMiller_049/LAST1_Page_32.jpg

By Joe Moore

Who said there are no rules for writers? Of course there are:

1. Verbs HAS to agree with their subjects.
2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
3. And don’t start a sentence with a conjunction.
4. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
5. Avoid clichés like the plague.
6. Also, always avoid annoying alliteration.
7. Be more or less specific.
8. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are (usually) unnecessary.
9. Also too, never, ever use repetitive redundancies.
10. No sentence fragments.
11. Contractions aren’t necessary and shouldn’t be used.
12. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
13. Do not be redundant; do not use more words than necessary; it’s highly superfluous.
14. One should NEVER generalize.
15. Comparisons are as bad as clichés.
16. Don’t use no double negatives.
17. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc. . .
18. One-word sentences? Eliminate.
19. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
20. The passive voice is to be ignored.
21. Eliminate commas, that are, not necessary. Parenthetical words however should be enclosed in commas.
22. Never use a big word when a diminutive one would suffice.
23. Kill all exclamation points!!!
24. Use words correctly, irregardless of how others use them.
25. Understatement is always the absolute best way to put forth earth shaking ideas.
26. Use the apostrophe in it’s proper place and omit it when its not needed.
27. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."
28. If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a thousand times: Resist hyperbole; not one writer in a million can use it correctly.
29. Puns are for children, not groan readers.
30. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
31. Even IF a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
32. Who needs rhetorical questions?
33. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
And finally…
34. Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.

Did we miss any?

John Ramsey Miller

This week we learned that the Big 3 automakers bailout package included pay raises for Federal judges. I’m sure there’s lots of other pork in there as well. And it failed, and I’m not sure how I feel about it, but only because three million jobs are at stake. Everybody but the auto company’s executives knew where they’ve been screwing up for decades. All week long they pumped out cars by the thousands to ship out next week so they can sit rusting in lots across the country because nobody is buying. Less demand, fewer cars produced. Easy. Bad mileage, high gas prices, who wants them? High drama from the idiots we elected, as usual. There is NO leadership in DC. I pray that isn’t true after the 20th of January.

The governor of Illinois (a man who looks like Bob’s Big Boy) was arrested by the FBI for trying to sell Barak Obama’s Senate seat. Jesse Jackson’s son may or may not have been willing to buy it. He says he wasn’t going to buy it, but when has any politician admitted to doing anything on the first pass? Nothing ever changes in politics except the faces, and President elect Obama has so far made the campaigning-for-President Obama a pipe-dreamer at best and a skilled liar at worst. Not that there’s anything new in candidates lying, but a lot of people who are idealistic and believed the hype, are disappointed already, and they should be. I had an uncle who said the only thing under heaven worse than an attorney was a lawyer elected to an office.

A lady saw the Virgin Mary in an X-ray this week.

One of the pillars of Wall Street has been running a financial Ponzi scheme that cost his investors $50,000,000,000.00. Some of his clients were respected charities, and I suppose they’ll be bailed out along with the rich investors. Enron only lost a few billions more than this one guy.

In Greece thousands of Anarchists (mostly young people) burned the entire country, or large sections of it because some kid who’d been throwing Molotov cocktails at cops was killed by a ricocheting warning shot. The cop was put in to prison to placate the mobs, but yet they rage on and are still burning buildings and businesses. Call me old fashioned, but any kid who is threatening cops with death can catch a bullet and I won’t lead any riots. And it’s spreading across Europe like a plague. I’m not looking forward to the same here in the near future, but I smell it in the wind.

Caylee Antony’s corpse was found ½ mile from her home. Everybody in the United States, except the unfortunate child’s grandparents, knew the party gal killed her daughter, and that no mother who isn’t in a coma waits a month after the babysitter fails to return a child to tell someone about it. Just don’t happen.

Here’s a few headlines from this afternoon:
Canadian Man Builds Himself Robot Girlfriend, Clues found at Caylee kin home, Rapid-Fire Killer Robot Passes Flight Test, Muslim Scientists Prepare for Battle With Creationists, water vapor detected on distant planet, Who Needs the Big 3? Atlanta Company Plans New Police Car, Failing U.S. automakers popular in Europe, Teacher reveals Santa’s identity, Woolies’ facing bankruptcy, John Ramsey Miller’s dog Buddah run over by a gas truck…

I’m sure I’ve missed something huge, but the point is the world is feeding us plots and sub-plots and characters. Could you have not spotted something this week to put into your newest project?

By
John Gilstrap
www.johngilstrap.com

With the publication of No Mercy looming in just six months, I finally saw the cover art for the first time last week. If I knew how to insert pictures here, this would be the perfect place to do so, but alas, there lies the limit of my technical ability. So, please indulge me and visit my website via the link above. You don’t have to linger, but the new cover is proudly displayed there.

Sure, now’s fine. We’ll wait.

Thanks for that. Welcome back. Pretty cool, huh? I love the creepiness of it. When you consider that the primary purpose of a cover is to get a potential reader to pick it up off the shelf, I think it accomplishes its goal.

But I haven’t always been so lucky. In fact, early in my career, my covers ran the gamut from kinda weird to just plain boring. At All Costs, for example, featured a cityscape in the background, which I probably would have liked better if the book had taken place in a city. As it was, it was mostly set in remote, rural America. When I asked my editor at the time why they did the city thing, he told me it was because they couldn’t come up with anything better. Does that breed confidence, or what?

Nathan’s Run is a story about a 12-year-old boy on the run for murder, even as an assassin is on his heels to do him in. HarperCollins at the time saw fit to create a hardcover jacket that featured a sepia-colored image of a curve in the road. That’s it; just a road with stripes on it. It was certainly artistic, but I vastly preferred my British cover, which showed the image of a bad guy in whose sunglasses we could see the reflection of a boy running for his life.

The point where I am right now with No Mercy defines the stage of book-writing that I find most frustrating. From here forward, I am virtually powerless to affect the future of my labor of love. The manuscript is done, and with that final edit, I’ve handed the process over to the team of professionals who have to make all the other parts of the puzzle fit together. If the past is a predictor of the future, I’m in good hands; but it’s still hard to surrender control.

One of the great clichés of all time is that you can’t judge a book by its cover, yet all of us do it every day. So, what do y’all think? We’ve talked gender bias and age bias. We’ve touched on genre bias. What about cover bias? I confess that I’m a practitioner. Are you?

I’ve actually been dreading this post for a few days now. Not because I don’t enjoy blogging, or the debates and discussions it fosters: those I love. But I’m rapidly approaching my least favorite part of the writing process: the deadline. And I am way, way behind.

I start each day optimistically. I’ve completed a rough draft. A very rough one, if I’m being honest, riddled with typos and writing of the lowest caliber imaginable. But hey, the bones of the story are there, right? And some of my research has been completed. Of course, not the parts that might actually change the bones of said story–those I’m still working on. So I have minor panic attacks periodically, terrified that one of my experts is going to answer a question with, "Oh no, that won’t work at all. You’ll have to change all that."

I mentioned this to a friend the other night, a "literary" writer, who scoffed and replied, "Deadlines?! Haven’t met one yet. My last book was a year late." Lovely, if that’s the sort of thing your publisher tolerates. Mine does not. And so here I am, with two weeks remaining until I have to hand something to my editor that she’ll read without raising any alarms.

And therein lies the fear.

I realize this can seem like a shallow complaint. I’m lucky to even have a contract, and remain thrilled that my publisher accepted my proposal and wants to publish the book. It’s hardly fair to look back on those days when I was writing The Tunnels, spending weeks on a single chapter, as halcyon days. Because now, at least, I labor under the certainty that I will actually see those chapters in print. But still–nostalgia has a way of seeping in, usually when I’m at this stage of the writing process. What a luxury that was. I really wish I’d appreciated it more at the time. It took me a little over two years to write that book. For this one, I had four months.

I’m trying to edit 30 pages a day. Doesn’t sound like much, but I spent seven straight hours working on the manuscript today, and when I checked: 19 pages. Argh. Even if I work every night and through the weekend (a near impossibility with family commitments), I probably won’t make it. And somewhere in there I’m supposed to tour preschools, shop for the holidays, and decorate a Christmas tree. Everything else has fallen by the wayside, which includes answering emails, exercising, preparing healthy meals (or any meals). Lately every night is pizza night in our house. Even my husband is starting to complain about it, disproving my theory that he would happily eat pizza daily for the rest of his natural life (note: harkening back to our recent gender discussions, this has not motivated him to actually cook a meal).

And if I don’t meet the deadline? It won’t be end of the world, but it means less time on the next, even more critical draft. Our turnaround window is already fairly tight, and losing another week or two would probably mean pulling a few all-nighters in February. I shudder at the thought.

So forgive me for the abbreviated post. I’m off to cry quietly in the corner.

By John Ramsey Miller

Last week some woman in California had salsa shoot out from her blender and the red stain on the wall looked to her to be a precise likeness of the actual Virgin Mary. I’m not talking about a Virgin Mary (tomato juice, Tabasco, pepper, celery stick, but hold the vodka either. What are the odds that this freak accident might just be a random stain caused by a blender lid failure and not the actual Virgin Mary communicating with this Catholic housewife? It might be the former were it not for the unexplainable odor of roses in a kitchen that ought by rights to smell like decaying salsa. Just to make sure people make the connection, this woman placed a portrait (available in any Catholic relic superstore) of the Virgin Mary on the stove and pinned up her rosary in to encircle the Salsa Virgin Mary so one’s eyes immediately zero in on her SVM. This Holy kitchen event (worthy of being covered by the world press in the time of terror attacks) got me to thinking once again about the nature of religions icon sightings. We’ve all seen coverage of the face of Jesus in the screen door in a trailer park, drawn in dirt on the side of an eighteen wheeler, in a rust stain in a shower, and in a glass window in an office building. We’ve all seen the Virgin Mary spotted in the oozing of water leaking from the concrete wall under a bridge, in a potato chip, the spot on a cat’s stomach and in various other unusual places. People flock to these sights to see Jesus or Mary in the flesh, or Salsa, for themselves. It’s hard for me to imagine Jesus or Mary planning these events, or taking place in them. You can see a better likeness of either or both in any church or cathedral in the world.

The thing I find fascinating about these iconic appearances (or mysterious apparitions) is that Protestants “always” see Jesus, while Catholics seem universally to spot Mother Mary. Likenesses of Buddah and Mohammed either never turn up on a kettle fry, in black mold on sheetrock or some other odd media or simply aren’t ever covered by the world media. Well, I suppose any appearances by Mohammed would be immediately erased by nearby Moslems since there can be no likeness of him ever created for any reason whatsoever. I wonder if that was his edict or some decision of his loyal followers due to the sorry state of portrait art in the Middle East at the time? Obviously Mary and Jesus have the whole appearing icon thing monopolized. Graven images have come a very long way since the days when Mohammed was spreading his religion by the sword. In fairness most (if not all) religions have been spread by the sword, the dunking chair, or a nice hot fire.

You know, I like religion and I’m not surprised that the latest research says that you will live longer if you attend to church regularly. In fact the more often you go to church, the longer you live. When I sit through a church service time does tend to stand still, and an hour often feels like ten. I suppose, if that is correct, that if you have a Salsa Virgin Mary in your kitchen, a screen door Jesus on your trailer, or another equally interesting Holy Relic you could just hang out a at home and live as long as you like.

Any thoughts on these sightings?

By John Gilstrap
www.johngilstrap.com

Forgive me for wandering from the topic of writing, per se, to something that’s been bugging me.

Five days out of every week, I commute from the Virginia suburbs into Washington, DC via Metrorail. Generally, it’s a half-hour drive to the station in the morning, then a half hour on the train, topped by a three-block walk to my office, which is itself three blocks from the White House. Until I took my job with the trade association, I’d never worked downtown. Washington is a beautiful city, so there’s something attractively urban to me about the commute. Most days, it’s an opportunity to read in peace amidst a couple hundred strangers.

n its busiest, craziest days, Metro sets new records that top out somewhere south of 850,000 passengers. That includes commuters and tourists in the high season, along with Independence Day celebrations when about a million people flood the city for the fireworks. During those occasions, for security reasons, the Metro stations closet to the action are all closed off, forcing revelers to flood fewer stations located quite a few blocks away. Imagine thousands of people crammed onto an underground train platform, each of them wanting to get on the next subway. It’s actually scary when you’re in the middle of it. That’s why I never go downtown on the Fourth of July.

On January 20—Inauguration Day–DC government officials are reportedly anticipating a crowd of four million people to observe the festivities. That’s four times more people than Washington has ever seen for an event! Each of them needs to get in and out of the city, and, presumably, at some point during the festivities they’re going to have to eat. More than that, they’re going to have to pee—or, worse yet, make big potty. I don’t care how many porta-poops you import; there’s no way to support that much excrement.

Judging from the barricades that are already beginning to be staged around the city, huge swaths of preferred viewing real estate are going to be closed off to mere mortals to leave plenty of elbow space for the bigwigs. Widespread street closures will make parking garages inaccessible, which will in turn force hundreds of thousands of would-be drivers onto the subways for which access will be limited.

Now let’s throw in the security checkpoints that will search all purses and bags within X yards of the Capitol Building or the White House, along with the fact that a huge percentage of those being searched wouldn’t know which building was which without a picture to guide them. The mind boggles.

I personally don’t have any hard plans for that day, but I do know precisely where I will not be. What do y’all think? Is any historical event worth that much inconvenience?