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?

There was an interesting article in the Guardian this week asking whether or not young female writers are operating at a deficit when it comes to major literary awards. Not due to any shortcomings on their part, but because (as the author posits) "the literary industry as a whole – agents, editors, booksellers and critics – currently offer disproportionate encouragement to aspiring male writers to produce the kind of serious-minded, bookish work that gets on shortlists, compared to young female writers." The argument being that for whatever reason, publishers prefer discovering the next Norman Mailer to finding another Toni Morrison.

I’m not entirely certain I agree with this, but it’s an interesting piece, particularly since it was written by a young male author. I also did a quick head count, and during the past two decades only five women have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Five women won the Man Booker Prize. Only with the Pulitzer did women even approach parity, with eight out of twenty taking home the prize.

This got me thinking about gender bias in our own  neck of the woods. When my agent first called to sign me, she was noticeably taken aback. Toward the middle of our conversation she confessed that after reading THE TUNNELS, she’d thought I was a man (though the name "Michelle" was pretty straightforward, in my opinion). Since the subject matter was so dark, she felt it might appeal to more male readers than female ones. She recommended that I consider adopting a pseudonym, or shortening my name to just the initials (sadly, that would leave me "M.A.Gagnon," which doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue, and sounds like something the Mayo Clinic might have a specialized treatment for).

In the end, I opted to stick with my full name. Partly because I didn’t entirely believe that gender bias exists, partly because I’m just obstinate that way. But I do wonder. When I meet people at conferences who have read my books, the universal exclamation is, "but you seem like such a sweet girl." I suspect that very few male authors are referred to as "sweet" when they meet their fans, or hear that they seem "too happy to write these sorts of books."

Impossible to say whether or not it affects my sales. Occasionally this question rears its head on one of the mystery discussion groups, and everyone gets up in arms. Most people declare that they will happily read any book regardless of who wrote it. But does that apply to the world at large? Especially since I don’t write cozies (which are marketed more toward women), but thrillers, is my name working against me?

Where do you stand? Will you read anything by anyone? Or does gender bias sneak into your decision-making process, subconsciously or otherwise?

John Miller with Ramsey in the middle

The Mayan calendar ends in 2012, or so I’ve been told. I have been thinking about the future a lot and I have a few thoughts I’m almost sort of fairly sure of. Firstly human life on earth will probably survive 2012––the actual year and possibly even the movie of the same name. If the world does end in 2012, I’ve gotten one hell of a deal on my mortgage as I will have only paid five of the thirty years worth of payments they are expecting me to make. If the world does end, it’ll be a shock to a lot of people, but not for long. Most of us will be in denial way after we find the world dead, and denial is one of my favorite states of being.

Lately I’ve been thinking that maybe I would have been better served to have become a sheet metal bender, or a very sexy model and sometimes prostitute, or a super hero with some really neat power like mentally cashing checks across state lines. Being a writer is just so hard. Truth is, this week I’ve got nothing at all to write about. I mean my son did strike out to go back to school after the holiday and his car broke down and I had to drive a million miles and deal with his car and bring him back until I can get his car fixed on Monday, and I’m thinking being a parent never stops being hard, expensive and tiring. And what with Thanksgiving and Black Friday with a Walmart worker being crushed in the melee and the end of the world coming up in five years I think I’ll slide this week and stop this before this gets really ugly.

Plus I’m making venison sausage this weekend.

John Ramsey Miller

I am writing this on Tuesday because when it runs Saturday I’ll be deer hunting in dear old Mother Mississippi, and by 7 AM EST I very likely will have knocked down at least one deer. I hunt in November and December with the same boys, now older men like myself, whom I’ve been hunting with for forty-two years. My family eats venison all year long. I love it, my wife loves it, my sons love it, and their children love it. Yum, yum. I have never killed a deer I didn’t eat and I guess I’ve killed two or three every year I’ve hunted. Venison makes the best chili meat, the best crock-pot roast, the best tenderloin medallions, the best ground hamburger. Aside from the possibility that they eat grass tainted with pesticides or fertilizers, they are grass fed, acorn tempted and pure. Game won’t add weight to you either. Game and fresh vegetables is the best diet there is if you ask me. Nobody in my family is fat, nor are any particularly wormy-looking.

I sometimes hunt wild hogs in Tennessee and although wild pork smells dreadful when you cook it (we do that outside on the grill) it makes the best spaghetti sauce I’ve ever tasted. I also love boar chops, wild pork tenderloin, and Bar-B-Q. Store-bought meat has nothing on game. Game is 100% natural with no harmful fat, antibiotics, steroids, or other drugs in their systems. It keeps better than store bought. My wife cans it or freezes it. It is apparent that God put game on the earth to feed man correctly, and every time I take a game animal I thank Him for supplying the food. I almost forgot. Another good thing is, because I write about deer hunting in some of my novels, I get to call it research.

We just harvested a whole bunch of meat chickens we raised from chicks, and after 8 weeks their dressed weight ranged from 4.5 to 6.8 lbs. We fed them organic feed that comes from a local feed mill where they grind everything themselves from quality ingredients.

Our laying hens eat only organic feed, free-range for bugs and plants two hours a day, and our eggs are at least twice as tasty as store bought. I have fourteen, but want fifty or more so I’m building new quarters for them. Those I will not kill. When they stop laying, I have a friend with a large farm and he will let them pasture there as long as they live.

I do not think it’s the end of the world yet, and I’m pulling for President Elect Obama, but even if the country doesn’t collapse with half the country out on the street, food riots and infected zombies roaming the countryside, I’m serious about surviving as close to the bone as I can during the next few uncertain months and years and part of that is feeding my family as best I can. The farming community around here sort of roll their eyes at us, and probably think we’re being secretly filmed as part of some kind of reality show, but that’s okay. We are trying, and having one heck of a good time.

I know some people are opposed to killing animals, and frankly I don’t enjoy that part of hunting or harvesting, but there’s no other practical way to separate animals from their meat.

Hunting and raising animals gives me a chance to enjoy nature and think about my life and what I want to write, and sometimes even if I intend to keep doing it at all. Not that I don’t love writing, because I do and it has been good to me over the years. I just keep thinking that I should start some kind of a family business that involves my sons and grandkids. Maybe we can manufacture some sort of widget nobody can figure out how to live without owning. I do know that it should be some sort of business that won’t fail miserably, but I just don’t know what that could be yet. Feel free to give me some sure-fire ideas.

No Guarantees or
The Sophomore Principle
By John Ramsey Miller

When I speak to book clubs, writing students in high schools and colleges, I often tell them the story of my pre-career and payment of dues, but not my fall from grace and resurrection.

I wrote four books in my low-rent apartment bedroom on a computer set on a door supported by sawhorses. I spent five years writing my fiction full time while my wife worked at a bank. Our family car was a 1981 Camaro with 200,000 miles on it. To accommodate our youngest of three I made a jump seat of foam to go over the center hump in the back and I installed a seat belt for him since the car was designed for four people, not five. Most people who knew us during those years thought I was a parasitic deadbeat until I sold my first novel. My wife believed in me and she insisted that I give writing everything I had for a few years, and that I would know when it was time to move on. She never doubted that I would succeed, and that trust in my ability was my fuel and my inspiration.

After the first attempt at a novel, I acquired an agent who schlepped my first four around to the major and minor houses. I accumulated over 100 rejection slips before I sold The Last Family to Beverly Lewis at Bantam. She had my first three, rejected them all, but she saw something in them she liked, and she called and told me that if I would rewrite the draft taking into consideration her concerns, that she would like to see it again. I did and she made an offer on THE LAST FAMILY.

THE LAST FAMILY was something of a hit. It sold 40,000 copies in Hardcover, did amazingly well in paper back, was a Literary Guild Main Selection, was translated into a dozen languages, was optioned for a film, and gathered a stack of glowing reviews. The publisher offered a money-back-if-not-satisfied guarantee on the HC and they ran full-page ads in USA Today. I went on a 13-city tour at the request of Books A Million. I was wined and dined by the publisher and was offered a three book, seven-figure contract. After years of working hard, I thought I’d been escorted to the front of the line, and I was going to be right up there with my literary heroes.

I was no longer a deadbeat. Our friends said they’d always known I was a talent and that I’d eventually sell a book. I was an honest-to-God-fiction author with a big contract. I bought a four-bedroom house, wrote checks for a minivan and a Honda Accord, and the Millers moved to a wonderful and small southern town with good schools for my sons and nice neighbors. I had a large comfortable office in the new house, but I was so swept up in being a successful author, that I failed to concentrate on my writing. I had a deadline for my second book, and I made the date easily with a nice thick manuscript entitled THE DOWN DOGS. The trouble was, my editor didn’t think it was up to snuff (or more likely up to my pay grade), and to be perfectly honest, it wasn’t a worthy follow-up. I tried and tried to get it right. It was a book with decent enough characters, but structurally it had weak bones and I couldn’t make it work because I couldn’t see that I just wasn’t thinking hard enough and writing before I had thought things through. It was so frustrating that my editor suggested we scrap it and start from scratch with a new book. The publisher flew me to New York so I could pitch a new book idea, which was not bad at all, and so I went back to work. My contract was in jeopardy and I knew it. Now I was working in panic mode, and fear is a killer of creativity. I sent in a first draft and the publisher decided to pull the plug and I was released from my contract. Luckily I had earned out the advance, so there was no financial ugliness. Nobody was happy about it, and my editor and I kept in touch and she never stopped pulling for me, and I’ll never forget her continuing encouragement and the fact that she was always willing to talk to me about what I was working on.

After a few years spent actually writing every day and thinking about my work and being supported emotionally by friends like John Gilstrap, I got a new agent and went back in search of a publisher. As fate would have it, a highly respected editor at my old house read INSIDE OUT and wanted to buy it. Due to the publisher’s less-than-positive experience with me, she fought an uphill battle, but after a rewrite and an outline for a follow up novel, I signed another three-book contract. After those books were completed, I signed another. I have just delivered the last book under that last contract and I’m not sure I’ll be offered another one. My publisher loves the books, they even like me, but it’s the bean count that matters in the end. If I write this next book without a commitment from a publisher, so it goes. I’ll survive, and write without knowing if it will sell.

Being under contract actually only means the publisher has first refusal on the books in that contract, so I never know from one book to the next if I’ll be able to interest the publisher in the book I’ve just written. It’s been psychologically preferable to selling one book at a time, and usually the publisher does publish the books under the contract. It also allows an author to work with the same people book after book. Some think a publisher’s level of interest lags with familiarity––especially if the author doesn’t break out as soon as they would like. So I guess the question is whether changing publishers and sales teams a good thing or a bad thing?

By John Gilstrap
www.johngilstrap.com

I’m not making this up:

About seven or eight years ago, a former business colleague of mine called to tell me that his twenty-something son wanted to write a novel, and to ask if I would be willing to show him the ropes. I said yes, of course, and we all gathered at a Northern Virginia restaurant for dinner.

His son—we’ll call him Mark because I can’t remember his name—sat quietly through most of the meal while his father, Lloyd, explained this lavish plan he had put together to make his son a fortune by writing a hit book. Writing is a business, Lloyd explained, and since Mark wants to write full time, Lloyd pulled some strings to assemble a board of directors to fund the start-up costs (folding money for Mark) and to provide quality control for the product (the book). Mark would submit each new chapter to the board for approval, and then together they would determine the plot points that would generate the most revenue, based on market analyses of what sold well. With proper business oversight, they would have a product that they could all be proud of.

As this presentation ground on, complete with market charts, I watch Mark sink further and further into his chair. When Lloyd was done, he got to the reason I was there: to give some tips on what plot points sell the best. I was also offered a seat on the board, but I refused. Instead, I told him that if torturing his son was really the point of this exercise, then pulling out his toenails with pliers would be more merciful. Toenails grow back with time; that kind of assault to self-esteem lasts forever.

The meeting ended shortly after that. We didn’t even have dessert.

I think about that meeting often, especially when I talk to my writing colleagues who are losing their publishing contracts and editors who are losing their jobs because the suits at the top of the corporate chart decided that we need more of X, and that Y just doesn’t sell the way it used to.

I believe that if the publishing industry as we know it dies (and I don’t think it will, even though I think painful times lie ahead), it will be at its own hand; under the weight of the business model it has chosen. Gone are the days when art producing businesses were run mainly by lovers of the art form. Now those art businesses are run as profit centers of behemoth companies. It’s not enough to turn a profit at the end of the year; you have to hit target goals.

Hey, I’m a free market guy, a great believer in capitalism, so at face value, the model makes sense. After all, a publicly-owned company has responsibilities to its stockholders. I’m all over that. If cinnamon toothpaste doesn’t sell, it makes no sense to keep the cinnamon toothpaste division in business. You gotta go for mint toothpaste. People like mint toothpaste. You build your market share by differentiating your product in other ways, but you start by acknowledging that everybody’s doing mint.

Thing is, art is not toothpaste, and it defies market analysis. Sure, we can declare Painter X to be the best gol-durned artist on the planet and talk people into buying his mass-produced canvases at ridiculous prices, and in the process we can have success. With enough success, we can push the independent art gallery on the corner out of business and flood the market not just with Painter X’s work, but with knock-offs of his work.

But what about people who want something else—people who dare to like what others don’t? They might try a Painter X just so they can talk about it with their friends, but they’re not going to buy another one. In fact, maybe they’re going to move away from galleries altogether and just paint murals on their walls. A few years down the line, people will wonder why the art market is shrinking.

The big publishers today anoint “lead titles” on which all the “co-op” money is spent to “package” the book in a way that will give it the best “placement” in the store. The idea is to hit a home run every time. If the ball falls inside the park instead of blasting over the wall, then it will of course be the author’s fault, and we all know how many more of those are out there to take his place.

To hedge the bet, the B-school graduates at the top look at what people have bought in the past, and they push writers to create more stuff just like that. That’s what they buy, and that’s what they push. There’s very little future for a writer these days who merely earns out his advance. It’s The List or nothing, baby.

And then we wonder why the public prefers the fresh, unlimited (even occasionally awful) content on the Internet over plunking down $25 for a rehashed version of a book they’ve read a dozen times already.
I’ve vastly over-simplified here, and I of course exempt myself and my Killzone colleagues from any of the above. What do you think?