During the downtime between book deadlines, I’ve been able to catch up on my reading. As many writers can attest, when you’re writing you want to read, and when you’re reading it’s easy to wish you were writing.

Not to say I haven’t been dabbling with the next manuscript, trying to reach that acceleration point where the process takes over, but with the holidays, it’s slow. Oh, I’m getting five pages a day, but they haven’t sparked yet.

So for inspiration, I picked up an old favorite off one of the shelves behind my desk. It was Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show, a book that should be required reading for all future Texan authors. It’s not a long novel, and I finished it in one blustery afternoon when I couldn’t force myself into going outside. Putting it back, my fingers brushed Texasville, and I was away on another adventure with his character Duane Moore in Thalia, Texas.

After finishing all five books in that saga, my appetite for McMurtry wasn’t sated. I considered his Lonesome Dove books, but decided to read some of his more contemporary novels , and that’s when tragedy struck.

See, I’m a collector. When I find an author I can’t put down, I’ll search out all their works in first edition, and I’ve been a McMurtry fan since reading All My Friends are Going to be Strangers back in high school. I have them all, and went to find the next one. But I hadn’t put them order since we had the new bookcases put in. When the Bride and I bought this new house, we hired a craftsman to install my dream shelves that now groan under the weight of bound worlds.

Once the cabinetmake finished, and my librarian daughter quit climbing the ladder and rolling back and forth on the rail, and we simply unloaded all the books from the boxes, putting them only in author order, and I’ve never gone back and sorted them.

“Good lord!”

The Bride wandered into my office a few minutes later, unimpressed by my outburst. “What have you done now?”

“I’m missing a McMurtry.”

“Are you sure?”

I blinked at her for a long moment. “Of course I’m sure. I’m standing here on the ladder, looking at all the titles and In a Narrow Grave isn’t here.”

“You sure you had that one?”

“What’s with the interrogation? I remember all my books, and the day I picked that one up from a bargain bin long before we met. It was one of those little bookstores that just bought books and stacked them around.” I momentarily drifted away. “What a wonderful store.”

“Go buy another one.”

I shook my head “This was a first edition.”

“So?”

“The last one I saw was somewhere around eight hundred dollars.”

“Well, you need to find that one.”

We searched high and low. It wasn’t mis-shelved, or behind other books. It was simply gone. I might have lost it in one of the several moves over the years, but I swear I remember seeing it on the shelf in our previous house.

But then another lightning bolt struck as I put the remainder of McMurtry’s works in order. “Good lord!”

“Really?” She wandered back in. “What now?”

“The Late Child and Somebody’s Darling are gone too!”

Que the mystery music. Dum, dum, dum.

As the camera moves in, we exchanged perplexed expressions, and then understanding dawned.

I felt faint and placed both palms against my cheeks. “Someone’s borrowed them!!!”

Her eyes widened. “Without asking!!!”

I’m sure the Bride would have taken to the fainting couch, if we had one.

“Hannah!” The name unconsciously slipped out.

The Bride shook her head at the mention of our youngest daughter’s best friend. I like to blame her for many incidents and accidents through the years from the time they were children, but the Bride yanked me back. “She’s off the hook. She doesn’t read.”

I struggled with her statement “Hannah asked me for a recommendation one time, when she was in middle school. I might have given her a book, and I doubt she ever brought it back. Maybe she likes odd numbers and took two more.”

“You wouldn’t have given her either one of those.”

“You’re right.” I struggled with the enormity of what we faced. Someone borrowed two prized possessions. Why didn’t they take the dog instead, or one of the girls? At least they would have wandered back home at some point.”

“Burglars,” I wondered aloud. “Maybe there’s some hot, black market for those two volumes.”

I don’t own a lending library. I’d learned my lesson decades earlier when I loaned my complete collection of William Jose Farmer’s World of Tiers series to a good friend who loved to read. We shared many fine hours talking books and authors, until he betrayed me. He finished those first editions and ––– gave them to someone else.

“I didn’t know you wanted them back,” he answered, perplexed when I asked for them back.

They’re as gone as the Library of Alexandria.

Today there’s only three people who are on the Loan List, and two of them have their own McMurtry collections. (I wonder if they completed those by borrowing mine…nah.)

Pouring two fingers of Buffalo Trace to settle my nerves and a great sense of loss, I resumed arranging my entire library, which took some time, leaving space on the shelf to replace those missing volumes.

Now the search begins to find quality first edition replacements. It will be a hard, bitter road, but the sense of anticipation, and then joy of discovery, is something to look forward to.

So if you’re considering a Christmas present for me, you now have an idea.

With that, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all. Good luck to the writers, and happy reading to those who enjoy settling in with a good book.

By John Gilstrap

Finally! I no longer have to keep the secret: my nonfiction book, Six Minutes to Freedom, has been set up at Netflix to be a feature film with a projected release in 2026. I’ve known for at least two months now, but I had to wait for the announcement in Variety before I could go public. Jared Rosenberg will write the script and Toby Jaffe will produce. More on them later.

A romantic beginning.

Back in April, Joy and I were in Greece, celebrating her birthday with an al fresco dinner at the base of the Acropolis when my cell phone rang. Normally, a romantic dinner trumps a phone call, but not when the caller I.D. shows your Hollywood agent’s name, and there was no way he could be bringing anything but good news. With no current film projects in the pipeline, there was no conceivable bad news to deliver.

Good news indeed! One of the hottest new screenwriters in Hollywood–Jared Rosenberg, whose film Flight Risk, directed by and starring Mel Gibson and Mark Wahlberg, will be released in January, 2025–loves SixMin and wanted to sign an 18-month shopping agreement to turn it into either a feature or a long form series.

“Great news!” I said. “How much?”

“Well, nothing. It’s a shopping agreement. It gives him exclusive rights to package the property and shop it around and see if there’s interest. Maybe he’ll write a treatment, put together a production team, get actors excited.”

I was confused. “Aren’t you the person who told me that no one gets to do anything with my book without paying for the right? Pay to play?”

“That was before the writers’ strike,” he explained. “All the rules have changed. I think you should do it. This guy’s got horsepower now. He can open doors.”

I still wasn’t ready to leave the world I thought I understood. “How can he sell something he doesn’t yet own?”

“That’s the beauty of the shopping agreement,” my agent explained. With so much of the legwork already accomplished by the shopping entity, the author is in a stronger position than ever before.

Not insignificantly, let’s remember that the book came out in 2006. The opportunity cost of a potential mistake was pretty low.

“Let’s do it!”

Then Comes September . . .

. . . and word that 20th Century is very interested in doing a deal for SixMin. While I was busy not paying attention, Jared Rosenberg had joined forces with producer Toby Jaffe and together had been drumming up excitement for this great movie project. It was time for the agents to go to work.

And here’s where it got interesting because we’re all repped by different agents, each of whom is jockeying for the best deal for their client. Over the course of the next few days, we received, rejected, tweaked, countered, and tweaked again various dollar values and deal points, as I presume the other players were likewise doing. It felt to me that we were coming very close to a deal we could live with when . . .

Wait! Netflix wants to make the movie! The negotiation chess game just became three dimensional, with three agents negotiating deals with two studios, with no one knowing the details of what the others are asking for/demanding. This was the first time when I really understood the value of good representation.

Now it’s time for me to be a bit coy so as not to step on toes. When the dust finally settled, the production team was happiest with the deal they hammered out with Studio A, while the Studio B terms were far more favorable for me. I won’t say which player was A or B, but it’s rare in the movie business when the author of the source material is in able to negotiate from a position of power. The best terms for the production folks don’t mean much if they don’t own the rights to the story they want to produce.

Stuff happened behind the scenes, and now we’re set up at Netflix. Cool beans. And as far as I can tell, nobody’s feathers got singed during the back-and-forth.

It’s been a very long time since I’ve had a hand to play in Tinseltown. It feels good to be back. And for now–for this brief, shining moment in time–it looks like the movie will actually be made. (Everyone please do me a favor and knock wood now.)

A book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us. — Franz Kalka.

By PJ Parrish

Spoiler alert: I’m going to reveal an ending. I have a good reason.

The plot setup: On a warm June day, a crowd of villagers gather in the town square. They’re there to hold an ancient ritual, the meaning of which has been lost to time. They come forward, and each villager draws a slip of paper from an old wooden box. The tension builds because, according to tradition, no one can look at their paper until everyone has drawn. The crowd is restless:

“They do say,” Mr. Adams said to Old Man Warner, who stood next to him, “that over in the north village they’re talking of giving [the ritual] up.”

Old Man Warner snorted. “Pack of crazy fools,” he said. “Listening to the young folks, nothing’s good enough for them. Next thing you know, they’ll be wanting to go back to living in caves, nobody work any more, live that way for a while. Used to be a saying about ‘[ritual] in June, corn be heavy soon.’ First thing you know, we’d all be eating stewed chickweed and acorns….”

Finally, each person opens their paper. Only one paper has a black dot on it. It is held by Tessie Hutchinson. The crowd parts and Tessie stands alone in the center. All the other villagers, men and women, old and young, begin to pick up stones.

Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her. “It isn’t fair,” she said. A stone hit her on the side of the head.

So ends Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery.” You can click here to read the whole story, though I’d guess most of you already have. It was pretty much required reading if you went to school after 1950. I hadn’t read it since oh, 1970 or so, but I did so today because I want to talk about fiction that leaves room for ambiguity and maybe even pain.

First, back to Shirley Jackson’s classic. It was published in The New Yorker, to great controversy and outrage, three years after the end of WWII at the start of the Cold War. With its twin themes of conformity and cruelty, many saw it as an allegory for McCarthyism or the Holocaust. It is debated anew today amid our politics of populism and cancel culture (source: not me, but Harper’s Magazine ciritic Thomas Chatterton Williams).

But Jackson biographer Ruth Franklin argued in an essay published last year that reading politics into the story misses the point. The story’s power comes from its disturbing ambiguity:

The author deliberately declined to wrap up the ending neatly for her readers, some of whom (in a foreshadowing of the ending of The Sopranos), asked whether The New Yorker had accidently left out an explanatory final paragraph. That’s why the story has retained its relevance: not because of any obvious message or moral, but precisely because of its unsettling open-endedness.

I’ve posted here before that I believe all good fiction comes from disturbance — not just for the characters, but for the writer herself. (By the way, Sue had a good post on this yesterday, about identifying your character’s defining wound. Click here!)

I think making the reader uncomfortable isn’t a bad thing. The best literature, Ruth Franklin says, provides a vital service when we allow it to disturb us. Yes, what one person reads as discomfort another reads as aggression. But Franklin believes the idea that a writer should not offend someone is a recipe for bad writing.

The Lottery shocked people in 1948 because of its lack of a tidy message. It’s the reason it is still taught and talked about 75 years later.  Great writing can entertain, enlighten, and even empower, but it’s greatest gift to us is its ability to unsettle, prodding us to search for our own moral in the story. It is the ax, Franklin writes, quoting Kalka, to break up our frozen souls.

Many readers really hate ambiguous endings, thinking the open-ending negates everything that came before. I get that. When I read The Life of Pi, I felt really frustrated by the ending — Pi Patel washes ashore in Mexico after surviving a long time at sea on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. On land, the tiger simply walks away into the jungle without looking back. Pi is left to grapple with the ambiguity: Is the magical story with animals the truth? Or is the truth what he later tells investigators, a dark horror story involving human violence and cannibalism.

I was a bit angry. What the? Is this a who-shot-JR dream switcheroo? What really happened? Which story is the truth? Was the tiger a hallucination Patel made up to block out the horrors of his real life?

Years later, I gave it a second read. I came at the story from a different place and to me, it became an allegory about faith, survival — and the healing power of storytelling.

But hold on a minute, I can hear some of you saying….

We genre writers work within certain guidelines and reader expectations —  The lovers must live happily ever after. The white-knight hero must vanquish the evil villain. How do we square the narrative circle that our readers crave? How do we provide the satisfaction of a well-resolved plot and still find room for ambiguity?

Can we color outside the lines?

Ambiguous endings are polarizing, for sure. But when done well, they add emotional layers that make our readers confront their biases — and make us crime writers stretch the boundaries of our genre’s tradition.

It’s not easy to pull off. A well-done ambiguous ending comes from being in complete control of your narrative. It might make a reader uncomfortable, but if it feels logcial and well-earned, they will go with it.

One last point before I go. I said above that all good fiction comes from disturbance — not just for the characters, but for the writer herself. That last part is important, if a tad off-subject. To write well, you have to be willing to take chances and not be afraid of challenging your readers. But you also have to be willing to challenge yourself. The best writing — indeed, all of art — comes from a private place inside you. Sometimes that place is painful to revisit. That’s just part of the work of writing.

Indulge me for one more minute. This is a scene from an episode of Dr. Who. The doctor goes to the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, sees Van Gogh’s 1890 painting The Church at Auvers (my favorite Van Gogh). Struck by the fact that Van Gogh was ignored in his lifetime, he goes back in time and brings the painter back to modern-day Paris. Get out your hankies…

“He transformed the pain of his life into ecstatic beauty. To use your passion and pain to portray the joy and magnificence of our world, no one had ever done it before. Perhaps no one ever will again.”

Write well and without fear, crime dogs. I am traveling today to be with family but will check in with you all. Happy turkey day.

We recently had several folks over to the house for a get together…no. Let me start again.

Our house was a zoo last week when we hosted our youngest grandson’s 4th birthday party. There were about a million kids I’d never seen. I knew our own grandcritters and a handful of others and that was all. The same held true for the adults. The rest were strange little apes who set up a howl that lasted for two hours.

The kids were loud, too.

Family and friends made up part of the attendees, but there were a lot of people I’d never met.

To preserve my sanity, I found a nice corner of our outside kitchen counter and settled in with a couple of dads clutching adult beverages to watch the action. My daughters and the Bride opted for an old fashioned home birthday party. No bounce house. No petting zoo. And thank God for no Chuck E. Cheese insanity. Instead, they had old-fashioned games for the kids, including bobbing for apples, which resulted in only one near drowning.

Who would have thought they’d take their shirts off and go in headfirst?

The only thing the girls didn’t resurrect was Pin the Tail on the Donkey. With our critters, there would have been a stabbing with the tail and the addition of paramedics would have just added to the cacophony.

Conversation wandered as the party wound down. What was a group of adults watching kids have fun evolved into a mixed confederation of grownups and tweens, young people between the age of 9 and 12.

I heard the twelve-year-old ask her mother, who was our youngest daughter’s best friend growing up, why I was wearing a tee shirt that didn’t match my unbuttoned aloha shirt. “Why is Da wearing that? The colors don’t go together. He should know that.”

“That’s because Da can’t help it.” Hanna has known me since she was seven, and I’m convinced she lived with us for a couple of years when she was a teenager. She was at our house all the time. In fact, I recently asked the Bride if we’d sent her to college along with our own girls.

Hanna gave me a sympathetic smile. “He’s colorblind.”

Hanna’s daughter looked at me with a frown. “You only see in black and white?”

I sighed. I’ve spent my whole life answering that question from adults. “No, I see color all right, but it isn’t they same as what registers in your brian.”

She plucked out the tail of her blouse. “What color is this?”

“I don’t know. I’m colorblind.”

“Is it gray?”

“I’d be willing to bet it’s purple or something, but it’s green to me.”

“It’s turquoise.”

“It’s green.”

“What color is mom’s shirt?”

Remembering I was talking to a kid, I bared my teeth and smiled. “I don’t know. I’m colorblind.”

I’ve been caught in that endless loop before with those who can’t seem to grasp that I don’t perceive what everyone else sees.

The Bride picked out my clothes each morning when I worked full time and had to wear suits and slacks. As the years passed and I moved up in our organization, seniority provided some leniency and adjusted my wardrobe to jeans, white shirts, and a blue or black sports coat. There was a time before we were married when I dressed myself.

More than once I walked into my office to find my secretary with her hand out. “Give me that tie. It doesn’t match.”

“Last week you said it matched this shirt.”

“Nope. Your other shirt is a different shade. Use the black tie on the back of your door today, or don’t wear one at all.”

Color is an issue in writing, also. I’ve described sunrises and sunsets, the light on trees and vegetation, or the changing color of rocks, hill, or mountains without ever seeing what registers in most people’s brains. It comes from asking the Bride wha see sees as we pass, or sit on the edge of a drop-off to watch the sunset.

If I describe the subtle colors of a Craftsman house restored to it’s original paint scheme, it’s a cheat, because I looked it up, or asked her.

She gets those questions all the time. “What color are those clouds?”

“Salmon. Pinkish. Tope. Chartreuse. Vermilion. Persimmon.” She really doesn’t include all those at one time, but they’re examples of what I hear.

“You’re making those up.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Persimmon. If I don’t know the colors, how is persimmon going to help? What are those other colors I always have to ask you about?”

“Mauve. Coral. Lavender.”

“Just words. What color is mauve?”

“Dusty rose.”

“Sigh. Roses are red, or yellow So you mean red.”

“No.”

“Give me another color.”

She pointed at her shirt. “This is coral.”

It looked vaguely orange to me, so I gave up.

We recently hiked through Palo Duro Canyon in the Texas panhandle, and I spent half of my time asking her and the couple we were with about their descriptions of the canyon walls, or the vastly different layers we passed. As they walked ahead, I stopped and wrote it down in a small notebook.

The desert scrub plants I saw as silver, gray, or brown came in subtle shades I didn’t understand. I had to write them down, too, and when I set my novel, A Dead Man’s Laugh there, I resorted to my almost indecipherable notes.

For example, a creosote bush has, according to my companions, dark green leaves with brown-burgandy fruit. I saw waxy dark brown leaves with even darker brown buds. That’s because I’m red/green challenged.

It made elementary school art a living hell. My grades weren’t good because the crayons in class didn’t have their labels and I had no idea what colors I was using. trees were brown, grass probably turquoise, and people’s hair most likely began the punk movement.

According to Color Blind Awareness:

Being ‘red/green color blind’ means people with it can easily confuse any colors which have some red or green as part of the whole color. So someone with red/green color blindness is likely to confuse blue and purple because they can’t ‘see’ the red element of the color purple.

And that’s only the tip of the iceberg for me. I can identify the basic colors, red, blue, yellow, orange, etc, if they’re neon bright, but subtle shades leave me in the gray dust.

The Bride, the editor I sleep with, corrected those descriptions in A Dead Man’s Laugh to match what she saw in the canyon and I sent the manuscript off.

We always talk about using all our senses in writing. The scent and taste of chocolate. That one I can easily identify. The squeak of metal as a swing set moving in the wind. A smooth tabletop, or the hard slap of a gunshot.

For those of us who are colorblind, these descriptions are hard and we have to find a way around them.

I sincerely hope you don’t suffer the same malady.