Dear readers: I had my second eyeball surgery yesterday (run of the mill cataracts) and can’t see the computer screen quite yet. Well, I can see it if I cover the “new” eye but that’s makes it hard to type with one hand and my head hurts a little. Plus I just want to lay around, feel sorry for myself and watch Project Runway reruns. Actually, I feel pretty good because for the first time in 15 years, I can see without glasses. So considering how squeamish I was about having Dr. Louis slice off my lens and sew on a new one, I am pretty darn happy. If you are facing cataract surgery, buck up and do it.  

My sister Kelly is stepping in for me today. She’s working on a project helping a cop-friend write a non-fiction book. The experience has granted her some insights we crime dogs maybe don’t normally think about. Be back soon. — Kris

By Kelly (PJ Parrish)

We write about crime, death, torture, corpses, graveyards and cops and we do it very often with a glass of wine near our keyboards or across from each other at a restaurant table. It’s pretty easy for us to use our purple Post-Its to move one murder from chapter forty to chapter thirty five, because, when you write fiction, you can kill anyone you want whenever you want and then finish off the wine and go to bed.

Sometimes, with enough wine or after a particularly gruesome scene, Kris and I would wonder what kind of people we are to be able to write this stuff, and almost always, the answer is that no matter how graphic we may get, in the end, we know none of it is real.

But I have learned it’s far different when it is real.

I have had both the pleasure and discomfort in recent months of assisting a new author on a true crime novel. He is a police officer and he had a story he wanted to tell but he had no idea where to start. As writer of police procedurals, I needed technical information about his department. Outside a bowling alley one night, we struck a deal. I would do a little editing for him. He would answer my police questions.

I thought it would be easy. Like many authors, we have frequently done light editing and critiquing for charity auctions and occasionally for friends, and I suspected this would be no different. There were things I didn’t anticipate.

First was the author’s passion for his story. His need to tell the story eliminated any of the usual author ego issues and it made the editing more honest and easier. Second, I did not realize how different it would be writing about events and people that were real.

Over the next few months, as the story unfolded on my laptop, I found myself weighed down by the sadness of it. I started to think about the victim at the oddest times. I even found myself playing the “what if” game on the crime, building on the tragedy of a murdered police officer and making the nagging sense of loss for a man I never knew even deeper.

Now driven with a duel passion, we kept on.

But even as the chapters went back and forth over the internet, and the scenes started to come alive with more vivid images, and I began to see the finished project as publishable, the late night haunting continued.

I expected at some point, that the repeated exchanges of the same chapters and scenes would work to dull the emotional impact. But it didn’t. It got to the point where I would postpone sitting down to edit until I knew I had two days to be depressed afterwards.

Then I was allowed access to the crime scene photos. And I looked.

Now everything was real.

The project is nearly completed now. The author’s passion has not waned, and except for his heavy work schedule, I am sure he would prefer to write until dawn, even as he wraps up the final chapters. On my end, I continue to fill his pages with red ink, and the learning process for both of us goes on as a book is nurtured to maturity. And as strange as it sounds, when it is complete, I know I will miss it. I will miss the author’s passion and dedication and I will miss the people in the book, because in a way, telling the story allowed the victim to live once again, if only on pages and if only for a few months. I hope we have done him justice in our efforts.

I have thought recently about what I will ultimately take away from this experience. It is a complicated answer because I know I will reap some sense of satisfaction from helping a new author, and as someone who deeply respects law enforcement, there’s a part of me that is honored to have even penned a single word.

But I suspect that in the end, what I take away from this will be something far different and more meaningful.

Faithful readers might recall that a couple of weeks ago my blog post revolved around how books were once sold on display racks or shelves in drugstores, bookstores, and department stores. As a young reader back in the 1960s, the length of a novel wasn’t high on my somewhat limited radar.

I still have paperbacks purchased off those racks with the price tag of 35 cents stamped in the upper right-hand corner. Prices changed though the years. They rose to 75 cents, 95 cents, and ultimately cracked the one-dollar ceiling. At the same time, the length and page count of those pocketbooks didn’t seem to budge.

For full disclosure here, ninety-nine percent of my reading material came from libraries and was in a variety of genres from science fiction, history, anything else that caught my eye. Most of those novels I spent money on and collected back then were westerns by Louis L’Amour and a stable of similar artists.

Cranked out in a matter of weeks, or months, the vast majority of these books ranged from 28,750 words for Shalako, to 60,000 for one of his most popular releases, Hondo. Despite their length, both books, and many more by this prolific author became successful movies. In his later year, L’Amour’s novels became heavier and some even broke that 124,000 mark.

Short novels back then weren’t limited to paperbacks, or westerns. Like most boys, I finally got my hands on those wonderful hardboiled books by Micky Spillane and absolutely absorbed them. One I, the Jury comes in at slightly more than 53,000 words, and the hard-hitting sequel, My Gun is Quick is slightly longer.

My point here is that the length of a novel doesn’t determine the quality or success of the work. Take a look at the length of these million-selling books from years past that were eventually filmed.

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, 208 pages, 47,094

Murder on the Orient Express, Agatha Christie: 336 pages, 58,514 words

Double Indemnity, by James M. Cain: 115 pages, 30,072 words

Rosemary’s Baby, Ira Levin: 245 pages, 56,044

The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain: 116 pages, 35,000 words

The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler: 234 pages, 56,955 words

The Hound of the Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle: 128 pages, 57,689 words

The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger: 234 pages, 73,404

A Farewell to Arms, Earnest Hemingway: 332 pages, 74,240

Carrie, Stephen King: 320 pages, 61,343

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, J.K. Rowling: 309 pages, 77,325

Things, they are a-changin’. My first manuscript weighed in at 140,000 words before my editor at Poisoned Pen Press, Annette Rogers, suggested (no, ordered) that I cut 50,000 of those little gems. I did, crying great crocodile tears, until The Rock Hole was 90,000 words, the length of the average novel. When I was finished, I didn’t miss a thing and the work read much better.

My contracts today specify the work’s length from 90,000 to 100,000 words for all mysteries, westerns, and contemporary thrillers. Some authors struggle to reach the lower end, while others routinely crack the 110-120,000 ceiling or more without breaking a sweat.

One of my publishers recently told me that he prefers a novel to register at 90,000 words, because it’s only fair to the reader, since the price for paperbacks have increased and they want to give readers their money’s worth.

That also works great for those who embrace technology, because there’s no printing cost in this new media and readers don’t have to lug around doorstops that can be ten times the length of a Stephen King novel. In a similar vein, I’ve talked to consumers who say that because hardcovers are more expensive, readers tend to gravitate toward meatier publications. More bang for their buck(s), I guess.

But is it length that makes a successful novel? Those listed above, and millions more, fall well below the average length and to me, that’s just fine. I recently finished writing a novel that originally topped out at 80,000 words. At that count, the fast-paced story was told, complete with plenty of tension, red herrings, and a satisfying plot that surprised even me.

But my contract required that holy grail of 90,000 words, so I went back and lo, the count rose and the novel came in at the appointed amount. Did those extra words make it better? Were they a determent to the finished product? That’ll be up to my readers to determine.

Maybe those additional pages filled out some descriptions, or detailed the five senses we should all include. I wonder.

On the other hand, I recently sold a short story that was too long, more of a novella, and the publisher is going to serialize it, because the new up and coming magazine is looking for something completely different in westerns and that story filled the bill. Here’s an interesting point, the story is the first act of a short novel I wrote decades ago that finished up at 50,000 words.

As I dug around the internet to find titles and their length for this piece, I came across the website, Book Riot, that asks this question that I couldn’t phrase any better. “Have consumer tastes and habits changed that much in 100 years? Have authors themselves changed in the last 100 years? Why has the big book come to outweigh the short book in the hearts and minds of readers? Is the short book dead? Or just on a reprieve?”

So I wonder about this magic 90,000-word target. What do you think?

No, we’re not discussing politics, classified documents, or dementia. The discussion today is about the forgotten literary treasure (written and then set aside) stashed in boxes in your closet, or tucked away on flash drives, or even CD’s, or even floppy drives. How many years ago would that have been?

I recently glanced back through the files on my Scrivener app as I began to work on my WIP. I noticed a story that I had written a couple years ago as an experiment, to try Kindle’s Vella (serialized fiction). My story was never noticed. I was told that I would need to make a fool of myself on TikTok if I wanted to make any sales. I took down the story, and thought I would publish it as an eBook, then realized I would need a cover. I set the project aside and forgot it.

As I began reading through the Scrivener file, I felt the excitement I had when I first wrote it. I thought, “This isn’t bad.” And I continued to read. I set aside my WIP, began to edit, and have now decided to publish it “properly.” I have my first beta reader reviewing the story, and am setting up a meeting with my cover artist. I wonder how many other experiments are buried on flash drives that are worthy of being reviewed.

So, TKZ community, what literary gold is buried in your boxes and flash drives, CDs, and floppies? What stories excited you in the past and have the kernel of a great idea that needs to be germinated and grown with your expanded toolbox of writing skills?

1. Do you have any stories you initially set aside, then rewrote/edited and published later?
2. Do you have any stories that are hiding in your files that deserve to be reworked and published?
3. Tell us about them.

By John Gilstrap

On Monday, Sue Coletta wrote a wonderful piece on how to write a dance scene. As I read it, I realized that a) I’ve never written a dance scene, and b) what a daunting challenge it would be to try. The page is an inanimate thing. There’s no music to hear, no rhythm to feel. All of that–and the romance that it triggers–must be borne solely by word on the page. The more I think about it, the less likely it becomes that I will ever write a dance scene.

I do, however, write my fair share of violence, and it shares at least one requirement with dance scenes: choreography. Whether it’s mano a mano fisticuffs or a major armed conflict with firearms and explosives, it’s our job as writers to bring readers into the middle of the action in a way that makes them feel involved.

It all boils down to point of view.

If you’ve ever endured the adrenaline dump that is our fight-or-flight instinct, you know that in the moments when your survival is threatened, the world becomes very small. If someone threatens to hurt you or to hurt a family member, there’s a special kind of clarity of purpose. The why of the situation that brought you to that moment could not be less relevant. Survival is all that matters. Sometimes, that means running away, and other times it means defeating the threat.

FULL DISCLOSURE: Experts in managing violent encounters–specifically active shooter situations–tout the strategy of Run-Hide-Fight, in that order. Run away if you can, otherwise hide. Only as a last resort should one attempt to fight back. As a non-expert in such things, however, history all too often has shown that to hide really means to await one’s turn to be be a victim. Something to think about.

When it comes to the fight scene in your story, ask yourself whose is the best point of view from which to present the action, and then stick with it. My 2019 Jonathan Grave thriller, Total Mayhem, opens with a mass shooting at a high school football game:

            Tom Darone had seen a lot of people die in his day, but not like this. The lady in the blue coat—the first to go down—made a barking sound and then folded in on herself.  Tom’s first thought was that she’d suffered a seizure, or maybe a stroke.  She sat two spaces down from him in the bleachers, and one row closer to the football field.  Her emergency happened at the same second when Number 19 of the Custer Cavalrymen intercepted a pass at the end zone, robbing the Hooker Hornets of a go-ahead touchdown.

In all the excitement, nobody saw her collapse.  Then her husband noticed.  “Anita?” he said as he stooped to help her.

Then the crowd erupted with a new kind of cheer.

People pointed, and Tom followed their fingers to see that a player had collapsed on the field.  Was that blood?

Then two more players fell.  A chunk of helmet erupted in a gruesome spray from a third.

The lights went out. In an instant, the field went from the artificial daylight bright that is unique to nighttime football to true darkness.

Anita’s husband shouted, “Oh, my God, she’s been shot!  Help me!”

A ripple of four spectators to Tom’s right fell side-by-side among yelps of pain.

The field was under attack.

Tom watched with a strange sense of detachment as the panic hit.  Home now only two months from his eighth deployment to the Sand Box, and six weeks into his new status as an unemployed vet, the reality of the moment crystalized in an instant. The first survival challenge would be to avoid being trampled in the stampede of humanity.

The panic around him didn’t blossom or bloom.  It erupted.  Those who’d been hit—and the people who loved them—hunkered down, while everyone else fled. In a single instant, hundreds of people decided that personal survival trumped everything. A few were so overwhelmed by the enormity of the swirling action that they simply shut down, but those were the minority.  Most people ran. They had no obvious destination, and they had no apparent plan. Most didn’t even know where the exits were, so they followed the people ahead of them on the assumption that strangers were smarter than they were.

The mayhem grew to critical proportions in mere seconds. Tom realized in a rush that he was in the epicenter of the kill zone.  As the sea of spectators pushed and tumbled past each other—and as bullets continued to find their marks—Tom dropped to his stomach into the foot-trough of the bleachers and rolled to his right.  As he dropped into the matrix of the metal support structure, his boot found a foothold, and then so did his hands.

If I had chosen to write that scene from the point of view of Anita’s husband–the spouse of the first victim–all of the action would have been secondary to his efforts to save Anita’s life and shelter her from further harm. If I’d written it from a football player’s point of view as his teammates are dying, the scene would be different still.

If I’d told this part of the story from the shooter’s point of view, it would have given away too much of the story, so that choice was never in play.

The point here is that while each POV character would observe the same swarm of panicked humanity, the reader’s journey through the scene would be entirely different depending on the author’s writerly choice. Even the narrative voice would be different. Because Tom Darone had recently been in battle, his voice is naturally more observant and less emotional than would be, say, a teenage football player.

Action scenes fail when the author tries to take too big a bite.

The choreography of violence is inherently confusing, so it’s easy to lose the reader. Take the cliched barroom melee from every cowboy movie of the 1960s. On film, a viewer can easily keep track of the different punches thrown by John Wayne and Dean Martin because our brains process imagery at the speed of light. On the page, though, there’s that extra filter in play that translates spots on the paper into words and then those words into images that can be far more vivid than any movie adaptation, but that translation is as fragile as a single misplaced word. Throw in a bunch of different POV characters and the risk of losing your readers grows astronomically.

If you pick a single character from whose point of view to show the scene, you can give the reader a literal blow by blow description of that character’s corner of the fight, while observing flashes of the rest of the activity through peripheral observation. We feel his knuckles hurt when he throws a punch, and we feel the pain in his gut when he takes a body blow.