Bill Was Writing

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By John Ramsey Miller

There is an oft-told story about William Faulkner and I’m not sure if it’s true, but it probably is. One day he was walking near the downtown square in Oxford, Mississippi and someone who knew him socially spoke to him, but he didn’t so much as turn his head to look in her direction when she saluted him. Later she complained to Mrs. Faulkner, who said, “Don’t take it personal Honey, Bill was writing.” It’s a great story, and it applies to so many authors I know. It’s quiet where I live, and I have the luxury of not being interrupted through the days and nights. I do my best writing when I’m using a chain saw, building something, or driving, and when I’m plotting in my head I am oblivious to everything.

We fiction authors are a group of individuals who have so much in common. What we do is ninety percent mental and ten per cent physical. Kate Miciak, my editor at Bantam, told me that good writing requires deep thinking, and I think about what I’m going to write a lot more than I write. I think that’s true for most of us, and if it isn’t it should be. If you are writing without planning where you are going, your work could probably be a lot better.

I’ve had a long-running discussion with Gilstrap over many a cocktail ….many, many a cocktail about process. We’ve discussed this and I think John may have blogged this one, and if so I apologize for repeating it. I heard an author say recently that he creates his characters and follows them around recording what they say and do. My characters don’t write the books, I do, and I can’t imagine how much LSD I’d have to eat so that I could follow them around and record what they do. It seems absurd to me that you can let fictional characters dictate to you, but it may be true. I create my characters and I dictate what they will do on my pages, and by God they do it. Unless my editor says they can’t, or they shouldn’t oughta do it, or that it couldn’t happen in a hundred million years, not even if we’re talking California. And I never talk California, nor do I allow my characters ever to go there. They can go as far west as Las Vegas, but no farther. A character off on their own could get stuck in California, and I’m not about to go way out there to fetch them back, or follow them across Death Valley with my pen flying.

I haven’t been writing much for the past few days because I’ve been winterizing my pump house, and the chicken coop because the Yankees are sending their damned cold weather down here. Heated water bowls, brooder heat lamps, thick layer of sawdust on the floor, covers on the outside faucets, stacking firewood close to the house, and gathering chestnuts to roast. I don’t want my rooster’s comb to get frostbitten and turn black, which can happen and could seriously diminish his sex appeal although he’s the only rooster in the yard and the hens have no choice in mates. Cold is an unwelcome export and definitely not a Southern thing and from here on out none of my characters will be allowed in the North in winter, although my villains might well come from there.

I am going to try to write a few hours every day on my new book, regardless of the weather. It’s hard to write on a book that’s set (at its beginning) in the Louisiana Lakes area south of Houma in August. Think par-broil. I fish there a few times a year, and there isn’t a more beautiful place on earth and although I’ve used the locale in other books, I’ve never had a Cajun protagonist before. I like Cajuns. They talk funny but there’s nothing funny about them if you piss them off. How do y’all feel about Cajuns?

That’s it for this week.

http://www.johnramseymiller.com

Has Anyone Seen Mike Hunt?

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By John Gilstrap
www.johngilstrap.com

If you’ve ever been a thirteen-year-old boy, chances are the title of this blog entry made you chuckle. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, just say it out loud.) When I was a kid, this was the Holy Grail of setups. I lived for the moment when I could set up a friend or a teacher—or, ideally, a store clerk—to help me find my friend. As far as I know, the only time it ever worked was in the movie, Porky’s, but at least I had a goal.

Thinking back on those days, it occurs to me that language is funny. It’s such a regional thing. Where I grew up, a group of more than two people were greeted as “y’all.” Where my wife’s family comes from in the Pittsburgh area, that same group would be “y’uns.” Each of us thinks and writes in the language that resonates to us.

Cussing was part of my kid culture. I’d have cut out my tongue before I did it in front of my mother—or any adult, for that matter—but the creative use of the F-word was a major league sport among my friends. By the time I joined the fire service, I considered myself a veteran potty-mouth; but man did I have a lot to learn. Hanging out in a firehouse was like a master class in creative cussing. Way beyond the words, there was that magical combination of cynicism, dark humor and truly foul imagery. It was inspiring. Seriously, if you’ve never been chewed out by a fire captain, you’ve really never been yelled at.

It makes sense, then, that my potty mouth would transfer to my writing. My first book, Nathan’s Run, is replete with cuss words—enough, in fact, that the book has been banned in some school districts, despite the fact that the protagonist is a 12-year-old. There are F-bombs galore, more than a few GDs, and a character who calls herself The Bitch. I didn’t put the words into the book with any intent to shock; I just wrote it the way I heard it in my head. Who knew that the rest of the world would be so offended? If I had, I would have written it differently.

While F-bombs and GDs ruffled a few readers’ feathers, nothing—nothing—brought as much hate mail as my assassin’s one-time use of the C-word in a sentence. As in, “I’m going to effing kill you, you effing c-word!” Whoa.

It seems horribly naive, I know, but this was a dozen years ago, and I had no idea that that word carried the burden that it does. I’m not sure I fully understand it even now, but I sure as sh . . . shootin’ know not to use it again. In fact, now that I know that bad language actually offends a lot of readers, I’ve recently made a concerted effort to de-effify my writing. The F-bomb still detonates from time to time, but now it’s a conscious decision on my part, and it’s used to make a specific point.

Writing is ultimately about the reader, not the writer . . . right? What accommodations to readers’ tastes have y’all made in your writing?

My Other Car is a Porsche

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by Michelle Gagnon

At least, this week it is.

We’ve spent a fair amount of time on this blog discussing gender issues, but far be it from me to stop flogging a dead horse. Here’s what happened.

My new car needed to be taken in for servicing and a few minor tweaks. My husband graciously offered to run this errand since I was swamped. So he drove to the dealership, and they offered him a choice of two vehicles. One was basically the same car we bought: a wagon, which is used to shuttle kids in car seats, dogs, groceries, the odd dragon costume, etc around town.

As he was leaving, the salesman said, “Oh, and we have another one you could take. There it is, over there.”

This, my friends, is the car that the dealer offered my husband:

cayman

I’ll let you guess which one he chose. The practical car, something like those Honda SUVs which could easily handle everything we throw at it for a week? Or the two-seater with terrible gas mileage and worse crash records, which by the way happens to be a standard?

For anyone wondering just how bad things have gotten for the auto industry, there’s your answer. You hand them a wagon, they give you the keys to a Porsche Cayman. That can’t be good. If you’re looking to buy or sell a vehicle within the next few months, you can look into a site like one sure insurance, to highlight some of the most important information and trends in the motor industry, hoping to save you money and make the best decisions about your vehicle.

And here’s the real kicker: I don’t know how to drive a stick shift. Never had the chance to learn, since all of my cars have been practical, work horse automatics.

Did I mention that this was to be my car for the week? My husband uses a motorcycle to get around the city, and keeps a ridiculously large Dodge 3500 truck in storage for his job towing boats around the state. Driving a truck the size of a small house around San Francisco is not my favorite activity, which is why we agreed to a loaner car in the first place. Seriously, to parallel park that thing requires a full ground crew, complete with waving flashlights and orange cones.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a sporty car as much as the next person. And I’m not unsympathetic. I understand that, as my husband describes it, “I wasn’t thinking. My eyes just glazed over. Never in my life has someone handed me the keys to a Porsche and said, ‘Have fun with it.'”

Sure, I get it. But under the same circumstances, I can pretty much guarantee that I would have held the keys longingly for a moment, before sighing and handing them back as I said, in a voice laden with regret, “I’m afraid we’ll have to take the wagon. Our toddler has trouble holding on to the roof at high speeds.”

So there you are: gender differences. What leapt to my mind was the infamous scene in “As Good As It Gets,” where misogynistic romance writer Melvin Udall (as played by Jack Nicholson) is asked (by a woman), “How do you write women so well?”

And he replied, “I think of a man, and then I take away reason and accountability.”

Reason and accountability, eh? Hmm. To every woman who cringed at that line, I offer you this: my husband, handing me the keys to a Porsche, our (temporary) new family car. Without even blinking.

Business owners looking to add vehicles to their fleet should consider leasing from Intelligent Car Leasing.

Fernando’s advice

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By Joe Moore

A few days ago, my friend and blog mate, Clare Langley-Hawthorne, asked the question: Can the Introverted Writer Succeed? I think we all agreed that, yes, just about any writer can succeed given the right set of circumstances including big doses of talent and luck. Of course we could say the same holds true for winning the lottery; given the right set of numbers, anyone can be a winner.

But whether you’re introverted and shy or known as the life of the party, I believe the first step to becoming a successful writer is to adapt a successful attitude. By that I mean, if you act like a success, there’s a good chance the world around you will treat you in like manner.

Now, we can get into a heavy discussion of what success means. For some, it’s big money and a slot on the bestseller list while others feel successful in just completing a manuscript. Certainly it’s important that each of us determine what we consider to be a success and then work toward it. But in the end, it doesn’t really matter. I believe that success in a state of mind.

If you don’t feel that you’ve achieved success in your writing yet, it shouldn’t stop you from taking on a successful attitude.

bc Many years ago, the wonderful comedic actor Billy Crystal played a character called Fernando on Saturday Night Live. Fernando’s famous line was “It’s better to look good than to feel good.” I think in many ways we should embrace Fernando’s advice. We should look successful now in anticipation of achieving success later. No, I don’t mean spending thousands on fancy clothes or showing up at a book signing in a stretch limo. Nor do I suggest lying about your success or attempting to deceive anyone.

Having a positive attitude is not deceit. In fact, it’s addictive and usually produces successful results.

Someone once said, “You are what you eat.” I think that concept goes way beyond food. For example, if you complain about the results of your writing or constantly bad mouth the state of the publishing industry, chances are you will quickly develop a self-fulfilling prophecy and those things that you find negative will continue to come your way. Your writing will suffer, your head will become clouded, and at some point, you will consider yourself a failure because you just might be.

Successful writers (or any profession) become so because they believe in themselves and their ability to succeed. And the more they believe, the more they attract success. Act the part, walk the walk, think as a successful writer would think, and before you know it, your writing gets better, your advances grow, your sales increase, and your publisher pays for the stretch limo.

Listen to Fernando.

Why did the writer miss her deadline? It was an icestorm. No, a sandstorm!

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This morning I pressed SEND on my first draft for MAKEOVERS CAN BE MURDER. The manuscript should now be safely in the hands of my editor in NY. Ahh…sweet sigh of relief.

I was especially relieved to send this draft off. Because let’s just say that it was a bit…overdue.

Which brings me to today’s blog topic: the many rich, varied, and creative procrastination rituals that are employed by writers.

Yes, we writers have some amazing ways to delay the inevitable pasting of butt-on-chair-and-typing that is required to complete an actual finished work.

For example: I have a sitcom-writer friend who cleans every drawer, organizes every closet, and sharpens every pencil in her house before she starts working on her scripts for the Zack and Cody Show. And she doesn’t even use pencils.

Internet surfing has become a big-time Writer’s Time Sink. In fact the Internet is learning how to surf us. For example, even if you try to ignore those omnipresent pop-up ads, they know how to leap off their launchpads and grab hold of your cursor. It always takes me a half minute of muttering and banging around with the mouse to drive those damned Wells Fargo horses back to their window. I wonder if there’s some way I could customize my cursor into a whip?

Excessive procrastination sometimes causes writers to fall seriously behind on our overall writing output. We have even…gasp! been known to miss our deadlines.

When that happens, there’s a temptation to come up with complex and creative excuses for why one’s manuscript isn’t being turned in to the editor on time. But fair warning: Editors, or at least the editors in New York, have heard every excuse known to creative mankind for not meeting a deadline. These include:

* I was on the wrong side of the International Dateline (thank you Gary Busey)

* The lack of reliable mail distribution in your neck of the woods (not a workable excuse in a major metropolitan area)

* The impending demise of a close relative (but don’t make it too close lest it prompt the sending of an embarrassing bouquet of sympathy flowers)

* The onset of a persistent-but-vague immune-deficiency ailment that saps the energy required for sustained bouts of writing (but not for attending conferences where one is observed singing and pounding the bar with fists at wee hours of the morning).

So do you have any excuses you can add to the list? Any good procrastination stories you’ve heard?

Click here if you feel like procrastinating some more with the Marx Brothers.

Can the Introverted Writer Succeed?

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by Clare Langley-Hawthorne
I have been pondering the sticky issue of looks, personality and success and how this translates in the world of publishing.

I remember reading a story in the New York Times a few years ago on the anatomy of a bestseller and it compared two books coming out that year that had received huge advances and marketing budgets – one was The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova and the other was (and this is prophetic…) something I can’t even remember. Anyway the gist of the article was that the author of The Historian had been willing to do a great deal of publicity and ‘be out there’ while the other author was virtually a recluse. While The Historian went on to make millions the other book sunk like a stone despite all the publisher money thrown at it. The moral of the story (I think) was that to be a bestseller a writer had to throw aside introversion to be successful. Basically, this article suggested, a writer could no longer afford to sit behind a typewriter or a computer. Nowadays that’s a no-brainer but still it got me thinking about the thorny question of writer personality (and let’s face it looks) and success.
Now I’m not the kind of person to hang out at the bar at conferences all night and I’m totally crap at networking but I would hardly be called introverted. I’m more of a dinner with friends and red wine kind of girl and though conferences can and do overwhelm me at times I suck it up as I know it is important for my career. the question is just how important? Leave aside the whole ‘the writing is always the most important thing’ – let’s just accept that shall we – then what comes next? How does a writer’s ‘popular persona’ help or hinder her (or him)?

So throw aside you political correctness and ponder this question…is it easier to be an attractive outgoing writer than a shy, ‘more homely’ one?
Perhaps it’s a crass question but not one I think that is without foundation – especially when photographs are on book jackets and websites and your personality is judged in a range of venues – from online blog entries to in-person panel presentations. How would some of the literary stars of yesteryear fare in our current media-centric environment? Can a writer even afford to be introverted these days? How much is publishing success like a throwback to high school – when many yearned to be the prettiest and bubbliest of them all?
What do you all think?

Ten Stupid Things Cops in Books Do

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Robin Burcell .2008.Today The Kill Zone is thrilled to host Robin Burcell, despite the fact that her credentials make some of us feel horribly inferior in comparison. For more than two decades Robin has worked in law enforcement as a police officer, detective, hostage negotiator, and FBI-trained forensic artist. As if that wasn’t enough, she’s won an Anthony Award for her Kate Gillespie series. We especially appreciate her post since it addresses cliches that can be terribly vexing for crime fiction fans. One lucky commentor will receive a signed edition of her latest book. Read on to find out more…

Let’s say you’re writing a book (or perhaps reading one) and you want to verify that the cop stuff is correct. Where do you turn for accurate info?

The secret is… watch CSI. 

Just kidding. The real secret is to ply me or any other current or ex cop at mystery conventions with alcoholic FaceofaKiller mm c beverages, then remind us of whatever promises we made in our drunken state to answer questions you might have on your work in progress. But what’s a writer to do if they can’t get to those conventions and bribe us with free drinks? I thought I’d compose a Top Ten Stupid Cop Things in books to help you guide your way until you can meet us in the bar.

10. Getting the jargon/slang wrong for a particular department or part of the country. It’s more than the age-old discussion on perps versus suspects. I’m talking the everyday lingo. It’s the difference that tells me which generation of cop is talking. Saturday Night Live could have done a whole skit on some of the double entendres of this stuff. Typical phrase heard on the radio: "Put your unit at the back door." For years I resisted, instead calling my or anyone else’s "unit" by the more recognizable name of "patrol car." We won’t even go into the whole "back door" thing. And I also resisted calling the detective bureau the "dick squad." I don’t think I was the only generational upstart who started reshaping the language in a department.

9. Really dumb radio transmissions no cop would ever make. Short transmissions are a must. In real life, if you have a long transmission, you “break," for any emergencies that might arise while you’re hogging the mike. So if your characters are busy saying anything longer than one or two short sentences on the radio, have them pick up the phone instead. Radio transmissions vary by region. Some talk in "ten" code, some in "nine,” and many are moving to "plain English," because who the helllpd car remembers the damn codes when the $#!+ hits the fan?

8. Not knowing the elements of the crime, or what constitutes a crime. A cop looks up, sees a young lady falling to the ground, sees a man running away, and thinks: Purse snatch, a felony. He and his partner jump out, chase after the suspect. One problem. No one saw the crime. They assumed. At least have your cops stop and ask the victim before they get in a foot chase, tackle the suspect and cuff him for a crime they think he committed–because when those officers get to court, the defense is going to rip them apart.

7. The clichéd loner, alcoholic cop with the rumpled raincoat, whose wife and kids were murdered by the serial killer while he was out eating donuts. Wcoffee-bagelshy doesn’t this scenario work? Because the whole donut eating thing is so passé. Let’s pause for history. Donut shops were the only thing open on graveyard shifts where the coffee could be found. That cliché would never work in California. There’s a Starbucks on every corner, and a bagel shop two doors down. And who buys their bagels from Starbucks, when you can get really good ones from Noah’s? 

6. Having cops hired/fired on a whim. Unless a cop resigns on his own, it’s almost an act of congress to hire or fire one. But an even bigger pet peeve is the shoddy hiring background investigations I’ve seen in some really Big Name novels. Backgrounds that allowed, say, the FBI to hire someone who had an arsonist serial killer for a father, but the father’s guilt (and the suspect’s identity) are questionable, and so we should be surprised when our agent turns out to be the real killer. And if they do pass the background, are you saying these arsonist/serial killers are going to pass the psych? There’s a reason why it takes months to complete the background investigation. It almost takes that long just to fill out the background application, which is longer than the average book contract.

5. Evil or stupid police supervisors. Repeat after me: Only some of the bosses are evil or stupid (and no, they didn’t all work for my department). There are actually some pretty decent supervisors still out there. The standing joke is that to get promoted to Sergeant, you have to first have a lobotomy. To make it to Lieutenant and Captain, you have to have your spine removed. True in all cases? No. But some…

4. The hated, despised Internal Affairs cop, who is usually evil or stupid. See # 7 above (which is not to say that if you’re the one being investigated, you don’t tend to think of the IA cops that way, but that’s a different story).

3. Dirty cops planting phony evidence in that overdone bad cop cliché manner. If you’re going to write this, do it better than anyone else. One of the best scenes I saw in a movie was where a dirty cop was seen committing a crime on a surveillance video which was booked into evidence and was going to nail him. The dirty cop set up a “window smash” of a business—with a highly magnetic device used to shatter the window. It in turn was booked into evidence right next to the surveillance tape, which it then demagnetized and was rendered useless. Such a scenario would be difficult to accomplish in this digital age, but back then it was way cool.

howdunit_lofland2. Stupid blunders at crime scenes. Being aware of what can contaminate a crime scene takes more than simply watching the latest episode of CSI. Just knowing the basics can help, everything from keeping a crime scene log to what constitutes trace evidence and cross-contamination. Keep this in mind next time your sleuth picks up a phone at the scene of the murder, tromping across a carpet, leaving fiber evidence.

And the top ten pet peeve, in my opinion?

1. Bad officer safety. This is equal to the sleuth investigating a noise outside, when she knows the killer is lurking around somewhere. Cop-wise, I’m talking things like cops showing up at a suspect’s house without backup. These guys are assigned partners for a reason. Safety is one of them, but so, too, is having a second set of eyes and ears for investigative purposes, as well as for testifying later in court. I hate it when writers shove the TSTL syndrome (too stupid to live) on their characters to foster an exciting climax.

So, aside from the age-old "safety on a Glock", what are your stupid cop (or amateur sleuth) pet peeves in books?

Robin Burcell, a veteran cop of twenty-something years, dutifully avoids all the above pet peeves in her latest novel, FACE OF A KILLER, about an FBI forensic artist. You can verify this fact by reading the first chapter on her website

Is That Noise An Avalanche Or A Stampede?

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By John Ramsey Miller

In case you haven’t noticed, TV shows like THE TODAY SHOW are basically 95% advertisement/ promotion content and 5% news. Seriously, unless there’s a disaster of epic proportions, the first five minutes of the telecast contains the most news you’re going to see for three hours. The other morning Al Roker stood before a Sharp TV monitor to wave his hands at the high def map of crappy weather happening (and he shamelessly plugged “This Sharp Monitor”). That was followed by one of many “What’s new in Electronics” features. Then cooking with chef whoever, make-up tips, some stuff about babies, and a controversial author hawking her book condemning the left-wing media over the left-leaning media. I love irony. Yet I watch it every morning and I’m a consumer and I want to see or hopefully own the latest electronics just like everybody else. Since I am officially downsized for life I am not buying all of that totally unnecessary shiny crap like I used to. For Christmas I got an iPod. It’s on my dresser and one of these days I’m going to figure out how to use it and at that point I intend to load it with music and books and possibly videos of my dogs lying under the porch.

The world is all about promotion of products because unless we all buy, buy, buy, the economy collapses. Most of us fall for sales pitches in some form or another every day, and night until we sleep. In order for someone to act on a sign or ad, they have to see it nine times and have to be open to the product, or they zone it out. Of the millions of messages most of us are exposed to, our brains screen out all but a few. I spend a few years in advertising and I was pretty good at making people want things. But after twelve years at this craft I still have no idea how to promote my own books. Even though I understand that if I don’t do it, it probably won’t get did, I curl up in a corner at the thought of promoting myself. It’s no secret that the authors who best promote themselves …sell best.

My first fiction editor told me something that stuck with me, “It is your job to write the books and ours to sell them. You handle your end and we’ll handle ours.” The perfect situation for this author, and most other authors I know. She wanted me to spend my time writing and not out at signings because she explained that they could sell more books with one small ad than I could crisscrossing the countryside pen in hand. And she was right …at the time. Gilstrap told me recently that what she said was probably true twelve years ago but that the days of being an author and staying away from “flogging” the work and letting the publicity department at the publisher take care of it, is in the same trash can with last year’s Sony Play Stations. Don’t get me wrong, my present publisher’s publicity department does a thorough job, but none of the houses have the budgets they had in the old days and not a farthing to waste. If your books sell in big numbers it’s a different story, but most of us don’t knock Patterson off the best-sellers lists with any regularity.

I’ve been thinking about doing an infomercial where a reader can (if they act immediately) get two books for the price of one if they pay the ten bucks shipping and handling plus they’ll get a bonus offer of a plaster pig-lying-in-the-sunshine-smiling paperweight.

My new book, THE LAST DAY came out in Mass Market paperback December 30th. That’s a picture of it up there in the first paragraph because I couldn’t figure out how to put it right here where this “X” is.

I am presently writing a new book without a publisher signed on, which is not really unusual, but sort of scary in the current currents. I am told that the mood at the major houses is akin to Paris in the days before the Terror where necks are being eyed for the blade, and agents are worried because selling books to the houses is harder than selling new Chevrolets. For years I’ve told aspiring authors the odds of a financially successful career are slim, but possible. Lately a lot of best-selling authors are seeing their numbers plummet and it appears that the ranks of new works being purchased by the houses are being trimmed down, and the amounts of advances being lowered. I think we may be seeing the death of big-house publishing as we’ve know it, even when the economy improves. What we do now will determine our own survival as authors. I don’t intend to be a dinosaur standing around chewing plants wondering what that growing bright thing in the sky might be. Okay, now all we have to figure out what we are going to do about selling our work in a new way and in a whole new world. I think we best be looking for alternatives to depending on the traditional houses, and living without their advances, and not thinking primarily in the printed-books-shipped-in-boxes model, is something we’d better explore sooner than later. Or we can look for a career change. So far I have my eyes open, but I can’t see anything clearly through the fog of uncertainty. Yet I am pretty sure I hear a thundering herd of something large coming toward me.

Check out my newly improved site: http://www.johnramseymiller.com/

So, gang, what can we do to stay ahead of the game? Curling up in a corner isn’t working.

There’s No Such Thing as a Silencer

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By John Gilstrap
http://www.johngilstrap.com/

Sometimes, I think I think too much.

Our job as authors is to create fictional worlds that resonate with our readers, and in the process tell stories that keep them turning pages. That means making sure that “the narrative spell” is never broken. If you throw in a twelve-dollar word in the middle of a paragraph, or if your subjects and verbs find themselves suddenly at odds, that spell is broken, and the reader realizes that he’s hungry and he puts the book down. I hate making it easy to put my books down. In fact, if we all do our jobs well, we bear responsibility for sleeplessness and ruptured bladders.

Okay, that last part is actually an unpleasant image.

Here’s my dilemma: Everybody who’s watched more than a dozen movies in their lives knows that a silencer can be fitted to any gun, and when it fires, it goes phut and no one in the next room can hear a thing. That’s the comfortable reality that will keep them turning pages.

But the comfortable reality is wrong. There’s not even such a thing as a “silencer.” There are suppressors, however, and they’re considerably larger than the ones that movie guys use. When you shoot one, that tiny phut is in reality a significant crack which will easily draw attention from the neighbors. It’s way better than the unsuppressed bang, but it ain’t no phut.

And that scene where the assassin makes the 700-yard shot with his “silenced” sniper rifle? Absolutely not.

Thing is, I want there to be a silencer. I want it to be on a pistol that is easily pulled from a shoulder holster, and I want to be able phut, phut my way through a shoot-out. It’s a crutch that would make my life as a writer easier, even though I know it violates the laws of physics.

Is it worth incurring the wrath of my buddy John Miller—or worse yet, the wrath of the people whose respect I gained in writing Six Minutes to Freedom—for the sake of a plot point that 98.999% of the reading public would accept as reasonable? Or is it better to shock that majority out of their spell by startling them with something new? I mean honestly, is it worth calling into question all the good done by the likes of Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin simply for the sake of accuracy?

Even though we write fiction, where does our obligation to research end? Is it just about what we can get away with, or is there a loftier responsibility to our readers?

Am I really just thinking too much?

My Obsession with Twilight

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twilight And no, I don’t mean the wildly successful book by Stephanie Meyer, or the film based on the book. Although I hear they’re both excellent.

Something became painfully clear to me last week as I mapped out the timeline for my next book, The Gatekeeper. Since I never start with an outline, one of my final acts before handing in the draft is to map out exactly when and where each scene takes place. The main action in all of my books occurs over roughly a week, give or take; that’s never the problem. No, what I invariably discover is that almost everything happens at night. Particularly at twilight. I’ve been known to have twenty-five incidents of twilight in a weeklong span. It’s not pretty, trust me.

I wish I knew where this unhealthy predilection originated. I’m a big fan of the daytime, and there’s no good reason why, in a thriller, critical scenes can’t take place, say, mid-afternoon. There is admittedly something spooky about the darkness, but in Gatekeeper, spookiness wasn’t really what I was after. So why was the sun constantly going down?

Another problem I quickly discovered: teleporting. This is the first time I’ve attempted to write across time zones. My first book took place entirely on a college campus, then with the second I widened the scope to a region (The Berkshires). Now I’m attempting to portray multiple points of view scattered across the country. Worse yet, the characters fly from one to the other with abandon. Or rather, based on evidence in my initial draft, they teleport, since they frequently get from New York to California in mere minutes. Even with the time change, they probably shouldn’t be landing at precisely the time they left: twilight, of course. (Although after traveling over the holidays, I’m wondering if teleporting is ever going to be a possibility. I’d even settle for a flying car: weren’t we supposed to have those by now? A two hour flight from Phoenix involved three hours of waiting at the airport, another two on the tarmac, no water, threats to divert to Monterey, and an extra $100 because we dared to check bags. Beam me up, Scotty).

So I spent the better part of a week mapping out the action scene by scene, minute by minute, checking flight times to insure that my characters were experiencing the same travel nightmares the rest of us undergo on a regular basis. (It’s pretty much the only time in my life I use Excel, but wow, I love that program. I just wish it was easier to get everything to fit on one printed page).

I rewrote scenes so that characters were no longer darting through the shadows cast by moonlight. I eliminated their flashlights and night vision goggles (another weakness of mine: flashlights have been prominent in nearly every book. There must be some sort of twelve-step program that deals with this). I gave them sunscreen instead and pushed them out the door into the light.

After a lot of work, I got it down to a week of sunrises and sunsets, with plenty of light in between. There are, granted, still scenes that occur at night, but at least now it’s not all of them. And as always, now that the draft is done, I’ve promised myself that next time in an effort to avoid this problem I will absolutely try to work off an outline. (I won’t, though. I never do. I might as well promise to stop eating mass quantities of soft cheese, it’s just as unlikely to happen.)