I’ll be a part of a Halloween panel discussion on the Horror and Thriller genres with fellow members of the Liar’s Club, Gregory Frost, Kelly Simmons, Jonathan Maberry and Ed Petit at Brandywine Hundred Library Wilmington DE, Saturday, Nov 1 Noon – 2. 

Should be a lot of fun.

The podcast of my short story Bad Debt went live this week on Seth Harwood’s excellent crime fiction podcasting site, Crimewav.com. Very interesting experience.

This is my second short-story-podcasting experience; my story Grounders was podcast on www.variantfrequencies.com earlier in the year. But this was the first time I read the story myself.

Now, I am not one of those writers who hates the sound of their own voice. (I’m more like the talking donkey in Shrek; the trick is getting me to shut up). I kind of enjoy reading in public, and while I’m doing it, I think I’m doing a good job. But as it turns out, listening to a recording of it is torture.

It also turns out, the recording process can be a little more torturous than it might appear, as well.

Seth was great, sending lots of encouragement, along with the recording equipment and  tips on how to use it, like putting up blankets to deaden the room, reading just slower than you think sounds natural, and printing the story single-spaced with tiny margins, to minimize page-turning sounds.

I set aside two days when I would have the house to myself for much of the day.

I put up the blankets, like Seth suggested, but I figured I could eliminate the page-turning noises completely by just reading from my computer screen and scrolling down with my touch pad.

Before I started recording, I read through the story from start to finish, all thirty pages, and it went perfectly. Of course it did.

Then I pressed record.

The first take was way too fast. The second take was interrupted by a loud request for puppy attention (the puppy accepted a bribe of a nice chewy pig ear). The third take, and the rest of the day, were occupied with a massive line of deafening thunderstorms.

Oh, well, that’s why there’s another day. 

Day two began perfectly. Sent the boy to school, gave the puppy another dried body-part to chew, and off I went. In the middle of the first take — three pages after the part of the story that contained sirens — came the actual sirens, all sorts of them. (Apparently, one of my neighbors was experiencing some horrible tragedy involving police, fire, and ambulance  – why, I asked, do these things always happen to me?).

Finally, just before I had to go meet my son off the school bus, I got through a great take – perfect tempo, very expressive, just a few flubs, no interruptions. If only the memory card hadn’t run out of room three pages into it.

Damn.

The next afternoon, I managed to squeeze in a couple of hours for two more takes, and they seemed fine …until I played them back and realized that the reason you can’t read off your computer screen is that the fan sounds like a 727 taxiing on the runway.

So, I met my son off the school bus and made a deal with him: “Yes, you can have a friend over, but you have to play in the basement or in the back yard, and you cannot disturb me unless it’s an emergency.”

Well, I got off two complete takes, maybe a little slow, definitely a little tired, a few more flubs than I would have liked, but finished and without interruption. Only later did I find out there had indeed been an emergency: a potato chip emergency, as in, my son came up to the third floor while I was recording to ask if he could have some potato chips.

I’m not sure if it was the F-bombs falling like rain or the growled threats of physical violence, but he heard me reading something that made him rethink the whole potato chip question. He ran back downstairs and didn’t say a word about it, at least not to me. I heard about it after he told my wife. At least that explained why he was looking at me so weird.

Anyway, if you get a chance to listen to Bad Debt  at Crimewav.com, I hope you enjoy it, and as for the quality of the reading, well, you should have heard the one that got away.

 I hate to pitch. Hate it. And it’s not just because, by definition, it involves stripping out all the subtle nuances and clever wordplay and devious twists. And it’s not because the pitch is the earliest and most blatant instance of turning a creative endeavor into “product” (that doesn’t bother me at all). No, I hate to pitch because I’m so bad at it.

I recently had a talk with my agent about my next big project, a thriller called DRIFT. I’m very excited about it, and when I told him a little bit about it, he was excited, too. I told him it was completely outlined and ready to go. Then he asked me to e-mail him with a little more about it.

The process went south from there. He got back to me and politely said …maybe not. He pointed out some of the specifics that he didn’t like, and that the idea as a whole didn’t grab him.

I couldn’t believe it. It was a great idea, a great premise, and soon, I hoped, a very good book. The idea of bagging it and moving on made me feel sick.

Now, I was already well aware of my lame-ass pitch writing skills. One of the best things for me about getting an agent was that I could stop pitching agents (and in my experience, no, agents will not take your word for it when you tell them that you write real good, just not pitches). So I asked my friend and fellow Liars’ Club member Jonathan Maberry to take a look at what I had sent my agent. Jonathan, in addition to being an excellent writer and student of both the craft and the industry, is also a great teacher. One of his classes is on how to write a pitch.

He read mine, making an effort to keep the shudders and head-shakes to a minimum. Then he looked up and said kindly, “Well, you write a hell of a novel.” The pitch, however, was dreadful.

We talked about what goes into a pitch, and he helped me tweak this one (i.e., throw it out and start all over). A lot of what Jonathan told me, I already knew, but hadn’t applied. Some of it was new to me.

The main thing I realized was that my biggest shortcoming in the writing of the pitch is my obsession with relatively minor plot points. I’m a plot geek, I admit it. When I’m structuring a plot, I get a big kick out of the minor bits of plot hardware that make the whole thing work, or the clever twists that make everything logical. The ones I think are cool. And god help me, I put them in the pitch.

That’s not what you do when you’re trying to sell an idea. You don’t see ads for watch companies that say, “Rolex: We use .5 mm Z-toothed micro-cogs.”

Looking back at what my agent had said about the pitch, I realized he was probably right about the specific points he mentioned. So I went in and changed them. Then I rewrote the pitch, from the point of view of an agent trying to sell it, or an editor trying to convince a marketing department, or a reader trying to decide if they want to read it. And not from the point of view of a technician geeking out over the details.

I did change the story and the outline, but I changed the pitch even more. My agent read the pitch and liked it. Then we talked for a while about the idea, and he liked it even more. By the time we were done, I think he was as excited about it as I am.

To be honest, my pitches are probably still kind of lame, but they’re getting better. Now, if I could only write a decent synopsis….

I like Google. It makes my life easier and gives me cool and useful tools, like Google Earth. Every now and then, Google does something vaguely icky, like censoring search results for repressive regimes, but my overall impression of Google is mostly positive. I was a little leery about Google’s “search history” feature, although not enough to deactivate it or delete the results (what can I say.. it’s handy). But, I’m always looking forward to their next big thing.

Now, though, it seems Google’s newest big thing, Google Chrome, comes with an End Use License Agreement (EULA) giving Google a claim to your soul that the devil himself would envy. (in case you don’t know, a EULA is that thing you click “I Accept” without reading when you load software.)

While graciously allowing that “You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services,” the agreement goes on to state that “By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.”

Yikes.

Kind of makes Microsoft seem warm and fuzzy.

Google is backing off a bit, now, saying it was a mistake and they will reword their End Use License Agreement, but I think I’ll be just fine without Chrome in my software arsenal. What really worries me is what I’ve agreed to with all these other “I accept” buttons I’ve been clicking without reading.

Labor Day has always been a bittersweet holiday for me. On the one hand, I love autumn, and I’m always ready to say good bye to the dog days of summer and hello to a crisp snap in the air. But I love the tempo of life in the summer, especially with a kid. Summer means more time to hang out with my son, to spend time with him in the morning without struggling to get him ready for school and to play catch in the afternoon without having to bug him about doing his homework.

The impending school year also brings anxiety about what new things he will face. I was one of those kids, by the end of August, I was ready to go back to school. But not my son. He likes his school, but he dreads going back, dreads the newness of a new grade. I feel his anxiety, too, in a way I didn’t feel when I was a kid (not that I didn’t have plenty of other anxieties).

In my writing life, the change of season is important, too. All that extra downtime has to come from somewhere, and I guess a lot of it comes from my writing. I always expect to accomplish more in the summer than what I end up doing. This summer, I wrote a short story and a couple other small projects, I caught up on some reading and posted a few blogs (which take me way longer than they should). I also spent a lot of time working on an outline. Looking back, I had hoped to accomplish more.

Now that September is here, however, I am ready to go.

I don’t think it is purely coincidence that the outline I’ve been working on is just about finished, and just when it’s back-to-school time, I’m starting to write the first draft.

So tomorrow, we’ll chill out a bit, maybe cook out, maybe go to the pool. But then it’s back to late nights and extra coffee, bags under the eyes and a steadily growing stack of pages.

I’m so excited, I can hardly sleep. Maybe I’ll just stay up and write, instead.

Like many authors, I feel an emotional attachment to most of the characters in my books. I’m sure Kathy Reichs feels an attachment to Tempe Brennan, and Patricia Cornwell does to Kay Scarpetta. It happens with stand-alones, but I think it happens even more when you write a series. You spend a lot of time with your characters. You see them grow and change. So I wasn’t surprised that I became attached to Madison Cross and the other characters in my books.

One thing that did surprise me was how attached I have become to the crime scenes in my books. Although parts of each book take place in fictional locales, most of the action takes place in Philadelphia, and most of the crimes take place in real places. Whether it’s the University of Pennsylvania, St. Peter’s churchyard, the Schuylkill Expressway, or Thirtieth Street Station, I’ve been dropping bodies all over this town. With Body Trace, Blood Poison and Freezer Burn, I have three books out now, and I find that as I’m driving around the city, I’m usually not far from the scene of some horrendous death of my own invention. Maybe I’m a sick pup, but this usually makes me smile.

Part of the attachment to these settings is probably formed while researching the books. If you’re writing about a real place, you can’t fudge the details. If it’s a location where you’ve never been, you have to visit it and study it, and it’s exciting discovering and exploring someplace new in the city where you’ve lived all your life. Much more likely, it’s a place you’ve been to hundreds of times before, but when you write about it, you find yourself looking at it and getting to know it in a totally new way.

This is true to a lesser extent with the other settings in the book, as well — a chase through Northern Liberties, a funeral in Manayunk or just a quiet conversation at Silk City Diner. All of these places become a part of you when they become a part of your books.

But with the setting of a death scene, it’s different.

I thought maybe the locations were emotional surrogates for the unfortunate characters lying dead on the ground. Like I said, I get attached to most of my characters. The murder victims are usually dead before I meet them. But while I don’t get to know them like the other characters, they do have back stories and histories with plenty of details, even if that’s not usually included in the book. But then again, I do get to know some of them before killing them off late in the book. Could it be that since I know what fate awaits them, I subconsciously try not to get too attached? 

Nah, that’s ridiculous; some of the dead characters are among my favorites. In fact, I think there should be a subgenre of zombie books about all the dead literary characters who were too much fun to die. You could kill them all over again (it’s easy — you just have to go for the brain).

Maybe it’s a combination of all of these things, plus that fact that while writing can be hard work, writing crime scenes and murder and carnage never is. That’s just fun. And we all remember fondly the places where we have fun.

Either that or I really am a sick pup.

Well it ain’t Sunday, and it definitely ain’t the first Sunday, but it’s still Noir at the Bar!
Peter Rozovsky is back once again with his excellent Noir at the Bar series at the Tritone Bar, 15th and South St. in Philadelphia, 6:30 tonight, Tues., Aug. 19.
Dave White, Derringer Award-winning author of When One Man Dies and his latest, The Evil That Men Do, will take questions from interviewer, reviewer and crime-blogger Sarah Weinman, as well as from the crowd.
Dave White was nominated for the Private Eye Writers of America’s Shamus Award for best first novel for When One Man Dies, and he’s a heck of a guy.  So come on out to the Tritone in Philadelphia on Tuesday, Aug. 19, at 6:30 p.m. to congratulate Dave and hear him read, and stick around for the best mahi-mahi burgers and fried candy bars in all of crime fiction.

Find out about Dave’s work and read his short fiction at http://www.davewhitenovels.com/.

Detectives Beyond Borders
“Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home”
http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
presents
 
“Noir at the Bar: Come for the mystery,
stay for the mahi-mahi.”

Where: The Tritone, 1508 South Street, Philadelphia
215-545-0475  http://www.tritonebar.com/
When: Tuesday, August 19, 6:30 p.m.

Crime is wrong. I know that. And so is spam, even the non-criminal variety (unless it’s me, shamelessly promoting my next book, like Freezer Burn, which comes out June 3, 2008  from Penguin Books). But every now and then, a piece of scam-spam comes along that is so wrong, it just feels right. In this case, I am talking about an e-mail I received with the subject heading:

SCAM VICTIMS REIMBURSEMENTS PROGRAMME

which was sent, faithfully, from

GEORGE OLUMIDE,

Processing/Transfer Officer,

The missive runs 545 words and is one of the finest examples of free-form Nigerian bank scam prose I have so far encountered, but more important is the scam itself: a solicitation to previous victims of Nigerian bank scams, offering to reimburse them for their losses. All victims need do is hand over the same information they handed over when they got taken the first time. And they will be sent $150,000.
They are self-selecting a for people whose gullibility has already been demonstrated. It’s downright elegant.

Could anybody really fall for it twice? I think it’s a legitimate question, and apparently, so does “George Olumide.” Looking around at the state of the world, I have to think the answer is probably yes.
And frankly, if “Mr. Olumide” manages to get any money from this particular scam, I say let him keep it.

I just checked out the new podcast of my short-story Grounders on Variant Frequencies and I think it’s pretty cool. You can judge for yourself if the story is any good, but the people at Variant Frequencies did a heck of a job producing it, and Thomas “cmdln” Gideon did a great job reading it.

I first started talking about podcasting the story with Seth Harwood a couple of months ago. Seth writes and podcasts the Jack Palms crime series, including the recently published and (deservedly) much buzzed-about first in the series, Jack Wakes Up. Seth does the reading himself on his podcasts. He does a hell of a job and he makes it sound easy. When we first discussed podcasting Grounders, Seth told me to practice reading it.

Now, I have always thought I did a pretty good job of reading my work (and I undeniably  kill reading Dr. Seuss), but as I sat at my dinner table, reading my story aloud to myself, it sounded lame and flat and terrible. Luckily, Seth forwarded the story to Rick Stringer at Variant Frequencies, and Rick agreed to produce it for podcast, which meant someone else would be reading it. Thank god.

Rick tapped Thomas to read it, a great fit not only because of his talent as a reader, but also because of his extensive background in computing and his excellent blog, Command Line, both of which are relevant to the story itself. Hearing his reading brought home how much difference a great reader can make.

I was thinking about this the other night at the Tritone Bar in Philly, at the first night of Noir at the Bar, a new monthly event put together by Peter Rovosky. Duane Swierczynski, author of the crazed and amazing Severance Package among other excellent works, was the featured guest (I’ll be doing the second Noir at the Bar, on July 6). Duane is an excellent public speaker, but adamant about not reading in public (he very well might need corrective lenses, but we don’t know because he won’t even read an eye chart out loud). The program that night had two parts: an interview by Duane’s friend (and mine) book critic Ed Pettit (a.k.a. The Philly Poe Guy); and a reading of the first chapter of Severance Package by Ed’s wife, Kate, who is an actor. I’ve been to plenty of author readings, and I’ve enjoyed them immensely, but there is a big difference listening to a trained actor up there, inflecting, intoning, doing all those actor-ly things, and really doing justice to what was on the page. Duane’s book is great, but Kate’s reading made it even better.

the writing that you would never have noticed reading it quietly, or reading it aloud yourself.

I’m thinking of asking Kate or Thomas to come with me next time I get my eyes checked. I can hear it now, a voice rich with emotion and meaning, reading:

E

DG

KXBL

HVWXP