Unprime Suspect

We’re on Cape Cod this week and, so far, have lucked out with the weather, which means hiking, reading, star-gazing, and time with friends. It also means TV, which is a novelty for us. At home we have a set on which we watch rented videos, but no cable, no box (whatever that is), no antenna (do they still make them?).

The other night we watched the new Prime Suspect, which confirmed my long-held view of remakes. Sometimes they work. The Coen brothers’ True Grit, I think, is a better film than the 1969 version with John Wayne. And while High Society doesn’t have the pacing or performances or razor-sharp wit of The Philadelphia Story, it does have Cole Porter’s score and Grace Kelly’s charm. But when a film or TV series was beautifully written and directed, and intelligently performed—e.g. the original Prime Suspect—I say: Hands off, unless you’ve got something new and compelling to bring to the table.

There was nothing new or compelling in the episode I saw of Prime Suspect. The script wasn’t credible, the dialogue sounded as if it had been written by someone unfamiliar with human speech, and the director seemed to have been hiding in the bathroom. And, yes, the performances were dismal, but what can an actor do—even a fine one like Aidan Quinn—when he’s up against those obstacles?

A couple of questions: What remakes have you seen that equaled or surpassed the original? Any that shouldn’t have been made? And if you disagree about the new Prime Suspect, please jump in.

Hint Fiction Film Contest

While actor and film director Bill LeVasseur was listening to an NPR segment about Hint Fiction: An Anthology of Stories in 25 Words or Fewer (editor Robert Swartwood) last November, he was inspired to visualize the short stories as short films. Eventually, he created the idea for the "Hint Fiction Film Contest."

Producing the contest along with Bill LeVasseur is filmmaker/actor Michael Howard, who runs the Indie film company Invisible Productions.

The film contest will be based upon ten of the stories that appear in the anthology. Congratulations to my co-contributors for having their stories chosen.

There is an entry fee of $25.00 per submission. Once an entry form and fee is received, the entrant will receive two stories to choose from to create a one-minute film. The deadline for submission is January 15, 2012.

The top five submissions of each story will compete in the "Hint Fiction Film" program at the 2012 Vail Film Festival in Colorado. All finalists will receive two filmmaker passes to attend the festival.

The official rules and guidelines can be found here.

On Twitter? Follow @Hint_Fiction @RobertSwartwood @BillLev @VailFilmFest @katcop13

Should they stay or should they go?

One of the best perks of attending writer conferences is the huge bag of free books you receive, which can also be one of the worst perks.

Where will all these freebie books—not to mention those “must reads” purchased in the book room—go when you get them home? Will there be room on the shelves for twenty or so new volumes or will piles build into towers on floors and furniture causing stubbed toes and off-balance slips?

This was the dilemma I faced after returning from Malice and Bouchercon. My bookshelves were full and I didn’t know where I was going to put all the great new reads I’d acquired. It was time for some selective culling and, let me tell you, it wasn’t easy.

I studied the shelves and made some hard choices. Among those that went were The Switch by Sandra Brown, Timeline by Michael Crichton, Storm Warning by Jack Higgins, Brides of Blood by Joseph Koenig and a half dozen others. Some volumes I just couldn’t part with were all 14 books in Lindsey Davis’ Marcus Didius Falco Roman mystery series, Stieg Larsson’s Girl trilogy, Time and Again by Jack Finney all my Charles Dickens and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

All this careful pruning gave me space for about ten new books. What I’m going to do with the other 20 or so sitting in a stack on my bedroom floor is beyond me.

What about you? Any books, old or new, you just can’t give up? Any you’re ready to part with? Let us know.

Visit me at www.cathistoler.com to read an excerpt of my novel, TELLING LIES and check in on my latest news and events.

What Big Wolves You Have for Tuesday Twosome

I love a good werewolf story and one of my favorite writers about werewolves and other creatures is Patricia Briggs. Her stories include packs of wolves all over the world, and they're believable, wonderful characters that make you feel werewolves, vampires, and fae could walk among us.

The series about Mercedes Thompson, the Volkswagen mechanic, features the Columbia Basin Pack led by the inimitable Adam Hauptman, the Alpha. Her character descriptions and interactions make it easy to believe these people live in Kennewick right next to unsuspecting humans.

This is from the third book in the series, Iron Kissed. The paragraph describes Mercy's supernatural gift as a walker. She becomes a coyote without much effort, and it's easy to believe that happens with descriptions like this:

"When I change into a coyote, I don't need a skin or—I glanced down at Warren, once a cowboy and now a werewolf—the moon. When I am coyote, I look just like every other coyote. Pretty much harmless, really, as far down the power scale of magical critters that lived in the state of Washington as it was possible to get."

My sentences are from “A Vampire in Brooklyn,” a short story of mine included in the anthology, Murder New York Style: Fresh Slices:

I glanced in the mirror and smiled. I looked good for a 30-year-old woman who had been killed by a psychopath in 1971. He swore he fell in love with me, and kept me alive for three weeks, torturing my body with his hands and my soul with his words. Before he left me, he made me vampire.

Supernaturals living side by side with humans? Impossible, right? Ever think about the “other you” that lives in a parallel universe?
Oh yeah.

My Town Monday: St. Louis's Old Post Office Plaza

While I was in St. Louis for Bouchercon (big fun!), I stopped into a downtown grocery store and grabbed some vittles for a quick lunch. Looking for somewhere to relax before heading back into the conditioned air, I found this patio of open tables with landscaping.

Imagine those tables as noon, and when you turn to 3 o'clock, here's what I think must be the old post office, because there was a placard reading Old Post Office Plaza.

Sorry for the tilt on this one and the next, but turning then toward 6 o'clock, there's this attractive redder building across the street. 

Closer, that's a shallow, flowing set of water steps taking up another chunk of the plaza. Turning just to the right of what I'm calling the water steps is a zinc-clad wall and the ramp up it is lined with overhanging flowers.

The flow from the shallow steps feeds into a kind of circulating moat, which the gent in blue was keeping sparkling. I know the wall's zinc, because I looked up the place and found an article in the St. Louis Business Journal about it. And that's also how I know that when I rotated all the way to 9 o'clock. . .

. . .this waterfall I saw trickling from above the steps is three stories high, and that giant torso belongs to Icarus.

(I was similarly illuminated that the park opened in 2009, a year late and $600k over budget.) Still, it was a very pretty place for a visitor to catch a few peaceful minutes of garden and gurgles.  Thanks, St. Louis!

Tell us about your town, or link to it in the comments, and we'll post it here and at the My Town Monday blog.

UPDATE: Jennette Marie Powell has fantastic Oktoberfest fun from Dayton, Ohio, and Barrie Summy has an extremely special V.I.P(resident) visiting her town in California.

Not Bragging, Celebrating with Kudos to Harper Collins

Image from Daniel Bates's Daily Mail's article on the EBM in April, 2009.

(Click image to enlarge)

A couple of us WoM have been asking for in-store POD of Big 6 backlists since at least 2009, and Harper Collins is going to give it a go by allowing Espresso Book Machines (EBMs) in physical bookstores to handle about 5,000 titles of their trade paperback backlist to begin.  It always seemed like a natural to me/us, once the technology became available.

When people are shopping for new titles, or investigating an author's backlist which may be too costly or too infrequently requested to keep in stock, why not allow them to order a printed copy from a database that can be produced in about 20 minutes from start-to-finish while they're browsing? Alternatively, order from home--it could be ready by the time you arrive for book club.

If you read here or at CriminalElement.com, you know I'm no technophobe (obviously) and a big e-book fan.  Still, I adore physical books, parchments, folios, etc., as a fabulously robust format that just plain works.  Want to read the Egyptian Book of the Dead?  You can!  Because it's a book, and despite the indignities and ages they suffer, well-made books do a great job of outlasting conditions and even civilizations.  I also love, love the beauty of them and find there are times when the library or used bookshop won't do, when I desire or need a brand-new, physical copy of an older book.

H-C's pricing for this new initiative will be on the agency model, and guarantees the same royalties to authors as the usual retail copies.  Usually on the pricing issues, I have to dig in deeper before I understand the many-tentacled implications, so if you know why this particular pricing model for the Espresso-printed books is a good move or not-so and for whom, please share! Until I know more and can try it myself, I unconditionally volunteer many Huzzahs to Harper Collins for being the first mover.

(Turns out that NYC's McNally Jackson bookstore already has one I can try.  I've been meaning to field test the Espresso Book Machine's final products, and hadn't gotten to it. I'll report back on how I find it using not-so-great source material and a very well-formatted source, and feel free to share whatever you know, too.)

Last, related to this quote from the Publisher's Lunch article:  "Harper ceo [sic] Brian Murray says, 'I think it's important that we make more of our books available in brick and mortar stores' which 'are important for discovery.' He adds that 'if I only cared about profitability, I wouldn't be doing this,' but it's 'good for authors and for booksellers to be able to satisfy a customer' who goes to a physical store and wants a Harper title."*

*Okay, but if the new delivery model's good and serving a need well, snowy nobility will be accompanied by profitability, I'm sure.  And I think that would be fine with Harper Collins, too : )

Banning Books: Is it Ever Okay?

Image from La Deetda Reads

Every year during Banned Books Week (this year it's today through Oct. 1) I'm shocked by the latest lists of banned and challenged books. The last three years alone have seen challenges of books including And Tango Makes Three, Brave New World, The Hunger Games, Twilight (series), To Kill A Mockingbird, Catcher in the Rye, My Sister’s Keeper, The Color Purple, His Dark Materials trilogy, and The Kite Runner.

This year I defended my freedom to choose by posting videos of friends reading from a favorite banned or challenged book on You Tube's Virtual Banned Book Read-Out. I'm reading from The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien.

But while I've trumpeted the right to read books I consider important, I've been uncomfortable about applying that right to "hate" books. Words do incite hateful actions. Take Mein Kampf, and consider the role it played in Hitler's Germany. What if our freedom-to-read values mean we must defend works that counter everything we stand for? What if our kids read precise and accurate instructions for making bombs in the garage?

Should we keep dangerous material available so we can weigh sides of an issue and come to our our own conclusions? Should we make it available to children who presumably don't have the experience to develop a considered opinion? Aren't these questions we should discuss as we celebrate intellectual freedom and the right to read books that present unorthodox or unpopular views?

Writerly Organizations

I once upset some people on Twitter (while pleasing others, as is ever the way) by saying "I expect professional writing organizations to give me critique & career help. I don't need unending love and support--I have dogs for that."

The people who took umbrage felt I was saying that professional organizations shouldn't be supportive, which wasn't my point at all. But I find very little value in an organization that does nothing but tell me that my writing is great, that any effort I expend on adding pages to my manuscript is good, that I am just wonderful, and that all publishing opportunities are equal.

Recently, someone asked me on Twitter whether it was worthwhile to join Sisters in Crime. I gave her the same advice I give to everyone who asks me that question about any of the multitude of organizations I belong to: go to a chapter meeting or two and see whether it suits your style. Then decide.

I belong to the national RWA, but none of the individual chapters because the "local" chapters aren't truly local to where I live, meet at inconvenient times, and don't provide added value for me above what I get from National. I belong to MWA, and they assigned me to the NY chapter, but those meetings are also hard for me to get to and expensive for me to attend, so I rarely go unless there's a guest speaker I feel I can't miss. I belong to Sisters in Crime and the NYC chapter.  Even though I don't make as many meetings as I would like, the chapter provides consistently good speakers and opportunities, so I never feel as if it is a waste of my money.

But all of that is specific to me, to where I live and my schedule and the place I am in my career. It might be completely different for you. But when you decide it's time to buckle down and become serious about your writing, you might want to consider joining a genre-specific organization. And if you do, give all the ones around you a try before making any decisions. And reconsider as you grow. As your needs change, your memberships may change, too.

Road Rules has a Winner!

Wonderful news! Fiona L. Woods who blogs at Cats and Crime has won a copy of Jim Winter’s very entertaining e-book Road Rules in this week’s Women of Mystery giveaway.

Jim blogs at the eclectic Edged in Blue. He varies his blog topics just enough to keep his followers guessing. In fact today he is talking about President Rutherford B. Hayes. Did you know that the B stands for “Birchard?” I didn’t until I read Jim’s post.

Thanks to everyone who participated and thanks to Jim Winter for donating a copy of Road Rules, and if you didn't win, remember this very entertaining book, (I told you all about it here) is available in most e-formats for ninety nine cents. Go get it!

Stay tuned. You never know when the Women of Mystery will sponsor another giveaway.

Terrie

On Re-re-reading

I’m re-re-reading Donald Westlake’s Trust Me On This, and it occurs to me that this is exactly what kids do, go back to the same book again and again. I remember my poor father suffering through The Grasshopper Man every night for about a year. There wasn’t much plot, but what a character that grasshopper man was, with his grassy hair blowing in the wind as he took kids wherever they wanted to go.

There aren’t any surprises for me in Trust Me, but that doesn’t spoil the pleasure of hanging out in the newsroom of the Weekly Galaxy, a publication where editors pitch stories like “Does Sex Cure Gallstones?” and “Jogging Causes Nymphomania.” And then there are the characters, a nice mix of evil, lunatic and charming: the despot publisher whose office is an elevator; the three perpetually drunk Australians known as the Down Under Trio; the cynical editor and the spunky young reporter whose initial antipathy is so great you know they’ll end up together. It’s the reporter, on route to her first day on the job, who discovers a corpse with a bullet in his brain half-hanging out of his car—a murder she can’t interest her editor in because that kind of story has no news value at the Galaxy. Besides having fun, I’m convinced that I learn more about good writing—writing that appears effortless—from re-re-reading Westlake than I would in any seminar. Here’s a peek at the Down Under Trio in action:

“This was the scene Sara came upon when she entered the Veteran’s Bar & Grill on Freemont Avenue: Louis B. Urbiton leading a lot of elderly dipsoes in some sort of vile calisthenics, Bob Sangster demonstrating quick-draw from a make-believe shoulder holster to a couple of unemployed sheet-metal workers, and Harry Razza chatting blithely with the bartender, ignoring the fist the man was slowly raising.”

Please share: Have you re-re-read any good books lately?

Tuesday Twosome

I'm reading J.D. Robb's New York to Dallas this week, which features the wonderful Eve Dallas and Roark. This is part of Robb's In Death series, and it is the first time she has not had a title with "in death" in it. She says it's a one-time thing and we hope so. This is one of my favorite series, and the titles add to the appeal.

In this latest book, Eve is chasing a serial rapist and killer that she put away the first time years ago. Now he's out and hunting again and intent on exacting his revenge against Eve. To get him, Eve must leave her beloved New York City and travel to Dallas, the city from which she took her name and the one that is associated with the nightmares of her bleak childhood. Roark is right beside her, of course, and her intrepid partner, Delia Peabody, is running things back in the homicide unit in New York.

Robb has created a wonderful world in these futuristic novels. The year now is 2060, and I would love to have some of the conveniences available like cars that can zip above traffic and hover, autochefs that prepare food for you in any room or office, and a host of other things we mere mortals can't do right now.
Robb has an uncanny way of getting to the heart of a matter like these two short sentences from New York to Dallas:

This single thought lived in her gut like a parasite. There would be another victim, and soon.

I try to find that taut delivery of words in my own work every time I'm revising. Here's what If found this week:

When he stood before me in his stunning naked male splendor, I noticed his hands were smeared with blood. “Call the police,” he said. “There’s a body in the woods.”

Hope you've been having a productive writing time lately. Keep your writing tight, keep the plot moving forward, and use each word to its fullest potential!

MTM: Jim Winter's Road Rules

You all know Jim Winter, a My Town Monday regular who regales us with tales of the wonders the Cincinnati, Ohio region. This past summer he got my attention for sure when he told us all about the Coney Island in Cincinnati.

Jim is an excellent mystery writer, well known for his short stories, many featuring Private Investigator Nick Kepler. But let me tell you, Jim is off on a different tangent now.

One of the premier conventions of writing fiction is that a story character can pretty much do anything the writer decides PROVIDED the action is consistent with what the reader has come to know about the character’s personality. Let me tell you, Jim Winter has trumped the rule a dozen times over. Within pages of meeting each of the zany characters that populate his new e-book, Road Rules, you know that whatever you expect, they will surprise you—whatever you think will happen turns out to be something else.

This novel is definitely a cross between the screwball movie “It’s a Mad, Mad Mad Mad World” and Jimmy Breslin’s hilarious book, “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.” Yep, Road Rules is that kind of funny.

And while I will give nothing away about the plot, I will tell you that the road of the title leads from Cleveland, Ohio (Home of Bouchercon 2012) to the city of “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” fame, Savannah, Georgia. So there you have it, folks. A laugh out loud good time that you can snag for your e-reader for only ninety nine cents!!! I asked Jim what formats he has available and he said, “I have copies in .mobi (Kindle), epub (everything else), and PDF (kicking it old school).”

Jim has generously offered to send an e-book to one lucky commenter on this post and you have until Wednesday at 5 pm to comment here for a chance to win, but seriously folks, don’t wait until you find out that you didn’t win the drawing, go and buy the e-book. You can buy it here or here or lots of other places.

Before you wander over to check out this week’s My Town Monday posts, let us know in the comments if you’d like a chance to win Road Rules, just remember you can start enjoying it right now if you download it into your e-reader for only ninety nine cents.

Terrie

Brooklyn Book Festival AND....

Welcome to the weekend! This weekend the literati turn out in Brooklyn for the annual Brooklyn Book Festival. I'll be (wo)manning two separate booths at this event. One with the Big Heart/Big Apple Writers, a group of romance writers  from the New York area and one with the New York/Tri-State chapter of Sisters in Crime.

All the Women of Mystery are members of the NY SinC chapter and a whopping eight of us have stories in this year's SinC NY anthology, Murder New York Style: Fresh Slices, which we will be selling at the festival. There are twenty-two stories in the anthology, and while I have only read five so far, I've greatly enjoyed the ones I've perused.

You can read the table of contents and see keep up with the anthology stuff in general on its new website.

But since you're here, I'll give you the lowdown on the stories you'll find from those of us you know:

• Tear Down by Anita Page
• The Sneaker Tree by Terrie Farley Moran
• A Morbid Case of Identity Theft by Clare Toohey
• Only People Kill People by Laura K. Curtis
• The Understudy by Lois Karlin
• Out of Luck by Cathi Stoler
• A Vampire in Brooklyn by Leigh Neely
• The Cost of Cigarettes by Nan Higginson 

All that and fourteen more stories! Get it at the Brooklyn Book Festival or at any of your favorite online booksellers. Or get your local bookstore to order you a copy!

Criminal Element offers chance for a free E-reader!

If you already have visited Criminal Element, you know it is a fabulous site, filled with fun, informative blogs and great fiction, with the occasional giveaway in the mix. Well, if you are dying for an E-reader, now is your chance. In honor of Bouchercon, Criminal Element is offering some lucky book fanatic the chance to win a free one. Offer ends September 21, 2011.

Just click here for the directions which are simple as can be: login, click to enter and poof! you are in it to (hopefully) win it.

Great and grand luck to you!

Terrie

Mass-market paperbacks: buried in the sand.

Finding a popular, well-priced paperback beach read next summer may be nearly as hard as finding buried treasure. At least according to a recent article in The New York Times: The Dog-Eared Paperback, Newly Endangered in an E-Book Age. With shelf-space at a premium and reserved for more expensive editions, and the sales of e-books exploding, the mass-market paperback may well be in big trouble with sales falling 14 percent since 2008. Some authors feel its demise will mean few opportunities for readers to discover and purchase the work of new authors especially in mysteries and thrillers, popular paperback categories.

Consumers also realize that they no longer have to wait for the paperback, version—trade or mass-market—of a hard cover favorite—they can often get it the day it’s released as an e-book and for less money.

Another article on the WomenOnWriting website, cites e-book sales as having increased 160 percent since last year with paperback and hardcover sales dropping 17 and 23 percent respectively. It also discusses how publishes are trying to find a balance between digital and print to sell their titles.

Of course, not everyone has an e-reader. Not yet, anyway. And some people swear they’ll never give up the feel of holding a book in their hands.

How about you? Will you be paperback-less on the beach next summer with an e-book version from your favorite author instead?

Visit me at www.cathistoler.com to read an excerpt of my novel, TELLING LIES and check in on my latest news and events.

Tuesday Twosome

I truly enjoy reading Stuart Woods’ word, especially when I need an escape from my world. Stone Barrington manages to get into some great situations in these fast-paced, edgy page turners. I do wonder where Stone Barrington will have dinners with his pal Dino Bacchetti will have dinner now that Elaine’s, the famous New York City restaurant is closed. The well-known eatery featured prominently in Woods’ novels and life. His author photos were taken at his favorite table there.

Anyway, the picks for Tuesday Twosome come from Bell-Air Dead, the book dedicated to Elaine Kaufman, who died in 2010. As usual, Stone’s in the middle of a mystery involving one of the wealthiest people in American, the beautiful widow Arrington Calder. He’s her representative at a stockholder’s meeting, but the fun begins when he tries to get others to vote with him.

This quote is near the end of the story and provides an apt description of the character, Stone Barrington. As usual, he’s talking to his trusty sidekick, Dino:

“You have a point, Dino, as always, but that wouldn’t be any fun. I want to watch, don’t you?”

I’m working on the second book in a trilogy about a psychic, a shapeshifter, and a security expert with the soul of an ancient warrior. That also makes for interesting conversation sometimes. Here’s my offering:

“Her birthday is July 13, the date of birth of the god Osiris. Each timeshe renews herself it gives her a hundred years of life,” the older woman said sadly.

What have you been working on this week? How’s you work progressing. This is from book two; the first book is with an agent, and I’ve got toes, fingers, eyes, and everything else crossed while waiting. Share a couple of your sentences.

MTM: The Mount Kisco Firehouse 9/11 Celebration

Yes, I know, I talk about the Fire Department a lot. But it's a big part of my life, and--in many towns across the US--a big part of life in general. And come 9/11, even people who tend to forget the fire department in their everyday lives are suddenly reminded of it. For the tenth anniversary, that was ten times more evident.

This year, our fire department created a monument.  And by created, I mean they raised the money, sure, but they also contributed their time, skills and energy.  (They are good at that. After all, the weekend of Irene, my husband's firehouse went on more than 60 calls. And they're not the only house in town.) Being a volunteer department, we have guys who own pool companies, guys who work for the water department, guys who own sign companies, guys in construction...you name it. Sure, some of the labor was hired out, but a lot of it wasn't. They designed it and they built it.

There was a small parade and a big ceremony for the unveiling, with hundreds if not thousands of people. (I was selling tee-shirts to raise money for the department, so I couldn't see them all, but since we had trucks full of firefighters from all the surrounding towns, that alone accounts for several hundred folks.) After the ceremony at the monument, people wandered over to the Mutual house, about 1/10 of a mile away. 

Local restaurant Bellizzi donated an astonishing amount of food (they're very supportive of the fire department and they have excellent pizza, so if you're ever in Mount Kisco, you should go there), which is a good thing since the whole town was invited to the party. 

And, since the FD had hired the Bernie Williams Band to play the party, the whole town came. (For those of you who don't watch baseball, Bernie Williams was a long-time members of the NY Yankees. He's also a jazz guitarist.) I had to leave relatively early because my dogs were home alone, but when I left the line for food was still enormously long and everyone was having a fine old time.

It's a small-town thing, perhaps. Or maybe it's just the kind of thing volunteer departments can manage because they're not quite as restricted as paid ones. (Did you know that the vast majority of firefighters in this country are volunteers? They are. It costs literally thousands of dollars to outfit one firefighter in turnout gear and well over a million per engine. So paying the actual people who put out the fires isn't in a lot of budgets.)

So next time you're passing by a firehouse, whether volunteer or paid, stop in and say "hello" and "thanks."  They'll appreciate it. If you live in a town with a volunteer force, consider doing something nice. In my experience, cookies always work.

To visit many other locales, check out the My Town Monday blog.

Tolerance

Character Defined is a company that promotes ethics and good character. They produce bookmarks that encourage patience, honesty, forgiveness and other core values that we each try to develop in ourselves and hope to see in future generations. In honor of the anniversary of 9/11, here is the book mark on tolerance, because until we learn tolerance, we will never know peace.

Terrie

Odd Snobbery

photo courtesy of The Daily Kos

On a good day, the traffic in NYC is pretty unpleasant.  On the West Side Highway, it's often untenable.  And on wet, rainy nights, especially on the approach to the George Washington Bridge, it's downright horrific.

 But that's the best way to get home for both me and Clare2e.  On days we're working in the same office, we carpool.  And when it's raining, the emphasis there is on pool--the West Side Highway/Henry Hudson Parkway doesn't have the world's greatest drainage.

The other night, as we sat for an hour or so trying to go the five miles from our office to the GW Bridge exit in a downpour of biblical proportions, I realized that I have a form of bigotry or snobbery or something I hadn't recognized until that moment.

You see, for about half that time, we were behind a little red "Zipcar."  I don't know if they have these where you live, but basically you can get a car by the hour or day if you don't have one of your own and you just need it to run errands or whatever.  You pick it up at a parking lot or parking spot, drop it off either at the same place or another pre-arranged location.

When another car cut between us and the Zipcar, Clare mentioned that she was tired of the view anyway and I told her I didn't like driving next to or behind zipcars. And I don't. They make me nervous. Sure, the driver could be someone from out of town, who just needs a car for a few hours to get from one appointment to the next, or someone whose car is in the shop for the day, but the fact is that most zipcar drivers don't drive every day.  And they certainly don't drive whatever they're behind the wheel of when you see them in a zipcar.  So, yeah, they make me nervous.

Is that wrong? Am I a snob?

Friday Flash - Project Gutenberg's Founder Dies

Hats in hand for the death, on Tuesday, of Michael Hart, who pioneered e-Book publishing and the fabulous Project Gutenberg. His project had its roots in 1971 when, inspired by the ARPAnet (precursor to what we know as the internet), Hart envisioned a day when public access to a network-of-networks would bring literature to the world.

The US Declaration of Independence became Hart's first e-text. Gratified to find that other people were downloading it, he started entering and digitizing literary classics in the public domain - the first eBooks - and founded Project Gutenberg. There's not a writer among us who doesn't know who that project was named for, and most of us benefit from the 36,000-and-growing digital books in its collection.

Image & story at Go To Hellman

October Fiction Contests

There are several contests around the web coming up for October with prizes ranging from $250 to $1,000. Hopefully one of the contests will be a good fit with something you’re working on. Click over each contest’s website for all the details. Good luck!

2011 Newport Review Flash Fiction Contest. Deadline: October 1, 2011. Looking for original, unpublished flash fiction stories, 1,000words maximum.

2011 The Wilda Hearne Flash Fiction Contest. Deadline: October 1, 2011. 500 words maximum of previously unpublished work.

15^th Annula Zoetrope: All-Story Short Fiction Contest. Deadline October 3^rd, 2011. Accepting all genres of literary fiction. 5.000 words or less of unpublished work.

Visit me at www.cathistoler.com to read an excerpt of my novel, TELLING LIES and check in on my latest news and events.

THE DEBT

The Debt offers a lesson to those of us who write crime fiction. Character-driven equals compelling. Plot-driven can be silly and pocked with more holes than a machine gun target.

At the fine heart of this film is the story of three young Mossad agents, played by Jessica Chastain, Marton Csokas and Sam Worthington, who set out in the mid-1960s to capture a Nazi war criminal and hand him over to Israeli officials. When the mission goes awry and the Surgeon of Birkenau, played by Jesper Christensen, becomes the agents' responsibility, the tension brought about by the forced isolation of these characters in a decrepit East Berlin apartment is riveting.

Now for the goofy part. Flash forward to Israel in the mid-1990s where we re-meet the three agents, one of them briefly. We recognize Helen Mirren as the Chastain character because of their identical facial scars (What, no plastic surgery after thirty years?) Mirren and Tom Wilkinson, who plays the Worthington character, face a moral dilemma that puts them at the mercy of plot twists we’re supposed to find suspenseful and compelling. I didn’t. It was fun, though, working out the holes in this part of the script at the diner afterward.

That said, I think the film is worth seeing for the moving and suspenseful central story, and for the fine performances by Chastain, Csokas, Worthington and Christensen. Mirren and Wilkinson are incapable of acting badly, but I wish they'd been given parts worthy of their talent.

Flaws aside, The Debt is, at long last, a film for grown-ups. Let’s hear it for the end of the summer movie season.

Two-Sentence Tuesday

As for the chapter I'm working on now, it's like writing at the bottom of a lake filled with glue. So here are two sentences from an earlier, happier time:

They ate quickly, no small talk, no questions, Gabrielle concentrating on not shoving the food into her mouth or dribbling mayo down her black sweater. When they finished, Flanagan leaned back and said, “I’ll tell you right off, I’m not crazy about liars, so you’re going to have to do a goddamn brilliant selling job."

The following is from The Inspector and Silence, by Hakan Nesser and his contemplative Chief Inspector Van Veeteren.

"As he stood there listening to the usual signals from the small of his back after a long car journey, a many-threaded skein of thoughts came to life inside him--about age and distance. For when he eventually...asserted the undoubted rights that came with his age and retired...when he gave up once and for all rooting around in the trash heaps of his environment, what he intended to seek out and lay claim to was distance--to occupy the elevated position afforded by keeping things at a distance."

Please let us know what you've been up to.

Happy Labor Day

Recently I saw this bumper sticker on a car and immediately knew that I have to have one. The original was designed by the Northland Poster Collective which closed in 2009 after thirty years of providing activist art.

I must confess that I have never held a union job. After my first one or two, all my jobs had fancy titles with words like “manager” or “director” in them. Still I come from a family that started life in America, as my Grand Aunt Elizabeth liked to say, “in the building trades,” which meant they did back-breaking construction work. The generation between Lizzie and me consisted of firemen, and construction workers, deli clerks and US Marshals. Lizzie herself was a sweatshop dressmaker in the era of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire and then worked in a city hospital for the rest of her life.

And it was Lizzie and her generation of organizers that brought us: the lunch hour, the minimum wage, the forty hour workweek, sick days, vacation days, health care and paid holidays. Any privilege you enjoy at work today, someone risked their personal security and sometimes their lives to win those rights for you. Think I’m kidding about the danger they faced? Read here about the 1894 Pullman Strike in which, at the behest of the railroad tycoons, President Cleveland sent in the United States Army to end the strike by any means necessary. And American soldiers killed American workers.

So if today there is a Labor Day parade in your town, please stand on a corner and wave the flag in thanksgiving for the ease in your life that the Unions have provided. In these modern times when only twenty-two percent of the American workforce is unionized, and some state government officials single out the Unions as the root cause of our economic problems, take a minute to think of how your life would be without the weekend.

For more My Town Monday posts just click here.

Terrie

Art Created from Hint Fiction Stories

According to the Columbia Daily Tribune in Columbia, Missouri, the Columbia Art League (@CoArtLeague on Twitter) opened a show based completely on several stories from Hint Fiction: An Anthology of Stories in 25 Words or Fewer, edited by Robert Swartwood.

Gallery Director Diana Moxon first heard about the Hint Fiction anthology on NPR radio.

Robert Swartwood read at 5 p.m. on September 1 in the lobby of the Missouri Theatre Center for the Arts before the "Hint Fiction" reception at 6 p.m. On Friday, September 2, he read at 12:30 p.m. at the University of Missouri Bookstore in the MU Student Center and at 3 p.m. at the Columbia Public Library.

Click here for a slide show of the artwork based on some of the Hint Fiction stories.

Come follow me on Twitter at @katcop13.

Unforgettable in Queens

Last Monday I bragged that New York City is now the Television Capital of the World. (At least in my mind.) You can read that post here.

Little did I know that while I was pondering the joy of bumping into Donny Wahlberg (Blue Bloods) or Julianna Margulis, (The Good Wife) Poppy Montgomery was a stone's throw away filming an episode of Unforgettable, a new police procedural scheduled this fall on CBS. Barbara Arnstein of the Queens Tribune captured all the fun in this great article.

Terrie

On Goals and Peeps

See those guys on the left?  They're Peeps.  Not YOUR peeps or MY peeps, however.  And, fact is, your peeps may not be the same as mine.

It's important to know your peeps (aka your audience) when you're setting career goals.  For example, the MS I just turned in to my agent is Romantic Suspense. My audience for that book also reads Brenda Novak, Allison Brennan, J.T. Ellison, etc.  I've met the readers of these books on the web, on Twitter, at conferences, in bookstores...I know who they are, what they like, and how they like to read.  I also know what they will and will not spend.  If I were offered a hardcover contract for this book, I wouldn't take it.

I know. I hear your gasps of outrage. Isn't HC the ultimate goal? Isn't that where I should want to be going? After all, my peeps also read Linda Howard, Catherine Coulter and Christina Dodd, all of whom release in HC.  But here's the thing...all of them worked up to it. My peeps simply won't pay HC prices for a debut author. Frankly, even if they wanted to, most of them couldn't afford to.  And with "agency pricing" of ebooks, even the digital versions of HC books are too expensive for most of them.

These are voracious readers who like to read in both physical and ebook formats, so I wouldn't want to go e-only unless I had to.  But if I were forced to choose either ONLY e or ONLY paper, I'd go only ebook. It would reach more readers that way.  Again, further along in my career, I might choose differently, but I'm talking debut here.

Now, I'm not saying I'll get a contract. I'm not even saying my agent will like the MS enough to send it out.  But it makes me a little crazy when I talk to writers and they have absolutely no career considerations beyond "I want to be published." There are a million kinds of publishing these days, and each one has different pros and cons.

Let me take this particular MS as an example and look at it a little further. Let's say I got two contract offers (hey, a girl can dream, right?). Publisher A is one of the "Big 6" and has agency pricing and standard ebook royalty rates.  Publisher B is a big enough press, but not one of the Big 6. Someone like Harlequin, who still publishes in Mass Market Paperback, not Trade.  Both are offering MMPB release. Big 6 Pub has better ebook royalty rate, but Agency pricing. Other press has lower rate but no agency pricing.

If I am in this for the money, I go with Publisher A. No question. But it's not that simple.  Again, remember this is a debut.  There are a number of buyers out there who really, really hate agency pricing. They may not buy my book because of it. If I want wider distribution, even though the money may not be as good, perhaps I should go with Publisher B.

If that actually happened to me, I have no idea which of the two I would go with. It's a really tough call. But I urge anyone who is serious about a career in writing to start thinking this way.  Because one of the other things that happens when you start considering your options is you start to realize what kinds of steps you may have to take to get to where you'd like to be.

Playing the Longshot

I’m an eavesdropper of the full-attention-on-the-conversation-at-the-next table variety. My husband no longer winces when I do this. I’ve convinced him that I’m honing my observational skills. Occasionally he participates, which is good because four ears are better than two.

Last week we were headed home from Lenox, Mass. and stopped at one of those old diners off the Taconic. The four men at the next table could have stepped out of a David Mamet script.

These were city guys, or maybe Jersey guys, in their late fifties to late sixties. Definitely not locals. Catching up on their families for a bit but mostly talking about horses. Betting, not breeding, which led us to conclude that they were on their way to Saratoga. They talked about big wins, big losses, how in the old days you couldn’t walk into the clubhouse without a shirt and tie, unlike the way these slobs walk around today. As it happened, it was a three-way conversation because the oldest member of the quartet, white-haired and morose, didn’t say a word, just kept shoveling in the food.

So I thought: What if these four are made guys? What if they plan to stop at Lake Taghkanic on the way to Saratoga, after which only three of them will finish the trip? And what if Mr. Morose knows what’s coming and has planned his own lakeside surprise party?

On the other hand, if they're four men of the cloth who happen to have a fondness for horses...

Any other eavesdroppers out there?