C.J. West's Blog, page 9

A Craving To Kill For

What do you crave?

For me it's chocolate. Dark chocolate. I have had a love affair with junk food since mom started going to the thrift store and freezing boxes of Devil Dogs, Ring Dings and Yankee Doodles. My brother, sister, and I went crazy for those.

 

Unchecked my craving will give me a bulge around the middle, high cholesterol, and a few other health problems that can be worked off by munching carrots and working out like a madman.

 

In the last two months I've been working on a project that involves more serious cravings for heroin. These cravings drive people to do tragic things to each other. The stories I've read have made me physically sick and writing this book has been difficult.

One particular aspect of my research has plagued me. Heroin addicts get clean using Methadone in clinics, or by sweating it out at home. Either way, beating the addiction means a horrible sickness that lasts a week and involves sweating in the fetal position with cramps, vomiting and the worst fever symptoms you could imagine.

Even while addicts are taking the drug, they require a larger and larger dose to get off "E". In other words, addicts need more and more of the drug just to feel ok. It becomes harder and harder to get high and many times they are stealing or prostituting themselves simply to get rid of the sickness that will eventually consume them.

I'm awed by the power of not only the drug, but the other emotional and life issues that would inspire someone to go back to heroin after kicking it. Sweating it out is a deterrent for sure, but recovering addicts go back over and over. Some have been in detox dozens of times. Thinking about this boggles my mind and assures me of heroin's power.

I won't risk my life and my health by trying heroin, so I'm going to explore my own cravings.

I've made a bet with myself. Or maybe I'm conducting a psychological experiment on myself to help put me in touch with the three recovering addicts in my new book. Starting today, until I finish writing the book (or I crash and burn), I am going to go on my No Junk diet and get in touch with the cravings I have for junk food.

Anyone is welcome to join me.

Here is my official list of banned foods (yours may vary):

No Chocolate… granola bars with chocolate chips are ok
No Fast Food – McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, KFC… Subway is acceptable
No Donuts, Cake, Cookies, Pies… birthday cake for my kids is acceptable
No Candy
No Soda
No Ice Cream 

I allow myself the following:

Beer and wine
Pizza
Chinese food

As time progresses I'll check in with my word count, my success on the diet, and the affect my cravings have had on me over the week.

If you decide to join me on the challenge, don't be shy. Post a reply and let me know how you are doing.

Are You Afraid of Me?

I'm a big guy but even in my mysterious-looking author pose I don't find myself very intimidating. I had the good fortune of being raised in a place with near zero crime and when I finished growing, I was 6' 2". When I walk into a bar or down a dark street, I'm not the guy people choose to make trouble with, but I'm not one to start it either.

In the last few weeks I've met people in real life who thought it odd that I have a pen name. They think I'm hiding something sinister behind my nom de plume. Like in my real life I'm a mass murderer who takes women and young children and cuts them up in the name of research for my books. Really? Me?

When I finished Sin & Vengeance I had a number of people, mostly parents of children my kids wanted to play with, look at me very suspiciously. They wondered where I got the ideas for that book and they wondered (out loud!) if they should let their children play with mine. (Sorry kids if you felt isolated. It was my fault.)

I had been wondering why people find me scary this week when I got an email from a reader. Some themes in my books touch a nerve for people and they share their experiences with me. Some are so horrifying they make me feel physically ill. The evil things people do to strangers and more often than I want to believe, their children, explain why good people are afraid of someone like me. I'm large enough to have the potential to hurt them and that is enough. They aren't spooked by me, but by things that have happened to them or their loved ones in the past.

The people who are doing these atrocious things live all around us and they are not afraid of me in the least. I'm learning about them as I research the heroin culture for my new series. I hear true stories of what people do to each other for drugs or money. I see particular graffiti as advertisements of drugs for sale. I see drugs being passed from hand to hand. I see the results of drug users stripping an abandoned home. This happens all around us and we do nothing.

The people selling drugs, pimping girls, robbing homes, and molesting children see me as a sheep not a citizen. As someone who will stand by and do nothing as they harm whomever they choose to get their drug or satisfy their fantasy. We've outsourced the responsibility for building safe communities to the police even though they can do almost nothing to protect us from crime. That is why criminals are not afraid.

I hope there comes a day when we begin to take responsibility for the world around us, a time when a potential burglar sees someone like me coming down the street and he's very afraid.

Is It Better To Give (Free e-books) Or Receive?

I recently enrolled in the KDP Select program and this weekend I'm giving away my first free book in the Kindle store.

Addicted To Love is free from Friday through Valentine's Day.

I'll wait while you go download…

 

Back? Great.

Some of you didn't download. I know you didn't. I guess you need more convincing…

It's mostly the guys.

Shame, I had my artist put the knife on the cover just for you.

 Maybe we should have chosen a bikini model instead.

You wouldn't really buy a book with her picture on it would you?

Excuse us for a second ladies…

Okay guys, eyes down here. On the text.

Imagine your lover attacking without warning. You can't hit her. But damn, she's trying to kill you. You want to cradle her, help her, but she's got a knife and she really wants to slice you open. You didn't cheat on her, didn't even say anything stupid, but she's furious. And you never knew she was this strong.

What do you do?

Click right here.

Okay. Great. Now you've got the book.

Welcome back ladies. On with the blog.

Some of you are wondering if I really want you to download the free e-book or if I secretly want you to go buy it later. You're not alone. Many people outside the business ask if I'm crazy when I say I'd like 50,000 hey, even 500,000 people to download my books for free.

Why would I want that?

Simple. I. Want. You. To. Read. My. Work.

One of the secrets in publishing is that there are tens of thousands of really talented writers out there. The big publishers want you to think anyone not anointed by them is a hack. Someone you shouldn't bother with. They highlight really bad books and annoying self-published authors and scare you into paying exorbitant prices.

Has it worked?

Are you afraid to try something new?

Do you know there are thousands of great books available for $3 or less. Do you know the great undiscovered authors who wrote these books? Of course you don't. If you did, they'd be at the top of the charts.

Well, guess what? That's all changing. Readers everywhere are taking a chance on free books and falling in love with someone new.

Me for instance.

Take a closer look and you'll find that beneath my shameless attempts to make you smile I've written some books that people rave about. The End of Marking Time has 110 fantastic reviews. Several people have told me that every high school kid in America should read it before they graduate. It's been called brilliant, amazing, and genius in review after review.

Have you read it? Why?

Because you didn't know about it.

I want you to read it. I want you to enjoy it. That's why it's usually priced like a cup of coffee and sometimes it's free.

If you don't have a Kindle yet, you should know I'm giving away 12 Kindle Fires this year. The contest is completely free. So go and sign up!

Okay, so you can tell I like giving, but is it better to receive?

Only you can decide.

I have enjoyed reading free books by dozens of new authors in the last year. Free books have helped me get to know writers I work alongside. Now I can point friends to great books they can buy for a few bucks.

What's not to love about that?

My 2012 Peace Plan

My peace plan isn't for world peace, but inner peace.

In 2011 I faced some difficult changes. I found myself mentally thrashing about and had difficulty focusing on my work. Late in the year I began reading about minimalism and Zen. At some point in my journey, I wrote the following daily reminder and posted it to the background on my computer. It has really helped me get up in the morning and face the day so I thought I would share it and talk a bit about my thinking behind each line.

Today I will be at Peace with Myself.

I will accept my current position in life and move toward my goals if only by inches.

I will SEEK the TRUTH in all things without fear for what others think and feel about me.

I will live simply, speak directly, and act with humility.

I will put myself aside and look deeply into the hearts of others that I may be of better service

Today I will be at Peace with Myself.

One of my personal struggles is accepting my own fallibility. I've lived long enough to make numerous glaring mistakes and then I became a writer and invited the entire world to visit me online and point them out. Oh joy!

I read an article this year that talked about our past failures and it was then I realized certain events from my past would come back to me and replay over and over in my mind. My heart sank each time I re-experienced the feeling of failure.

The article suggested we embrace our past, that we actively remember these events that cause us pain and love ourselves in those moments where we went wrong. To do this over and over until the events lose their hold on us. By removing our fear of those mistakes and what they say about us, we can move beyond them.

I feel like I've always tried to do the right thing. Maybe axe murderers feel the same way, but it was easier for me to accept my mistakes knowing that my intentions were good. The things I was remembering were simply mistakes. For the next two weeks I paid strict attention to memories that made me uncomfortable. I relived them over and over, all the while reminding myself of the purity of my intentions. In a short time I stopped those same old mistakes from robbing my spark and ruining my mood when I'm reminded of them.

Each morning I remind myself not to fight who I am.

I will accept my current position in life and move toward my goals if only by inches.

Several years ago I took a hard left turn into fulltime fatherhood. That was the best and worst decision I've ever made.  For several years I had the joy of seeing my kids every school event and practice and homework assignment. Now I find myself with two young adults and an opportunity to embark on a new career.

No matter how you got to where you are today, you can't change the choices you made in the past. All you can do is accept where you are, map where you want to go, and take small steps forward.

I will SEEK the TRUTH in all things without fear for what others think and feel about me.

So often I see, particularly with kids, an outright refusal to accept the truth. Seeing the truth means admitting to breaking a dish, or taking a vitamin, or accepting that you're not tall enough to ride an amusement park ride. Over the last few years I've watched the publishing industry hide from the reality of e-books when they could have embraced a new opportunity and seized market share.

Reality is scary sometimes. Embracing truth will be downright threatening to some people around you, but we can't change what will be if we cannot accept what is.

I will live simply, speak directly, and act with humility.

This year of tumult has taught me that I don't need many possessions; that many of the important things between people are only hinted at when they can be shared so much better with a few honest words; and that we all live in a world where our own troubles are paramount when others around us may have problems that are far more challenging.

I will put myself aside and look deeply into the hearts of others that I may be of better service.

One of the worst pieces of advice I ever received was: "I messages are more effective than you messages."  The author of this advice suggested that by putting things in your own terms, your listener would feel you could relate to him or her. This gem made it into my consciousness and I used it for decades. I think this was one of the worst pieces of advice I ever followed.

In the last few months I have done my best to take "I" out of my conversations, to listen and ask questions with true curiosity. I take joy in helping people, it's deep in my DNA, but to truly help someone, you have to know who they are and what sort of help is meaningful to them.

That's the end of my peace plan. I hope you've enjoyed a peek into my routine and maybe a snippet or two of my reminder will make it to your desktop for a while.

 

I almost forgot… I'm giving away $2,400 in bookish merchandise this year. You don't need to buy anything, just help me spread the word about my work. Enter here!

Love Made Me Younger

 

The last twelve months have been some of the most stressful of my life so when people started thinking I was much younger than I am, I had to stop and wonder why. First, let me give you some perspective on my year.

 Last year I lived in a big house in the suburbs with a comfortable office and six uninterrupted hours each weekday to write. I had a special area set aside for brainstorming with corkboards and whiteboards mounted on the walls. I worked in the yard to keep healthy, building stonewalls, extending the lawn, planting trees, and building perennial beds. The yard was big enough that I could work with my hands every day and never run out of things to do. (I worked without power tools to get the maximum exercise out of my projects.)

Here are some of them:

Perenniel Bed Behind the Swimming Pool

A Little Creative – House Numbers Built In



Stone Wall And Strawberry Bed



Dry Stone Wall I Built Along The Front of Our Property

With two kids and a dog, books to write, meals to cook, and all that work outside, I never lacked something to do. I seemed to have the world by the tail, but I wasn't a happy guy.

 Fast forward one year.

 I have moved into a single room with my few remaining possessions crammed in all around me. I write squeezed in between my bed and bins full of clothes with my laptop on my lap. The whiteboards, the desk, and the bookshelves are all gone. I still work with my hands during the day, but now I work for food—eating at Subway would be considered a major purchase. If that doesn't make my new situation cozy enough, one of my roommates likes to play guitar at 3:00 am. Johnny Cash. Same songs over and over. All night. Loud. You'd think I'd be miserable.

 

 So a few weeks ago my daughter's friends asked if I was her brother. I wouldn't have paid any attention, but another group of friends had asked the same thing a week earlier. These girls have seen me dozens of times. I'm at every game. I used to drive carpool. So I had to wonder why they were seeing me differently than they did before. Then the woman at the high school ticket booth charged me student admission for a football game. When I handed her back the extra two dollars, I knew something was up.

 What changed?

 When I wrote Addicted To Love I wanted to explore the idea that deep down we all want to find a passionate connection we can't live without. I created a place where everyone was desperately in love and obsessed over their lover so much that the rest of life became background noise. My parents have this sort of connection and maybe as I was writing this novel I was bitter I hadn't found it myself.

 And then something wonderful happened.

 I found someone I want to spend every waking moment with. I reach for her when I wake and if she's not there, I reach for my phone to look for word from her. When we are in the same room for more than a minute, one of us always closes the distance until we touch. It is an unconscious desire to be close that makes my heart sing whenever I notice it happening.

 For us being close is much more than physical. I can't remember when it happened the first time, but some time ago I was upset and my sweetheart explained what was bothering me and why. I was dumbfounded. I felt like half of the little old couple in matching rockers on the porch, but we've only known each other a short time. She cares enough to reflect on what makes me tick and she knows me better than anyone ever has. It is as if I have been alone all my life and suddenly I'm not.

 Something I said to her sums up our relationship. "When I appear, you smile." It is so true. No matter how many times I enter a room, she lights up when she sees me. Finding this amazing connection and feeling so deeply loved has made me so joyful that people think I'm 25 years younger. If you think I'm crazy for falling madly in love at my age, please don't tell me. I like feeling like a teenager.

 As Black Friday passed, I saw images of people hurting each other over little pieces of plastic and was deeply saddened. Material things will never hold that important of a place in my life and I hope they won't in yours either. I encourage you to go out and do some Christmas shopping. Help our economy, celebrate the season, but focus your energy on those most important to you. You might start looking younger, too.

 

 

Bouchercon St. Louis, My 3rd World Mystery Convention

In August of 2009, a friend and faithful reader urged me to go to his home city to attend Bouchercon. "It's the biggest mystery convention in the world. There'll be 1,500 people there. You've got to come."

Come I did. Hobbling all the way with a knee fresh from an ACL, MCL repair and a sturdy black brace over my jeans. I met hundreds of people that year. I took in a great tour of the Hachette distribution center. Watched dozens of panel discussions. Drank dozens of beers. Slept maybe a dozen hours in five days. The one thing I didn't do surprised me most: I didn't sell books.

Fast forward to 2011.

The first thing I did on a rainy Wednesday was to board a trolley and tour the city. Bouchercon moves from place to place each year and one of the joys of the event is discovering a new city. The trolley tour was a jumping off point to find attractions for the coming three days.

On Wednesday night I had dinner at Hannegan's downtown with members of 4MA. For those of you who aren't familiar with the group, 4MA is the best mystery discussion group on the planet, focusing on the discussion of books with almost no intrusion by authors to promote their work. Many of the members read more than 50 books per year so the discussion is very informed and it is a great place for a writer to get insights into the minds of advanced readers.

Maddy, Kim, Chris, Lucinda, Rachel and I had one of those great chats you can only have when you truly share a love of something. The only difficulty in these dinners (besides keeping Maddy's secret about whips and leather) is knowing that the group is too big for you to spend time talking with everyone.

Me moderating with Mike Befeler and Cara Black on my right

On Thursday morning I moderated a fantastic panel of authors. My sincere thanks go out to Ruth Jordan and Judy Bobalik who created the panel assignments. I spoke about offbeat protagonists with Simon Wood, Steve Ulfelder, Cara Black, M.J. McGrath, and Mike Befeler. Their characters include race car drivers, a former polar bear hunter, and a geezer with short term memory loss. Needless to say, it was a breeze leading a discussion with this diverse cast.

On Thursday afternoon I rode to the top of the Arch and took photos of the Mississippi River and downtown St. Louis. The Arch is 630 feet high and 630 feet wide. When you ride to the observation deck, you can look straight down and see both legs of the Arch beneath you. I felt a bit queasy looking straight down. My companion discussed what a rush it would be to jump! It took about an hour of waiting to get to the top, but the view was worth it.

Later, I explored the city garden, which includes sculptures, gardens and water features designed to be interactive. This is separate from Forest Park which is actually 500 acres larger than Central Park in NYC. One feature in City Garden contained over a hundred lighted fountains arranged in rows. Here, at about 9:00 pm, I challenged my sweetheart to a strange sort of contest, and we named this place Frogger Fountain after the video game.

"Frogger Fountain" in City Garden

You are free to borrow this idea, but please make sure to remove your electronics before stepping up to the starting line. The game is simple. Toe up to a row of fountains (they spout randomly). Hop over the fountains one by one when you think it is safe. Reach the other side, turn around, and hop back. The first person to return to the starting line without getting wet, wins.

Frogger was so much fun we did it two nights in a row. On the first night I won the race across Frogger Fountain, but I have to admit that on the second night I was beaten by a girl. To my credit, she happens to be an incredible athlete and you never know when one of those fountains will spout when you are in mid air.

Amazing Mosaics inside the Bascillica

On Friday morning I toured the Bascillica. If you go to St. Louis, don't leave without spending 45 minutes viewing the tile work. The scale and artistry are breathtaking and you won't see anything like it without travelling to the Vatican.

Later Friday, I bowled with teammates Nikki Bonnani, Terry Jacobsen, Alan Orloff and Rachel Brady. We made a great showing despite having three members on the team (myself included) that have never bowled competitively. The big winners were the libraries who received money raised from the teams and the spectators. My bowling might have been a bit better had it not been for the tequila shots given each time you bowled a strike. The shots helped my spirits, but not my score.

On Saturday I spoke on a panel with Kent Krueger, Dana Hayes, Patrick Lee, Keir Graff, and Stan Trollip. Afterward I signed two books and almost signed a book by a guy named Christopher West, but had to admit to the nice man at my table that I hadn't written that one.

Somewhere along the way I spent an hour with Tim Hallinan who writes the most elegant prose I've read. I heard dozens of inspiring stories. One of my favorites was of a signing years ago at Murder By The Book. Four NYT Bestselling authors visited the store together before they were famous. Only four customers showed up. If those four authors showed up now, you'd have to wait hours to see them.

Harlan Coben made the point several times that breaking into this business requires a huge effort. He joked about his meager advances but said he wouldn't change a thing. The struggle makes success that much sweeter.

These stories make me wonder which of the authors I met this year will be hugely popular four or five years from now. Famous or not, I'm glad to count them as friends.

I sold four books in four days at Bouchercon 2011, but this time I understood that Bouchercon is so much more than a gigantic book signing. Old friendships renewed, new friends met, I returned home to my new book more inspired than ever.

See you next year in Cleveland!

Why is the Book Always Better Than the Movie?

That first Myspace message looked fishy. Back in 2008, Myspace was the place to be, but it was also crawling with scammers and viruses. So when I received a Myspace message from a woman asking to option my book for film, I was skeptical. It was my first self-published book and it had been on the market for 3 years. Had it taken her that long to find me?

My office carpet took a beating as I paced and wondered what this chance might do for my books. Google told me that Marla Cukor, the woman who contacted me, wrote for a magazine called In Touch Weekly, and that she had written short films that starred actors I knew.

Advice poured in. Some writers vowed never to allow another film adaptation of their work because it had gone so poorly. Others cautioned that while the book is yours, the screenplay is completely out of your hands once you sign a contract. I decided to listen to the delightful Maggie Griffin, who relayed her boss' advice on the subject, "A movie is a 40 million dollar commercial for your book."

Marla and I signed our option in early 2009. Then we had our first call to get down to work on the adaptation. That call really opened my eyes. Marla asked, "What if we get rid of the money?"

The money appears in the opening chapter of Sin & Vengeance and ties several of the characters together, especially the protagonist and the villain. At first I didn't believe she could remove the money from the storyline. When I realized she was serious my heart sank. I worried an adaptation without the money would flop.

I learned quite a lot over the next several months and when we were done, I began to understand why books and their movie counterparts were often so different. What follows is a bit of what I learned from Marla.

Time constraints play a large part in determining which elements of a novel make it to film. The screenwriter has about two hours of time to work with. Each page takes about a minute of screen time and there is surprisingly little on the page of a screenplay. Sin & Vengeance (the novel) has several plot lines. In order to fit the movie into two hours, some of those plot lines had to be dropped.

Perspective in a novel comes from inside the head of a point of view character. On film, perspective changes based on what the camera is pointed at. We move from listening to the thoughts and reactions of our hero, to watching moving pictures. Abstract concepts that are easily portrayed in a novel become difficult in film, but the camera excels at portraying grand settings and intense action. Because of this difference, entire scenes are dropped and new ones added.

Exposition (telling the reader stuff) in a novel is simple. Many writers include passages that run a paragraph or more to give the background of a company or a character. Readers easily shift, especially at the beginning of a chapter, from a block of description to action. This has to be done very carefully on film because too much explanation can make a movie feel like a documentary. No one wants to pay to see a thriller and feel like they're in history class.  So, complex plot lines and abstract concepts are difficult for the screenwriter to include. Thankfully, moviegoers have been trained to accept really hokey dialog in action films. If you don't believe you've been trained, rent a high-concept action film and write out some of the dialog word for word. The actors pull it off and make it believable, but on the page you'd never believe a person would ever say such things.

In the end the money vanished, but I am really grateful for what I learned from Marla.

I'm also thankful that Marla went to such lengths to capture the essence of Sin & Vengeance, which is an intense story of revenge. I won't be disappointed if you see the movie one day and write me to say the book was better. I'm just hoping we both get a chance to see it on the big screen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You be the Judge

A drowsy corrections officer makes his way down the cell block, ever alert because even though it is 4:00 am, he's surrounded by men who have had their liberty taken from them. Some of these men resign themselves to serve their sentence and live under the conditions they have been committed to. Others make it their mission to lash out at their captors, entertaining themselves by disrupting the lives of all around them or seeking revenge against the society that cast them out. On the front lines of that system are unarmed men trying to make a difference while surrounded by hundreds of men deemed too dangerous to roam freely.

The cell door slides open and the two officers order the inmate out for a search. He refuses and the officers go inside to remove him and search for drugs, cell phones, and weapons.

The inmate shows his empty hands and the officer moves to step past. When they meet, the inmate swipes and in a flash the officer knows what has happened. The blue plastic toothbrush has become a weapon, a razor blade melted onto the end late at night when no one is watching.

Why do these animals deserve razors?

Blood rains down on the concrete floor. The officer clutches his throat, feels the warm sticky pool forming at his neck, and knows he's near death. The inmate gets ready to swipe again and the officer punches him with every ounce of strength. The inmate stumbles and the officer steps in and hits him again, dropping him to the floor.

Other officers rush their colleague out for medical assistance.

Over a year later the corrections officer sits in a Massachusetts courtroom with his head hanging down, not to cover the scar that will forever remind him how close he came to dying, but so he does not have to face the jury who has just read the verdict. The officer has been disciplined for striking the inmate, but the greatest insult is hearing the jury award. The man too dangerous to live on the outside, the man the officer risked his life to keep locked up so others will be safe, this man who tried to kill him, has just been awarded $50,000 by a jury because the officer used unnecessary force. In the face of losing his life, two punches were too much. Insanity.

What would you have decided if you were seated on the jury?

This is one of the true stories I unearthed while researching The End of Marking Time. I cringed at dozens of stories like this and I wondered how our system could have strayed so far from common sense. I think all Americans are glad for the protections afforded us, but when we see someone who's obviously guilty (in our opinion) we want them locked up because we want to be safe.

We wonder how Casey Anthony could be set free. We may never know the truth about what happened, but the death of a young child cries out for justice and it is hard for most of us to see Ms. Anthony escape punishment when she failed to report her daughter missing for a month.

Last week I heard former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee ask citizens not to be too quick to judgment. He spoke about his experience being the last man between a prisoner with a death sentence and the execution chamber. He spoke of the awesome responsibility of reviewing a case knowing the life of a person hinged on what you decided. Governor Huckabee said he'd heard plenty of people say they'd be glad to throw the switch that would end Casey Anthony's life. That's easy to say when you don't have that switch in your hands.

We can't know the facts of either of these cases, but what if I could give you a case and put that switch in your hand? To let you hear all the facts and in the end decide whether the defendant lives or is severely punished? Could you accept such an awesome responsibility?

The End of Marking Time gives you that chance. Let Michael O'Connor tell you his story. When he's done you can press the red button to see him punished or the green button to let him go free. You might be surprised by your own compassion. Many people are. 

[image error]
Which button will you press?