Leopold Borstinski's Blog, page 38

On Sequels

Howard Jacobson has written a piece on sequels in The Guardian; it’s about TV shows but speaks to novels too.

He argues that due to the nature of TV funding, anyone who writes a series never knows whether it will get commissioned for a second season. In the hope it might happen, the scriptwriters tend to leave unanswered questions, near-dead people alive and near-alive people dead in order to create the twists and tics for the hoped-for second season. And this is detrimental to the narrative of the first set of shows.

Indy authors are fond of a series too. We do this because it is hard enough finding someone to read your work. If they like it, you want to feed them with more stuff they like and a story involving the same characters is the easiest way to do this. I have The Heist and The Getaway, for instance, as the first tow installments in the Lagotti Family series.

Does this mean I left matters open? You bet I did. Was this to the detriment of the story? That I’m less sure about. You see, my first draft was so open it annoyed the initial readers. My original conception was to not cover any of the actual Heist. To stop the story just as Frank enters the bank, but people wanted more closure than that. So I feel as though I’ve got a more shut down piece than I thought I wanted – but now readers are more likely not to want to perform violent acts upon my person. A win-win for all concerned.

 

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Free Thrillers for Those Who Like That Kind of Thing

And here’s an opportunity to grab yourself some FREE thriller, mystery and suspense novels. As you might have guessed, The Heist is available through this offer but so are many other stories too.

I’ve said it before and I reckon I’ll say it again: fill your boots.

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Crime Read Recommendations

There was a fab list of recommended crime novels in The Guardian so I thought I’d share it with you. I’d love to provide a personal comment on each of them but that would require me to either have read them all or just to make up something to pretend. Neither of these events has or will occurred.

Besides. the journalists at the newspaper have already gone to the bother of writing reviews and I’m guessing their word has a stronger sway than mine. They are professional reviewers and I am not. All I could offer is a subjective perspective based on my own beliefs and foibles.

Of course, this entire entry could be an underhand way for me to make an implicit comment about reviewing in general and the hermeneutic relationship between reader and text. You decide. And, yes, I am very aware of the deconstructivist irony of that sentence.

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The Heist Sequel

I’m about to start work on The Heist sequel called The Getaway. Don’t worry. That’s about as much of a spoiler as I’m planning.

The second instalment of the Lagotti Family follows the two weeks after the Heist and will have another multi-character storyline. I’m looking forward to returning to some of my favourite fictional creations but I’m also scared I’ll be unable to get back inside their heads.

Irrespective of my concerns, The Getaway will be launched by December 2017 – just in time for the holiday season (or Christmas if that floats your boat).

I’m also thinking of releasing a cut chapter from The Heist but I might rework it to include in the sequel. It’d be part of Mary Lou’s back story. Let me know if you have a strong opinion one way or the other.

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A Sense of Proportion

If you spend your time living in a Western bubble, sometimes you need to get some perspective. Why do I mention this?

An article in The Guardian (yes, I read that publication a lot) covered the reversal of decision by Cambridge University Press to stop self-censoring its journal articles in China. Long story short: CUP removed pieces about topics banned by the Chinese government. Then under pressure from other academic publishers, CUP decided to publish and be damned. And damned it probably will be. I’m no expert in Sino affairs but even a casual observer knows the control the Chinese government has over media.

And, of course, China is unlikely to forget nor is it likely to forgive either. Double whammy.

To answer my opening paragraph question: as I focus my writing energies on completing The Bowery Slugger and begin thinking about The Getaway, all this pales into insignificance in the wake of the sacrifices people make in the name of free speech.

Mic drop.

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Quiz Time

The Guardian has added to the literary cannon with a quiz so in the interests of total transparency, here it is. Like so many others on the Internet-connected planet, I love a good quiz and have also taken part in many pretty rubbish ones too.

Fill your boots!

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Fiction vs Actual Crime

Found an interesting article in The Independent which asked a good question and then spent its entire length not even beginning to address anything close to an answer. The point was made that even though recorded crime has reduced, why is there a surge in popularity in the fiction crime genre?

The piece then became a strange wandering around a New Orleans book show where semi-naked women were more important than dealing with the issue at hand. To be fair, I think that says much about the state of the Independent (it was, where you?) rather than anything to do with crime fiction.

This leaves us with the question: why do people enjoy reading about death, dishonesty and the devil? Hmm. I feel the need to introduce a German word: schadenfreude. We love to watch other humans suffer and crime is all about suffering. An individual has lost something (property, their health, their life itself) and another tries to heal them. Sometimes successfully, sometimes not.

Decades ago, I recall talking with a friend about Stephen King’s non-fiction essay on the horror genre, which focused on the idea that we are all obsessed with death. King and the existentialists were right.

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FREE Crime Mystery Thriller Books

For those who enjoy reading at no cost, here is an offer I’m participating in as well. There’s a host of no-cost novels for you to try out.

Fill your boots at BookDeal.Today.

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Does the Booker count for anything?

The Man Booker prize is heading our way with all the excitement and flurry of press coverage implied in the simple statement. As part of that buzz was this article in The Guardian which argued that prizes aren’t worth the prize money.

More accurately, the argument put forward by Amit Chaudhuri is that a prize for the best book of the year is great for traditional publishing marketing strategies but says very little about the value of the work winning the prize.

Now, as someone who has not won a literary prize, I’d like to state here and now that I’d love to win that level of public recognition the Booker represents. Can’t pretend otherwise. If I ever were to (and I am very aware that I won’t) would that mean my work has value? Of course not! It would mean it fit inside some narrative required by the publishing industry. That doesn’t mean all book prize winners are rubbish, just that the correlation is non-linear.

I recall Nick Cave refusing to accept an MTV award because he didn’t want his musical muse disturbed by the tawdry cut-glass decanter and baser elements prize winning involved. And decades ago, I have a memory of John Cleese accepting a comedy award: a cut-glass bowl. Huge thing which took two hands to hold. He thanked the audience for giving him the gong and then dropped the bowl on the floor and walked away. Mic drop.

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Reviews and (Literary) Criticism

Over the last couple of weeks I have received the first two reviews for The Heist. One was very positive and the other was far from positive. It was negative. OK, it was negative. Don’t stare at me like that.

What I found interesting was the different responses I issued to the two scrivenings. The positive review came in second. I read it, felt very happy, re-read it and then mentally walked away. Thank you the Pople Backyard Farm blog. The negative one on Goodreads took me aback. I found myself questioning whether the reviewer was right and that I’d failed at everything I had set out to do.

Had I been wrong to offer multiple character points of view so that individual experiences of the same events contradicted each other, recalling the Akira Kurasawa film Rashomon? Should I have made the story all about the robbery itself instead of the slow, painful wait for the thieving? In the original version, I didn’t even include the heist at all; my beta readers saved me from that conceit.

Then I thought about the story and what it said about people – and what it said about 1960s America. Was it the greatest novel ever written? No, I must confess it is not. Is it good? Is it good enough to justify a follow-up on the surviving characters? Yes, I believe so at this point. Will I use a more ‘normal’ narrative structure? Almost inevitably: yes. Not because of one negative review, but because I’d like as many people to read this bleak tale of criminal folk as possible.

In the months since I finished writing The Heist, I have produced two-and-a-half other novels. Each has been better than the previous, I would contend.

So thanks for the reviews so far for The Heist. I hope I get some more.

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