Rob Hart's Blog, page 5

The one thing I remember from Bouchercon

(The title of this post is not a joke about how much I drank this weekend but it very well could be…)

Hahaha ok seriously though.

This past weekend, Kellye Garrett won the Anthony Award for Best First Novel for Hollywood Homicide. Attica Locke won Best Novel for Bluebird, Bluebird, and The Obama Inheritance, edited by Gary Phillips, won Best Anthology.

It was pretty incredible to see three major awards go to black authors—especially when the awards are a popular vote by the convention attendees.

(UPDATE: I can’t believe I missed this, but I’m also so thrilled that Kristen Lepionka, who is part of the LGBT community and is a hell of a writer, won Best First Novel in the Shamus Awards!).

But there’s something I’ve been dwelling on since Saturday night, and it’s what Kellye said during her acceptance speech.

She referenced the dismal state of representation, highlighted in this list at Sisters in Crime. It lays out, in a pretty stark way, how unbalanced the crime and mystery field is (and this is just crime and mystery).

There are less than 200 people here who are traditionally-published and not straight and white. Just 81 black writers, 22 Latinx writers, 9 Native-Americans writers, 19 Asian American/Asian writers…

Seriously, give it a look.

Kellye said something important during her acceptance speech: “We need to stop treating diverse writers as a trend and start treating them as the status quo.”

I understand and appreciate the need for diversity, and recently talked about the importance of reading diverse books (both as a writer and as a person). But Kellye’s speech and this list really take the issue and underscore it and highlight it and string it with Christmas lights. It makes the whole thing a little less theoretical and a lot more tangible.

In a large sense Bouchercon was a fun weekend. I was glad to see a lot of folks and a lot of people got to meet my daughter and that was nice. I was going to write a rundown of some of the cool stuff that happened, and the lessons worth sharing… but I keep thinking of standing there in the ballroom, listening to Kellye’s speech, happy as hell for her because she is super cool and it’s a great book, and how I wished more people could hear it, because there are a lot of people in the community who were not in that room.

So, that’s the memory I wanted to share.

Go follow Kellye. She’s a smart and strong advocate for this issue. Bookmark that list and the next time you’re looking for a new book to read, or you’re setting up your own event, recognize it as a resource that is both very valuable but something we should also be sad about.

And congrats to all the Anthony winners. It was a good year.

A brief guide on how to be a cool guy at a conference, and not a dumbass

It’s almost time for Bouchercon, the biggest crime and mystery convention of the year. As such, there will be a lot of socializing, a lot of drinking, and a few dumb assholes saying or doing inappropriate things.

That’s what happens when you shove a ton of people into a hotel for a few days and add a generous helping of booze. That doesn’t make it okay.

I’ve seen other authors sharing tips and survival guides for conferences—many of which are very good (seriously, stay hydrated).

What I haven’t seen is something that shouldn’t be necessary but is probably necessary: a quick guide on how to be a cool dude and not a dumbass.

There’s been a lot of discussion about convention harassment policies, and those are all good discussions—it’s paramount on conventions to create and enforce a safe and respectful atmosphere—but there are some specific behaviors I think it’s worth talking about.

So, I submit for consideration, a brief guide on how to be a cool guy, and not a dumbass:

THINK BEFORE YOU SPEAK. Seriously. Just take a second. Say it in your head. Pretend you have to say it to you mom, instead of the woman you barely know standing in front of you. Think about how your mom would react. Hopefully then you’ll realize that anything worth considering so much is probably not a thing you should say.

MANAGE YOUR ALCOHOL INTAKE. If you know you tend to lose control of yourself after you have five drinks… have four. Even better, three. Or, if you find this is something you have a difficult time controlling, maybe it’s time to have a long hard think about your relationship to alcohol.

MIND YOUR HANDS. Once, at a publishing party, I saw a man reach up to brush the hair out of the eyes of a woman he just met. He thought he was being polite and did not notice her entire body freeze. After she quickly excused herself, he seemed genuinely taken aback when I told him that what he did was inappropriate. This should be an easy one, but I guess it’s not: Handshakes, cool. Hugs, sometimes cool if the person is a friend. A gentle, intimate caress? No!

SPEAK UP. Guys, it is paramount that we speak up when we see something bad happen. If you stand by and let it happen, or worse, if you create excuses for someone, you’re complicit. Full stop. It’s not fun to call out a friend or colleague. You know what’s also not fun? Being subjected to unwanted physical and verbal advances.

STAND UP. At this coming Bouchercon, badass author extraordinaire Christa Faust is spearheading an anti-harassment posse—folks who will wear little silver stars on their badge or elsewhere, indicating they are there to help anyone who feels like they are being harassed. Being mindful is good. Being proactive and part of the solution? That’s even better.

KNOW WHEN TO PACK IT IN. Maybe you did or said something inappropriate. Maybe you want to apologize. This is not necessarily a bad instinct. But it can turn bad real quick when you hound the person you offended so you can “properly” apologize. Because then it’s less about the apology, and more about you wanting to be absolved, which is basically putting the responsibility of your harassment on the person you harassed. Sometimes you have to know to accept you were wrong, say sorry, walk away, and find some new folks to talk to.

THE RULES HAVE NOT CHANGED, THEY ARE JUST BEING ENFORCED. You hear this a lot, mostly from rotten people—”everyone’s different now, you can’t do this, you can’t say that, now you get in trouble.” No, it’s not that we all sat down and came up with a list of words and actions that are now off limits. It was always shitty to say and do those things. It’s just that now people are emboldened to call you on it. Now there are consequences. Stop pretending like your behavior is a right you’ve been denied, and realize that what’s really been denied is the safety and comfort of other people, by you.

I’m looking forward to a good time down in St. Pete’s this weekend! I know in my heart that the overwhelming majority of the people going are in it for a good time, and that good time will be had, despite the presence of a few bad apples. And I think with a little personal mindfulness, and a little vigilance, we can pare down that bad bunch even further.

Writing Advice Sucks #7: How to navigate the publishing industry like a poker player

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There’s this analogy I’ve been working on for a little while. It started off as a chess analogy but then turned into a poker analogy, at my wife’s suggestion, because poker relies more on the winds of chance than chess. She is so goddamn smart.

I think this analogy gets to the root of how publishing works, and how to successfully navigate it.

But hey, that’s for you to decide.

Here goes:

So you want to get a book published. Cool! Presumably you have read a ton of books and enjoyed them and decided you would like to do that thing that brought you so much joy.

You’re a little like someone who watches a whole lot of the World Series of Poker and decides you’re going to a casino. You’ve seen it done, it looks fun, you want to give it a shot! You just sit there and play cards. How hard could it be?

So you go to you local casino, exchange some cash for some chips, sit down at a table—and you lose. Hard.

Because nobody gets it on their first try. I mean, sometimes it happens. You get a prodigy who clears the table without ever having touched felt before, and it usually makes a huge splash when it happens. That kind of person comes along as often as a bolt of lightning is struck by another bolt of lightning.

No, you’re the journeyman/woman, the workaday player who knows the mechanics, but finds that in practice it’s a lot harder than it looks on television. Which is fine. We’ve all been there.

After you lose, to my mind, you have one of three options—two of which lead to failure.

You flip the table and go home. Obviously, you can’t win if you don’t play.

You complain about the game/the rules/the players, etc. This one is a little murkier. There’s a certain kind of player who will blame their losses on the anything other than themselves. The deck is rigged. The other players were cheating. The rules aren’t fair. Whatever. That person may even win some hands because the law of averages says the longer they sit at the table, the more likely that the cards break their way.

But here’s the thing about poker: The rules are the rules. There’s no changing that. An eight will always be an eight and an ace will always be an ace. There will always be three cards on the flop. Most importantly, you are playing against the house—and the house always wins.

This is a point I think gets lost on a lot of writers. It did on me. When you want to play poker, you are going into a place of business (casino) where you are sitting down at a table and making a tacit agreement to the rules of the game. You may believe you have a very valid and superior interpretation of how the game is played, but it doesn’t matter. You sat at the table and the game is Texas Hold ‘Em.

Just like how your book may be a thing of wonder and beauty—but if it doesn’t fit publisher’s taste or interest, if it doesn’t connect with an editor in a real and meaningful way, they’re not going to take it.

There’s no rule that says if a book is good enough it must be published. A book must meet a whole lot of requirements, and those requirements are steep as fuck when you want to play the high-stakes games.

Take The Warehouse. It was a big sale. It happened very fast. I essentially got dealt pocket aces and then watched two more show up on the flop. But it wasn’t as easy as: the editor liked it and bought it.

The editor who read it liked it. He had to pass it around to some other editors, and the marketing folks, and the head of Crown. Everyone else had to sign off (this is called going to the edit board—the bigger the publisher, the more likely you have to get a majority or unanimous vote in favor of acceptance. New Yorked made it to two edit boards, as I recall, and failed at both.).

I also had a long phone conversation with my editor before he actually made his offer. Essentially, I had to interview for the position.

That’s because these decisions are not easy. At a certain level, there are so many resources and so much time going into a book, everyone’s got to be sure it’s the right move.

Yes, marketability matters. Yes, whether a book plays to a mainstream audience matters. You may think you know what mainstream readers want. You may think you know what sells. But if you don’t have access to the data that publishers do—bookseller reports and Bookscan numbers and historical data and sales trends—then you do not.

Full stop. End of story. You do not.

Seriously, so many people who do not work in publishing are quick to tell other people how publishing works. I’ve worked in publishing for eight years. There’s a whole lot I still do not understand.

So you may think your brilliant book is a perfect fit for Editor A at House B… but if Editor A at House B doesn’t want it, they are not wrong. You were wrong. Sorry!

Point is, you are asking to play someone else’s game, in someone else’s house, with someone else’s toys. You can complain about the rules all the live long day, but it ain’t gonna do much. The rules don’t change.

Which brings us to the third path, and the one that I think leads to success…

You play. That’s it. You lose your first couple of hands, and you keep playing. You learn the rules inside and out. You learn to see patterns in the cards. You learn to read the other players. You learn when to fold and when to show. You accept as part of the learning process that sometimes you will do everything right and victory is within your grasp, and then you get fucked when the river card breaks up your full house.

You have to figure out the framework of the game and figure out how to successfully operate within that framework.

And sometimes the framework sucks.

Because some people walk in with a lot more chips than you do. They can bet more and risk more and they can sit at the table longer.

Some people aren’t even allowed into the room in the first place, or when they are, they’re subjected to side-eye the entire time (at which point it’s paramount on all the players to stand up and say in unison: “Fuck this bullshit.”)

(I would like the belabor this point: This doesn’t mean you don’t talk about unjustness or unfairness when you see it. But you have to be able to tell the difference between actual unjustness and unfairness, and you being butthurt that your brilliance hasn’t been recognized.)

And some people show up and spill their drink on you and slap a waitress on the ass and then they win big, and you’re sitting there with a bunch of nonsense cards wondering what the hell went wrong.

It’s a hard game—poker and publishing. It takes a long time to get good at it. Longer than you think, probably. And you can do everything right and the winds of chance may blow in another direction.

But as with anything, the harder you push and the longer you play, the better you’ll get.

I know some people reading this are probably rolling their eyes, thinking I’m oversimplifying things, or trying to reduce the art to a science, or that I’m speaking from a privileged position. You know what? All those things are probably true!

I know this is anathema to the idea of being an artist, too. By nature we want to color outside the lines. The idea of “sit down and do what you’re told” is repellant. And that’s not exactly what I’m saying. All I’m saying it: It’s a game, and the game is a little rigged, and you won’t win if you complain about the game being rigged—you’ll win by playing.

I’ve said this a few times, but I really did think The Warehouse was unpublishable. It’s about a giant online retail company that controls the American economy and is also evil. You should be able to do the math on that one.

But it will be published, by a mainstream publisher, as well as by a bunch of foreign publishers, and it’ll maybe be a big-budget Hollywood movie. So when I say you have to play the game, I’m not saying you should sanitize yourself or your art in the process. I’m just saying you’ve got to figure out how to get that art where you want it to be.

People ask me how I did it and this is the answer. I sat at the table and I played. Sometimes I complained, but after I while I saw that wasn’t helping anything. So I kept playing, and watching, and learning, and losing, until finally I won a hand, and then another, and finally, the cards broke my way.

Easy peasy.

Except it’s not!

I know I did one of these posts yesterday, and after not doing one for a few weeks I’ve put up two in a row. I’m trying to keep you on your toes! Also I’m procrastinating on something else I should be doing! But really, this one has been on my mind for a bit and I wanted to get it out there. As with all writing advice, it might be bullshit, so consider the source, and if you have a better analogy, feel free to share it.

Otherwise, next week I’ll be making some book recommendations in my newsletter—sign up here if you want to get down on that—oh and my latest novel Potter’s Field is available did I tell you that? Haha I did, a whole lot! Still, you can get it here. Finally, one week from today I will be in Florida for Bouchercon! Here’s a sense of where I’ll be.

Writing Advice Sucks #6: Read everything, read constantly

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A long, long time ago (looking on Amazon I see it came out in 2003 and holy shit that was fifteen years ago) I read a book called The Contortionist’s Handbook. It was a noir-as-fuck debut novel by a dude named Craig Clevenger, about an uber-talented forger who constantly reinvented himself to avoid the authorities.

It was one of those formative books for me—I read it and I was like yes, this, this is what I want to do, I want to do things like this. So I tracked down Clevenger’s e-mail and I sent him a message, asking him if he had any advice.

He came back with a bullet list of ten points, and it’s some of the best advice I’ve ever gotten. I was very, very lucky to get it at the beginning of this journey, and reading it now reinforces how much of it informed my writing DNA.

That list is still, to this day, taped to the wall over my computer.

I’ve been thinking about the first point lately, a lot. Enough I think it’s worth breaking into its own post.

Here goes:

1) If you’re a white guy, then read books by black writers and books by women, or books by Latino or Asian writers. If you’re a liberal, read books by conservatives and if you’re conservative, read books by liberals. A sphere of influence is necessary but, if you never venture out of it, then it becomes a bubble and your work suffocates.

This is important for a lot of reasons.

Chiefly, because you can suffocate if you don’t poke your head outside the bubble every now and again. Every genre—every book—can offer you something you didn’t know. Even if it’s an example of what not to do.

It’s why I don’t tend to re-read books a lot these days. First, there are too many good books in this world I haven’t gotten to yet, and second, as much as you can rediscover things or see a story from a new angle, I’m more interested in experiences that are completely new to me. I’m more interested in what I don’t know.

I say again, every genre—every book—can offer you something you didn’t know. Which seems obvious. Except, sometimes, I feel like it’s not. I have a low-key level of discomfort for one of the regular questions in the New York Times’ By the Book feature: Which genres are you drawn to and which do you avoid?

‘Avoid’ is a strong word. I get it: maybe erotica isn’t your thing and you don’t seek it out and that’s fine—but you shouldn’t stick your pinky in the air and proclaim yourself better than it, either.

Seriously, few things set me off like sticking your pinky in the air. I recently read an interview with an author who slagged mainstream writers as less intelligent and less interested in their craft. Not like him, because he is a genius and an artisté.

An artisté who, I’m sure, would not turn down that mainstream success if it were offered to him.

Grr. Anyway.

To be clear, I used to fall into this trap, to a degree, when I was newer at this, when I was more prone to blame my shortcomings and failures on other people, rather than look inward. I used to say some horrendous shit about E.L. James. But you know what? Fifty Shades of Grey sold 125 million copies. James understands something about the world that I don’t.

And here’s where we get into dicey territory, because I’ve said this to people and they look at me agog and they think I’m an idiot for defending the quality of Fifty Shades of Grey. I am not defending the quality. I’m simply saying that when you break it down by the numbers, her writing has appealed to more people than mine has. And honestly, as I get older I find it more and more exhausting to be an arbiter of good taste.

I recently read an interview with Ethan Hawke in Film Stage in which he raises a good point, and I think it applies here:

There’s a Cassavetes quote I love, “There’s no such thing as high art and low art, there’s good movies and bad movies.” The definition is: did the people who made it put their best love and ideas, did they work hard to complete what that thing is trying to be?

Did James put her all into Fifty Shades of Grey? Probably, yeah. Is the book for me? I tried to read it and couldn’t finish it, so no, it is not. But it’s for 125 million other people. And crossing my arms and throwing a tantrum about that is not going to sell one single more copy of my own books.

Put differently, it’s like in Mindhunter, where criminal profiler Holden Ford is trying to explain to a room full of cops that it’s worth studying and understanding Charles Manson, in the pursuit of understanding criminal psychopaths, and the cops are all like “fuck Charles Manson we don’t need to understand him he’s pure evil” and Ford is like “well yes I’m not saying he’s a cool dude I’m just saying why is he pure evil and can that help us catch other people who are pure evil?” and the cops are all like “rabble rabble rabble you’re a dummy mister smarty pants.”

(Those are not direct quotes and I’m not comparing E.L. James to Charles Manson, but do you see my overly-belabored point?)

Anyway. We’re close to going off the rails here, but the point I’m trying to make is that the second you decide you’re better than a book or a genre or another author—well, you do you, but I’m sorry to hear it.

This bit of advice feels a little less nuts-and-bolts that some of the other stuff I’ve talked about, but it’s so important it’s the advice I give to younger writers who are just starting out: Read everything, read constantly.

As much as I’ve been influenced by crime fiction, I’ve been influenced by literary writers and short stories and poets and YA and erotica and romance and science-fiction and memoir. Poetry is an incredible teaching tool! Nothing else can teach you as much about imagery and brevity.

Even within your own genre, it’s important to be well-rounded. Sometimes you have to recognize your blind spots and fill them in. I realized recently I had not read enough crime fiction by black writers, so I’ve been working to fix that.

And I’ll stress this point: Fellow dudes, read women. Speaking of the By the Book feature, it’s not a great look when a white male author lists only white male authors in their reading queue (there have been a few notable examples of this recently).

And I don’t mean “people will be upset with you” which they most certainly will be, I mean “you should be a little disappointed in yourself.”

We don’t just read to pick up tips and tricks. We don’t just read because it gives us something to do on cold winter nights, or when there’s nothing on television. We read to grow. We read to experience the world through someone else’s eyes.

And if all the stuff you read is set through the eyes of people of similar backgrounds and upbringings and in the same genre—I mean, that’s okay, you’re not breaking the law or anything, but you’re missing out on a whole hell of a lot.

So there you go. As with all advice, take what works for you, leave what doesn’t. Though if you feel inclined to share this on social media (HINT HINT) I would encourage you to do so with the link to a book you love that does NOT fit the genre you write. I’ll start with one here: The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel. I have bought this book a dozen times because I have given it as a gift to so many people.

For even more book recommendations—as well as the occasional update about what I’m doing—sign up for my newsletter!

It’s almost time for Bouchercon! And here’s where I’ll be…

[image error]Yesterday I wrote about the quantum state of conferences—how they’re worth it and not worth it at the same time, and really it comes down to your definition of “worth.”

Which is a pretty good segue into some news about Bouchercon, which is taking place in Florida this year. I will be there! I will be doing stuff!

First up: Noir at the Bar on Thursday night. Will you just look at this line-up? It’s madness. Sheer madness, and I feel extremely lucky to have made the cut. I’ll try to come up with something good to read…

I’ll also be appearing on two panels. They are:

Friday, September 7th, 1 p.m. — Remington Steele Goes Digital? — Writing the Modern PI Novel. I’ll be joining Rebecca Swope (moderator), J.D. Allen, Kristen Lepionka, and Paul D. Marks

Saturday, September 8th, 1 p.m. — Yin and Yang — Cozy and Noir. I’ll be moderating this one, which features Donna Andrews, Ed Lin, Melinda Mullet, Robert Randisi, and Jim Doherty.

Otherwise, I will be wandering the conference hotel. If you want to find me, the hotel bar is a good bet, followed by the pool.

Writing Advice Sucks #5: The importance of community, the quantum state of cons, and recharging your creative batteries

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Two weekends ago me and some pals rented a cabin in upstate New York for what we like to call Broke Hack Mountain: a few days of eating, fighting, drinking, and writing.

I was working on a final pass of The Warehouse before submitting it back to Crown. It was great, to see all 472 pages over the course of two and a half days—I caught so much stuff I wouldn’t have caught if the read were stretched over a longer period.

Like, hey, I used a somewhat similar metaphor 70 pages ago and why do so many characters have ponytails? kind of stuff. I know it’s not easy to find a whole, obligation-free weekend, but if you can, it’s worth it.

That’s not what I’m here to talk about, though! I’m here to talk about community. Because one of the many, many publishing-related questions that came up over the weekend was: are conferences worth it?

It’s actually a pretty common question, and one I’ve been asked a lot: do I need to go to this con or that con?

Which is a good jumping off point, I think, that’ll bring us back to why we went to the cabin in the first place (and why we hope to make it a more regular occurrence).

Because the answer of whether cons are worth it is: maybe. Unless it’s Murder and Mayhem in Milwaukee, at which point the answer is: why the fuck aren’t you registered already?

Conferences exist in a quantum state. They are worth it and not worth it, simultaneously. It really depends on your definition of the word “worth.”

From a dollar-and-cents perspective, hell no, they are not worth it. Especially if you are paying your own freight. Every year I attend Bouchercon and I do not sell enough books to cover plane tickets, a hotel room for three to four nights, cabs, meals, a bar tab, and incidentals. I don’t even come close to breaking even. It’s a big-time money-loser.

(Though I expect it’s a money-losing proposition for an A-list superstar author, too—no one is selling thousands, or maybe even hundreds, of copies at conferences. Dozens, at most? Unless it’s a bananapants conference like San Diego Comic-Con and you’re George R.R. Martin?)

From a networking perspective, they’re sort of worth it. I first pitched the Ash McKenna series to the publisher of Polis Books outside a bar in Albany. I was asked to throw my hat in the ring to co-author a Bookshot novella with James Patterson while in Raleigh.

Granted, I knew both of these editors from New York publishing circles, which is where I live and work. Did I need to be there to close these deals? Dunno. There’s a difference between running into someone at a party or a book launch, and being stranded in a shitty town for days on end with not much to do outside the hotel bar (looking at you, Albany…).

If you don’t live in New York, then yeah, if you want to do some serious networking, it’s probably worth it.

But conferences are also really hard, and there are things about them that really turn people off. Some of those reasons are pretty legit.

The cost, for one thing, is a huge economic barrier. Not everyone can drop two grand just to go hang out at a hotel bar for three days. Also not fun if you have social anxiety, because it’s a lot of socializing. Or if you’re sober, because everyone is boozed up like a dummy. Or if you’re a woman, because you spend a lot of time around people who are boozed up like dummies. Or if you’re a minority because a lot of these conferences are largely white-run and white-attended.

As a writer, the experience can be demoralizing. Especially on newer, younger authors. You’re not a known entity to readers or conference organizers, and some conferences just suck at courting younger folks (see: the recent Worldcon debacle).

I remember the year I was given an allotted time to sign books in a large ballroom, next to Charlaine Harris. She was lovely. She also had this huge line of people waiting for her. I signed, I think, two books? And one of them was a galley, which means the guy didn’t even buy it.

In the moment, kind of a bummer. But looking at it rationally, how could that have played out differently? She writes a hugely popular series that became a hugely popular television show (god, I miss True Blood…), and I’ve got a book out from a small press. Of course there’s going to be a disparity.

Which I think is an issue with conferences, and maybe even with a lot of the industry: an expectation problem. You go in having written a whole book and you expect a hero’s welcome for this valiant effort. But everyone is there to shill and no matter how big you are, there’s always someone bigger.

And the bigger names are the draws. No one’s there to see you. They’re there to see Lee Child, or Megan Abbott, or Laura Lippman, or Michael Connelly.

That’s even if you have a book out. If you’re an unpublished author with a manuscript and you’re looking for a publisher or an agent—that’s rough. I remember those days. Because you want to make meaningful connections with people but you also want them to recognize your genius and publish your shit.

It’s a lot. And it can be exhausting.

But there’s one thing about conferences that keeps me coming back: recharging my creative batteries.

This is me. Maybe it’s different for you. But there’s something special about being around other writers. It can be a boost. Maybe some shared craft talk. Maybe just some bullshitting. Think about this: how many of your day-to-day friends are writers?

Maybe not many. I’ve made some really close friends in the writing community in the past few years, but mostly, my closest real-life friends, the one I’ve been with the longest—they may be creative people, but they aren’t writers.

And writing is a damn lonely calling. You spend so much of your time doing it alone. It’s important to meet with fellow writers and realize that your trials and struggles and doubts are shared. Sometimes you need that realization: it’s not just you.

That said, the community of a con maybe isn’t right for everyone. It can be big and overwhelming and expensive. Some people there can be pretty lame and some of those friendships aren’t underpinned the way you think. Some folks use it as an opportunity to sell snake oil and junk science—building brands for themselves as punk rock truth tellers or master craftsmen when really… they are not. And sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference between who knows their shit, and who is full of shit.

So maybe you don’t do a con. Maybe you recharge your batteries at a cabin. Or in a writing group at your local library. Or in a weekly Skype chat with a reliable critique buddy. Or deep in the woods, over a pentagram drawn hastily in the blood of a goat, when the moon is full and the forest seems to come alive…

I don’t know what you’re into. You do you!

But this is a roundabout way of saying: Cons are great, and they’re not. I like them, because I like to travel, and I like to meet new people, and I like to see friends who I don’t normally see. I like to share drinks and talk writing and sometimes get up to shenanigans.

I also like the intimacy of the cabin—just six guys doing guy stuff (being gross dumb assholes). A curated group of people who like to eat, who like to fight, and who like to put on our headphones and work for hours at a time.

And sometimes I like to sit in my office by myself.

Spending a shitload of money on a conference or a cabin rental is not going to make or break your career. But if you go into this stuff with the right expectation, with a willingness to listen and meet new people, with the self-awareness to sell yourself without being a dummy about it—they can be valuable.

I’ve gotten a lot out of them. Which, I know that I say that from a position of privilege, because I can afford to go. There seem to be some conversations going on right now, about ways to take down some of those economic barriers, and I am happy to hear them.

Find your community where you can. But don’t forget that, for as fun as that community can be, it doesn’t matter if you’re not getting your work done.

So, there we go. My usual caveat: writing advice is subjective and maybe none of this is helpful and that’s fine! And this isn’t even really writing advice, but the question comes up often enough I thought it was worth talking about. If you’ve got some thoughts to share, pop on down to the comments.

Otherwise, Potter’s Field is out in the world, and you can find it here, and also, sending out another newsletter soon with some book recommendations. Sign up, and see previous newsletters, at this link.

Writing Advice Sucks #4: Editing ‘The Warehouse’, why Elmore Leonard was right, and one secret editing trick that will BLOW YOUR MIND

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I run an online workshop program at LitReactor, where we bring in writers and editors to lead classes on craft. I listen to a lot of pitches. And one of the pitches I get most frequently is on editing. Not how to write the first draft of a novel or story, but how to refine a written story.

And I cannot sell them.

I’ve had authors whose other classes sold very well try to teach an editing class and I’m lucky if we sell enough seats to keep it open. I cannot for the life of me understand why this is.

The first draft of a novel is—and should be—a nightmare. It’s like going to the beach and building yourself a big giant pile of formless, lumpy sand. Once the pile is built out to the right dimensions, then you go in with your hand tools and you chip and carve at it until you’ve got a pretty sandcastle.

There’s a lot that goes into the editing process—a lot—which I’ve been thinking about as I’m working on my edit for The Warehouse. My editor at Crown, Julian, had said he didn’t anticipate major surgery. He still sent me a 14-page edit letter—single-spaced, with half-inch margins. His assistant, Angeline, sent me her own five-page letter (and they both hit on a lot of the same points, which really underscored where the faults were in the narrative).

It is not major surgery. But Julian did drill down into the connective tissue, the things that I subconsciously knew didn’t work, but couldn’t really put my finger on. He’s challenging me, like I completed a Rubik’s cube, and he took it from me and mixed it all up and handed it back to me and said, “Now do it again, jerk.”

Except the Rubik’s cube will look even better when it’s reformed.

Julian edited The Martian, which is a book that is both hugely technical and science-y, but also incredibly readable and entertaining—and now I understand why. Specifically, his notes really embodied something Elmore Leonard said: “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”

Leonard continued:

Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative. It’s my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing.

It’s a great piece of advice. My interpretation is slightly expanded, to all those cute but belabored sentences where it feels like I’m showing off. They’ve been highlighted and I am ripping them out without any regret, because I can see how they aren’t as clever as I thought. They’re speed bumps in the narrative.

I see those a lot—sentences or details that should have been removed, but the author formed a personal bond with them and didn’t want to lose them. This is where my journalism degree has really been useful. When you’re writing a news story, you have to be ruthless because you’re writing to a target—at my old paper, an inch count.

Your story about a fire or a stabbing might need to fill a ten-inch hole on a page, and that meant you had to hand in ten inches. No less, and definitely no more. If you handed in 11, then one inch was getting cut. Which meant sometimes you would have a great detail or quote and it would get tossed.

What sucks is that in journalism, it’s generally gone forever. In fiction, if you really love it, you can stash it in a file somewhere, and maybe it’ll get another chance at life. I’ve certainly had lines and ideas that I’ve pulled out of books because they didn’t fit, only to find another use for them down the road.

Another place where my journalism degree helped: I work fast. I once covered a pretty big fire late on a Friday night—big enough they were holding page one for it—and I had less than ten minutes to sit down and write it. You don’t get to ask for more time. You finish it and get it in.

Fiction doesn’t have the same sense of urgency. But it sort of does, too. My contract doesn’t even really require the book to be done until October, but the sooner we finish it, the sooner we get it into the hands of the sale reps. Plus, having more time means we can do another pass or two if we feel like we need it. Finally, all the foreign publishers are waiting for the finished manuscript, so they can get started on translation.

I got my edit letter on June 7. I took most of the month of June to think the notes over and make my own notes, and started work on June 24. I’m aiming to deliver Aug. 1. I’m doing two passes—one to address everything, and another to make sure it’s smooth.

It’s daunting. And it’s not, because again, the journalism training helps. The Warehouse is a big book. The version I submitted was 123,000 words, or 526 pages double-spaced in Word. The Ash novels averaged around 75,000, so this is a lot of book. It’s a different kind of story, with three narrative voices, interlude chapters made up of manuals and film scripts, and a whole lot of world-building.

Those interlude chapters were a lot of fun to write, and it was fun to break form a little bit, but Julian really challenged me on which ones I needed and which I didn’t. In one of our first conversations about the book we talked about cutting, and he said he didn’t anticipate a lot—even at the size it was he didn’t think there was a lot of bloat.

But as he dug down into it, and as I’m following along, I’m finding that there are opportunities to evaluate—stuff that provide some interesting shading, but what function do they serve to the overall story?

I just finished the first pass and got the book down to 119,000 words. Cutting 4,000 words might not seem like a lot but I also added chapters and sections, to address logical inconsistencies, or timeline issues, or to flesh out some of the plotting stuff that didn’t totally make sense.

A good editor is a valuable thing but it’s important to be able to see this stuff for yourself. To take it as far as you can before sending it out into the world. A book is ready to move onto the next stage—beta-readers or agents—when you can’t see the shortcomings anymore. When you’ve run out of ideas on how to make it better, that’s when you bring in the outside set of eyes.

That said, here are a few tips I’ve developed for my own editorial process, some of which are obvious, but the last one isn’t and I think it’s pretty cool.

Read out loud. This is tried and true. Reading something out loud will help you find the hitches in your sentences and dialogue.

Give yourself some space. I try to build in a couple of weeks between edits—taking that time to read more or write some short stories—so I can get some distance from what’s on the page. That way you can look at it with fresh eyes. I busted ass on this rewrite so I could get two weeks of dead air before I read it one more time, just to make sure the changes are smooth.

Don’t drag it out. To the previous point, the reason I’m busting ass is because two weeks from today, I’m going to a cabin with some writing pals so we can punch each other in the face and grill meat and cry about our feelings over a campfire (manly stuff) but mostly we are going to WRITE. I’ve got two and a half days and I plan to do my entire final pass, beginning to end, before we leave. There’s something to be said for seeing the whole story in such a short timespan. You really see how those threads you placed in the beginning tie into the end. It’s tough to find the time to do something like this—but when you can, it’s worth it.

Use the tools Word gives you. I like to turn on track changes and comments, and I even toggle the little paragraph symbol on the Word toolbar, to show all the nonprinting characters, like spaces and returns and tabs. Something about seeing all that puts me in the right kind of technical mindset.

Get yourself some good beta-readers. I actually don’t tend to use a lot of beta-readers—the first person to read The Warehouse after me was my agent. Usually I have my wife read my stuff, but she was in the middle of a pretty intense master’s program. She is a phenomenal beta-reader, because not only does she have another master’s, in English literature, but she reads very widely, and not exclusively just the kind of stuff I write.

Keep a notebook or notes app handy. I have talked a few times about the value of forgetting stuff. Now is not that time! I am spending a lot of my idle thought time chewing over The Warehouse right now—I literally had a dream about it one night. Sometimes a detail is so good but so small, and it’s easy to forget. Don’t forget. Write it down.

Take notes in general. After Julian sent me the edit letter, I thought a lot about my response. I’m taking 95 percent of what he suggested, and there are only a few minor points where I feel differently. The best way for me to process everything was to sit down and write my own response notes—for example, all the characters in The Warehouse wear tracking watches, and there were some logical inconsistencies with how they worked. Julian did a fantastic job of pointing out those inconsistencies, and even offered some tips on how to fix them. But I still had to fix the big-picture stuff. It’s easier to do that re-mapping when you have it in front of you, rather than doing it on the fly. And it made our follow-up conversation a lot easier, because I had answers on how I was going to tackle everything.

Just because it’s an idea doesn’t mean it’s a good one. That said, I’m not going to use all the notes I made. Sometimes you get a flash of inspiration and it sounds really good at the time, but in reality it’s not, and you have to know when to ignore it. How do you tell the difference? Fuck if I know. But there was one scene in particular I wanted to add, and I couldn’t figure out a way to do it organically, and I realized I would have to go at the book with a hammer to make it fit—and that was pretty much my answer right there.

Start at the end and work your way backward. This is my favorite bit of advice. When you start a book, you are full up of energy and excitement, but by the end of a book, even if you don’t mean to consciously, you just want to get it done, which means you might rush. I have read books where it feels like an author is ready to be finished, and the dominoes fall in such quick succession you’re left wondering: what happened? So I always do one full pass where I start with the last chapter and then work backward. This way I’m putting fresh energy into the ending, but I’m also seeing the story from a new perspective.

And there you have it. My usual caveats stick: most writing advice sucks because there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all approach. This is just what works for me. Maybe there’s something in here that’s useful to you. And if not, that’s cool, too!

I love editing. It’s where you find the book. It’s sculpting the pile of sand into something with borders and dimensions and details. It takes time and multiple passes and it can be hard and frustrating, but when you hit the mark, damn does it feel nice.

In other news: My latest novel, Potter’s Field, just hit this week. That’s fun! Find it here in hardcover and eBook. If you’re just showing up, you can see all of these writing advice columns at this link. And if you want to keep on top of what I’m doing (as well as get some cool book recommendations every now and again) sign up for my newsletter.

‘Potter’s Field,’ the fifth and final Ash McKenna novel, is available now

[image error]Today is the day: Potter’s Field is available in hardcover and eBook. It’s weird and bittersweet to be at the end of a road that started with the publication of New Yorked in 2015. Though really it started in 2010, when I first began to write it. Fun fact: the first title of New Yorked was Apophenia, which is the condition of finding patterns in random data, which I thought was so clever and I now realize is probably the dumbest fucking title ever. Glad I didn’t roll forward with that one.

I wrote the series for a lot of reasons, but a big one was that I wanted to write the origin story of a private detective—about what would push someone into that kind of profession. Because I felt like a lot of PI stories are about characters who are jaded and worn and who’ve been at it for a very long time. So I thought it was be cool to start at the start. The fun thing about Potter’s Field is that I get another chance to tell a New York story, but without all the accumulated bullshit of a first-time novelist.

I’ll likely be insufferable the next few days as stuff starts to land. I was on the Writer Types podcast with pals Eric Beetner and SW Lauden (they’re all over but here’s a Stitcher link), Dan Malmon continues his very thoughtful and kind reviews over at Crimespree, and I’ve got a LitReactor column to finish, uh, right now…

Click here to find it. It’s okay if you haven’t read the whole series. You can start with this and work your way backward. Or go start at the beginning and know you won’t have to wait for the story to finish. Or buy it to use as a doorstop. Whatever works!

Oh, also, release party July 17 at The Mysterious Bookshop and I’m reading at Noir at the Bar at Shade on Sunday night. Links!

But to all of you who stuck with me through this: Thank you. From the bottom of my heart, it has meant the world to me.

Writing Advice Sucks #3: ‘Analysis paralysis’, Shiny Thing Syndrome, and the Nicholas Cage Rule.

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Do you ever go on Netflix looking for something to watch, and despite hundreds of choices right in front you, you can’t decide on something?

So you click through the menus until you end up re-watching an episode of The Office you’ve already seen a dozen times?

This is “analysis paralysis.”

It’s something I struggle with constantly as a Netflix customer and as a writer.

When it comes to Netflix, my wife and I have a rule: If we spend more than 15 minutes without making a choice, we have to watch the first Nic Cage movie we see. That usually helps to settle things.

Which is a difficult rule to apply to the writing end…

Jump back to early last year. My agent peaced out. I was suddenly un-repped. I had finished The Woman from Prague and was gearing up to write Potter’s Field—the final book in the Ash McKenna series.

So I was thinking about the long game. What I should do next. And I had no clue.

I have a half-dozen ideas baking at any given time. For each one, I have a Google Doc. That’s the repository for notes and research and stray thoughts.

I knew I needed to pick something and make that my next project.

And I picked wrong.

I narrowed it down to two: Not Yet Lost, a horror novel with a very ambitious meta narrative (which proved to be too ambitious), and a project I’d been kicking around since 2013: The Warehouse.

I wrote 70,000 words of Not Yet Lost before I realized it was not the book I should be writing. It was a fun idea and it was a huge challenge and I think I was more in love with the idea of making it work than with the story itself. I may go back to it one day, but that book and I, we were on different paths.

The Warehouse, meanwhile, was a book I’d been laying down notes on for the past five years. And it was timely. It’s about the American economy, and how corporations are treating workers like disposable products to package disposable items, and it seemed like if I waited too much longer, the winds might shift.

Worse, someone else might get to the story before I did. Which happens!

A few years ago I had an idea that I pitched to my then-agent, which she loved: A book about a bunch of “final girls.” The gist was to take a bunch of women who had survived horror movie scenarios, team them up, and pit them against a new challenge. The thing that made them “final girls”—their intelligence, their physical ability, their luck—would now be pushed even further.

I had a rough idea of the characters and the setting (abandoned resort in the Catskills) and then BOOM:

Final Girls by Riley Sager was announced!

Again, it happens. There are only so many ideas, especially when you get into the realm of big hooks.

But, I realized Not Yet Lost wasn’t working, and the book I needed to write was The Warehouse. It was calling to me, on so many levels. So I put down the former and picked up the latter.

I put together a working outline, then wrote the first 16,000 words. That first chunk comprised the first section, introducing the three characters and their voices, and establishing what they wanted. I polished it until it to a shine.

That landed me a new agent. And having an agent gave me the drive I needed to finish. Seriously, after we agreed to work with each other, I got to work the next day. I finally felt like I wasn’t floating. I wrote and finished the rest of the book—all 125,000 words—and submitted it to my agent three months later.

And it worked out pretty well from there.

Anyway, this is all to say: It’s really very easy for writers to fall victim to Shiny Thing Syndrome—for your attention to hop from one project to the next, based on how you feel on a given day.

The Warehouse had been calling to me for five years; Not Yet Lost popped in my head and a few weeks later I was writing it. Not that a sudden infatuation can’t be successful, but sometimes the answer you need is staring you in the face.

And sometimes you need to find a good reason to buckle down. I was in a nice position where I had a new agent and since he was taking a chance on me—agreeing to rep me off a partial and a pitch—I wanted to get my work done and give him something to sell.

The big picture here is that the only thing that matters is the work. Ideas are great. But you can’t always sell an idea (unless it’s a comic book pitch… or a non-fiction pitch… or you’re Stephen King, who could scribble a premise on a napkin and even if it was illegible someone would snatch it up).

This goes hand-in-hand with that piece of advice about how you need to finish your first draft, because once it’s done,  you can shape it into the book it needs to be. You’ll never get to step two if you don’t get past step one.

Still, it’s good to be organized. To make sure you’re ready when the book you have to write comes knocking.

Last column, I talked about the value of forgetting shit. But sometimes you need to remember stuff, especially if you’re talking about a space of years between idea and finished product.

If you’re the kind of writer whose brain is constantly hopping between projects, consider setting up some kind of note system. Like I said, I use Google Docs. Every new project gets a doc. Easy enough to access and search, and you can also use the app on your phone, for when you’re out and about.

Or carry a notebook. Or use Dropbox. Or develop a complicated system in which you always have a carrier pigeon at hand. Doesn’t matter. As long as it works for you.

And you can dump anything in there. Links, pictures, stray thoughts. Just give yourself a little context. There’s been a few times where I’ve put down a few words, thinking it would serve as a reminder, and then two years later I’m looking at it like what the fuck was I thinking?

Still, more important than coming up with a system to keep your brain tamed is picking projects and finishing them.

Someone just asked me about what he should send to an agent: a book he’s finished, a different version of that book, or a work-in-progress… and I told him you should only ever really query with something that’s done. Or at least, as done as you can get it.

(Landing my agent with the first 16K of The Warehouse is the exception rather than the rule—I’d already published some books, he’d asked to meet with me when he heard I wasn’t repped anymore, and he asked me what I was working on… first-time authors are not afforded these luxuries).

Point is: you have to choose. You have to pick a project, and see it through to the end. You have to trust yourself that all those other ideas will be there for you when the time comes.

Five unfinished manuscripts are worthless, but one finished book can be worth a lot. As my boss is keen on saying: “They’re books, not fish. They’ll keep.”

Unless you find yourself in a Final Girls situation, and even then it doesn’t matter because there are still plenty of ideas out there! I’m currently hard at work on my seven-part series about a boy wizard…

Until then, don’t forget you can pre-order Potter’s Field (it’s almost out!) and if you’re in the NYC area on July 17, I’d love to see you at the launch party at The Mysterious Bookshop, where my pal Alex Segura will put the screws to me but also there might be cupcakes.

And you can sign up for my newsletter here—I’m currently on the road, catching up on some reading, and I’ll be sending out some cool book recommendations when I get back…

On powerlessness

I keep trying to write something about this, and I keep stalling out, because I figure, what is there to even say?

Or, what could I say that might make any difference, several thousand miles away from where this is happening, in the privileged bubble of my happy family life?

That picture of the little girl sobbing, after being separated from her family, after her goddamn shoelaces were taken away—I saw it while sitting in a locker room. I was about to test for the next level in Krav Maga, a martial art founded by Imi Lichtenfeld in the 1930s to defend Jewish neighborhoods in Bratislava from anti-Semitic gangs. All I could think was: the only thing that’s changed is the uniforms.

I looked at that picture and I shook because this little girl was so tiny and so afraid and I think of how I feel when my daughter is upset or afraid like that, and how it rips my heart clean in fucking two, and this child’s parents aren’t even there to comfort her. They’ve been taken away by a bunch of fuckers who are gleeful in their hatred. What that kid must be going through, what those parents must be going through, it’s a pain I can’t even fathom.

My daughter was born with a heart defect, and twice in the first year of her life we handed her over for six-hour open-heart surgeries. So I know that feeling of your child being taken away and the stakes being very high. But we were handing her over to a team of doctors who demonstrated the utmost care and compassion. And by the end of the day we had her back.

There is no care or compassion here. None. Instead there’s a complete and utter breakdown of empathy and kindness.

We are in the midst of a full-blown humanitarian crisis and I keep coming back to this feeling of: we are the bad guy. If this were a movie, then America would be the regime the freedom fighters would be trying to topple. And we would cheer for them, because a government that splits up families and then lies about why there doing it—there’s no law here, this is a negotiating tactic for Trump to get his dumb fucking wall—is just full-blown evil.

I don’t know what to do.

I gave money to ActBlue, which is funneling donations to a number of organizations trying to help these families. I found them on a longer list that Mashable put together. But my heart still hurts because I pressed a button. It feels like nothing.

I can beg and plead for people to vote in the midterms. Cut Trump off at the knees, at least, so his power will be limited. But I begged and pleaded for people to vote for Clinton, for all the good that seemed to do.

I don’t know what to do as an artist. Though, at times like this I tend to fall back to what Kurt Cobain wrote in the liner notes of Nirvana’s 1992 album Incesticide:

At this point I have a request for our fans. If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of different color, or women, please do this one favor for us—leave us the fuck alone! Don’t come to our shows and don’t buy our records.

There’s this debate that pops up a lot in artistic communities—especially lately—over how political an artist should or should not be, because you don’t want to risk sales. But I’m pretty comfortable saying that if you can look at what’s happening on the border and you can shrug it off, or worse, justify it—leave me the fuck alone! Don’t come to my signings and don’t buy my books.

Other than that, all I feel is powerlessness.

I don’t speak Spanish. I live thousands of miles away from the border. I’m not a lawyer. I poke around on the internet looking for articles like this in Slate, roundups of how to help, and I hold my daughter extra tight. I hide what I’m feeling from her, because I want to protect her from the horrible fucking place this country has become.

I don’t know that this changes anything or helps anything. I don’t know what it means to the broader fight. I just wanted to say something before I climbed into bed and stared at the ceiling for a little while.

I do believe in the best of us, still. I believe we will get past this. I will watch and wait and help where I can and be the best father and husband and citizen I can be and maybe right now that can be enough.

Maybe it’s enough for us to stoke the fire in our hearts, to make sure that flame doesn’t go out, even in high wind and heavy rain, because those fires will keep us warm and light the way in the dark, so we can see ourselves through this.

And yet it’s so easy to say because I’m too far away to say it to the little girl whose shoelaces were taken away.

If you can help, please help. If you can’t—please keep that fire alive. Just do that. I feel like we’re going to need every source of flame we can muster.