Marc Liebman's Blog, page 45

First Attempt Becomes Number 7

Way back in the late 1980s, I tried to write a novel called The Kuril Wedge Incident and never finished it. For many reasons, the plot didn’t work. Then, I started on Moscow Airlift that I have written about in this blog in the three “Manuscript Resurrection” entries. Moscow Airlift is scheduled to come out in March 2018 and is the sixth book in the Josh Haman series.

On my laptop, The Kuril Wedge Incident languished. When Big Mother 40 launched the Josh Haman series, The Kuril Wedge Incident was listed late in the series mainly because I didn’t know what to do with it. It just sat there collecting whatever dust electrons gather in a disk drive.

Looking at the dates of drafts, the first full draft in was completed in 2009. The plot changed from 1988 and the main character was now Josh Haman. The villains in the first draft were and still are North Koreans. Still not happy with it, the manuscript went back into a holding pattern and I focused on writing two other books, one was Big Mother 40.

2010 came and I made another pass at The Kurile Wedge Incident as a break from working on Big Mother 40. In 2013, I went through it again as I did in 2014 to incorporate the lessons learned from getting Big Mother 40 and Render Harmless published. By now, it was a good story and had to wait its turn to be published.

In 2016, I made another editing pass and liked the story, thought it was almost ready, but there was something wrong. What dawned on me was that while the term Kuril Wedge was relevant to me and those who served on the Seventh Fleet staff during the 80s, it means nothing to the average reader. Trying to explain the connection in the manuscript was a stretch and became a distraction that had no relevance to the plot. Because so many scenes in the book take place on and around Simushir, an island in the Kuril Island chain, the name was changed. The manuscript’s name was changed, references to the Kuril Wedge were deleted and voilà, the The Simushir Island Incident was born.

The book will be the seventh and last one in the Josh Haman series. It will released by Penmore Press in the late fall – the current schedule says November – of 2018.

The book’s plot wraps around North Korean actions to destabilize the region and threaten the U.S. Even though the story takes place 1992, many of the issues are relevant in 2018 as they were back then. FYI, Stephen Higgins from Cherubs 2 is back as a significant supporting character. The North Koreans are an interesting group trapped between power, greed and a desire for freedom. Several white knuckle flying scenes are scattered in the manuscript and Marty Cabot, a life long bachelor falls in love. It is now, after all these years a story worth sharing with readers.

Marc Liebman

February 2018

Drawing a Blank

Every Sunday, I get up about the same time, i.e. six or so and after letting the dog out, sit down and write my weekly blog. During the week, at random moments, I come up with an idea, or a theme and it gestates in the back of my mind for a few days. Then, on Sunday morning, it takes about thirty or forty minutes to write the 500 words or so, polish and publish.

But not this week! Nothing came and in fact, I didn’t have a clue what is as going to write until I sat down at the key board and my brain said, write about drawing a blank!

Looking back, the reason became clear. I’m about two thirds the way through – at least I think I am – the first draft of a manuscript called The Assassin. For the first seventy thousand or so words, everything was flowing smoothly. The plot threads were coming together, the timeline was working and the characters were driving what was appearing on the screen.

It was like I was driving in the mud, slowing down, the wheels spinning, the car slewing and now I’m stuck and can’t figure out what to write. It wasn’t a mental block because my mind raced with possibilities, but none, when applied would work.

Where does one go in the writer’s bag of tricks to come up with an answer? There’s no store you can go to that has an aisle with plot or character ideas. Googling, if that is a word, “help me with my plot” gets you all sorts of generic guides that tell you same all tried and true things like, “How to Plot a Novel, 7 Tips for Success.” I read all seven that were a compilation of what makes for a great novel. O.K., most if not all were in the book already or at least planned.

Clicking further, at the end of the day, all these sites want to sell you something, a course, help with editing, even ghost writing your novel. None of the above were applicable. So what does one do?

Write now – yes I used the word intentionally instead of ‘right now,” I’m stuck and am taking a few days off to let some ideas gestate. Looking back through the un-edited manuscript, two items leapt off the screen. One, the main antagonist’s character wasn’t developed properly. Another was I needed to keep bringing the plot, the historical context that surrounds it.

Meanwhile, in the back of my brain, the characters will do what they do and I’ll resume in a day or so. Today’s job is to get the blog published so I can go back to writing a book and not a blog.

Marc Liebman

January 2018

A New Blog Idea

Right after I started writing a new manuscript with the working title The Assassin, I came up with what I think was a cool promotional idea. The blinding flash of brilliance (at least in my mind) was to share the experience of writing a novel with potential readers.

My first reaction was to run it as a second blog on my web site. After thinking about it for a day or so and for reasons known only to God and broccoli (I don’t like broccoli), I rejected the idea. But, the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea of a blog tied to a novel in process of being written.

So, I turned to the Texas Authors, Inc. which besides having a web site, runs book fairs, has a radio network and other promotional vehicles for authors based in Texas. Alan Bourgeois, the founder, is open to new ideas so I penned him an email with the idea fleshed out. Keep in mind, I had was an idea and not a clue of how to link his site to this blog, my site and make all this work, but what I would do is provide the content several times a week.

Readers of the blog would get to share the challenges, frustrations, excitement of an author while he was writing the novel. To preserve the raw emotion and immediacy, the blog wouldn’t be polished as it would be in a book. The content will vary from entry to entry. There will be some info on the general topic of the book, the overall plot, the characters but details on exactly what will happen will not be there for two reasons.

One, I won’t know until I finish writing it and two, because I’d like you to read it when it gets published. Once it is on the market, you may have fun and go back and forth between the blog and the book trying to figure out what happened in my warped mind as the book was being written.

My commitment was a series of short blurbs, all under 500 words several times a week. They’d be written as I wrote the first draft of the manuscript. There’s no outline, no planned sequence of topics, just my thoughts as I write.

We agreed that when I finished the first draft, we’d re-evaluate because before doing the first major edit, the book sits on the shelf for a few weeks to give my brain a chance to clear. Our thinking is we’ll keep going and see what happens. Initially, the blog will go until I finish it. Then, we may continue as the next phase, the first major edit and the most difficult of all, finding a publisher.

So, if you are interested, here’s the link – http://txauthors.com/index.php/pages/blog/marc-liebman-s-adventure-in-writing-a-book. There are already several entries published and more will appear every three days.

Enjoy it, ‘cuz its fun writing it.

Marc Liebman

January 2018

My Latest Obsession

Late last year, in the post titled “A Muse From and Unlikely Source,” wrote about how an interview on a radio station got me thinking about a sequel to Forgotten with Janet Pulaski as the main character. The manuscript which has the working title The Assassin – has gotten well beyond the thinking stage. As of the moment this post is published, I’m 117 pages and 34,319 words into the manuscript.

Writing it (or any other one) is an obsession. I think about it all the time. Some time, it is deliberate when I am walking our dogs or working out. These times alone allow me to work through “issues” with the plot or script scenes in my head. Other times, while driving, shopping in a grocery store, and other times, I think about the characters and the plot.

All of this led me to a weird idea, i.e. share experience of writing a novel with readers while the book is being produced. The second part of the idea was to use another promotional vehicle besides my web site so I turned to the Alan Bourgeois, the president of the Texas Association of Authors and asked if we could put the blog on his site, link it to mine and maybe get more readers.

Alan thought it was a neat idea and it took a couple of days to figure out how to do it and the simplest was I’ll write the material, send it to him and he’ll post it. He mentions it on his weekly radio show, he’s tweeting about it and I will too if I ever get around to tweeting, but that’s another story. It is on my long list of things to do.

Back to the blog called “The Assassin’s Blog” which came from the working title of the book – The Assassin. Yes, I know a Clive Cussler book with the same title was published several years ago, but heck, for the moment, it’s a good title. Assuming a publisher takes it, we can always change it.

The posts will appear several times a week, I’ll write short notes about problems I’m facing, issues with the characters and the plot along with the emotional ups and downs that come with creating a novel. I’m not trying to spend hours polishing each post because of the frequency and because I want to preserve, as much as possible, the raw emotion of the moment.

In other words, the blog is almost like a diary. Each time I struggle or blow through a scene or create a new character, I’m writing a short piece about it, or them, or whatever.

If you’re interested, here’s the link – http://txauthors.com/index.php/pages/....

I hope you check it out and recommend it to others.

Marc Liebman

January 2018

Bringing a Character Back

First of all, Happy New Year. As a reader of my blog, I wish you a happy, healthy and wealthy 2018.

In my last blog, I mentioned during a radio interview, the host got me thinking about Janet Pulaski, one of the main characters in Forgotten. Janet is also one of my favorite and most complex characters I’ve created. Since that call, my conscious and sub-conscious have been working overtime about the plot of a novel starring Janet and tentatively titled The Assassin.

This is not the first time I resurrected a character from an earlier book. Besides the main two characters – Josh Haman and Marty Cabot – in the Josh Haman series, I’ve done it before. For example, in Moscow Airlift, I brought back the Debenards from Cherubs 2; Krasnovsky from Render Harmless; and Volkov from Inner Look to play significant roles in the plot. In The Simushir Island Incident, if and when it comes out, Steven Higgins from Cherubs 2 raises his ugly head.

For the record, I sent The Simushir Island Incident which is the last book in the Josh Haman series to Penmore Press on Friday, January 5th. The high level plan discussed with Penmore in November 2017 is to release it late in 2018. We’ll see.

With The Simushir Island Incident finally done, I can turn my attention working with Penmore to finish Moscow Airlift so it can be released in March 2018. I now, I hope, I can plug away on the long list of books I want to write that now has nine (!) novels and one non-fiction book. To be fair, of the nine novels, I’ve got three manuscripts done, one of which is sitting with an agent. More about that in a later blog.

Back to The Assassin. It is different because Janet Pulaski will be the hero/main character, not a supporting one. Already, I’ve got the plot worked out in my head and sort of outlined on paper, but it is still evolving. The majority of the book takes place in 2003, two years after 9/11. From a writing perspective, I have to keep a copy of Forgotten next to my laptop to use as a reference. I’m only into the first chapter and already I’ve had to dig into the book to make sure that I get the dates correct as well as the names correct of people who appeared in Forgotten.

Is this going to turn into a new series?  Dunno.  I haven’t gotten that far.

Writing The Assassin should be fun. Right now, I envision including a Cuban intelligence officer who wants to find Janet and blackmail her out of retirement to kill opponents of the Venezuelan dictator, Hugo Chavez. Another bad guy member is a member of Islamic Jihad targeting Americans. Then there’s the Ukrainian born Aliyah Skylar who is trying to recruit Janet at a vulnerable time in her life. More I can’t mention because I haven’t written it yet. Some characters I envision now will make it into the manuscript and some won’t. Telling the story will be fun.  Stay tuned, I’ll have more as I write.

Marc Liebman

January 2018

A Muse from an Unlikely Source

Since its December 31st, 2017, Happy New Year. And, to all of you who read this blog, I wish you a healthy and prosperous 2018.

For me, that means getting more books published and writing news ones. Moscow Airlift is on track to come out in March 2018 and as soon as I can finish the last book in the Josh Haman series – The Simushir Island Incident, it will go off to Penmore Press and hopefully be out by the end of the 2018.

Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of being interviewed on Dear Texas Radio. And, over the half hour, we got talking about some of the characters in my books, and the question was, “tell me about the most interesting character you created?” My immediate answer was Janet Pulaski in Forgotten.

Over the next few minutes, he asked questions about Janet and then fired the one that got me thinking, “Is she going to appear in another book?” The front lobes of my brain gave the answer as “no.” However, the question haunted me and started my brain thinking there was another book there.

When Forgotten was in the editing process, the publisher asked me would I consider turning it into two books with the second one titled The Assassin. We decided not to do it because one of the reasons behind creating Janet in the first place was to tell the story of the wives of POWs. To make her really interesting as a character, the Janet that I love became what one reviewer wrote – a badass, nymphomaniac lesbian assassin. All this took place in the summer of 2015.

Fast forward to a few days after the radio interview. The creative part of my brain was working overtime thinking of ways to bring Janet back. Questions like timing, i.e. when would the book take place? Answer, probably in 2002 or 2003. What happens to Karin? She dies of an aggressive form of breast cancer that metastasizes into uterine cancer?

The questions and answers keep coming. Does Janet keep the ranch after Karin’s death? No, she sells it after Monika dies. Where does she live? Janet buys a house in Dallas along with a bunch of property along a lake near Dallas. What happened to her next egg? It was invested well and she’s now worth north of $150M. Is Janet going to become sexually active again? Of course.

All of which brings me back to the three most important questions. One, does she resume her career as an assassin? Yes. Two, how is she be recruited and why? This is the hardest part because it drives the plot. I’ve figured it out, sort of. Three, who are the antagonists? If I started writing today, there will be a Russian, a Cuban and maybe a due gooder in the CIA.More I can’t tell you because a lot will evolve as I start write.

Can you tell I’m excited? Again, Happy Holidays and Happy New Year. And thank you Dear Texas Radio!

Marc Liebman

December 2017

A Time for Rejuvenation

Back in the good old days (?) when I was employed (ugh!), I used the end of the year as a time to relax and rejuvenate. In other words, I ‘shut down’ to give me a mental and physical break. In the consulting world, if client decisions weren’t made by the second Friday after Thanksgiving, they weren’t going to be made until sometime into the middle of January.

The slow-down gave me time to reflect and plot and plan for the next year. It was rare that I didn’t have what I called, ‘line of sight’ to most of my revenue quota by the time the end of the year holidays rolled around.

The end of year holidays was also a time to look back and be thankful for what I had accomplished and the family around me. So what’s different this year? I’m retired so technically, there’s no pressure from work. You may laugh because writers write, no matter what time of year.  The internal compulsion is always there, driving you to put something down on paper.

My mind keeps going back to the Lone Star Book Fair in downtown Dallas. It was slow, and several times, homeless people wandered into the tent and stopped by my booth. How or why life brought them to my table is not germane, but their appearance rammed home the point of how fortunate I am. Since then, what’s odd is that at least once a week I think about these people and the conversations I had with them.

Talking with these homeless people increased the pressure on me that comes from within because every day I can hear the clock ticking. I’m seventy-two and the actuarial tables suggest that based on my health and lifestyle, I should live until I’m eighty-three or so. You do the math, that’s only eleven more years and is very sobering.

I have so many more books I want to write and there’s so little time. The end could come any minute or I could live into my nineties. An extra ten years would be wonderful as long as I don’t come down with dementia or Alzheimer’s. I’m not trying to be morbid, but I can feel the pressure and it causes mental stress.

Over the past few days, I came up with another book idea out of my normal genre. After doing a little research and finding no novels with the same context, I think the plot would make a good book. More in a later blog if I decide to write it.

My point is that now, including this latest one, there are now nine – eight novels and one non-fiction – books on the ‘to write’ list!!!  Egads!!! All have working titles, all have plot outlines of one degree or the other and I want to write them all.

So that’s where the pressure is coming from and despite it, I am trying to take a break from writing, but it is hard. I can hear the clock go tick-tock, tick-tock. It is hard to ignore. When the New Year begins, it will be time for me to get back to work, maybe before!

Marc Liebman

December 2017

Free at Last

No, this is not about Martin Luther King. It is about getting the rights back to my first three books. One of the dirty little secrets of the publishing business is how long the publisher has the rights to publish a manuscript. In my desire to get my first book printed, I didn’t insist on a termination date for the contract thinking that courts take a dim view of contracts in perpetuity which is what one without an end date is. Not insisting on an end date was a rookie mistake and five years later, it came back to bite me in the wallet.

I signed my first contract for Big Mother 40 with Fireship Press in February 2012 and the ones for Render Harmless and Cherubs 2 came in 2013 and 2014. Like everything else in life, circumstances and management teams change. The problems with the release of Cherubs 2 caused me to look elsewhere for a publisher for Forgotten and Inner Look.

So what does an author do? The process is called “reversion of rights” and in the end the author gets a letter from the publisher giving him/her the rights to his/her books back. The writer is then free to either contract with another publisher or self-publish.

One would think that this is an easy process. In my case, and in talking with the Author’s Guild, it is not. Publishers don’t want to give up their “properties” which are the rights to publish a manuscript. They look at each book as an asset and a source of income and don’t give a whit if the author is unhappy with their support, service or the quality of their work.

To get my rights back, I had to retain a lawyer and was faced with two ugly choices. Front the legal fees of a breach of contract lawsuit that could drag out for months or years or pay Fireship to get my rights back. From where I sit, it is legalized extortion. The deciding factor was even if I won in court, I might still have to pay a fee to Fireship to “compensate them for their investment.” Yikes!!!

There is a silver lining in all this. One, by the end of next week, all three books will be re-released by Penmore Press under contracts that reflect the lessons learned from the reversion of rights process.

Two, they have vibrant new covers so four of the five books in the Josh Haman series will have the same look and feel. Forgotten has a haunting cover that I love and am reluctant to change it.

Three, four of the five are with the same publisher (Penmore) and I’ll get some decent promotional support/advice. In the end, Moscow Airlift which comes out next March 2018 and I hope, The Simushir Island Incident will be published in late 2018 will come out under the Penmore imprint.

Now, all I have to do is change all the promotional material to incorporate the new covers. Its just one more thing on my to-do list now that I got the rights back!!!

Marc Liebman

December 2017

Books May Be MIA for a Few Weeks

One of the idiosyncrasies of the reversion of rights process is the legal requirement that the publisher getting the books can’t re-release them until they have a copy of the letter. The reason is that the author doesn’t have the rights to the “works,” the legal term used to describe the published manuscript to give them to a different publisher. You can’t have two publishers of the same book so it is a three step process. Step one, the current publisher gives the reversion of rights letter to the author. Step two, the author gives the rights, via a contract to a new publisher. Step three, the publisher converts the manuscript into a book under its imprint with a new ISBN number. In short, any work the publisher does before he gets the letter is at his (and the author’s) legal and financial risk.

What this leads to is a gap in book availability. Right now, Penmore is hoping to have all three – Cherubs 2, Big Mother 40 and Render Harmless – available by the middle of this month. I’d have preferred it to be a different time of year, but getting my rights back was more important than the calendar.

To get ready, I did several things. One was to find the last version of the manuscripts used to create the book blocks, go through them again and make changes, if desired.

Two, have new covers designed. Reason I went down this road is that now I own the cover artwork so if I have to go through this process again, new covers won’t be needed unless I want to have them re-done.

By the way, the new covers are major improvements over the old ones and give five of the six books in the series the same look and feel. The images and colors are vibrant and eye catching. Much more so than the originals. The cover of Forgotten is the outlier. It has a cover with a haunting image that I love and don’t want to change.

Three, negotiate the new publishing contracts. While again, they couldn’t be signed before I had the rights to the books, we could get them ready to sign and in the process, I incorporated all the lessons learned from the reversion of rights process in the new documents.

For a awhile, I considered self-publishing them but decided against it for two reasons. One was cost – the firms that help with self-publishing looked at what needed to be done as if they were brand new books. The other was I don’t want to get in to the publishing business. I’m an author, not a publisher.

The ball is now in Penmore Press’s court. My part is almost done because before they re-released, I have to sign off on the actual book block. That should happen toward the end of the week. All that is left is the waiting, and it is hard.

Marc Liebman

December 2017

Getting the “Rights” to My Manuscripts Back

Back in 2012 when I signed my first book contract, I thought I knew my way around intellectual property rights. By then, I’d spent 20+ years in the outsourcing industry either working as a consultant or for a service provider. When you get down to it, outsourcing contracts are complex documents that revolve around rights and responsibilities of both parties and compensation and who owns and can use whatever new stuff is created by the relationship.

A book contract is similar in many ways. The author provides the intellectual property a.k.a. IP and the publisher gets the cover designed, provides editing and proofreading services and makes it available to the market through various distribution channels. If you’re lucky, you get some promotional help as well.

After having an attorney familiar with the publishing contracts review the contract for Big Mother 40 and suggest changes, I ranked them in three categories – “gotta have,” “important to have,” and “nice to have.” All the “gotta haves” and most of the “important to haves” made their way into the document and away we went.

Fast forward four years. There’s a management change and Fireship and support started to go south and I wanted to move the books to another publisher. The details of the whys are not as important as the process known as reversion of rights. In layman’s terms, the publisher gives up its rights to publish the manuscript, a.k.a. “the work” and the author who now owns them. With the rights to one’s work in hand, the author – that’s me – can assign them to any other publisher or can keep them and self-publish.

I didn’t want to self-publish., but trust me, I thought about it. Yes, the margins are better, but it means I have to learn how to be one and may lose some distribution channels. So, I decided to move my first three books – Big Mother 40, Render Harmless and Cherubs 2 – to Penmore Press which published Inner Look.

The process took well over a year. After my letters, phone calls and emails to get my rights back, one settlement offer, and now very frustrated, I retained a lawyer. The retainer agreement was signed back in June 2017 and we just got Fireship’s formal acceptance at the end of November 2017.

Through the law firm, I had to make it clear I was ready to sue for breach of contract. The problem I faced even though I had documented cases of breach of contract for all three books, the monetary value for any award was going to be small, i.e. probably less than $15K or $20K. Legal fees, assuming it went to court, would quickly exceed any money I received either through loss of income (royalties) or damages. And, the reality, the longer it went, and the more my fees would increase and the more, if we won, Fireship would have to pay which could have led to an appeal and more legal fees. So I wrote a check. Sometimes principle has to become subservient to what is right.

The truisms about any legal action raised their ugly head. Truism one is the lawyers always get paid no matter what the outcome. Truism two, lawsuits are all about money. He who has the most wins.

Net net, the books will be re-released with new covers in the next week or two and all will be right, at least I hope, with the world. And, most important, the lessons learned which will appear in a later blog, have been included in the new contracts.

Marc Liebman

December 2017