Matt Rees's Blog, page 15

Corrupt online reviews

Eleanor Roosevelt said that no one can make you feel bad, except yourself. I live by that rule. Particularly when it comes to reviews. And double-particularly when it comes to online reviews.

A recent Cornell University study found that 85 percent of amazon.com’s “top reviewers” had received free gifts from vendors. And 78 percent had reviewed the products. The “top reviewers” often strayed far from their expertise, if they even have one, boosting their productivity with reviews of minor domestic items so that they would maintain their “top reviewer” status and continue to receive free stuff.

It’s a corrupt system. Well, I live in the Middle East and I’ve become accustomed to corruption. So why have I had to bring Mrs. Roosevelt into the equation?

Because the corruption touches me personally, as it does every writer. Take the Amazon Vine program, which is mentioned in the Cornell study. As I understand it, Vine allows “top reviewers” to choose from a list of books, which they then receive free from the publisher on the understanding that they’ll write a review.

The publisher wants to participate because the number of reviews (as well as the quality of the reviews) seems to be part of amazon.com’s secret ranking system.

The problem appears to me to be that there’s a big difference between electing to pay for a book you want to read and clicking on a list of books you can receive free – and there’s likely to be just as big a difference in the kind of review you write.

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.

Podcast: How to write and edit a book

My latest podcast gives away all the secrets of the professional writer's trade. This follows previous podcasts about researching, structuring and plotting your book. Download my other podcasts here.

More Passion!

British Prime Minister David Cameron recently invited Tracey Emin, a purveyor of work which is shit even by the standards of contemporary art, to produce something – they probably call it “an installation” – for Number 10, Downing Street.

Emin, who won the Turner Prize for exhibiting her own used-condom-strewn bed some years ago, is a fan of Cameron. Yes, can you believe it, an artist supporting the fellow who abolished the Arts Council. She has been quoted as saying that his government is “the best government at the moment we’ve ever had.” Which shows that she’s as much of a political analyst as she is an artist.

Now, I don’t know why they’d need any new “art” in Number 10. Surely the place is chock full of Nineteenth Century paintings of horses. And at a time when the government is cutting back every ministry’s budget by at least 25 percent?

So what did Emin do for Cameron? A neon sign emblazoned with the words: “More Passion.”

Yes, indeed. The artist whose works evoke only negative passions (in me, for
one) urges the starchy Old Etonian and his coterie of distant, heartless
nobs to show more passion. No doubt she intends for them to throw caution to the winds when wielding the red pencil over university budgets and healthcare costs for old people. Show some passion; cut another million quid.

Here’s the true irony of Emin’s neon nonsense: politicians always claim to
be operating on the basis of passion and so do contemporary artists. Yet
both are clearly more interested in cash and have a corrupt ability to manipulate others into swallowing their feigned feelings.

I’ve always thought of art as going directly to your heart or your stomach.
Which is why “contemporary art” leaves me so cold. Art which requires
explanation before impact isn’t art. It may be “design,” but most likely
it’s faddish and aimed to shock. Take passionate Tracey Emin’s famous tent
installation onto which she attached the names of all the people she’d slept
with. Makes you think, eh? Well, no, actually it doesn’t. Unless it makes
you think that it’s a waste of time and that you’re lucky your name isn’t
there.

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.

Lazy Writers and Productive Creatives

There are lazy writers, writers who can’t say no, and then there are creative people who are able to combine their muse with their media.

I’ve discovered this in recent months a couple of different ways. First, on a recent book tour, I spent a week at a book festival where I was together with the same bunch of authors all week. I asked many of them if they’d agree to be interviewed over email for my blog. All said yes. Some very significant writers, including UK bestseller Tony Parsons, wrote swift responses to my questions, and you can read them here on my blog.

Others agreed to do the interview only to prevaricate when I sent the questions. They suggested that they’d be able to get to the interview once they’d finished a current freelance project or completed a three month writing fellowship. Now, I don’t believe it takes long to write the answers to my questions, so either they were blowing me off or they harbored deep reservations against….work – or they think a blog interview is a more serious thing than I do…. Several others gave me email addresses which turned out not to exist, but they were all somewhat elderly ladies, so I’m prepared to ascribe that to forgetfulness and lack of internet savvy rather than a desire to throw me off the scent.

More recently, I asked Tess Gerritsen, the best-selling US thriller writer
whom I also met at a book fair, if she’d read my (forthcoming in the US,
currently available in the UK) historical mystery MOZART’S LAST ARIA and
perhaps supply a comment on the book – favorable of course – for my
publishers to post on the cover. In the business, it’s called a “blurb.”

Even though she embarked last month on three months of daily readings to
promote her excellent new novel THE SILENT GIRL – a strenuous schedule that includes no fewer than two book readings a day in its UK stretch – Tess
zipped back her blurb double-quick. “Mozart, music, and murder seamlessly
blend together in this fascinating historical mystery. A perfect read to go
with a crackling fire and a pot of hot chocolate,” Tess wrote.

Read the rest of this post on my blog.

Writers Need Decisive Indolence

My wife is in labor. Though by the time you read this, she’ll probably have delivered a baby girl. In days gone by, fathers hung around in the waiting room sharing cigars with new fathers. I’m glad that’s no longer a tradition – if I wanted to suck on something long and dark, I surely wouldn’t be becoming a father, if you get what I mean.

But here I am, waiting. Our birth coach is giving my wife reflexology in the bedroom, so I’m taking advantage to pen my little blog missive for the week. Which is all about doing…very little.

It’s my new technique. Up until the book I’m currently plotting, I’ve been a fairly compulsive worker. I’m from Northern Europe; born Protestant; first in the family to attend university and cocktail parties. That sort of thing. This worked pretty well for me, up to a point.

However, since I completed the manuscript of my novel about Caravaggio in late April, I’ve been experimenting with a work method I would describe as “decisive indolence.” I’m still on the plotting stage of my next book. Almost everything about it has changed over those months. It was a historical novel set in London, 1914. Now it’s…not. The characters, the plot, everything’s different.

With my old technique, I’d have had a draft completed by now. But it might’ve been the wrong book. It’d be the book I abandoned already at the plotting stage.

So how have I perfected this decisive indolence? First, I work a little bit most mornings – but not every morning. But I allow myself time for other creative projects – music and painting – which keep my mind alert for the brief moments of creative concentration when ideas about the new novel come to me.

Second, no more car or bike to and from the gym. I’m walking home from the gym several times a week. It’s not the only time I walk somewhere, but it’s the only time when I don’t really need to get anywhere in particular and where my mind has been relaxed already by an hour of exercise.

As I listen to my wife’s contractions, I realize that labor is very much like the writing of a book. So many people these days are scheduling caesarians, and writers are rather doing the same thing – forcing their creative acts. I don’t advocate waiting around doing nothing, but I do think writers need to find a more natural formula from conception to delivery.

And with that, the reflexology is over, and I have to go back to stroking my wife’s back…

Podcast: How to Write a Book -- Structure and Plot

In my latest podcast I use my experience as an award-winning writer of nonfiction, crime fiction, and historical thrillers to show how to structure your book and, in the case of fiction, how to lay out your plot. This is the second of three episodes titled How to Write a Book. The next episode will cover writing and editing the book.

Sicko Writing: Is Crime Fiction Too Gory?

When I worked as a journalist at a major US magazine, it was clear that readers didn’t respond to hard news. They wanted features. Not fluffy features. Serious features. But they'd had enough of news stories about what happened that week.

What did the editors do? They ordered correspondents to write hard news. Because they didn’t care what readers wanted. They wished to appear as serious journalists before their peers, and serious journalists write tough hard news stories. Even if no one wants to read them.

I was put in mind of this as I listened to a BBC Open Book podcast about whether crime fiction has become too gory. Specifically whether descriptions of violence – and the torture of women in particular – have gone too far. I interpret that to mean: whether the violence is indulged for its own sake, rather than for the sake of plot or character development.

After listening to the show I felt as though I had been tuned in to a discussion by European liberals about multiculturalism – or some other subject on which all “decent” types agree and then simply talk about the nuances of their shared position, rather than ever saying “hey, there’s a case to answer here.”

I’ve seen a great deal of violence in my life. I’ve been a foreign correspondent in the Middle East for 15 years. I’ve seen people shot, blown up, burned to death, horribly maimed, and I’ve been threatened myself. I take no pleasure in that and I have no sympathy for those who would treat others’ suffering as entertainment. Perhaps that’s why I believe there is very much a case for crime fiction to answer: too many writers and presumably readers appear to be indulging in psychotically prurient interest.

That isn’t to say there’s no violence in my novels. But I’m very careful about its purpose, and I don’t require it to take place in front of the reader’s eyes, as it were. I try to think about Chandler’s great dictum on Hammett – that he put murder back in the hands of those who actually commit it in real life. No doubt some of those people are sadists, but most are criminals and most murders are committed with dispatch. That’s how I like it to be done in my books: by a criminal, not a psycho, and quickly, as a piece of business.

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.

Podcast: How to Write a Book -- Research

My latest podcast is the first of a three-part series on how to write your book. This episode is about research.

Do you feel lucky? -- Crime writer has a blast, uncovers bloodlust

I’ve tried to do everything the characters in my books do. I’ve roamed the alleys of Bethlehem’s refugee camps. I’ve had clandestine meetings with gunrunners in Gaza. I’ve risked diabetes to eat syrupy Palestinian desserts and made them key to the plot of “The Samaritan’s Secret.” I learned piano for “Mozart’s Last Aria.” I picked up oil painting and dueled with a rapier for the forthcoming “Caravaggio’s Madonna.”

The manuscript I’m about to start will include a little gunplay. So it was time I learned how to shoot. Naturally, I’ve had a blast. (Okay, that’s the only gun pun I’ll allow myself.)

I’m not sure how many crime writers actually shoot a gun. Perhaps it depends on their location. Growing up European, I’d be as likely to have experience with a gun as I would to have owned a Rembrandt. Perhaps it’s different for American writers. In any case, I live in Jerusalem, and there are plenty of guns around here.

I’ve watched people fire guns, as a foreign correspondent covering wars in the Middle East. I’ve had guns pointed at me by masked Hamas men. But when it comes to touching guns, I’ve barely done so. Near the Jerusalem bus station some years ago, I saw a bullet from an assault rifle on the ground. I picked it up gingerly and gave it to a nearby soldier as if it might go off in my hands. He regarded me with the look macho men give to sissies.

So I went along to the range with my pal Alon Tuval, an Israeli whose hobbies appear to be on the macho end of the scale (knives, high-speed go-karting, smoking), and an American foreign correspondent who shall go unnamed here due to the fact that he doesn’t work for Fox News and therefore might be considered somewhat suspect if his liberal-media-elite bosses discovered that he liked guns.

The “range” is something of a misnomer. It was a moderately large basement in the area of Jerusalem where I go to shop for cheap furniture and on the very street where I take my wife’s 15-year-old Toyota to bribe someone to pass it as roadworthy each year. (This is the Middle East, after all.)

We loaded our magazines with a rather expensive selection of bullets. Then the instructors, Elliel and Dani, gave me a rundown on the guns I had planned to shoot: a small Beretta, a Glock, an Israeli Bul, and Dirty Harry’s Colt Magnum. Elliel liked us so much that he gave us a special treat. He ran off to get a Tabor – an Israeli invention which turns a Glock handgun into a laser-sighted assault rifle.

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.

Lost 'News of the World' Scoop: MOZART MURDERED!

*Editor’s note: The Man of Twists and Turns has obtained the text of a major exclusive which was set to appear in The News of the World in London this week. However, News Corp. owner Rupert Murdoch shut down the 168-year-old tabloid to dampen a scandal over its reporters hacking into private voicemails, use of criminals and private investigators to intimidate and obtain privileged documents, and the bribery of police officials. The following major exclusive was, therefore, never published and has been obtained by The Man of Twists and Turns from a source within the newspaper. (In fact, we might’ve just hacked into their computer system to get it, but we aren’t saying that we actually did, and David Cameron went to Oxford with the writer so back off.)*

Classical music maestro Wolfgang Mozart was murdered, only for his death to be covered up for centuries by scientists, doctors and music historians. Now the truth has been revealed by an award-winning novelist.

The composer, who shot to stardom with hummable classics like Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and The Marriage of Figaro, revealed to his wife only weeks before his death that he was sure he had been poisoned. Constanze Mozart thought her husband was overworked, but when the deadly day came in December 1791, she was shocked to think that he had been right all along.

“There’s been a cover up at the highest level,” says Constanze, who now lives six feet under the ground in Salzburg, Austria. (The News of the World hacked into the spirit world and bribed St. Peter to obtain access to secret Mozart communications.)

Doctors and historians have repeatedly pooh-poohed calls for a full investigation of the great composer’s death. Only this week new reports
emerged from a Viennese academic that Mozart had died due to a deficiency of Vitamin D. (*Editor’s note: No, really. We’re not kidding.*)

The academic said that Mozart composed his tunes “late at night and no doubt slept late into the day.” This deprived the great man of Vitamin D from sunshine, which is anyway rare in Vienna during the winter, the academic asserted.

Read the rest of this post on my blog a href="http://www.themanoftwistsandturns.com... Man of Twists and Turns.