Jackson Coppley's Blog, page 13

The Code Hunters - The Movie

Book Pipeline selects novels to pitch movie studios. Is there a book that might challenge a movie producer? The Code Hunters may be one. See the follow Book Pipeline review:

THE CODE HUNTERS is an incredibly ambitious, sprawling sci-fi adjacent action-adventure story. The vivid imagination of the author is impressive and should be commended. However, looking at THE CODE HUNTERS through a purely film/TV adaptation lens, it's unlikely that it would be attractive to producers and studios. The biggest reason? This would require an astronomically large budget to pull off. And with producers and studios increasingly showing trepidation towards taking large financial gambles on untested, globe-trotting IP such as this, THE CODE HUNTERS would likely scare a lot of them off. 

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Keep in mind the feedback is not a criticism of the writing or the material itself--we consider the current film/TV market demands heavily, if not exclusively, into our criteria. Many entries, to be honest, were quite good, or had glimmers of potential, but for various reasons we felt the project might have a tougher time grabbing the attention of production companies. Since we work very closely with winners and finalists on development and circulation, we have to put that standard at the forefront.

 

Why?

I’m sharing a video with you. It’s a TED talk on ‘Why.’

Simon Sinek’s TED talk, “Start With Why?"

You might wonder why a writer would share a video like this one. It’s actually one that several writers rerun for themselves from time to time, just as I did today. When I spend time on marketing, the nuts and bolts of getting readers to give my books a try, I lose track of why I’m writing. Paraphrasing the video, it’s not ‘I’m a good writer. I have a book like the ones you read. Will you buy a copy?’ No. It’s ‘I have stories I love to tell. Spend some time with me and I’ll tell you one.’

Leaving Lisa - Free for Valentines Day

For Valentines Day, I have a special Kindle book giveaway for you. On Feb 12, 13, 14 Leaving Lisa, an AI Love Story will be a Kindle Bargain. It is free on each of those days. 

My gift to lovers everywhere.

Go to: http://www.jacksoncoppley.com/home for information on the novel and a link to get it for free.

How They Won

I’ve been chided by an editor for using ‘they’ to refer to an individual. We all do it in conversation all the time. Example: “If any one of you have an issue with what I said, they need to see me.” Of course, the sentence should be “If any one of you have an issue with what I said, he or she needs to see me.”

Thing are changing. If anyone has an issue with the correct using, I ask they take a look at the article on How ‘They’ Won (https://time.com/5763175/they-as-singular-pronoun/) by Katy Steinmetz and published in Time Magazine.

One of the beauties of using they as a singular pronoun is it being gender neutral. I’m writing a mystery and I don’t want you to know the gender of a bad guy. I have to perform literary gymnastics to work around the issue. Now, they can be either. Long live They.

Jack Reacher & Lee Child

 

James Dover Grant is best know by his pen name, Lee Child. When Grant set out to write detective mysteries, he was clever about the marketing. He chose the pen name Lee Child, not only because it was simple, but Child would appear on bookstore shelves next to Chandler (as in Raymond Chandler) a fellow Brit to whose readers he hoped to appeal. The name Reacher came from Child's sister who would call upon her taller sibling to reach things on high shelves. He was her reacher.

Lee Child's advice to writers is "write the fast things slow and the slow things fast." That's why, when Jack Reacher believes a bad guy is around the corner, you will read a page of how Reacher contemplates his maneuvers before he executes them. Stretch out the action. 

Now, after twenty-four Jack Reacher novels, Child is turning over the series to his brother. Let's see how the loyal fans (and there are many) react.

Read more about it here.

Bond, James Bond

A few notes about 007:

I've written about James Bond and the influence he had on Nicholas Foxe. See my post on James Bond here.

I have a new character in the works who is more like Bond, much to his chagrin. Be sure to subscribe to this web site to be the first to know all about him.

Recently I came across an interesting article on the family who has been the keepers of the Bond legacy. Read it here.

Book Review: Virgil Wander

Once in a while, a book comes along with odd characters you love. Virgil Wander is that book for me. The book opens with a car crash. Virgil survives the crash but suffers head trauma. He has a loss of words, particularly adjectives. Author Enger is masterful in describing the way in which these words return.

Virgil operates a derelict movie theatre in a derelict small town. The theatre offers a center point for several stories involving it.

The story progresses at its own casual pace, almost melodic. A gentle read.

 

Heroes and The Nicholas Foxe Team

When The Code Hunters - A Nicholas Foxe Adventure was launched late in April, I didn't know what to expect next. I'm delighted to report that it has been a hit. Readers report in their reviews how much they like the characters. When I created The Code Hunters,  I gave birth to a group of new friends. The inspiration came from other hero stories, particularly Mission: Impossible. Take a few minutes to peruse this blog for my entry on Mission: Impossible, Indiana Jones and other heroes. They all shaped The Code Hunters.

Hmong People in Vietnam

Eight years ago, I visited the Hmong people in Vietnam. What I learned about them inspired part of my Novel Leaving Lisa

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Better than Dan Brown?

The Code Hunters - A Nicholas Foxe Adventure5.0 out of 5 starsSuperb adventure tale seeking the origin of modern humansApril 28, 2019A team of expert cavers exploring a challenging cave in New Mexico in search of a possible connection to Carlsbad Caverns tumble into a chamber deep underground containing something which just shouldn't be there: a huge slab of metal, like titanium, twenty-four feet square and eight inches thick, set into the rock of the cave, bearing markings which resemble the pits and lands on an optical storage disc. No evidence for human presence in the cave prior to the discoverers is found, and dating confirms that the slab is at least ten thousand years old. There is no way an object that large could be brought through the cramped and twisting passages of the cave to the chamber where it was found. Wealthy adventurer Nicholas Foxe, with degrees in archaeology and cryptography, gets wind of the discovery and pulls strings to get access to the cave, putting together a research program to try to understand the origin of the slab and decode its enigmatic inscription. But as news of the discovery reaches others, they begin to pursue their own priorities. A New Mexico senator sends his on-the-make assistant to find out what is going on and see how it might be exploited to his advantage. An ex-Army special forces operator makes stealthy plans. An MIT string theorist with a wide range of interests begins exploring unorthodox ideas about how the inscriptions might be encoded. A televangelist facing hard times sees the Tablet as the way back to the top of the heap. A wealthy Texan sees the potential in the slab for wealth beyond his abundant dreams of avarice. As the adventure unfolds, we encounter a panoply of fascinating characters: a World Health Organization scientist, an Italian violin maker with an eccentric theory of language and his autistic daughter, and a “just the facts” police inspector. As clues are teased from the enigma, we visit exotic locations and experience harrowing adventure, finally grasping the significance of a discovery that bears on the very origin of modern humans. About now, you might be thinking “This sounds like a Dan Brown novel”, and in a sense you'd be right. But this is the kind of story Dan Brown would craft if he were a lot better author than he is: whereas Dan Brown books have become stereotypes of cardboard characters and fill-in-the-blanks plots with pseudo-scientific bafflegab stirred into the mix, this is a gripping tale filled with complex, quirky characters, unexpected plot twists, beautifully sketched locales, and a growing sense of wonder as the significance of the discovery is grasped. If anybody in Hollywood had any sense (yes, I know…) they would make this into a movie instead of doing another tedious Dan Brown sequel. This is subtitled “A Nicholas Foxe Adventure”: I sincerely hope there will be more to come.John Walker is a founder of Autodesk and current lives in Switzerland where he reviews books that challenge our thinking. His web site is at https://www.fourmilab.ch