Edged in Blue

My traveling this year is completely nil.  Gas prices haven’t helped, but haven’t exactly been a deterrent, either.  No, life changes have overwhelmed me to the point where the slush fund is gone.  I now have two house payments for the foreseeable future and a new car to deal with following the death of the Wintermobile.

It’s too bad, because I really wanted to go to Bouchercon this year.  With Ruth Jordan and Judy Bobalink in charge, it’s going to feel like it’s our con.  (Well, it always does, but this is the first year I know the organizers on a first-name basis.  And the Jordan clan throws great bashes at all this writerly stuff anyway.)

But most of all, I’m going to miss the mingling.  I spent almost all of the 2006 con in Madison in the bar.  Not drinking, though I did plenty of that.  I sat in there and did more networking and commiserating than I had in Toronto and Chicago.

And let’s be honest.  I love Baltimore.  But this year, my only conference was Love Is Murder in Chicago, and it was on the company dime.  I had to work for BigHugeCo at its Wacker Drive office that weekend, and shot up to O’Hare Saturday evening to hang out.  (Hi, Michelle Gagnon.  Remember me?  Remember that drink Jason Starr thought was a beer?)

But there’s something deeper going on here.  Conferences are where I meet my fellow writers in the flesh.  You can only convey so much in email and on MySpace and Facebook or whatever annoying social networking site is hip this week.  You can look that person in the eye over the rim of your beer glass, kvetch with each other with a mouthful of onion rings, or just chill in the hotel lounge.  Plus, I landed my first agent from an in-person meeting with one of her clients.  Who says nothing gets done at these conferences or at book signings.

Yet real life has intruded.  My book budget is pretty much gone while we sell Nita’s old place, and I have no writing/web design/standup comedy income coming in that will pay for traveling.  Yes, I’ve got to face reality.  I can’t traipse across the country like I did for a few years.  Does that mean I’m finished?

Hardly.  We live in the Internet age.  There are some who decry the intrusion of technology, complaining that email is impersonal and no one wants to meet in person anymore.  Ever notice those are usually the same people you probably would have ignored in back in the covered wagon days of the 1980’s and earlier?  The fact is the Internet has let me get more done and talk with more people than I could have when we were dependent on The Phone Company (TM) and the US Postal Service.  Some people complain that you can be deceived by someone on the Internet, and it’s true.  I’ll go as far as to say I was defrauded mostly on the Internet a couple of years back.  But you know what?  That’s always been around.  It just happens faster and electronically now.  Same with bad men stalking your kids and con men trying to trick you out of your money.  What’s changed besides the speed and gimmicks they use?  If anything, they’re just as prevalent as when we had only Ma Bell and the mail man.  Or were you not paying attention when your mommy told you not to talk to strangers?

I digress.  I communicate with my current agent via the Internet.  My gig at January came about because of the Internet.  I pay my bills on the Internet.  It’s here.  I use it.  And to stay connected as a writer, I have to keep using it.

Do I feel disconnected?

A lady I’ll refer to as my Big Sister got me through the early stages of my first marriage ending with frequent emails.  A pal in Seattle reminded me by instant message that I had proposed a debt management book (Who better to tell you how to get you out of horrendous debt than someone who narrowly avoid bankruptcy?).  Li’l Sis and I communicate almost exclusively by Internet, an extension of a relationship that started as a letter exchange and frequent long-distance calls.

John Scalzi uses the Internet extensively to promote and interact with his fans.  Lynn Viehl uses it pretty much exclusively.  And the Net fits prominently in MJ Rose’s bag of tricks, as well as JA Konrath’s.

The point is I don’t have to spend vast sums traveling when they’re not to be had for the time being.  I can stay put and interact.

But I do miss the road.

A belated announcement: I interview author Dave White for The Rap Sheet.

Graham Powell asks, “what have you been writing lately?”

Mostly my standup set, which evolves almost daily.

I am also working on novel with the working title “Monticello,” about a fictional Lake Erie city.  Road Rules is still making rounds, but Monticello is going to be going in a new direction for me.  In the meantime, I keep working here and there on a related novel called Holland Bay, which I descrive as 87th Precinct meets The Wire.

When Northcoast Shakedown was in print, I used to get all sorts of emails from people allegedly wanting to help me.

Agents who would get me into Simon & Schuster “for a small fee.”

“Publishers” who wanted to show me a new way to publish. (Yes, I’ve been solicited by PublishAmerica.)

And publicists. Mind you, I approached my publicist, mainly because she had a client list.

This guy, Milton Kahn, did not, despite the raves of his email:

Dear James:

I would like to make you aware of my public relations company. My clients have been featured in publications numbering Parade, People, Entertainment Weekly, Time, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and USA Today; as well as television shows such as Oprah, The O’Reilly Factor, Good Morning America, C-SPAN, CNN, CNBC, etc.

Among my most recent PR campaigns number the 2007 blockbuster, Stanley Alpert’s The Birthday Party: A Memoir of Survival, published by Penguin and acquired by Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner to be filmed for United Artists, the 2006 World Almanac Book of Records (which outsold rival Guiness Book of Records by a 4-1 ratio), and such other book campaigns as the Personal Finance number one BN.com bestseller, David Latko’s Financial Strategies for Today’s Widow (Simon & Schuster) and Thomas Sawyer’s highly acclaimed novel The Sixteenth Man (IUniverse)…

[Cue needle scratching across vinyl record] Um… Milt? Did you just say “iUniverse?” You mean the printer? And why are you emailing me now? When I have nothing in print, and the only thing in my backlist is a novel I now refer to as “allegedly published.” (’Cuz the publisher was only allegedly a publisher. Get it? OK, I said I wouldn’t talk about that anymore.)

Then it hit me. The PWA member directory came out. This is a useful little item, especially if you’re a Shamus judge or an officer or you just want to send Bob Randisi a Christmas card. Somehow, Milt got a copy, because I got the email less than a week after it came out.

But where have I heard Milt’s name before?

Ah, yes! Here.

So what’s wrong with this picture?

Does not use proper business name of prospective client. (No, it did not originally say “Dear James,” already a tip off.)

Does not check to see if prospective client has anything in print or has signed a deal.

Does not check the blogroll of Lee Goldberg’s blog or this one.

Does not have an actual client list.

If I’m not mistaken, publicists generally do their homework first. The real publicist I worked with a few years back did. Oh, yeah. Forgot. PJ Nunn has a client list. Yeah, that was kind of a hint she knew her stuff. Where’s yours, Milt? The vague list of unverifiable claims doesn’t cut it.

Thanks, Milt, but I already found someone to financially rape me. My mortgage broker. I get a house out of the deal.

Plots With Guns rises again.

Thank you, Neil Smith.

Thank you.

[OK, enough with this Wagner crap, that antisemitic prick. Someone put on Warren Zevon's "Lawyers, Guns, and Money" and get me a bottle of Jameson.  Time for some PWG!]

The new novel moves slowly, 25,000 words since September. Usually, that’s my output for a month. This is different. This is a bigger book. Bigger in scope, and likely, bigger in length.

Don’t know what possessed me to do this one the way I’ve been doing it. Fictional setting, feeding finished scenes to a friend, banging away without an outline and only a vague idea of what the end game is.

I have three (or four, really) touchstones driving this book. Hopefully, they drive the series as well. For starters, I take my inspiration from the 87th Precinct. It’s an ensemble piece, though hopefully, I have come up with a first among equals in a disgraced female detective. And like McBain, it’s set in a fictional city.

Second is the combination for Ken Bruen’s Brant series and Stuart MacBride’s MacRae novels. Both are very much the modern descendants of McBain’s 87th Precinct (though MacBride says he’s never read McBain. Can’t tell. He writes like he’s picked up where McBain left off.) Both stories are set in Britain, and the MacRae stories benefit from Scottish law vs. English or American law. So while I’ve learned how to modernize the McBain formula from both Ken and Stuart, I’ve also learned from the stark differences between these series and those set in America.

Third (or fourth if you count Ken and Stuart separately) is The Wire. Is there anyone writing noir, thrillers, or hardboiled crime fic today that doesn’t watch this show? But The Wire is not a television show. It’s a novel written by committee and presented in video. Sure, I can point to it and say, “That’s where I learned I could write morally ambivalent stories.” But what I learned from The Wire is how to pace a sprawling story with lots of characters. I don’t have nearly the huge cast The Wire does. This season, it not only pulled in two of Laura Lippman’s characters, but Laura herself is a character in one episode. David Simon, Ed Burns, and crew juggle a lot of balls, and from their juggling act, I’ve learned a new way to manage chapters.

That’s not to say this book will be the new 87th Precinct or Inspector Brant or DS MacRae. Certainly, it’s not The Wire. But all those have let me aim higher.

I just finished reading Homicide: A Year of Killing on the Streets.  Definitely the best book about crime I’ve read in a long time.  It’s also responsible for one of those moments of serendipity that catch you by surprise from time to time.

This morning, I bussed it to work, driving from one cushy suburb to another to catch an express bus downtown.  The express busses from Eastgate and Anderson follow the 275 Loop into Kentucky, then shoot into downtown Cincinnati via I-471.  I see nothing but franchise food, shopping malls, and 4-8 lanes of  asphalt all the way in most mornings.

There are no express runs during the day, however.  Cincinnati’s idea of streamlining public transit is to gut it.  I took the 24, an interminable route that takes one from downtown through Pill Hill (where no fewer than five hospitals are located) over to Hyde Park, and eventually to Anderson.  Yeah, making what used to be a 45 minute run into almost an hour and a half really streamlines it.  No wonder Ohio is in the toilet.

The 24, however, also cuts through Over-the-Rhine on its way up to the University of Cincinnati and Pill Hill.  It crosses Court Street out of Downtown into OTR and stays there until it finds its way to Short Vine and the university campus.

As we turned onto Liberty, one of the city’s most troubled streets, and then onto the northern leg of Sycamore, I found myself reading David Simon’s account of a ghetto shooting in Baltimore and Sgt. Terry McLarney’s cynical take on the scene with a suspect almost too stupid to appear in a Victor Gischler novel. (Almost.  Gisch can work magic with even the most willfully stupid people as characters.  Man’s a genius.)

Stopping for a moment to give my eyes a break, I peaked up over the edge of my reading glasses* and noticed…

Jesus, I’m going through that same exact neighborhood.  The buildings looked tired.  The residents looked tired.  And just as I witnessed years before delivering pizza in Madisonville and East End, the locals didn’t jump out at me with a gun or a knife or yelling boo.  But the street names and intersections all figure prominently more often than not on the morning news on WLW.

Cincinnati’s worst homicide rate in recent years was under 95.  Most years, it’s below 90.  So people who get killed “where it doesn’t count,” as the most recent episode of The Wire puts it, tend to make the news more often here than they do in other cities.

But something else happened.  It occurred to me, as I write the current novel, that some of the places I write about are places I never see anymore.  Since I quit delivering pizza as a second job almost six years ago, I don’t see the Madisonvilles and East Ends anymore.  I don’t find myself dropping coworkers off in Avondale or Evanston, delivering pies to unemployed former workers from Cincinnati Milacron.

No one ever pulled a gun on me in those eight years I delivered pizza, but that world was close and very real.  You couldn’t miss it.  Not long after I quit that job, more than a few writers criticized George Pelecanos for not portraying some of the more rundown neighborhoods of DC very accurately, that somehow, his dialog and descriptions were dead wrong.

It infuriated me because, first off, to a person, every one of those people criticizing GP was white.  I was angry because they seemed to have a distorted vision of how people in poor black neighborhoods behave (and why, something that gets overlooked a lot) that had nothing to do with the reality I’d seen over eight years.  (I found the Appalachian-based East End to be a bit scarier than Madisonville, probably because there’s nothing scarier than a drunk hillbilly on a Friday night.)  It angered me because GP was pitch perfect, writing dialog I’d heard every night from customers, from people I met on runs, and even from some of my coworkers.  Mind you, some of the people I got angry with I still call my friends.  They hadn’t seen what I’d seen.  It still pissed me off.

That was then, when my forays into that world were still fresh in my mind.  Today, while riding a bus through OTR and reading a book by a friend and coworker of George Pelecanos, I got a sharp reminder of how long I’ve been away from it.

I hope when I finish my own book, I’ve done it justice.

*Yes, I wear reading glasses now for smaller print.  God, when did I get old?

I have a confession to make.

I haven’t been working on my novel every day. And I’ve been feeding someone the first drafts.

Bad Jim! No Edgar!*

And yet, this novel feels better than the others. There’s no deadline, no contract, no pressure to finish. It’s just there. Not even with Northcoast Shakedown did I have this kind of freedom to do what I wanted with a book. NCS had a self-imposed deadline. The next two, now likely never to see print, were part of a contract. Road Rules was a dare from Charles Ardai. (He liked it, just not enough to pay me for it.)

This new one? Hell, I’m not even telling you what it is other than 87th Precinct meets The Wire with delusions of Bearded Noir. Still, I write not so much when I feel like it as when I finally know what the next scene is. I’ve gone as long as two weeks between writing scenes. What gives? Dunno. I do know the quality of the writing is better. I catch myself sometimes “writing” the story instead of telling it.

Unlike the previous books, this is a bigger book. There are more threads in this one than any other story I’ve ever written. Balancing all these threads and trying to figure out where they go next take time. So I may not write in the novel everyday.

The other thing I’ve been doing is feeding someone the early drafts of each chapter as it’s written.

“Hey! What happened to writing with the door closed?”

Good question. Answer? Friend in question had some serious surgery. He’s also been a bit down. Since he’s a huge McBain fan, and McBain is the spiritual Mack Daddy for this project, I flipped him the first couple of chapters as a get-well present. I haven’t stopped.

Sure, I’m getting an ego massage, but this person seldom hands out compliments lightly. It’s the closest a writer can get to performing live.

Would I do this again? Probably not. I’ve said before I write no two stories the same way. There is no routine. Probably should be, or I wouldn’t be so lax in my discipline. But this is new and different. In some ways, it’s like collaborating with this writer, even though I doubt I’ll ever collaborate on a novel.

So it’s a slow, strange novel. It’s likely I’ll be scrambling to complete a follow up to Road Rules in much the same way Road Rules was written. Because this…

This is something to be savored as it’s created.

*Seriously, there is no Edgar in my future. I can guarantee that.

[Originally posted to Northcoast Exile May 8, 2005.]

I’ve had a rough couple of weeks as a writer.  Makes the day job go easier, but my goal is to eventually quit the day job.

Anyway, it’s been frustrating, but I’ve mapped out my writing plans for the summer.  I also posted these 6 simple rules above my desk to remind me writing ain’t easy.

1.)     Failure is effortless; success is a pain in the ass

2.)    There’s a reason first drafts are called “rough”

3.)    You can’t please everyone

4.)    No one ever made money planning except consultants

5.)    Your worst enemy is the guy who says your work is perfect

6.)    Never listen to a Monday morning quarterback

So I vowed to kick the freelance writing career into high gear. I would finish reading Steve Brewer’s books over vacation to prep for an interview Jon Jordan asked me for in September. I would work on the new novel. I would open up my shiny new Writer’s Market and look for markets that would fund another drunken island-hopping spree in Lake Erie.

What’d I do?

Build web sites.

Yeah. Mike, Nerraux, you were right, You have to be insane to make this part of your freelance bag of tricks. Fortunately, no one has ever questioned my sanity. They just assume it’s not there.

In my own defense, though, I procrastinated on both sites.

Today, I sit on the couch, drink beer, and scratch myself while watching Battlestar Galactica: Razor on DVD.