Once again we highlight our criminally favorite cartoonist, Future Thought channel of YouTube. We love the sausage-shaped Shifty, a Minion gone bad.
Yikes! In this Crime Time episode, only one outcome is possible.
| © www.FutureThought.tv |
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That’s today’s crime cinema. Hope you enjoyed the show. Be sure to visit Future Thought YouTube channel.
The Art of Crime is another show I’ve discovered, streaming on MHz, and I like it, but…
It’s funny what pulls you in, and what waves you off.
Very often, you find a book series, or TV, to be an acquired taste. I wasn’t drawn in right away, for example, by Jackie Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs books. I loved her memoir, This Time Next Year We’ll Be Laughing, but it took me a couple of books to warm up to Maisie. (Once I was sold, I was sold.)
I’ve tried to read James Benn’s Billy Boyle series – I read two start to finish, and cracked the spine on a couple more, hoping my first impression was wrong – but I’m sorry, they leave me cold as a mackerel. (This is a private opinion, obviously; your math may differ.)
A show it took me the entire first season to even tolerate was Brokenwood, and well you might ask why I bothered, but something kept pulling me back, and I’m glad it did: I think I had to get over my aggravation with DI Mike Shepherd, who just seemed like one of those guys you’d go out of your way to avoid in the workplace.
A classic example of this is Death in Paradise, which is hands down the most annoying show on television. They had the inimitable Ben Miller for the first season, and he’s the reason I watched Primeval (along with Doug Henshall), but then they cast the utterly execrable Kris Marshall, and almost killed the show. Seriously, if not for the supporting characters and the Caribbean landscapes, I would have given up.
Speaking of, although I’m nuts about Deadly
Tropics (which is a terrible and uninviting title), but like the cast more
than the scripts, I’m crazy about the local scenery of
It’s shot in
I have to admit, and not just in this show.
I love the genuinely terrible Armin Mueller-Stahl policier variously titled Midnight Cop, or Killing Blue, because
they shot it in
I don’t mean to damn The Art of Crime with faint praise. It’s got a cool premise, not necessarily art theft, but art adjacent crime. This is the French OCBC, not a fictional crew, that investigates cultural property trafficking – smuggling, counterfeits, money laundering – and our entrée is to team a streetwise plainclothes cop with an artwise academic. They expend a little too much nervous energy at the beginning, rubbing each other the wrong way, but you let it go. (It’s like Jonathan Frakes; you don’t take Riker seriously until he grows his beard.)
The obligatory exasperated senior officer, on the other hand, is a much better character in this show, not a wet blanket but a full narrative partner. There’s also the trope where the art expert explains herself to her psychiatrist, not to mention explaining herself to imaginary artists, Toulouse-Lautrec, Hieronymus Bosch, da Vinci. The only superfluous character is the art expert’s dad, an unnecessary aggravation.
I should be clear, that I in fact find it quite charming, in spite of the occasional too-cutesiness.
You realize they established certain dynamics, but after the shakedown cruise, they didn’t throw the excess cargo overboard. Somebody on the team was too proprietary. Be that as it may. I’ve finished Season Three (out of an existing eight, but only two episodes a season), and I’ll finish them.
I think, as I’ve said before, that there’s a different rhythm to European cop shows. It’s an enlivening change of pace.
If we’re lucky, we find an editor who likes our work well enough that it leads to multiple acceptances, and it may even lead to additional opportunities when that editor puts together invitation-only anthologies. This is a good thing.
Sort of.
Initially, it is wonderful to realize you have developed a strong working relationship with an editor and are confident that you have, through that relationship, a reliable home for your work. It’s a form of literary monogamy.
Me? I try to avoid literary monogamy because it can lead to heartbreak.
FEAR OF MISSING OUT
First, there’s the fear of missing out. There’s the fear that, had I tried harder, I might have developed a better relationship.
For example, if you review your list of published stories and discover that most of them have appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, with only the occasional dalliance with other publications, you probably aren’t missing out on much.
However, if most of your stories have appeared in Jim Bob’s Magazine of Mystery, you probably are missing out. It’s time to make a concerted effort to step up to the next level. Don’t abandon Jim Bob yet, but don’t make his publication the first place you submit a new story. Send that story to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine or Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine first or to the publications that aren’t quite at their level but fall somewhere on the scale below them and above JBMoM.
Once you step up to the next level, and can do so consistently, it may be—to torture the metaphor a bit—time to practice literary serial monogamy. Leave Jim Bob behind. Devote your time and attention to your new, improved literary relationship.
I SPY A WANDERING EYE
Some of us—especially those who might be considered prolific—need to develop more than one literary relationship.
If you review your list of published stories and find that most have appeared in one or the other of two publications, you’re already on your way to literary polyamory. You have established that you can satisfy the needs of at least two editors, so it may be time to put some effort into developing a third relationship.
By diversifying your attention, you can alleviate the inevitable disappointments that come from investing too heavily in your relationship with a single editor. Editors, die, retire, and change jobs. Publications die or change focus. Publishers cut back or eliminate anthologies from their list.
If you don’t already have relationships with other editors, your writing career might come to a screeching halt.
I’ve experienced this several times during the many years I’ve been writing.
Magazine editors who liked my work were replaced by editors who didn’t. Editors who included my work in their anthologies stopped editing. Magazines and anthology lines ceased publication. All of which left me scrambling for new markets because I had not developed enough relationships.
Worst of all was when entire genres collapsed. Even though I developed multiple literary relationships within several genres, each time one of them imploded I lost every relationship in that genre at essentially the same time.
LITERARY MONOGAMY OR LITERARY POLYAMORY
As an editor, I enjoy relationships with several writers I count on to provide stories I want to publish, who deliver on time and on theme, and who are easy to work with through the editing process. I never ask if they think we have a monogamous relationship or polyamorous relationship.
Whether your goal is to be a literary serial monogamist, regularly stepping up to better and better markets, or your goal is to be a literary polyamorist, the path is essentially the same:
Keep your current editorial relationship(s) solid, but always, always, always, keep your eyes open for the next opportunity. Strive to improve your work. Diversify the genres (or subgenres) you write. Then submit, submit, submit.
And never take actual relationship advice from me.
Reminder: Murder, Neat: A SleuthSayers Anthology (Level Short), which I coedited with Barb Goffman, is currently nominated for the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s inaugural Derringer Award for Best Anthology. There’s still time to order and read a copy before voting begins.
This quote is universally attributed to Ernest Hemingway, and there is no evidence that he actually said it. But no one cares, because it’s exactly the kind of thing he would say, and we do know that’s what he believed.
On
this matter, he was correct. If you
spend an hour a day messing around on the guitar, you’re a guitar player. If you go to the driving range every weekend,
you’re a golfer. If you write all the
time, because you‘re compelled to do so, you’re a writer. Before I was published, I didn’t feel this
way, which I regret. It wasn’t fair to
my unpublished self, because I sure as hell worked like a son-of-a-bitch to
remedy the situation.
I have a young friend, unpublished,
who’s been working on a book for many years, putting in the hours of writing
and rewriting, casting about for help and advice, cramming in writing time
around a demanding job and busy toddler, feeling buoyed and desperate in equal
measure, and generally going through the paces of apprenticeship. To me, he’s a writer, because he’s always
working at it, no matter what.
The thing is, writing is rarely
easy. There are moments when we all feel
as if some supernatural power has taken hold of us, directing our hands to
tap away effortlessly, composing as easily as breathing or strolling down the
street. We’ll also agree that this
hardly ever happens. Instead, it’s not
unlike digging a ditch. You have to put
the shovel in, push down with your foot, and haul the stuff out of the ground. This is hard work, and you know how hard it
is with every word and shovelful.
Some people don’t feel well unless
they run a few miles a day. Some of them
are friends of mine, and in their 70s have sleek, toned bodies and the glow of
clear heads and arteries. I’m not one of
them. I think a car is a much better way
to travel from point A to point B, and will never run unless being pursued by a
wild animal, which is a distinct possibility where I live in New England. But I understand their addiction. I’m the same way about writing. If I don’t write something, anything, at
least once during the day, I feel like I’ve not slept or eaten. I get jumpier than an addict, which I guess I
am, sort of. I know it’s a mental
problem, but I’ve heard of worse.
Though as noted above, running for a few hours or crunching through a narrative is difficult, even if you can’t help yourself. It usually starts smoothly, but there’s always that point when you start to fatigue and mild regret sets in. Your breath shallows or your hands begin to get sore. Your brain starts to wonder why you launched this effort in the first place, when you could be on the couch watching NFL Highlights or Antiques Roadshow.
But then, endurance kicks in, and you keep going, because why not.
You’re already out on the road or at the keyboard and it seems better to just
push through. You start to think of new
things to write, new connections and old ideas that can be pulled out of the dusty
attic of your tired brain. You tell yourself:
this isn’t that hard. You just have to
keep going, and if it sucks, you can always erase it all and start over again
tomorrow. There will aways be other
ideas, other notions, other turns of phrase, something else you can put down on
the page, because this is what writers do.
They write.
I've obviously dedicated most of my writing career to crime and mystery fiction, and as you might expect I read a great deal of work in that field growing up. I also had a deep love for science fiction, though, and while I've read relatively little new work in the genre in the last few decades, as a kid I delighted in the classics by the giants of the field--Asimov, LeGuin, Silverberg, and so on. Recently, going through a box of books from my childhood home, I came across an interesting artifact by another of those giants, Arthur C. Clarke, probably best remembered today as the author of 2001. I thought it worth looking at, both as an example of the perils of writers imagining the future and as a lens on the world writers are working in today.
In 1986, Clarke published a book titled July 20, 2019. The date, of course, is the 50th anniversary of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, and the book is a series of essays in which Clarke predicts what the world would look like in that then far-off year. I bought and read the book when it came out. I don't remember what I thought of it then, but reading it now, almost six years beyond the date Clarke chose for his prophecy, was certainly eye-opening.
So how did Clarke do with his predictions?
Well, there are a few hits. He thought that the field I work in, distance education, would be huge, though he assumed it would operate via teleconferencing rather than being online (more on this later) and largely text-based. He said that cars would still be much the same and still mostly gas-powered, though he thought they'd get 100 miles per gallon. He thought entertainment would reflect an increasingly fragmented culture with more books, movies, music and so on aimed at specialized audiences, and he predicted the boom in self-publishing as part of that. He was right about shortened hospital stays and the fact that medicine would still be largely controlled by corporations, though he didn't seem to give much thought to the social implications of the rich having care most people can't afford.
There are, however, far more misses, some amusing, some depressing. Examples:
SPACE. Clarke believed that by 2019 there would be a permanent manned outpost on the moon with perhaps as many as 1000 inhabitants. There would be several manned orbiting space stations as well, and we would be routinely mining asteroids and preparing the first manned mission to Mars, with an eye to exploring the outer solar system. He discussed in detail several conceptual engine ideas then being theorized which could cut the voyage to the red planet from months to a few weeks. It's interesting to contemplate how much of this might have happened if NASA had gotten, say, a third of what the US has spent on the military since 1986. Incidentally, earthbound transportation in Clarke's 2019 is similarly advanced, with magnetic trains and advanced hovercraft linking cities and jets that go from Shanghai to Los Angeles in two hours.
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| A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies |
SPORTS. Clarke predicted that steroids, hormones and other chemical enhancements would be made so safe that there would no longer be any reason to ban them from competition. In addition, many athletes would have cybernetic parts, or even nerves cloned from legendary competitors to improve reaction time. Elite athletes would be identified through genetic testing by the age of five and spend much of the rest of their lives being rigorously trained, using computers designed to enforce the most efficient way to perform any motion. In baseball, for example, batters using boron bats would routinely hit home runs, though the fences had been moved to 500 feet from home plate. They would do this facing pitchers who could throw 125 mph and pitch every other day. The NBA would have to raise its hoops to 12 feet and make them smaller, since the average player would be over eight feet tall.
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| Offered without comment |
THE MIND. Clarke had little patience for the idea of therapy. He thought that, by 2019, genetic mapping and brain imaging would make it possible to produce a vaccine preventing schizophrenia, drugs to prevent highly specific phobias and complexes, and compounds that would induce any desired mood. For example, there would be a drug whose only effect is to enhance music appreciation, which would be routinely taken before attending any concert.
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| OK, maybe there's something to that one |
ROBOTS. Clarke would have been stunned to know there are still people making their living as coal miners today. One of his most confident predictions was that virtually every job involving elements of danger or drudgery would have been taken over by robots well before 2019. He honestly didn't think there would any longer be people working in factories, aside from very occasional repairs and inspections. He also thought that most homes would have robots to handle routine domestic chores, and he dedicates considerable thought to how home design would emphasize simplicity and reduce clutter to make it easier for the robots to get around. Clarke is very clearly NOT thinking of computers, but of humanoid robots. He honestly thought they would be everywhere. On the other hand . . .
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| Rest easy, humans |
COMPUTERS. Clarke vastly overestimated the importance of the individual computer, and vastly underestimated the importance of computer networks. He correctly assumed computers would be everywhere, in every home and every workplace, by 2019. But while he occasionally mentions computers communicating with each other to share information for specific purposes, he still thought of every computer as an essentially distinct unit that learns to master the skills and demands of its particular job and function. The idea that the computer would be connected to others essentially all the time, and that it would be useful only to the extent this is true, simply never occurs to him. Thus he could not predict anything resembling Facebook, or Google, or Twitter, or Wikipedia, or Amazon, or the internet itself as it has come to exist. Nor does he ever imagine anything resembling a smartphone--which might seem odd, from the man who, shortly after WWII, correctly predicted the creation of communication satellites. This one oversight is so fundamental that it touches nearly everything else in the book, making it much less accurate than it might have been. There's simply no way to understand almost anything actually happening in 2019 (or 2025) without taking account of the web.
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| Clearly, he did know there were dangers |
GEOPOLITICS. Again, Clarke was oddly short-sighted here. He assumed the fundamental structure of world politics in 2019 would still be based on a Soviet-led Warsaw Pact contending with a US/UK-led NATO, with the front lines in a still-divided Germany. There is virtually no mention in the book of Asia, Africa, or South America, let alone any notion that nations like China and India would be emerging superpowers that would shape much of the 21st century. Weirdly, despite his ambitious claims for robots elsewhere, he envisions war still being conducted by human operators in planes and tanks; drones are another invention he did not foresee. Something else he didn't mention, though it will dominate our lives for the foreseeable future: climate change. Scientists by 1986 were well aware of this coming crisis, but Clarke never mentions it. Perhaps he assumed the problem would have been solved, given his surprising degree of faith in …
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| Not pictured: ice |
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| Arthur C. Clarke |
My 18th book launches today. The Silent Film Star Murders is close to my heart. I'm pretty sure it's my best book yet. So I'm anxious to see this baby birthed. Except – wait minute – there's a hitch. Which is what this post is all about.
HOW BOOK BABIES GET BIRTHED (mine tend to be breech)
I've had 18 books launch, and I still panic every time we get close to launch date. This is because I'm pretty sure the Literary Gods have a sense of humour, and delight in adding new codicils to Murphy's Law.
By profession, I'm a marketer and event planner. We, by definition, are planners. Over-planners, some would say. I have lists for my lists. But think about it. Marketing plans are developed months before promotion campaigns launch. In the case of event planning (think of large conferences) we try to plan for every possible contingency - every single thing that could go wrong. Because for dang sure, something that nobody dreamed about will happen!
It's the same with books. Want proof? (If you're looking for a quick way to develop a drinking habit…)
1. WHERE ARE THE BOOKS?
Launch date for the Silent Film Star Murders (book two in the Merry Widow series) is March 22. In-warehouse date is Feb. 21. Promo blogs and other ads have been created and are to go live in US and Can on this weekend.
Publisher has just been informed that Amazon and B&N won't have the books in time because of the frantic increase in shipping (read madhouse) across the border due to - you guessed it - trying to beat the threatened tariffs. So there's a new launch date. March 22 in Canada, April 12 in the US. Which means ALL the promotion comes out in the US before the book is available! <hits head against desk>
2. BOOKS DON'T FLOAT
Who-da guessed, but Pandemics really screw with book launches. One of my books was to launch the very week Ontario shut down due to the pandemic. It, poor thing, never got the attention it deserved. But that was small potatoes compared to what happened next.
The entire second printing of Crime Club, due to be here for the Christmas buying season, got dumped into the Pacific Ocean.
Yup, you heard that right. A container off a monster container ship took a dive with 16 others, into the Pacific, during a storm. That is one hell of a lot of royalty moolah washed away.
The irony of this post (and yes, I live for irony) is: my current series takes place on the high seas, on an ocean liner in the Roaring 20s! You'd almost think there was a diabolical plan to my life, Literary Gods.
I hope the fishes like to read.
The Silent Film Star Murders SHOULD be available April 12 in the US, and March 22 in Canada and elsewhere. It's traveling by land, I think. Hope.
What's it all about?
Lady Lucy Revelstoke reboards her 1920s ocean liner for another high society murder mystery on the high seas — with rival film stars, resentful ex-lovers, and renegade snakes!
Available at all the usual suspects.
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| © Embassy Pictures |
For years, especially on Short Mystery, I've found myself drawn into the whole Music While Writing vs. Complete Silence debate. I haven't for a while, but my latest take is interesting. I've gotten really good at ignoring the television if I work evenings in the living room. However, as I type this now, I'm playing ocean sounds on my streaming app.
Years ago, the then-spousal unit and I had a roommate who demanded a lot of attention. I, of course, wanted ours to be a couple's home, maybe eventually with a kid. (Spoiler alert: I later became a serial stepdad, but that's a different story.) So I would blast Metallica and Led Zeppelin through headphones to shut her (and the nearby TV) out. The roomie wanted to know how I got anything done playing loud music through the headphones. "I can't hear the rest of the world."
And really, if you have ADHD, diagnosed or not, music gives your wandering brain a place to go to and come back from. As the years went on, however, I liked that wall of sound as I wrote. It was particularly fun when a friend from Ireland started sending me blues CDs and certain members of the crime community latched onto Tom Waits. More recently, I rediscovered Yes (I'd kind of soured on any prog rock not played by Pink Floyd for a few years) and King Crimson. Plus my jazz phase.
When this debate comes up, people tend to center on what their brain wants. Coffee, followed closely by tea, is a given. Some people need calm, but not necessarily quiet. The most common response has been classical or ambient music at low volume. Although one scifi writer I know live-streamed as he wrote the last chapter of a book and played jazz in the background. Not sure I could do the live-streaming part. I've had people who wanted to peer over my shoulder as I write or wanted to read everything before it's finished. That results in a firm "No," followed by something more assertive when they don't take the hint. (Similarly, I hate reading unfinished manuscripts and refuse to do it as an editor.)
Some people want silence. Complete silence. The door is shut, and unless you're the cat (or a well-behaved dog), keep out. I get it. Absolutely no distractions. Also, there's a need to keep anything outside that might influence a story from getting in. Hence writers from Tolstoy to Chuck Wendig have write shacks. (John Scalzi bought a church, but I suspect he still writes at home, based on his blog.)
I'm of the low-volume music school of thought these days. Mind you, I don't listen to loud music as much as I used to. I was once the proud owner of the entire Led Zeppelin catalog on cassette, a Camaro, and an impressive mullet. (1987 or 88. No photographic evidence exists of either the hair or the car. I'm kind of bummed about the car.) Jazz can be played at lower volume, and I got into the jazz habit driving Uber. I could tell whether I'd like a passenger or not based on how they reacted to jazz. (Nearly threw one guy out of the car when he wanted "good music," but couldn't specify what that meant.)
Silence sounds very appealing. No noise other than the ambient noise of a house or the outdoors, maybe, as right this moment for me, the furnace kicking in. Sounds almost like meditation.
I think most of us need a little noise to write. Creatives' minds wander as it is, and music or ambient noise is a benign way to fill up space where the mind might go, "But how will The Bachelor end tonight?"
