The holiday gift-giving season is here, and one of my favorite ways to say how much I care about someone is to give them a book that I either know or suspect they’ll really enjoy. Usually they turn out to be books I’ve enjoyed myself.
What makes this sort of gift really special is having it signed or inscribed by the author. So if you’ve considered purchasing a hard copy of Immaculate Deception as a gift for someone this year, here’s your notification that there’s only one way to get a custom inscribed and signed copy of the novel, and that’s either by bopping over the Novel Pursuits page to click the “order your very own signed copy” link or clicking here on this very page.
When you click the link, you’ll be redirected to PayPal. To request an inscription, simply type what you’d like me to write in the “Add special instructions to the seller” field, then complete your order. Charges will appear on your PayPal history or credit card statement as Write On Time LLC. It’s that easy!
Please note that since the Codorus Press crew is finished with live events for 2013, this is the only way you can receive an inscribed and signed edition (other than, you know, bumping into me on the street) in time for the holidays. Sorry, but I can’t guarantee that orders placed after Dec. 16 will arrive in time for Christmas Eve delivery, so make your orders soon!
Hi, yes … that fateful day has arrived. Today I turn 45.
Given the new realities of the lifespan of healthy humans (and the fact that genetics are working in my favor here), unless I do something (else) monumentally stupid, I fully intend to live at least until the age of 90.
That puts me squarely at the doorstep of midlife. Half my life down, half yet to go.
For lots of folks (particularly men), this is a time of re-evaluation. To paraphrase Edna Mode in The Incredibles, men this age are often … unstable.
Me at 45 – A TSFW (Totally Safe for Work) Selfie in Brown
Well, hopefully no more unstable than on any other day. I won’t be going out shopping for a red Porsche Boxter convertible in which I’ll install a significantly younger woman. I married a significantly younger woman, and if there’s any toodling around in exotic sports cars to be done, it will most certainly be done with her.
And any instability anyone might notice was, honestly, probably there already. Folks working with a full deck rarely go into writing for a living, and they certainly don’t become newspaper reporters or novelists.
So, there’s that.
What I do have, however, is a pretty decent sense of accomplishment. I noted in this space not long ago that Stan Lee, dean of Marvel Comics and the creator of most of its characters, didn’t create cornerstone superhero Spider Man until he after he turned 40. Stan is now 90 years old, which means he’s spent the last 50 years not as Stan Lee, but as STAN-friggin’-LEE!!!, who still runs a media empire, hosts a TV show or two and maintains a busy schedule of sci-fi and comic book convention appearances.
That carries a lot of weight with me because I admire late bloomers. I never aspired to be one of those pain-in-the-ass writers who busts out of the gate at 25 with a Pulitzer Prize-winner (mainly because what those sort of writers produce is usually self-absorbed, whiny crap, but that’s another blog posting).
As someone who got carded for booze up until his 32nd birthday and took 20 years to write his first book, I realized it might take me a while to grow into this whole novelist thing. But once I managed to give birth to that 300+ page baby at the (entirely appropriate, given my genre) age of 42, there’s been no looking back. If I never write anything again, I can rest assured knowing that I have added my own little piece of original creativity to the universe.
And there are other, perhaps more significant, accomplishments, too. I have amazing friends, cultivated over decades, who remain the sort of people I can talk now exactly the way we did when we were in high school or our early jobs. They provide me with a constant source of encouragement and inspiration and I am in awe of a great many of them every day. I can only hope I send back to them just a fraction of the love, support and laughter they send my way.
And most importantly, I have an amazing family – a beautiful wife who supports me with warmth, patience and love through all the ups and downs of this writing life and frequently jumps in to help with a needed dose of reality, and two spectacularly smart, funny and kindhearted children who are always proud to tell their friends and teachers that their daddy is a writer.
But wait a minute. Let’s put the brakes on the sentimentality. Weren’t you promised presents?
Indeed you were.
Without you, the readers, my family and friends would still be with me, my work would still get done and my book – and those I still hope to write – would still be out there. But without readers, a book is only words on a page.
Once you – a stranger – pick it up and begin that first chapter, you become a willing participant in a reality that another has created. It’s like telepathy in a way. I’m putting my thoughts into your head, and in the midst of the trance-state we call “reading,” those thoughts are manifested in your own mind as an alternate reality. Other than unconditional love, I believe it’s the closest thing to magic any of us will ever really experience.
So as my gift to you, starting today I’m offering the Kindle version of Immaculate Deception free for three days through Amazon, in the hope that if you enjoyed it, you’ll be inclined to let others know that they can, as well – and with minimum risk. Other than individually shaking your hands or giving you big, wet kisses, it’s the best I can do.
Really, thank you ever so much. And here’s to another 45 years.
So I spent a good portion of the spring and early summer slogging through an exceptionally dense non-fiction tome on Napa Valley that was serving as background for a large scale co-writing project that, unfortunately, tanked hard in mid June.
I don’t consider it wasted time, because I’m one of those folks that considers any reading good reading. And in addition, I learned some things I didn’t know before, so it all evens out. Also, now if I ever want to set a story in California wine country, I’ve at least got a jumping off point.
But with the burden of research-related reading lifted, I got to return to some writing by several of the authors that have really inspired me along the way.
The gentlemen represented here aren’t going to be taught in high school English classes anytime soon, but I’ve immersed myself in their work over the years nonetheless. And that’s not to say that I haven’t spent my time with some English class stalwarts – diving back into the pool with Ernest Hemingway helped me learn how to write with a bit more economy. Then again, a few walks along some long dark alleys with pulp-master Mickey Spillane (who, incidentally, lived the last years of his life in Murrells Inlet, S.C., just down the beach from Myrtle Beach, where Immaculate Deception is partially set) helped me pull some tough-guy detective fiction tricks out of the bag, too.
But as far as modern-day writers who are still busy writing go, these guy are my boys. If you’ve read Immaculate Deception, you can probably see each of them peeking through the narrative, the subject matter and the writing style here and there.
Derivative? Some might say so. But others – mostly other writers – will be the first to tell you that the way to get started writing like yourself is to write like the people you love to read. What comes out after it’s passed through the creative filter of your own unique brain is – shazam! – your style of writing.
There’s an old story about a woman who approached Pablo Picasso in a cafe and asked him to draw her something on a napkin. However, before he would give it to her he asked for an exorbitant sum of money because that tiny sketch represented the culmination of his life’s work up to that point.
Not many of us ever actually cross paths with a great artist, let alone get up the gumption to ask him or her to create something just for us. Still fewer will have an artist create on his own something so very personalized that it could only ever be yours, and then hand it to you as a mere throwaway gesture.
Jak Smyrl in a typically rendered self-portrait.
I was fortunate enough to have that happen to me thanks to a gentleman named Jak Smyrl.
He was the first staff artist for The State newspaper, the major daily newspaper that covers Columbia, S.C., and the surrounding area. His satirical map of South Carolina (rife with intentional misspellings and regional in-jokes) was first published in the late 1960s and since then has become iconic. His style mimics that of many of the best Mad magazine artists with a flair that was straight-up Southern.
Back in 1995, when I was a young reporter and columnist at the Chronicle-Independent in Camden, S.C., Jak, who had retired to Camden, was suggested to me as someone who could create a logo for Rockin’ Horse ’96 (top).
Rockin’ Horse was a concert that grew out of a newspaper column I wrote calling for more entertainment surrounding the Carolina Cup steeplechase event, which annually brings in more than 60,000 visitors and millions of dollars to the town of about 8,000 or 9,000 people. The concert was held on the grounds of Historic Camden as a benefit for the Revolutionary War historic site.
In the absence of our own newspaper staff artist I could hire to do the logo on the side (we got all our editorial cartoons from syndicates), one of the ladies in the layout department suggested I get in touch with Mr. Smyrl. She described him in loose terms as a former artist for The State, a description that really only scratched the surface.
We met at his home studio and I did a rough sketch of what I was looking for. He gave me an anticipated date of delivery for the final image and we worked out terms that were entirely too reasonable for someone of his stature (I seem to recall he asked about $100 for the image).
When I went to pick up the sketch, he was out of the house, but he had left it for me in a manilla envelope adorned with the personalized image you see to the right. As a result, an item that would otherwise have been recycled or tossed in the trash became, for me, a valuable work of art.
Jak, who died in 2007, is the subject of a new exhibit that was recently dedicated at the University of South Carolina. That means a significant number of people who actually know what they’re talking about considered his work a valid subject for study and appreciation.
I’m not sure where the rocking horse-and-jockey drawing I commissioned for the concert stands in that body of work, but I do know it adorned t-shirts, tickets and banners associated with the event. If you lived in or visited Camden in the spring of 1996, chances are you or someone you know could still find a Rockin’ Horse ’96 tee stuffed in the back of a drawer somewhere.
Maybe if I contacted the University of South Carolina they’d ask to include it. If so, I’d happily donate it to the collection.
However, as for that small bit of an ordinary manilla envelope that in a few pen strokes became something only for me, that I’ll treasure as my own little napkin from Picasso.
Roger Ebert, the way most of us remember him. In recent years his face was disfigured by multiple surgeries for cancer, but he never lost his drive, his wit or his motivation to write about movies.
For many of us who grew up in the hinterlands, where we were lucky if the local newspaper carried movie advertising, Roger Ebert and his TV partner Gene Siskel were frequently the first exposure we had to film criticism.
Thanks to PBS and their show “Sneak Previews,” it was possible to get the opinions of two erudite, educated men whose joyful duty was to go to the movies, then come back and tell us whether those movies were any good.
As a result, this young fellow got to find out about many movies he wouldn’t see until much later, and also grasp the ins and outs of what “film critics” actually did. For these were real people, and they obviously had real (and legitimate) jobs at newspapers. How cool was that? The were the kindly uncles giving us all movie advice, rather than the harsh, cosmopolitans like Pauline Kael, who wrote from on high at the New Yorker (which was not well stocked at small-town Southern newsstands in the late 1970s, as you might imagine).
But even if I’d known to look for Kael’s work, I probably would have liked Roger Ebert’s better. He seemed like a kindred soul – the nerdy kid who loved the magic of the darkened theater.
Ebert died today at the at of 70, just a day after announcing that he would scale back on his still prodigious level of productivity. Even ailing, he wrote books, blogged regularly and still reviewed movies. He hand-picked the critic team put in to cover for him at the Chicago Sun Times, his home newspaper. He was in the midst of preparing to host his own film festival. That is a hell of a way to go.
All of us who have ventured into film (or music or theater) criticism since watching “Sneak Previews” and its various later incarnations owe Mr. Ebert a great debt, as he influenced all of us in one way or another – sometimes just by proving that there were successful people who actually did it.
Last week marked what would have been the late Douglas Adams‘ 61st birthday, and I should take this (belated) opportunity to thank him for proving to me that although writing is a serious business, it doesn’t have to be entirely serious.
The original, having passed through many hands, as evidenced by the vigorously taped spine.
As a kid, I’d always been a fan of the absurd. I glommed onto Monty Python and Benny Hill early and shared many long BBC-via-public TV blocs of Fawlty Towers with my dad, mostly to the consternation of my mom, who never quite got what the appeal was.
But when I discovered The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I quite literally fell in love. Since my original edition (shown here – the cover held together by Scotch tape) notes that it is the fifth printing of the Pocket Books first edition with a publication date of 1981, I suspect that I stumbled across what would prove to be one of the defining books of my youth when I was in 7th grade.
As American readers go – at least for my age group – I always felt that I was a bit of an early adopter when it came to H2G2, as it is now fondly known. Many of my classmates were clueless, unaware that such a perfect melding of sci-fi, satire, social commentary and outright hilarity even existed.
Ford Prefect, Arthur Dent and Zaphod Beeblebrox from the 2005 film version of H2G2. Or, me and pretty much any two of my friends after an evening of festivity.
I recall reading and re-reading my copy (thus the tape), then becoming something of an evangelist for the novel, loaning it out to friends who I thought would appreciate it. They, too, became fans, and joined what, for me, was like a special little club of in jokes and cultural exclusivity.
Even today, I sometimes have to restrain myself from foisting it on others – my kids included. Thankfully, my son, at 9, has a growing appreciation based on the 2005 film version. He has my full permission to read the novel whenever he is ready. In fact, he noted to me the other night that his copy of The Dangerous Book for Boys (a must for any adventurous-minded lad) lists H2G2 as a must-read.
This is a good thing, because I can’t even begin to estimate the role H2G2 played on my development as a writer. I can most definitely trace my style of column and opinion writing, first honed at my high school newspaper, right back to the novel. As I grew as a writer and began to read other novelists and columnists, I always found myself drawn to those that maintained a sense of the patently absurd (Dave Barry and the late Lewis Grizzard, I’m talking to you guys).
In fact, I can also trace my eventual discovery of Christopher Moore to my fondness for Adams, and that led me to the legendary West Chester Christopher Moore Codorus Press Ambush, of which I might be convinced to write about some other time.
Nevertheless, if you’ve actually read my novel Immaculate Deception, and you also happened to have read H2G2, I wouldn’t be surprised if you saw some similarities. Hopefully they also made you smile.
Writers can come from any number of backgrounds – just go down the list of famous authors and you’ll see a broad spectrum of “first” careers.
But if you’re a teenager or young adult and you’re serious about wanting to get paid to write every single day, I have two suggestions for you.
The first is to write a brilliant bit of fiction or a staggeringly wonderful bit of non-fiction before you are 21, then get a multi-book deal with a big New York publisher and ride that gravy train for the rest of your life.
The second and more realistic suggestion is this: go into journalism.
Why? Well, first, the world needs more journalists. It needs people committed to rooting out truth and telling great stories and doing something other than gushing over celebrity gossip and ranting, twitchy-eyed, about their given partisan political perspective. It needs folks willing to toil in relative anonymity to hold the powerful accountable and tell the stories of the ignored and disaffected.
Second, you will gain the skills that every good writer of fiction or non-fiction books must develop, and you will acquire them early. You will learn to write with speed and clarity, get to the point quickly, interview strangers, go into uncomfortable and unfamiliar situations, observe the world around you and do sneaky things like read upside down and eavesdrop on the folks in the restaurant booth behind you while simultaneously holding a meaningful conversation with the person across from you.
You’ll also learn to take criticism without taking it personally. Of all the lessons you could learn early, this is probably the best, as it enables you to accept a comment like, “This need a lot of work,” without collapsing into a heap of self-doubt and whiny pleas about the writing coming from your soul.
Trust me. The value of each of these skills, for any writer, can not be overestimated.
Third, you will join a line of great writers who made the transition from journalism to writing fiction, depending on many of the skills they learned as reporters to make their writing special. Mark Twain started in newspapers and pulled the things he experienced and wrote about into his fiction. Ernest Hemingway started his working life at the Kansas City Star and used the lessons he learned there to inform his writing from then on.
J-school is the writerly equivalent of joining the U.S. Marines. You might arrive thinking you are one badass mofo of a writer. Your high school English teacher gushed over your work. Your parents fawned over your awards and teacher’s-pet status. In high school, you might have thought your writing was the absolute shit.
A good journalism school does exactly what Parris Island does for young recruits – it strips you down of all your self-delusions and preconceptions to the very kernel of what you know and who you are, then builds you back up the way you’re supposed to be to do the job at hand.
The Marines specialize in turning tuner-driving, subwoofer-blasting high school douchebags into honorable, unstoppable fighters by breaking them through mental, physical and moral trials, then putting them back together the way the Marines want them – fearless, razor sharp and hard as nails.
A great J-school takes your flowery and overwrought high school prose and says, “You might think you’re awesome. You are not, but we’ll make you that way.” It will strip you so bare of your writing preconceptions that you’ll wonder if you could ever really write at all. Your professors will then start adding basic skills – simple interviewing, the inverted pyramid style, headline writing and copy editing. Only when you have mastered those skills will you be allowed to go down the flowery path again to become the writer that you were truly meant to be.
Sure, I’m biased. I graduated from the excellent journalism school at the University of South Carolina at a time when the faculty was populated with delightful, curmudgeonly newspaper veterans – people who remembered copy boys and typewriters and the clackity-clack of the Associated Press wire machine chugging out reams of stories from around the nation and world. They themselves make great stories.
But here’s the best part of going to a real J-school. Unlike your fellow aimless undergrads, with their relatively useless English and history degrees, you will not only get an excellent liberal arts education, but you will be actually learning a trade. Depending on the market, you can graduate and immediately get a job in your field. And what do you know – that field is writing.
Granted, that first job will likely be at a small newspaper in a backwater town. That sounds like a drag – wouldn’t it be much better to work at the New York Times or ABC News, after all? Sure it would, but unless your parents own a paper or sit on the board at Disney, neither is likely to be your first job.
But the benefits of parachuting into East Outer Nowhere are myriad. Depending on the size of the paper, you’ll get to do almost everything. At my second newspaper job, as city reporter at the Camden (S.C.)Chronicle-Independent, it was possible to cover everything from snooze-inducing city council meetings to violent crime, business ribbon cuttings to interviews with visiting celebrities and political bigwigs, .
I got invited to pilot a glider plane, fly with the Army Golden Knights skydiving team, rappel from a fire department bucket truck and qualify on .38, .45 and Glock 9mm handguns with the police department. On a weekly basis I hung out with cops without being a suspect, visited the jail without being a prisoner and got to see the inner workings of local and state politics without the mess of running for election.
Will you get rich? Unlikely. But you will learn to live within your meager means – a must for any writer, no matter how successful you might become. And until you write that breakout novel that’s bubbling up inside you, you’ll get the daily satisfaction of knowing that you are being paid every day to hone the craft you aspired to.
Music, much like smell, is a powerful memory trigger. Just as a whiff of a lover’s old cologne or perfume can ignite an encyclopedia of emotions, music carries with it the ability to draw a person back to a particular time, place or emotional state.
Personally, I think everyone has a time during their life when they’re especially susceptible to an imprint tied to music. And because an important key in being an effective writer is being able to tap into real emotions, music can be a tool for that.
For me, one of the first moments I recall music directly tied to emotion was as a pre-teen in the late 1970s. Disco was at its height and somewhere out of my field of vision punk was percolating in New York City and London.
But because I was living in a small town near the coast of South Carolina, my exposure to anything other than what was on the local Top 40 AM station was pretty limited. Consider that the first time I heard the Beatles was around that time period when a friend hoped to cure me of my ABBA fandom with a copy of Revolver. Thankfully it worked.
Still, a few bits of excellence filtered through on the airwaves. And while I, at that age, could have already told you that Rod Stewart’s“Do You Think I’m Sexy?” was an abomination, I was able to pick out some gems that really stuck with me. Part of that is directly related to the fact that I was feeling the first pangs of late-grade school infatuation with members of the opposite sex.
So it should come as no surprise that a couple of standout songs from that period were “Is She Really Going Out With Him” by Joe Jackson and “Cruel to be Kind” by Nick Lowe. Both spoke volumes to what I felt was a cargo ship full of unrequited love I was going through at the time. Now, when I need to tap youthful heartbreak, it helps to cast my mind back to how those particular songs seemed to capture everything my much less cynical younger self felt.
Much like a Method actor, who uses real-life experience to tap into what emotions a character in a film or on stage might be feeling, as writers we are called to do the same things with our stories. Think about the songs during your life that have coincided with highly emotional events or have somehow captured the way you’ve felt about a person or situation and don’t be afraid to use them (and the feelings they recall) in creating genuine, rich and layered emotions for your characters.
It’s all well and good for authors to talk about deciding to pursue writing for the sake of art.
But today it’s time to talk about a secret reason many do it, and a possible motivating factor for you to do it, as well.
It’s called revenge. Or as I like to refer to it in terms of writing, the F-You Factor.
Consider this: Many writers, no matter how early they begin, are told either point-blank or through inference that pursuing a career in writing is for losers/social outcasts/people resigned to being broke.
Somehow, the fact that you have stories in your head that you simply must get out is treated like a passing fancy, pointless daydreaming or – worst of all – mental illness.
You’ll often see this kind of treatment early, usually by playful dismissal from parents who haven’t a damn clue what they’re doing. Remember, folks, the idea is to lift your kids up and let them reach their full potential, not to be a soul crushing demotivator because your kid decides she doesn’t want to be a radiologist.
“Ha, ha. You make up such cute stories, Ricky. Too bad that’s just going to get your ass kicked at the country club and ensure no one will ever let you into Harvard.”
Later in life, such comments will come from people like teachers and guidance counselors who are really bad at their jobs – again, demotivating rather than motivating – who say, “Yes, that’s all well and good. But no one can ever make a living being a writer.”
Assuming you make it out of high school with your aspirations intact, you are indeed going to have to make a living. And for lots of people, that living relates to writing not one bit. Everyone has to eat and pay rent, right? But mention your writing aspirations to co-workers and you might get sneers and snickers as they go about their meaningless existences slaving for the evil corporate overlord, with only complete viewings of every season of “The Bacholorette” to show for their pathetic, meaningless lives.
For some this might be the final straw, killing the spirit of potential writers, binding them up like bowels after a big French cheese course and forcing them to never pick up a pen or sit down at a keyboard again, unless it’s to prepare the dreaded TPS reports for the passive-aggressive boss they secret wish they could see sodomized with a garden trowel, partially eaten by maggots, then dumped into pit of molten lava.
But out of all the things listed here, there is NOT ONE that should ever stop you from writing if you feel driven to do so.
In fact, all the above situations should result in you being a better writer – or at least a more motivated writer – because you’ve got plenty of reason to want to prove every single one of those people wrong. You’ve got to want to put your words to paper and have their very presence there shout a resounding “F-You!” to all those people who told you, “You can’t.”
A confession: My wife loves the singing competition The Voice. And because I love her and like being around her, I often watched it with her this past season. There, 18-year-old contestant Trevin Hunte confessed that his prime motivation for auditioning for the show was to prove wrong the teacher who told him he’d never succeed. And when he sang, he sounded like this:
That, my friends, is a prime example of the F-You Factor at work. He could have ended up working in a McDonald’s or an insurance office or any of the other places we all end up having to work, so consumed by his rage – by a debilitating case of the woulda-coulda-shouldas – that it ate him away at the insides, affected every relationship in his life and drove him to an early grave.
Instead, he got out there on national TV to show the world – and that unsupportive teacher – that he would at least give it a try. And to tell that single doubter that she couldn’t keep him down.
The missing piece to someone getting writing accomplished isn’t actually believing they can do it – most aspiring authors have no problem with that – it’s not giving in to all the people around them who say they can’t do it that causes trouble.
So what if no one has ever told you that writing was a sucker’s game? What if you got along great with your parents, they’ve always been supportive and your teachers nurtured and fostered your artistic ambitions?
Well, chances are there’s still someone who’s done you wrong. Class bully make your junior high years a living hell? F-You! Have him eaten by a car, Christine-style, in your latest horror story. Girlfriend or ex-wife ditch you for someone with a cooler car or bigger paycheck (or other attributes)? F-You! She gets to be the first victim of the serial killer in your detective thriller. Those co-workers who sneer? F-You! They’re the troop of zombies your hero defeats by luring them into an industrial furnace.
It’s a stereotype that the best writers come from the most painful backgrounds. I would never say this was true, because everyone that goes through a harsh life doesn’t become a great artist. What an artist does is takes that pain – and joy and ambivalence – that we all feel and translates and distills it for consumption by the masses.
As an author, you’re turning against what most people do, which is keep feelings deep inside hoping they’ll go away, or turning to expensive therapy where someone is paid to listen to them air their grievances. Instead, you get to take that anger, that hurt, that pain of unrequited love and use it to fuel your creative engine, drive you towards greater things and give your work the depth that comes from real, honest emotion.
So if you’ve been told you’re not good enough, or just need a little extra oomph to get that honest writing flowing, be like Cee Lo, and embrace the power of the F-You Factor.
Scott B. Pruden 