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So Two Guys Walk Into Afghanistan…

The trouble with this is that one of them doesn’t have a compelling enough reason to walk into Afghanistan.  Author Michael Blair pointed this out to me when he was critiquing my novel, In a Country Burning,  three years ago at the Bloody Words Mystery Convention.  He also suggested I “pump it up a notch” for the first chapter and also speculated that I was too close to this novel and should just give it up and write something new.

Bummer.  I hate it when people are right, and I often wish I’d paid attention to all three of his comments.  I did pump up the first chapter quite a bit, and comments from Fogel and other readers now describe it with words like “relentless, dizzying and confusing.”  Oh well, I can pump it down.

But the motivations: Jackson is a lousy freelance journalist with not much of a career until he gets approached by the CIA, not to spy but just to come in for interviews every time he returns from Afghanistan to tell them what he’s seen.  It’s illegal for the CIA to use American journalists for intelligence gathering, but Jackson is a Canadian.  In return the CIA co-ordinate with the mujahideen parties to ensure Jackson gets to all the right places in Afghanistan at the right time to ensure he gets the stories he needs to be a successful freelance journalist.

The problem for Jackson is that he has stepped on a slippery slope.  He finds himself passing on CIA advice to the muj, and soon pushing them into CIA agenda assaults.  He is no longer a journalist but is now a combatant.

Okay, now for the protagonist: Thomas Sutton.  His motivation is much weaker.  He was a paramedic in the Rochester Fire Department, a committed Christian, and engaged to be married when all that fell apart.  He made a surprise visit to his fiance and caught her in bed with another man, a no good loser who’d gone to the same high school.

Sutton is later accused of negligent homicide in the loser’s death.  After escaping a guilty verdict, Sutton decides he is guilty and goes to the most dangerous country in the world at the time, Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, seeking God’s punishment for his crime.

Susan summed up the biggest problem with this motivation: whine, whine, whine.  Get a gun.  Shoot yourself and we’re all done.  Get it over with and save us the time.

Which brings me back to Michael Blair.  He said, “Look, he needs a better reason to go to Afghanistan.  I mean, come on!  You didn’t go there just to research this novel.”

Uhm, actually I did.  To which Blair replied without skipping a beat, “You’re crazier than I thought.”

Maybe that’s why I have trouble finding a suitable motivation for Sutton: I didn’t need much motivation myself to seek out adventure.

Want to Write a Novel With Me?

I like writing because it’s a solitary task.  I’m the complete dictator of an entire world when I sit in front of my keyboard.  I decide who lives and who dies, who get’s laid and who joins the priesthood.

Of course this dictatorship ends when I present my work to others to read, whether an editor, a writers group or friends.  Then I have to listen to opinions, weigh reputations and compromise.

So Fogel, my editor, has serious concerns about my novel, In a Country Burning, and I have some big decisions to make.  Because it’s my first novel, written and rewritten dozens of times over twenty years–yes, you heard me–twenty years, I’ve lost all perspective.

So I thought, why not make it a public effort?  I’ll tell you where I am in the novel and the problems I’m having.  People are welcome to e-mail suggestions.

Just remember: I’m still the dictator in the end.  All opinions are just that: opinions.  If you send me a suggestion, you’re sending it for free and will receive no compensation.  If I use one of your suggestions it doesn’t mean you own part of my novel.  I retained all rights, copyrights  and ownership.  This is my baby.

So: these two guys walk into Afghanistan in 1983…

Sony, Why Do You Make Me Crazy?

I want to like my Sony e-reader.  I was one of the early adopters, which means I paid double what most of you paid so that I could  get it a few months sooner.  Yes. I’d have waited if I’d known the price was going to fall through the floor, but I’d been tracking e-readers since the Rocket e-book debuted in 2000, and I just couldn’t wait any longer.  This was the future.

I’m no tree hugger, but hey, why cut down forests so that you can read a mystery novel once or twice, let it gather dust on a book shelf and leave someone else to throw it into landfill after you’re dead?

Content is king, and when I found out Sony was open source e-pub software and would have a e-reader store a la Amazon, I went for it.  The problem is the Reader Store.

For the third time I’ve gone to the Reader Store, clicked on a promoted novel and been unable to load it because it’s “Unavailable in your territory.”

Worse, the first time I had clicked “Canadian Edition.”  It took two days for Sony staff to figure out that it was a mistake and there was no available Canadian edition.

Today’s victim was “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.”  Susan bought it with her Kindle from Amazon.com no problem and recommended it.  We debated whether she’d just loan me her Kindle, but it was easy to see that she didn’t want to part with the device for even a day.  She’s an avid reader.

That’s how I ended up at Sony’s Reader Store today, and I was pleasantly surprised when I saw that Larsson’s bestselling novel was on sale for five bucks.  Now I’d signed in to the store, so the software should have known my “territory.”  But instead it just threw up whatever page is there for Americans, prominently featuring Larson’s novel.

So Sony promotes this novel to me but won’t sell it to me.  Why do you make me so crazy?  If it weren’t for the fact that Google e-books work on the e-reader, I’d be pitching the damn thing into the snow on my front lawn.

Snow Helps E-books

Lots of people got Kindles and Nooks and e-readers over Christmas this year.  These lucky people also apparently decided it was too snowy to go out shopping between Christmas and New Year’s, because instead they stayed home and purchased record numbers of e-books.

According to USA Today, the top 6 bestsellers sold more e-books than print books, and 19 of the top 50 also sold more e-books.  After more than a decade of hype and failure, it looks like e-books have finally got off the ground, and this time it’s not just better readers but more and cheaper content that has made the difference.

It’s time for traditional publishers to wake up and remember that they’re publishers, not printers.  Stop fighting to keep to the old delivery system and just move on with the new one.

Vinyl is still dead and e-books are here to stay

Vinyl records are coming back!  CD sales are falling!  I’ve read the articles and heard the stories, but sorry, vinyl isn’t coming back.  Vinyl sales truly are way up, but it’s easy to double sales of a product when you’re hardly selling anything in the first place.

According to Alan Cross, who does the History of New Music on radio stations such as CFNY in Toronto, vinyl record sales have climbed from nothing to somewhere between 1 and 2 % of the market.  Most people still download straight to their i-pods.

Fogel sent me this comment that she read on slashdot.org, in which the commenter claims:

“… It has become so easy to record a band’s music and to release it …  that music has become so incredibly oversaturated. … With vinyl, it costs so much more and is such a bigger process that it almost weeds out much of the bullshit.”

Please!  Weeds out much of the bullshit?  I went to high school in the late 70s and endured the terrible canned music that was being pumped out on vinyl by the ton.  KC and the Sunshine band?  That’s the way, ah-huh ah-huh, I don’t like it. Ah-huh Ah-huh.

This myth that the record industry and publishing industry were  saving us from garbage music and books is an old tired old fiction mostly promoted by the established industry hacks.

If the cost of production is such a filter of crap, how does Hollywood keep making junk year after year?  Howard the Duck?  Who thought that was a good script?  George Lucas?  That is one of the very few times I walked out on a movie.  It was that bad, even with a monster budget.

Indy bands have come out of nowhere for years and produced great music that the record companies were more than happy  to scoop up late when the band had already done the hard work of building a following.

There’s a growing market of indy writers like myself thanks to e-books.  Some of us will never get out of the garage, others will get publishing contracts after they’ve done the hard work of building a following.  The true filter is the writing.  If it’s good you’ll have fans.

So for all you book lovers that hate e-books and think that the supposed vinyl comeback proves e-books are a fad: sorry.  E-books are only going to increase in sales, and all those books made from dead trees will fade away with the boomers.