Archive for January, 2012

Real books sold, book business burned

Every writer probably spends some time wondering what form the “book” she is writing will take and how it will get out into the world of readers. Like many, I’m resigned to a future filled with e-books, though really really want a real book to hold if I’m ever published. At least my first one, for the immortality bits and bytes can never confer. There’s a reason “the cloud” is now the preferred name for the place where all our digital stuff goes to live. Clouds are emphemeral.

Publisher’s Lunch reported heartening news after the holidays for those of us who want to hold a book, any book. The publishing newsletter covered Barnes & Noble’s pretty decent holiday sales, noting the retail chain said, “book sales were strong overall, fueled by strength across multiple categories,” and “physical book sales on a comparable basis increased by 4 percent, exhibiting growth for the first time in five years.”

For the radical take, look to Bloomberg Businessweek’s excellent cover story this week, “Amazon Wants to Burn the Book Business.” Brad Stone’s piece details Amazon’s push into book publishing. This is not an e-books-only story, as Amazon is arranging to have physical versions printed. This is not an authors-get-screwed story, as writers get  a much better split when they do business directly with Amazon. But it is a big-six-publishers-are-in-deep-doo-doo story.

“The reaction to Amazon’s move is analogous to the screech of a small woodland creature being pursued by a jungle predator,” writes Stone in the article. Publishers are “trying to protect a century-old business model—and their role as nurturers of literary culture—from encroachment by a company that consistently reimagines how industries can be run more efficiently. Book publishing, an inefficient industry if there ever was one, seems ripe for reimagining.”

Whether you agree with the article’s take, or Amazon’s strategy, it is must reading for all of us who like to read, and to hold books, whether our own or anyone else’s.

Obsessing on cars in little boxes

The Crossroads in Boulder was the first indoor mall I visited. I was five and we’d just moved from Poughkeepsie, which though already IBM country, was still pretty rural and only had strip shopping centers. The year was 1965. On my first visit, I decided the mall was called the Crossroads because it was like being on two indoor roads that crossed, a giant plus of a building filled with stores. (In reality, it probably got its name from some intersection of two important roads in Boulder.)

At the crossroads of the Crossroads was a toy shop, a smallish store crammed with stuff. The aisles were narrow and the shelves tall (to me). And on one counter sat a glass display case with stepped shelves. Parked on the shelves were miniature cars, Matchbox cars, and these I coveted from my first visit to the Crossroads. I don’t know what they cost then, but I wasn’t often able to buy one. I would stand and stare at the white Cadillac ambulance on visit after visit, needing that car more than I needed anything else in the world. I also wanted, needed the Chevrolet El Camino, though not as badly as the ambulance. Back then, Matchbox cars were made by a company call Lesney, and that also made them special. They were imported. From Britain. Little metal cars that felt heavy, real, constructed somewhere.

The box was the final element that turned them into kid obsession. Once you pointed to the car you wanted — could afford, really — the store clerk would slide open a drawer and pull out the special blue and yellow box with the car in it. The box had the car’s picture and name, and was instant garage for each car — no plastic blister pack here. That’s where the name comes from, though I’ve never seen a matchbox that size, so I assume it must have been the standard in England.

My son Patrick has the sharpest eyes around. His nickname is Eagle-Eyes McDoom. While it’s a given he often spots the things he wants, this is not always the case. The other day he was in Stop ‘n Shop and saw what I’d seen at the Crossroads in 1965: a “Matchbox Lesney Edition.” In a bid to sell quality and nostalgia, Mattel, which owns Matchbox now, is offering vehicles featuring “the classic combination of quality die-cast body and chasis to honor the heritage of the Lesney name.” Patrick bought me one, generous son that he is, a ’56 Cadillac Eldorado. It feels like the old Matchboxes, with a weight and heft today’s mostly plastic cars can’t match. It even came with that classic blue and yellow box. The irony: car and box were packaged together in the blister pack, for there is no display case at Stop ‘n Shop or a clerk to get the little box out of the drawer. I’ve since gone back and grabbed the ’70 Plymouth Cuda Hemi. Now, it they’d only get in the Cadillac ambulance.

The Academy of Crime (Fiction)

I’ve been accepted into the Crime Fiction Academy, a new program offered by The Center for Fiction in New York. The Center, founded as the Mercantile Library in 1820, is one of those great little institutions in New York unknown to many, and has a history worth an entire post of its own.

Elmore Leonard, Harlan Coben, Lee Child, Laura Lippman and Dennis Lehane will teach master classes at the CFA, and Jonathan Santlofer, SJ Rozan and Thomas H. Cook will run 12-student writing workshops. There’s also a monthly seminar on published crime fiction.

During the course, I plan to workshop LAST WORDS, the historical mystery I’ll be readying for editor submissions with my new agent Dawn Dowdle over the next few months. The timing was pretty amazing. I heard I’d gotten into the CFA just two days after Dawn agreed to represent LAST WORDS.

Yeah, I’m pretty excited.

A calendar that tracks time travel

Designer Alex Griendling’s peculiar calendar project gave me a chance to tryout crowd sourcing and indulge my love of time travel. Almost no strand in science fiction—I hate the term sub-genre, since it sounds so “sub”—has enthralled me more than time travel. It started with “Danny Dunn, Time Traveller” and the bad Irwin Allen TV series, “Time Tunnel,” and has continued through every chronology-bending, Grandfather-paradox-killing book, show or movie I could get my eyes on.

The only stories that ever trumped time travel, at least in my pre-teen mind, were dystopian tales of post-apocalyptic futures, since running from mutants and hunting your own irradiated food across a disaster-blasted planet Earth sounded like pure adventure to a 12 year old. What’s wrong with a life expectancy of 22?

I have proof that obsessive attention to a topic can have its benefits. My second novel is a YA time-travel story called “TIMERS: Samuel Tripp’s adventures across time with Rip Van Winkle, the Connecticut Yankee and Ebenezer Scrooge (oh, and he saves all of history).” I started it in late September and I’m flying—18,000 words written so far—and I’m having a blast. There’s nothing that says you can’t have fun writing. But I digress.

Griendling proposed on Kickstarter to create the 2012 Time Travel Calendar and I plunked down my $10. He got it funded and I got this great calendar. Each month, instead of a picture, the calendar lists important, and not-so-imporant, moments in history visited by time travelers in TV shows, films, videogames and comics. January begins with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles back two and half billion years battling Slash in a 1992 video game, and ends in December with Superman trapped in the year 1,001,963 under a red sun with no super powers.

In between is a bounty of time travel trivia. The Titanic hosted both the dwarves and Kevin in the great film “Time Bandits” as well as Dr. Anthony Newman of craptastic “Time Tunnel.” Eighteen years later in history, Kirk and Spock travel to the Great Depression to stop McCoy from altering the past. This Star Trek episode, “City on the Edge of Forever” written by Harlan Ellison, was where I first encountered the change history, timeloop condnundrum that has fascinated me ever since.

The calendar also marks key dates in the history of time travel stories. You’ll find Skynet became self-aware on April 21, the day after Passover this year, the novel “The Time Machine” was published on May 7, as well as the birthdays of Robert Zemeckis and Stan Lee. I could go on and would if I weren’t already well beyond reasonable post length. It’s hard not to with a calendar that on one page alone cites “The Time Machine,” “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” “Somewhere in Time,” “Midnight in Paris” and “Timecop.”

Who doesn’t have time for that?

I GOT AN AGENT

That is the only headline I will ever type in all caps. Dawn Dowdle of the Blue Ridge Literary Agency has agreed to represent my crime novel LAST WORDS. We talked yesterday and really hit it off. She’s also interested in the project I’m working on now, a YA science fiction tale called “TIMERS: Samuel Tripp’s Adventures Across Dimensions with Rip Van Winkle, the Connecticut Yankee and Ebenezer Scrooge (Oh, And He Saves All of History).” More news on that when I have it.

I leave behind the wearying place I call QueryWorld. Wannabe writers are not supposed to moan about the process of querying to get an agent, but let me just say several months of nagging friends and total strangers alike was hard work. Querying has more rules than the Japanese tea ceremony, and agents will often say no based on a one-page pitch letter. I can now concentrate all my time and energy on writing TIMERS. Phew!

The odd thing is it feels like I’m running even though I’ve crossed a finish line. I’m very happy, but my mental to-do list hasn’t adjusted to the new circumstances. A big part of most days was dedicated to the process of finding an agent. I will be working with Dawn on edits to the manuscript and then comes the next round of submissions—this to publishers. But for today, I’m going to type again, I GOT AN AGENT!

Spider-Man shows up on Broadway

I saw Spider-Man on Broadway just before the holidays. Funny thing was, I saw him in the theater right next to where the musical “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” is playing. This got me to thinking how the producers of the now famous, near-greatest-Broadway-disaster ever could have created a much better show for a lot less money.

Patrick with two performers from Cirque Shanghai.

We actually were in the New Victory Theater, literally next door  to the Foxwoods Theatre on 42nd St. where “Spider-Man” runs, to see the Cirque Shanghai perform “Bai Xi.” The title means “one hundred amazing acts.” And they certainly were. Men and women hurtling and soaring through the air, often without benefit of safety harnesses. A woman stacked chairs three stories high and then stood atop the vertical tower. And then disassembled her way down again. Two men ran around the spinning double Wheel of Death, seemingly sticking to the metal of this out-of-control carnival ride like a spider-man would.

My gasps, my ten-year-old son’s gasps, at the “Bai Xi” stunts were far louder, far more numerous and far more enthusiastic than when we saw “Turn Off the Dark” a year ago as it lurched toward its eventual opening night.

That’s when I had my brilliant idea. The producers of “Turn Off the Dark” should have just shipped a few issues of “The Amazing Spider-Man” from the early days to these practitioners of the 2,000-year-old art of Chinese acrobatics. They’d have come up with twice the show, saving who knows how much money. And it would have opened on time.