Bad Loving

Hollywood gives out awards for just about anything. It’s all about the facetime, baby. We writers are a bit more reserved. We have regional awards and a few national awards for genres and one big national award, which so few viewers tuned into that they’re no longer on TV. But there is an award that probably would be a hit on TV: the bad sex award.

Never heard of it? This year - the 17th annual year, mind you - France's Bad Sex in Fiction Award went to Jonathan Littell for his novel The Kindly Ones. Now, if you haven’t read The Kindly Ones, you might think it was a novel so obscure only the judges had read it. Au contraire: it won the Prix Goncourt in 2006 and has sold a million copies in Europe. The BBC said:

In one excerpt, the author describes a sexual encounter as "a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg".

There’s even been a Lifetime Achievement Award for bad sex in fiction. Last year John Updike won that honor after his novel The Widows of Eastwick gained him a fourth consecutive nomination.

There are still prestigious awards to be had, people. Keep writing!

Never Pee in the Water, Agents Might be Surfing

All of us, bloggers, tweeters, facebook frienders, goodreads reviewers, linkedin connectors, tend to think we’re talking only to a small group of friends or interested bypassers. We forget that our tweets and comments are out there for the world to see and read, forever, even if you delete your website or blog. That can be a bad thing.

It can also be a good thing. GalleyCat recently reported on a good example.

In two weeks and 314 tweets, the Fake AP Stylebook Twitter feed has earned more than 43,000 followers. Now, the creators have signed with an unnamed agent.

The website pays homage, in a funny way, to “The AP Stylebook.” The two founders, Mark Hale and Ken Lowery queried a book proposal to three agents and ended up choosing Kate McKean of the Howard Morhaim Literary Agency. McKean is no stranger to the Internet.

McKean is the agent for several bloggers with print aspirations, including the authors of TheLongThread.com, UnecessaryQuotes.com, and the I Can Has Cheezburger crew.

So remember this little tale and Never Pee in the Water, Agents Might be Surfing.

Ready for Some Good News?

It’s the beginning of a new week, so let’s start with good news - and not just good news, but good news about an agent. Writers sometimes think that an agent, to be good, must be based in New York. The truth is that an agent, to be good, must love books and working with writers. According to West Virginia Gazette-Mail writer, Bill Lynch, Christine Witthohn is such an agent.

Witthohn admits that getting published is harder now than it’s ever been, but this has been her best year yet: “I've sold 16 books and three others are on the fence.” How has she accomplished this many sales? By not being in New York, or even in Charleston, her home base, all that much.

"I'm at one to three writers' conferences a month. I also commute to New York. About once a month, I spend a week in the city."

All the traveling doesn’t leave a lot of together time with her husband.

Last month, they made a breakfast date at the airport in Atlanta. Witthohn had a stopover before flying out to another conference.

Witthohn believes that the Internet allows her to do business without having to live in New York. Plus, she spends time on the phone or on email, and she does go into New York, too.

You can find out about Witthohn and her agency, Book Cents Literary Agency, online. Check the Submissions section to see if she represents the kind of books you write.

Good Question

Carolyn Kellogg of The Los Angeles Times asks a good question at the end of her article, Publishing From the Grave, Michael Crichton.

She starts the article off by admonishing: “If you're an author, be careful what you leave lying around.” Then she cites two examples. First is Vladimir Nabokov who died, leaving a pile of index cards. Those cards were published as The Original of Laura -- “so faithful to the original that part of the book are reproductions of the index cards themselves, which can be punched loose and stacked.”

The second example is a Michael Crichton manuscript, which has been published posthumously. Pirate Latitudes, from the description given in the article, sounds to me like an earlier manuscript he wrote and most likely had no intention of publishing (we all have a few of those in the attic, don’t we?).

The article ends with what I think is a good question and one which we writers might want to think about as we shove that first or second manuscript under the bed.

Are a writer's heirs really entitled to strip-mine his papers for every conceivable nugget of value?

Digital Pirates

Mike Harvey, Technology Correspondent, for The Times Online had an interesting article last week on digital pirates, those who plundered music and films a few years back and who are now going after e-books.

In the US, where the Kindle has been available for two years, digital book piracy is booming. The web has enabled thousands of sites to distribute pirated book content free. American publishers are estimated to have lost more than $600 million (£363 million) last year to piracy.

British publishers are trying to stop piracy, but here on SFH we’ve talked about those efforts and the successes are small in relation to the number of e-book copyrights that have been violated. The article says that the Publishers Association has noted “more than 4,000 cases of online piracy by more than 40 publishers and has succeeded in taking down 2,638 illegal copies of books. Sounds like a lot, except when you also read:

Even before The Lost Symbol was published in September, pirated copies were circulating on the internet. Within a couple of days of its release filesharers had downloaded it more than 100,000 times.

The thing that makes books so much easier to steal is the file size. “A film can be up to 1.5GB whereas the typical e-book is no more than 3MB, making it much easier to download.” Combine that with this statistic: “In the US an estimated 1.7 million people own one, and that number could rise to 4 million by the end of the year, according to analysts.” Then top it off with a sampling of the comments to this article:

Since digital books typically cost rather more than printed copies, I have no sympathy for the industry….Serves them right.

Yet another rip-off industry squealing over problems that they've created.

It's farcical to suggest the inventors of these devices didn't realise this could happen. As for the fact that people can now read books for free surely this is a service libraries have offered for centuries.

It seems to me that people are looking at the publishing industry and saying, so what, they make millions. They should be looking at the everyday authors who are not making millions. Those who steal books might do well to wonder how they would put food on the table if they worked for ten months and profited barely a hundred dollars. There are plenty of authors out there who net that little after writing and marketing their book, not to mention getting their book in e-book format if they don’t have a publisher to do it for them. I also think that the big publishers who are now putting their print authors into digital form should give those authors a higher percentage of the profits.

What do you think?

Lying on the Couch

Thanksgiving’s over. I’d get up to greet you all, but I ate too much Breakaway Bread. I did manage to get out and visit a few of you, but … well, Fruit Pie was a’calling my name. I hope all of you had a family-filled, fun holiday. I know I did.

I’m going to cross-post today. Yesterday, over on The Blood-Red Pencil, I posted a recommendation for a book. Probably wasn’t a good day, since by 9:30 last night, I was the only one who had stopped by to comment. The book I recommended is a good one, so I’m going to post about it here today. I hope you’ll check out the book!

Punish the Deed by Diane Fanning

I recently got my hands on the second book in Diane Fanning’s mystery/police procedural series starring Lieutenant Lucinda Pierce. I’ve been looking forward to following Lucinda again.

Lucinda is, in a lot of ways, typical of women police officers. She’s tough and believes in her work. In others, she’s very different. After taking a shotgun blast to the face, one side is mauled and she lost an eye. In this book, she’s taking the first real steps to plastic surgery, but is still on the job. Along with dealing with the physical injuries, she’s working on the emotional ones.

Setting aside her personal problems, Lucinda now has to deal with a violent killer who hides in the shadows and who eventually threatens her own life. She’s got quite a few other things going on in her life - like the rest of us. Lucinda Pierce is no one-dimensional character. I enjoyed discovering the different layers of Lucinda.

Here’s a snippet of Diane’s writing in Punish the Deed:

“She’d been to many crime scenes and seen many gruesome photos from others. Those sights were not alien -- they were the stuff of her life. She could think and work as she looked on the gory remains of a brutal death. She could hash over the details with her fellow professionals without the slightest churn in her gut. She swore that none of it bothered her any longer. But then there were those images that burned into her brain. The visuals she wanted to forget but instead they hung on, haunting every blink of her eye and troubling her dreams.”

The intensity of the plot and the believable development of the characters keep you reading. Fanning comes to mystery writing with a credible writing pedigree. She’s the best-selling author of 10 true crime novels, as well as another mystery series starring Molly Mullet. You may have seen Diane Fanning on Court TV or the Discovery Channel. If she ever comes to speak in your area, go hear her. I sat in on a talk she gave at the University of Texas on The Criminal Mind and she is a great speaker. Her talk sent chills down our spines.

If you or someone you know likes mystery/police procedurals with a strong, totally believable protagonist, I recommend you look for Punish the Deed by Diane Fanning. It’s available online at Barnes & Noble or on Amazon.
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FTC Disclaimer: I consider this more of a recommendation than a review, but I'll go ahead and reveal that I paid for this book and the postage. And, no, I am not giving it away. Diane autographed it for me, so it goes on my bookshelf. (I love autographed books.) I don't even lend my autographed books. I've done that once or twice and lost books. Excuse me? You lent the book I lent to you? You don't remember to whom? Aaagghh! What do you mean, the FTC confiscated it? All they gave you back was the cover, but no book? Where's the cover? Did you even try to get the cat to throw it back up?

Group Blogs

I’m wondering how many of you are part of group blogs? I’m talking about blogs where there are multiple bloggers.

I blog daily here on Straight From Hel. I also blog occasionally on a group blog, The Blood-Red Pencil. I think I’m posting there today. I say, think, because I’m never sure when my posts will show up. I’m not in charge of scheduling. Since I never know, it’s difficult to let readers of Straight From Hel know to pop over. If I’m there today, it’ll be to make a book recommendation for Punish the Deed by Diane Fanning.

And this leads me to my questions for those of you who participate in group blogs:
What has been your experience? How are the posts planned? Is there a set schedule for the participants?

I’ve seen blogs where there are, for example, seven participants, one for each day of the week. The bloggers have a set day on which they post. Others have 14 or 15 bloggers, so each posts only twice a month, like Women in Crime Ink. I’ve seen blogs with multiple bloggers, but there doesn’t seem to be a set schedule, such as The Blood-Red Pencil.

Some people participate in multiple blogs, some their own, some with others. Jean Henry Mead seems to be part of seven different blogs. Gracious! I can barely keep up with this one and an occasional post on TBRP.

What about you? If you’re part of a multi-person blog, how does it work? If you blog on your own, how often do your blog and do you ever wish you had cohorts?

By the way: Happy Turkeyday People! (This is the day we celebrate turkeys by eating ham, right?)