Sneak Preview

by Libby Hellmann

Hi, all. My new thriller, DOUBLEBACK won’t be out until October, but so many of you helped me with the cover a couple of months ago I wanted to show you the final version Bleak House came up with. Btw, I have to give a shout-out to Alan Orloff who suggested we flip a “b” or two. We did, and we love it.



And here’s a peek at the 45 second video trailer for DOUBLEBACK. Many thanks to Renaissance man Brian Gilomen for his editing expertise. Ellie would approve.



What do you think?

Nancy Drew's Granddaughters

Sara Paretsky, Laura Lippman and others on the influence of Nancy Drew in today's New York Times.

Mortification

One of my favorite books of all time is an anthology called Mortification: Writer's Stories of Their Public Shame. In it, authors like Margaret Atwood, Carl Hiaasen, Chuck Palahniuk and Michal Ondaatje tell stories about their most humiliating public speaking engagements. In one, Rick Moody looks around at those gathered for his book reading and realizes there was only one attendee who "hadn't expelled me from her uterus." In another, John Banville was approached by a potential customer in Miami who said, "I'm not going to buy a book, but you looked so lonely there, I thought I'd come and talk to you."

One of my own most humiliating moments was during the promotion for my first novel, Burning The Map. My publisher called, asking if I would make a "big appearance" at the opening of a super store in South Bend, Indiana. The store was on the campus of Notre Dame, which, they said, would tap right into my college age demographic for the book. There would be "massive PR" around the opening, I was told. I agreed and on the appropriate Saturday drove off to South Bend, where I found not a super store, but rather simply a grocery store. My big appearance took place at a card table in the frozen produce section. I sat there, shivering, near a large stack of my untouched books. Thankfully, I was approached by a woman writing sci-fi romance. Her book was forty pages long, she said, and she was ready to publish it. I counseled her for about an hour on the publishing business and then she left without buying a thing. The manager took pity and bought ten books for me to hand out, but no one wanted them, they just wanted directions to the chicken nuggets. Finally, still trying to make me feel better, the manager showed me the "massive PR" which consisted of a tiny photo of me in the coupon newsletter, right below an ad for .25 cent green beans.

Last night, I told this story to new author Henry Perez (henryperezbooks.com) when we signed together here in Chicago. I assumed Henry wouldn't have any such stories yet to contribute, but I was wrong. Henry stopped in a book store and proudly told the clerks he was there to sign his books. But they didn't believe he was the author, no matter what he told them. Finally, he was forced to show them his author photo, which still didn't convince them. In the photo, he's leaning on a railing over a river and looking over his shoulder. Determined to prove his authorship, Henry turned around, leaned forward and looked over his shoulder at them (a stern expression on his face), acting out the authorial pose until they grudgingly allowed him to sign a few of his own books.

One author in Mortification, Deborah Moggach, posits that writers actually feed off mortification. "We can use it in our work," she says, "just as we use everything else. And we know, deep down, that we deserve it. Every writer I know is waiting for the tap on the shoulder and the voice that says: "So you really thought you could get away with it?""

Amen, sister.

And Yet Another Honor for Sean!

Just heard that Sean won the CWA Short Story Dagger!!! Unbelievable. Come back from across the pond, Sean, so we can congratulate you in person!!

For those who don't know, the story was "One Serving of Bad Luck" from Killer Year (Mira.

Unauthorized Advice from Arthur Phillips

by Marcus Sakey

Six or seven years ago, my wife bought me a book called PRAGUE on a whim—she liked the cover and the flap copy, and knew that I harbored expatriate daydreams. The book turned out to be amazing, and I’ve been a big Arthur Phillips fan ever since.

Three books later, he hasn’t disappointed. The man is wicked smart, and writes emotionally sophisticated showpiece prose that’s also a pure joy to read. His latest, THE SONG IS YOU, came out this year, and I snatched it in hardcover but pleasure-delayed until the other day.

It’s wonderful. Each of his novels tread distinctly new ground; this one focuses on music, and the longing it can evoke, and how that longing effects the lives of those who love it, and which came first, the music or the longing or the love. I’m about halfway through, and spellbound.

The reason I bring it up is that there’s a section where the middle-aged protagonist is watching a woman sing, this rock-star-to-be who is just on the cusp of exploding, and he’s writing notes for her based on his experience as a commercial director. I thought the advice applied to writers as well:

(Arthur, if you’re out there and object, email me and I’ll take ‘em down, and, separately, offer to buy you a beer next time you’re in Chicago.)

1. Indulge in no one’s taste but your own
2. Never fear being loathed and broke
3. Repeat only what is essential; discard mercilessly
4. Sing only what you can feel, or less
5. Hate us without trepidation
6. All advice is wrong, even this; a little makeup would not go astray
7. Never admit to your influences, not dear Mum or Da, nor the Virgin Mary (competition)
8. Laugh when others think you should cry—we will gladly connect the dots
9. Even now, cooing, swooning ghouls of goodwill scheme to destroy you
10. Oh! Bleaker and obliquer.

Good stuff, huh? Of course, they’re aimed at a developing pop diva, at a woman trying to morph herself into a myth, so some apply more than others. But honestly, I got something from all of them.

“Repeat only what is essential; discard mercilessly” is a variation on some of the best writing advice you’ll ever get; Elmore Leonard puts it, “Don’t write the parts people skip,” Strunk & White say, “Omit unnecessary words,” but it comes to the same.

“Hate us without trepidation” sounds like it applies more to a punk rock girl, and does, but what if you apply it to free yourself to write what you want? Or to keep yourself from falling into a comfortable, safe place, where you’re begging for love instead of trying to tell honest stories?

“Never admit to your influences” is antithetical to my instincts—I tend to shout the names of the people whose work formed mine, as you all know—but is probably great advice. If your goal is to craft a public image, there’s some merit to the idea that it’s best to present yourself as a finished whole, the influencer instead of the influenced.

Anyway, while I wouldn’t take every word as gospel, I think there’s some damn good advice there. But what do you think? What about the later ones, which are a little more challenging, a little less comfortable—do think they apply? Do you like them?

Rants, Vents, and Raves

by David Ellis

I figured if I ever wrote a blog, I would sometimes just go off on various topics. Since I joined up with the talented bunch of writers here, I have limited my comments to a single subject on writing. Not today. We’ll see if people are okay with this. A few rants, raves, and observations.

1. Don’t you hate it when you’ve thoroughly researched a subject and you proudly vomit all the information onto the pages of your novel—only to discover, either on your own or through your agent or editor, that you went on way too long and you have to cut it down? That has happened to me a lot. Whenever I get outside my comfort zones of law and politics, I seek outside assistance, compile a bunch of information, and then end up over-detailing the subject. For those of you aspiring novelists out there, I think the lesson is this: The novel is not about you. You learned a whole lot about an obscure subject? Congratulations. Use it at cocktail parties. But the people buying your novels don’t give a shit. Just tell them what is necessary to make the book interesting.

2. Speaking of the cutting-room floor, some of my favorite passages from my novels are the ones that didn’t make it. Usually I am the one removing it, and the typical reason is that the passage no longer fits. The plot, or the character, has changed. And then I do what, I suspect, all of us writers do—I store that nugget away for another time. And you know what? I have never once taken one of those nuggets and inserted it into another novel. The lesson here is—actually, I don’t know what the lesson is.

3. I think I’ve said this before but it bears repeating: If you are bored with a particular passage in your novel, count on this universal truth—the reader will be, too.

4. Is there a “far left” political movement in this country? I hear, in major newspapers and TV news channels, about the “far right” all the time. I hear them called “extreme,” too. Ever heard of the “extreme” left? The “far” left? Just asking. Hey, I’m no Rush Limbaugh, but I’m a fan of evenhandedness.

5. My take on writing about sex: Leave it to the imagination. A novelist I respect who shall remain nameless (she writes on this blog) once told me (she has red hair) that she (her initials are LC) thought the sexiest scene I ever wrote was in my first novel. But that scene didn’t have a single graphic image. It was all about the lead-up, the flirtation. I have never—and I mean never—read a sex scene in a novel that I found captivating.

6. A really cool thing happened to me the other day that illustrates the organic nature of a novel. I was writing a scene between my protagonist and a woman who, so my plan went, was only serving a minor role. I was rolling along through a brief encounter between the two when suddenly, the thing turned a little sexy on me, and the next thing I knew, something was developing between the two of them. It wasn’t what I had planned. It doesn’t really fit in my novel. But hey, romance often doesn’t fit with your life. Damned if I’m not going to keep it in the book. That’s what I love about writing.

7. When someone says your new book is the best novel you’ve ever written, does that make you momentarily feel insecure about the ones that came before? My favorite fan is the one who says that all of my books are equally compelling. I hope to have one of those fans someday.

8. I absolutely, positively, cannot fathom how anyone could have written a novel on those old typewriters, or long-hand. I jump around my novel like a frog on speed. (Mental note: cool simile, store it away and use it in next book!)

Plan to not fail

By David Heinzmann

Every once in a while I think of a tidbit about David Mamet I once read. On the wall next to his writing desk he had tacked a card that read something like: To fail to plan is to plan to fail.

Some writers need to plan more than others, perhaps, but everybody needs a layer or two of discipline. Often when we talk about this we mean either carving out the same writing time and a word count every day, or addressing the question of outlining or not.

For a handful of reasons (but mostly because of two shorties under the age of 5) I struggle with carving out the regular writing time. And I can’t say that the outlines I’ve made have been worth all the time I put into them, though I’d surely have been worse off without them.

Lately, when I've thought of the Mamet maxim, I’ve also been thinking about the first kind of planning I learned as a writer. When I was in college I had a wonderful creative writing teacher named A.E. Claeyssens who taught a novel writing class. We all had a novel we were planning to write, but first Claey had us spend most of the semester writing what he called preliminaries, volumes of character profiles, pages and pages of their external and internal lives, biographical details we’d never put on the page in the novel, but the stuff that makes you understand who they are so that the actions and thoughts that do make it onto the page ring true. Exploring characters before you write is one way to tell as story, but some writers feel they need to discover their characters as they go. When they’re in the zone and become lost in the story, the characters reveal themselves, etc.

I got a lot of out preliminaries, but somewhere along the way I stopped doing them, partly because in the years since college I’ve learned to write with a gun to my head—on deadline, nearly every day.

By necessity, I do a good bit of my fiction writing on the L-train ride to and from work. It’s not the best method, mainly because it comes in half-hour chunks. But I take my time alone where I can get it.

I write in a notebook atop a leather brief case sitting on my lap. The eventual typing up of my chicken scratch becomes an act of revision, with most of those revelatory writing moments coming in the late-night transcription sessions at the keyboard. I actually find the process to be fairly productive, if not ideal.

Lately, as I’ve been rewriting the ending for the novel I’m trying to finish, I’ve felt particularly unplanned and at least frustrated, if not failing. When my agent read the manuscript a few months ago, he said the ending felt a little easy. So I pulled back from the big moment of revelation in the book, and started going sideways a bit. I wrote several new scenes with my man Flood continuing to stumble in the dark.

But I was having trouble finding the final confrontation that will get me back to the end. Trying to major surgery on the plot, I suddenly had no real plan.

This is what brings me to the lessons of Mamet and Claeyssens. Without thinking about it the other day, I started retroactively writing out preliminaries on the train. I’m once again finding my way through with the preliminaries.

Looking forward, I’m pretty sure I’m going to need preliminaries for the next book, too. I have a premise and protagonist, a couple of scenes, but the big picture remains a fog. I’m going to need serious plan.

Agent Secrets, Man

By Kevin Guilfoile

A friend of mine called recently. He had just met with an agent about representing his first novel. That's the stage when an aspiring writer probably feels most excited and most vulnerable. The hope that one of your dreams might come true is accompanied by the realization that the mechanisms of publishing are a complicated mystery and you need a Virgil to guide you through its circles. You seek a lot of advice during this period, and you get a lot of it too. Some of it good, some of it irrelevant.

I told him that the agent-writer relationship is basically about trust more than anything, and so asking another person whether this agent would be a good fit is sort of like asking a friend if you should get married to a person that friend doesn't know. Sometimes you just know when it's right. Other times there's only one person who wants to marry you.

On request I once shared my getting-an-agent story (including query letter), but I suspect other writer's stories are more informative or interesting or funny. Surely there are some things you should look for in a good agent, and some warning signs of a bad one. We've touched a bit on this before at The Outfit, but what are some of your agent tales, good and bad? And what are some of your getting-an-agent questions?

Unrelated except in a lazy, kitchen-sink Friday way: Over at the Infinite Summer blog I go deep into the history of an urban legend that gets recycled in the book Infinite Jest (be sure to follow the endnotes for some entertaining links). It might be of interest even to those who haven't read the novel. More significantly, the excellent discussion that follows in the comments about the appropriateness of such appropriation is relevant to anyone who writes fiction for a living I think.

Follow Kevin on Twitter.

Not Up to One's Former Standard

by Barbara D'Amato


My husband, Tony D’Amato, read my post [June 25] about critics, fair and unfair, but thought I’d left something out, something critics sometimes do.

Tony says:

I always read The Outfit to find out what my wife Barbara D’Amato is thinking about. Her most recent blog was about critics. What she didn’t mention was her own dispatch of a pompous reviewer in her short story “Of Course You Know that Chocolate is a Vegetable.”

The critic takes asthma medicine, theophylline, that is chemically very similar to the caffeine and theobromine in coffee and chocolate—dangerous in large quantities. At this point, at the urging of the victim of his critiques, he has eaten several chocolate desserts and drunk several espressos.

An excerpt:

We were seated at a round table covered with a crisp white cloth at Just Desserts, a scrumptious eatery in central Manhattan that specializes in chocolate desserts.
“I must say, Ms. Grenfield, it’s very handsome of you to invite me after my review of your last book, “ Ivor Sutcliffe said.
Ivor’s review had begun:

In Snuffed, the victim, Rufus Crown, is dispatched with a gaseous fire extinguisher designed for use on fires in rooms with computer equipment and other such unpleasant hardware, though neither the reader nor the fictional detective knows this at the start when his dead but mysteriously unblemished body is found. The reader is treated to long efforts—quite incompatible with character development—on the part of the lab and medical examiner to establish what killed him.

Sutcliffe’s review had gone on:

I deplore the substitution of technical detail for real plotting. One could amplify the question “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” by asking “Who cares how Roger Ackroyd was killed?” No one cares what crime labs and pathologists really do.
Since he was eating at my expense, he found the need to be borderline pleasant. “You know, I did say in the review that I liked much of your past work.”
Actually no, you clot. His review of my first book, graven on my heart, said, “This novel is obviously the work of a beginner.” And his review of my second book, also etched somewhere in my guts, said “Ms. Grenfield has not yet got her sea legs for the mystery genre.” The third and most recent review had, in fact, damned with faint praise: This effort, Snuffed, is not up to her former standard.”
As he finished off the tray of chocolate candies, he said “These are good. I’m rather surprised.”
“Why?”
He said, “I’d always thought of you as lacking in appreciation of the finer things.”
“Oh, surely not.”
“All those bloody and explicit murders, or poisons with their effects lovingly detailed. Hardly the work of a subtle mind.”
“Au contraire, Ivor, I am very subtle.”
“Well, I suppose it does require a certain amount of delicacy to keep the knowledge of whodunit from a reader until the end.” He fidgeted as if nervous. He started to sweat.
“Yes. Until the end.”

Kudos for the Pros

by Michael Dymmoch

I grew up reading the Chicago Daily News because my parents subscribed. Sidney J Harris taught me philosophy—before I knew what the word meant—and that the purpose of a liberal education is to make one’s head a decent place in which to spend one’s leisure. The Daily News also introduced me to Erma Bombeck and Mike Royko

Years later, I followed Royko to The Chicago Sun-Times, then to the Trib. After he died, I drifted back to the Sun-Times because an acquaintance started giving me her copy when she’d finished with it. I still mostly read the Sun-Times because I’m currently addicted to Mark Brown and Richard Roeper, Roger Ebert, Cathleen Falsani, Neil Steinberg and Carol Marin (and because the Trib jettisoned its book section and moved the TV guide to Saturday).

What impresses me almost as much about the pros as their talents is the fact that they wrote/write so much—some of them four or five columns a week, forty-five or fifty weeks a year, many of them for decades. To anyone who’s ever tried to blog regularly (even just once every two weeks) that’s amazing! And most of their stuff is really good, though that may not be obvious because they make it look easy .

Blogging seems to have taken over as the medium for getting ideas across, and those of us with a life or occupation now have too many talented writers to keep up with. But all of them, wherever their work appears, continue to remind us that we belong to a community of people who value ideas and appreciate those ideas skillfully presented.

With so many terrific writers to choose from, how do you decide with whom to spend your time?

Here Comes TYRUS BOOKS!

by Sean Chercover

If you haven't heard the publishing news that broke last weekend...

Ben LeRoy and Alison Janssen announced today that they will leave their positions at Bleak House Books (a division of Big Earth Publishing) and begin a new venture, Tyrus Books.

To read the news release and learn more, visit: Tyrus Books.

For those who don't know, Ben LeRoy and Alison Janssen are the brains and talent (they are both, both) behind the success of Bleak House Books. Ben started the company in 2001, and Alison came on in 2003. Together, they have published some of the best crime fiction in recent years (in 2008 three of their titles were Edgar Award-nominated - an unprecedented achievement by a small, independent publishing house).

So you'd be right in thinking that Ben and Alison are two of the smartest folks in publishing, and that they are possessed of great taste.

One of the Edgar-nominated titles was the Chicago Blues anthology, edited by our own Libby Hellmann, and containing stories by most "Outfitters". I spoke with Ben last night, and he had this message:

Building Bleak House Books was a years long process and one of the projects we are most proud of is Chicago Blues. A special thank you is due to most of the members of the Outfit. And Laura Caldwell has become a great friend of the company. I appreciate all of you so much and look forward to working with you all in some capacity moving forward.

I'd also like to thank all of the support that readers, reviewers,and retailers have provided us. As we move forward on this exciting new venture, we want to assure everybody that we will continue to deliver the best books we know how. Love to everybody.

As Ben and Alison start their new adventure, they also leave Bleak House stocked with some excellent titles, including Libby's upcoming novel DOUBLEBACK, and Jen Jordan's short story anthology, UNCAGE ME.

If this post reads like an unbridled love letter to Ben and Alison ... well, it is. In addition to being two of the smartest people I've met in publishing, they are also two of the finest human beings I've had the pleasure of knowing.

I am very happy for them, and excited to see what they will do at Tyrus Books.

Congratulations, Ben and Alison!

Let's all Dance Like A Monkey to their continued success:

Ready to Commit Murder

by Libby Hellmann

Ah, the joys of summer: bright sunshine, soft breezes, flowers, steaks on the grill...

And skunks.

Some of you already know about my ongoing trials with these creatures. Well, at this point, they’re winning. And I’ve had it. It’s war.

I live on the North Shore of Chicago not far from the forest preserve. I’ve gotten used to the deer eating my day lilies (and pooping on the lawn), the raccoons tipping over the garbage cans, even the occasional fox strolling across the yard. Live and let live, right?

No more.

It started about three years ago when our wonderful Beagle, Shiloh, was still with us. Unfortunately, Shiloh thought everyone was his friend, and that included rodents and varmints. The upshot was that he got skunked in our back yard, not once but three times. The first time I rushed him to the vet, but they wouldn’t take him. Instead, they told me about the peroxide-baking soda-dishwashing liquid mix (tomato juice definitely does NOT work), and I raced to the drug store to take care of the poor guy. Shiloh hates baths, but he had a good one that night. Of course, the stench stayed in my car for days – even a once-over with the mixture and at least two bottles of Febreze didn’t do much.

About a month later, it happened again. This time I was ready. I locked Shiloh in the garage, had the solution ready in a jiffy, and we went through the process again. It happened a third time before the end of that summer (I never said Beagles were smart). I remember being thankful when cold weather came.

Fast forward to the following spring. It’s about five in the morning, and I’m having a nightmare about a disgusting odor that just won’t go away. I wake up to discover it’s no dream. The odor is in my house, and it’s skunk spray. I jump out of bed, tear through the house, and find out that skunks are mating under my deck, and one of them just had to spray into the window-well where the stink penetrated into the basement.

This time it took two weeks and several trips to the store get a special enzyme-y thing that was supposed to break up the skunk-spray molecules but didn’t really work. Not to mention the traps that Animal Control set. Naturally, they didn’t catch the skunk -- Turns out they’re pretty smart, at least smart enough not to crawl into a cage for bait. But I did catch two lovely raccoons.

The last straw came a couple of nights ago. A skunk came to my front door, sprayed, and then pranced off into the night. The stench penetrated inside in a minute. I swear it was a deliberate provocation. That skunk was singling me out. I know it.

I’m convinced that there’s a skunk population explosion on the North Shore and the authorities are covering it up, because they know the citizenry would rise up in arms if they knew how many of these creatures are actually roaming around. It’s clearly a conspiracy. And what the authorities aren’t covering up, the skunks themselves are perpetrating. Because they can. They’re trying to take over the world, one forest preserve at a time.

But I won’t let them. I’m done playing defense. It’s war. I have my Illinois FOID card and I’m going to the gun range for target practice. Before I do, though, I’ll open it up for one last round of suggestions.

How do you stop a skunk dead in its tracks?

July 4

When I was growing up, July 4 was our best family holiday. The others tended to get bogged down in my parents culture wars (think George and Martha in the Albee play.) My mother came partly from WASPy stock, family who came here in the 1730's; my father's parents had fled pogroms. Both parents felt a fierce connection to the promise of freedom implicit in our history and every year, until their culture wars made life together impossible, they'd recount the history of the country.

My father would recount the history of the revolutionary war up through the Stamp Act. My mother could recite most of the Declaration of Independence from memory, and then we would suffer through the harsh winter of 1777-78, the doubts, the triumphs, the faltering of the new country, and end with the Constitutional Convention. The Constitution somehow always coincided with the triumphant production of chocolate ice cream, hand-cranked in the old churn my mother had brought from her small-town home--perhaps there's an association of chocolate with freedom.

We would set off fire crackers, and then my parents would play their old 78's of Paul Robeson singing Ballad for Americans. These were issued by Victor Records in 1940 and my parents had bought them when they first started dating, right before Pearl Harbor and my father's disappearance into the Pacific Theater for almost four years.

We're living in one of America's most challenging times right now, with strong echoes going back to the 1930's. Remembering how my parents celebrated the 4th with us helps remind me that for all our problems as a society, for all the times we fall short of our heroic ideals, we still manage to come together as a nation to solve our most pernicious problems.

What are your own favorite memories of Independence Day?

Sara Paretsky

Digital Distractions

by Marcus Sakey

Morning folks!

So in preparation for the release of THE AMATEURS, I’m doing the stuff we do: planning my tour schedule, doing interviews, thinking about contests, and, the topic of the day, revamping my web site.

I’ve had a site to promote my books for about four years now, and it has changed significantly as time has passed. Initially it was really a sales piece aimed at the industry, a reference point I built for agents and publishers. Once I was signed, I started to change the focus, hopefully making it more useful and interesting to readers.

Which brings me to the topic at hand. What does interest you about an author’s website?

Certain things are obvious. My tour schedule is up there, as are excerpts of all my books, and review copy, that sort of thing. And I suspect that those elements form the core value for most people.

But over the years I’ve been trying to expand beyond that. I built and maintain my site myself—in a past life, I ran a web design shop—so I have a lot of flexibility. Everything is in my voice because, well, I’m typing it, and I hope that helps.

I also have sections where I write about good books I’ve read recently, give hands-dirty advice for aspiring writers, answer common questions, and share interviews and photographs. And of course I’m promoting my mailing list, and the fact that I’m on Facebook and Twitter. (I’ll post more on that another time, but I have to say, thus far I’ve been impressed by Twitter, and used judiciously I do see the value in it.)

Anyway, the revamped version of the site is live now, at MarcusSakey.com.

My feeling is that if you take the time to visit, I’d like to make sure that time is rewarding for you. Seems the least I can do. And so I’m wondering, am I missing anything?

What else would you like to see on an author’s website, mine or anyone else’s?