What I've Been Reading

February 13, 2012
Here are the first 10 (sort of) books I've read so far in 2012.

1. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by JK Rowling
I'm re-reading the series in order, slowly. Phoenix is one of my favorites, certainly one of the darker books, as we get to see Harry develop undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder.

2. Threat Warning by John Gilstrap
Gilstrap's action hero that runs a security firm and hostage retrieval service gets totally wrapped up in domestic terrorism. With some quibbles, I enjoyed this book.

3. The Mirage Man: Bruce Ivins, the Anthrax Attacks, and America's Rush to War by David Willman
There are many lessons one can take from this book. One is: If you're going to give a PhD in bacteriology top secret clearance and access to deadly pathogens, it might be a good idea to occasionally run a psychological screen on him. Two, if you are ever caught in a widely televised criminal investigation, hire the best damn lawyer you can get because the system will chew you up and spit you out. Three, do not believe anything the media says. This was a very disconcerting lesson, because Willman tracked many of the news stories by major news sources like Brian Ross at ABC World News only to find that Ross's sources were people who were passing on gossip and who had no real access to the investigation. In fact, if there's anything I got from this book, it's that the media can become a sort of echo chamber in these types of cases, where so-called experts don't have primary access to information, but talk to friends of friends of friends and pretty soon rumor and innuendo gains the weight of fact. Also, the FBI and the Justice Department leaks like a sieve.

4. The Defector by Daniel Silva
I'm almost caught up in reading the Gabriel Allon series. Gabriel is a spy/assassin for Israeli intelligence and the plots are extremely complicated. I'm not as impressed as many critics seem to be with Silva's ability to write action, but I like his sense of place and his tradecraft and the complexity of his plots. This one involves a Russian agent who defected to the UK (with Gabriel's help) who either returns to Russian or is coerced to do so. Then Allon's wife is kidnapped...

5. Killer's Wedge by Ed McBain
I meant to write an entire blog post about this book, but got busy with other things. McBain's backlist has been re-released as ebooks and one of my goals is to read much of it, which ought to take years. Killer's Wedge is an 87th precinct book that was published in 1959. In it, the widow of a crook who died in prison walks into the 87th precinct with a gun and a suspected bottle of nitroglycerin and holds the squad hostage, waiting for Steve Carella to show up so she can kill him in revenge. Meanwhile, Steve's investigating a "locked-room suicide" that he thinks might be a homicide, but he can't figure out how it would have been accomplished, since the victim hanged himself inside a locked room. This is a riveting book and McBain's writing energy is amazing. I also note with some chagrin that he breaks one of the cardinal rules I often lecture new writers about - shifting POV. The narrative shifts among the various cops and the woman in the squad and it's just so deftly done that it works - but I'm fairly sure in less gifted hands it would have been a confusing mess. A terrific book that I highly recommend.

6. An Election by John Scalzi
A short story by SF/F writer Scalzi (available as an ebook for 99 cents). Scalzi is probably best known for his mostly military SF book series starting with OLD MAN'S WAR, but he also writes almost political satire SF that's very damned funny. And that's what this hilarious short story is: it's the future and well over a hundred different alien races live on Earth. The main character, a human, decides to run for city council in a district that hasn't had a human councilman elected in over 30 years, due primarily to the fact that humans are a dramatic minority in that district. For instance, one of his opponent's entire campaign platform is a rewriting of the laws that would allow people's pets to be eaten. Hilarious.

7. The Tale of the Wicked by John Scalzi.
Also a short story for 99 cents. More military SF with space battles and spaceships with artificial intelligence. Somewhat humorous, but thoughtful with some nice twists and perhaps, inside jokes for the SF lover.

8. Breaking Point by Dana Haynes
I'm not entirely sure how to describe this book. I really enjoyed Haynes's first novel, CRASHERS, about a NTSB team of investigators that investigate plane crashes. In his second novel, he takes damn near everything - terrorists, plane crashes, cutting edge weapons, assassins, forest fires, dirigibles, hackers... and it's thrown into one huge pot of gumbo and although fairly entertaining, it's about as plausible as Star Trek (and probably a lot less coherent). There are also about 800 characters to keep track of. So I'm not entirely sure I recommend it. CRASHERS is significantly better, but if you liked CRASHERS, you'd probably like this one reasonably well.

9. Taken by Robert Crais
Well, it's Elvis Cole and Joe Pike and the plot is fairly interesting, if someone chopped to pieces and scattered across the pages. It's rather hard to follow and there are some continuity issues, but I enjoyed it for the most part.

10. To The Hilt by Dick Francis
I've long cited this as one of my favorite novels. I still probably will, but people change, even if the books don't. I haven't read this in 8 or 9 years. One reason for that is it's largely about a man, Alexander Kinloch, who is a painter who lives out in the mountains of Scotland by himself, but gets called back to London when his mother's second husband has a heart attack. He gets drawn into trying to get his stepfather's business back on its feet after one of its officers embezzled millions of dollars. He also gets tangled up in a lot of asset management and family politics. I last read this when my father was going through the last stages of cancer and much of the sickbed issues described in the book came back to me hard. Also, I last read this before I was a full-time writer. I identified strongly with a character who just wanted to go off by himself and paint (i.e., write). Almost a decade later my life has changed, as, apparently, have I, and my identification with the character is different - although I can definitely relate to how Alexander gets pulled into situations he doesn't want to simply because, well, somebody has to and apparently he's the one most willing to. Still a terrific book and I was struck by how strong the writing was in this one. Still highly recommended.

Cheers,
Mark Terry

Adjustments

January 24, 2012
You've no doubt heard the statement that doing the same thing over and over again in hopes of a different outcome is the definition of insanity? I don't know who said. I seem to recall it credited to Albert Einstein, but I probably read it on Facebook, which has a bit of a credibility problem when it comes to passing on inaccurate information.

I don't know if it's the definition of insanity, but I think sometimes you have to step back and say, "So, how's that working for you?" (I've heard this credited to Dr. Phil, but then again, who cares?)

Which is a long ways of saying, er, I parted ways with my literary agent yesterday (again). Yes, again. We parted ways a year or two ago, and then about two days later I got an offer for which I needed her services. So we decided to give it a go (again) and frankly...

Well, as I told her yesterday, the publishing industry has changed so dramatically in the last two years that I just don't foresee writing anything in the next year (or even two) that that will be offered to her to market or, for that matter, offered to a legacy publisher.

Unlike, say, Joe Konrath, who argues you should never go to a legacy publisher (unless that "legacy" publisher is Amazon, but that's a discussion for another day), I think a more reasonable response is: It depends.

I think there are authors out there that have reasonably effective careers with legacy publishers. I think there are clearly some self-published authors these days who are breaking out in the new e-book self-publishing environment (not necessary as many as you might think, given the deluge of titles being e-self-published). And I believe there are many so-called mid-list authors who are doing at least as well, and oftentimes better, by self-publishing than they were with their legacy publishers.

If I fall into any of these categories, it's this last one. I've never particularly felt like I was successful enough to be called "mid-list," but the fact is, over the last several months I've made more money off my Kindle and other e-book sales than I've made off any of my other book sales. Enough, in fact, that I can conceive of it actually being a reasonable part of my yearly income, at least if it continues the way it has lately. Which prompted my wife, something of a publishing agnostic (or perhaps even fiction publishing atheist), to say, "E-books are the way to go." She also said, "When are you going to let your agent know?"

I think it's possible that in the future I will write something that I want to show to a legacy publisher, assuming that in that time frame there are any legacy publishers around whose contracts won't seem like a joke. A friend commented to me yesterday that he bought THE FALLEN for $1.98 and wondered what the royalty must be like, then joked that "they say publishing is a low-profit business." Well, let me put it this way.

If I had self-published THE FALLEN as an e-book and were pricing it not at $1.98, but at $2.99, my royalty would have been $2.04 per copy sold. If I had self-published it at $1.98, that would have qualified for the 30% royalty rate, which would come to 59 cents ($0.59) per copy. As it stands, due to the contract I had with the publisher (negotiated by my agent), and which fell into the nebulous period before anyone started to dig in on e-book royalty rates (or, perhaps, my agent just didn't know any better and neither did I), the e-book royalty rate is, I believe, identical to my hardcover royalty rate, i.e., 10%. That is to say, when it sells for $1.98, I get, well, $0.198, or about 20 cents per copy. (And for the hardcovers, which have only sold a few hundred copies, as far as I know, I get 10% of $25.95, or $2.595).

There's another factor, and it's not insignificant. My publisher writes royalty checks once a year. Last year I believe I got paid in May. That did not include sales from that year, but were for the previous year.  It also gets routed through my agent, who takes 15%. Then I get a check and pay the federal government 24% and Michigan 4%.

For the most part (not Smashwords), with Kindle and Barnes & Noble, I get money direct-deposited into my checking account at the end of each month. I'm not 100% sure with B&N if there's lag time, I'll have to check. With Kindle, the deposit into the account runs 60 days behind, so, for example, my payment at the end of January reflects sales from November.

So, there were financial reasons, for sure. There are plenty of marketing reasons as well.

There are creative reasons, too. Here's some truth. I've written any number of non-Derek Stillwater things over the last few years that my agent didn't like or even refused to market. And this goes to other issues of personality and approach to business, but sometimes the feedback I got was, "I hate it. Try something else."

Except you know what? I didn't hate it. I thought it was great. And I want to write them and complete them. Let the readers decide. And several of the projects I have planned for this year are works my agent didn't like, so I knew that even if I did want to market them, she wouldn't (which begs the question of who works for who, but this post is long enough already).

So, to get to the point. I've made some adjustments. I've tried not to burn any bridges. There's a film agent still dealing with my works and she would probably be interested in looking at any future ones I write and publish. If I get into a contract negotiation that is over my head, I'm going to take the advice of Dean Wesley Smith and hire an IP attorney to negotiate it - for a flat fee.

Times have changed. I expect they will continue to change. But I'm trying to adapt with those changes.

Thoughts?

Details

January 16, 2012
I recently read a thriller by a bestselling thriller author. He's not a brand name, per se, but if you read a lot of thrillers you'd probably recognize the name. I've read several of his books in this series and I like his books a lot. We have very similar story-telling sensibilities, by which I mean if you like my books you'd like his and if you like his books you'd like mine. (Which sort of kills me, because he has a lot more readers than I do).

Let me say from the outset that when I finished the book I really enjoyed it. It was full of action, had a reasonably thought-provoking premise and it was, for the most part, an enjoyable read.

Why "for the most part", Mark?

Therein lies a problem. At one point in the book we get a chapter from the POV of a little girl who is Muslim. We are led to believe that she lives in the Detroit area. Her father drives her to school in Detroit. Much is made out of how where she lives has the highest density of Muslims in the U.S.

Then, it is indicated that they lived in Flint, Michigan.

Okay. I'm a life-long resident of the area. So there are some problems here.

First, Flint is not a suburb of Detroit. It's 60 or 70 miles away and although you might get commuters from one to the other, really, nobody who lives in Flint is taking their kids to school in Detroit. (And for god sakes, why would you want to? Detroit's got one of the worst school systems in the country).

No, the writer meant Dearborn, Michigan, which does have the largest Muslim population in the U.S., and in fact, is typically described as having the highest numbers of Arabs outside of the Middle East.

So another problem. Living in Dearborn and going to school in Detroit. Um... why? But that's not really the point, because Dearborn is never mentioned. Flint is.

In other words, I'm fairly convinced the writer remembered some news story about Dearborn and never bothered to double-check or, for that matter, even look at a map. And this mistake isn't an isolated mistake. It's pretty much ongoing for the first third of the book, repeated over and over again.

Okay. So is this writer a sloppy researcher? That's not my impression. The man knows a lot about weapons, bullets, hate groups, Delta Forces, special forces weapons and tactics, presidential security, etc. There may have been some "hand-waving" when it comes to the hacker stuff (there almost always is), but I know he wrote about his research on his blog and how he went to the Special Forces training program and they let him shoot guns and run through the obstacle course and watch them train and allowed him to ask questions.

So no. I don't think he's a particularly sloppy researcher. But man, he screwed up.

I think you can go overboard with the authenticity, or at least, worrying about it. I try to get things right, but there comes a time where I just have to write the damned thing.

I remember someone complaining about The Da Vinci Code because he had the character on the wrong side of the Seine in Paris. And although I think you can fault Dan Brown for a lot of things (like sloppy writing), I'm not sure I'd fault him for sloppy research.

It's just hard to get every single freakin' pesky detail right.

Just days ago Barry Eisler (who did not write the book I'm bitching about here) said he was going to Thailand or someplace to research a short story. Which definitely gives me a WTF moment. Clearly his self-publishing ventures with short stories are making him some money to justify that.

On the other hand, Dean Wesley Smith has said at least once on his blog that you can waste a lot of time on research and maybe you should just make stuff up and get on with writing the story. And Stephen King once made a comment about if you don't know the details of (for instance) Moscow, why don't you set the story in someplace you do know (like Derry, Maine, Stevie?).

I'm somewhere in between. Of course, the novel I'm writing now takes place mostly in Moscow (Russia, not Idaho) and I've never been there and these sorts of locations sort of drive me crazy because I want to get it right but I constantly ask myself if I should have just written a different story.

I will say this. Despite liking this guy's books a lot, I almost quit reading it with his repeated Flint, Michigan screw-up. I kept getting tossed right out of the story and it was pissing me off (and, alas, there may have been some sour grapes, because he sells a LOT more books than I do, mistake or not). So getting it right can make the difference between a satisfied reader and a non-reader.

What do you think? Ever been thrown out of a book by something you know is wrong? Are there levels of mistakes you're willing to forgive and some you're not?

Inspiration

January 10, 2011
I've been looking for inspiration.

No, not looking for ideas for stories. I'm looking for a broader type of inspiration - the type that gets you up in the morning eager to get to work.

For seven years that's rarely been a problem, no matter what type of writing projects I've been working on. I always looked forward to getting into the office.

Starting this year, less so. Some of it is simply that it's winter and I'm not that eager to get out of a nice warm bed. Some of it, though, is a little more problematic.

I know some of you dream of being a full-time writer. I was for years. I spent most of my free time writing. At lunch, in the evenings, on the weekends.

Then I became a full-time writer and for the most part, I was still eager to write all the time. But that's hard to do. Really. And writing for a living often means you have to write things you're not really all that excited about writing. I'm careful to point out that I can often be interested about things intensely while I'm working on them, but they may not necessarily be intrinsically interesting to me. In other words, once I'm done working on them, I go off and pursue passions, rather than "interests."

I think I may have returned to a little earlier time now, a time when I wanted to focus more of my energies on fiction of one sort or another. I definitely find if I don't, the rest of the writing thing becomes work. If I just carve out some time to work on fiction, fit it in as a priority, then I get to my desk with enthusiasm.

I'm currently working on a short story, "Humanitarian Aid" and a novel, THE SINS OF THE FATHER. Both have been limping along for a while, but by pushing deeper into both of them, I seem to have found that enthusiasm for writing that seemed to be lacking. Perhaps it was all there to begin with, but I just wasn't giving it enough time to get into the zone. (Or I just really need a real vacation).

What do you do to find inspiration?

2012 Resolutions & Goals

December 30, 2011
I almost didn't put these up here, because, well, it's really none of your business, right? Anyway, here they are, broken into 4 categories of sorts.

Business

1. Earn $80,000+
It's do-able, I've done it before, and it solves a lot of money problems when I make that much. But I also remind myself that if I spend all my time working on projects I don't enjoy just because they're big money-makers, I'm on the wrong path.

2. Publish 3 reports re. Terry Communications, LLC.
A couple years ago I tried newsletter publishing and found I didn't really have the time for it (or financial resources). Last year I spent some time on some web-based things, but didn't follow through because my heart really wasn't in it. This year I'm thinking of publishing a couple reports directly and selling them myself and/or via various e-publishers. These would be the types of business reports I write for clients already. We'll see how this goes.

3. Write a nonfiction book proposal.
Almost didn't put this one down. I wrote one last year we didn't sell. I'm not 100% sure what I want to write about, although I have a couple ideas. Once I settle on an idea, I need to do research. But it's on my radar, so again, we'll see.

Creative
I've separated this for the first time from business.

4. Finish THE SINS OF THE FATHER and market and/or publish it.

5. Finish short story, "Humanitarian Aid" and market it.

6. Finish another novel and market and/or publish it (CRYSTAL STORM, CAPITOL SECRETS, A PLAGUE OF STARS or something else).

7. Write another Derek Stillwater novella and publish it with DIRE STRAITS.

Health & Fitness

8. Lose 18 pounds.

9. Run 2 or 3 organized 5Ks

10. Run/walk 7 or 8 miles at least once.

Sanchin-Ryu
I haven't numbered these because I don't see them (except the last one) as an actual goal, but rather more of a focus for the first part of the year.

CBAs (combined basics advanced): Work in particular on San-Go and San-Ju.
These are combinations and they both, not surprisingly, involve a fair number of kicks. San-Go, for instance, is 3 kicks, front, back, to the side, all without putting your foot down in between. These two CBAs I feel are my weakest, so I'm going to put special emphasis on them for a while until I either get sick of working on them or feel like my improvement has reached a temporarily acceptable level.

Forms: Work in particular on Empi-Uraken.
I know all the steps, and there are always other things to work on, but Empi-Uraken is one that eludes me most in terms of "why am I doing what I'm doing?" Parts of it I understand. But there are some spins that I'm not terribly proficient at and I'm also not clear on why I would want to do them and when. I could just ask, of course, but in my experience that gets me only partway toward where I need to get; I need to experiment and work on it and then I see things as possibilities. Also, I need to practice the spins to the point where I could actually imagine doing them in a real-world situation without having to think about them.

Kata: Learn the entire choreography to Sanchin-San.
I've been a shodan for a little over a year. There's no rule that I'm aware of that says you need to learn Sanchin-San to get to nidan (2nd degree black belt), but Sanchin-San is essentially the first kata (technically second, but anyway...) and I've worked on it and probably know the steps of about the first 2/3, although it's not clear to me how accurate what I know actually is. As the thing I wrote about Empi-Uraken above might suggest, knowing the moves and knowing the applications are two different things. This year I want to learn all the steps to Sanchin-San (About a hundred or so). Learning what it's all about, well, that's another 20 or 30 years of practice and study.

P.S. One thing I've learned over the years is two-fold: 1) Sometimes I don't meet my goals and resolutions for a number of reasons - sometimes because they require involvement of other people and... 2) Sometimes my priorities change. With #2 and #3 I can imagine that happening fairly easily, simply by deciding they're interesting ideas, but I don't have the time or enthusiasm needed to actually make them work. I would point out also that #2 and #3 are the ones I have the most doubts about anyway. Well, except #8. No doubt it's a great idea, but...