This is my annual end-of-the-year post, where I discuss my writing and the books I’ve read. No movie talk this year. I watched a lot of ’em, some good, some bad, but couldn’t even begin to come up with a list of the best ones. I’ll try to do better about that next year, when I may bring back my end-of-the-month updates, if I can remember to do it. (Remembering anything is more of a challenge than it used to be.) So . . .
Writing
At the beginning of the year, I got this crazy idea: what if I could average 500 pages of fiction per month? That would give me 6000 pages for the year, something I had never achieved before. Was it possible? Was it even wise to attempt it? I’d thought about it in previous years but always given up by sometime in the spring. 500 pages a month, month after month, is just too hard a pace to maintain. Fall behind, and it’s almost impossible to catch up.
But wouldn’t it be cool, I asked myself, to stack up twelve reams of paper and then stand beside them to illustrate how much I’d written? There were a couple of problems with that. One, it’s a stupid, show-offy idea. So you write 6000 pages. If they’re not any good, all you’ve got is a 6000-page-high pile of crap. Two, I don’t have twelve reams of paper, and since everything’s digital now, I probably won’t ever need that much paper again and refuse to waste the money buying it for some dumb picture. So, no photo.
But yes, I wrote my 6000 pages. 6017, to be precise. Looked pretty iffy for a while, but I made it. Being a dinosaur from the typewriter era, I don’t keep a word count. It’s all about the pages with me and always has been. But I know that many pages comes out to be somewhere between 1.3 and 1.4 million words, the most I’ve ever written in a year. It breaks down to 16½ books under seven different names, including my own, and about half a dozen short stories. It also includes my first original e-book, RANCHO DIABLO: HANGROPE LAW.
On the publishing front, I had 16 books published in 2010 (books written vs. books published usually comes out pretty close to the same like that), under six different names (all of the above except my own, but REDEMPTION, KANSAS will be out in March with my name on it). Plus a few short stories.
Will I ever write that much again? I don’t know, of course, but I have my doubts. While I’m sure there are some crappy pages among the 6017, I think for the most part they’re pretty good. I think at least a couple of the books I wrote this year rank among my best ever. But the readers are the ultimate judges of that. However, that pace is a little too much, even for me. Barring unforeseen circumstances, I’ll do my million words again in 2011 – I already have about 1.1 million under contract – but unless something else sells or I find myself with more time to work on spec projects than I expect, I don’t think we’re looking at 6000 pages again. Probably more like 5800.
My biggest goal is to get everything back on schedule again. My primary editor has been remarkably patient about me turning in books late. I really appreciate that, and I’m going to do everything in my power to get things squared away so that by the middle of the year, the books will be coming in on time again. There’ll be a few logjams along the way – I have three books due on April 1, for example – but I’ll work through those.
So what it boils down to is that I wrote a lot, I think I did pretty good work, and I intend to keep going as long as the editors have faith in me and the readers enjoy what I’m doing. And none of it would be possible without all the help I get from Livia, Shayna, and Joanna, so a great big thanks goes out to them as well.
Reading
After a few down years, I got back on a more normal pace in my reading. I read 146 books in 2010, which I consider a good year. I read a wide variety of books, in many different genres, as I usually do, some old, some new. I read a number of books in manuscript because the authors wanted blurbs from me, something I’m always glad to do as long as I have the time. Coming up with a list of ten favorites wasn’t easy (it never is), but here are the books I liked the best this year, in the order in which I read them:
THE BUNTLINE SPECIAL, Lou Cameron
ONE FOR HELL, Jada M. Davis
THE HARDBOILED DICKS, Ron Goulart, ed.
THE CROSSROADS BLUES, Troy D. Smith
THE TOYMAN RIDES AGAIN, Robert S. Napier
THE WALK, Lee Goldberg
RAINWATER, Sandra Brown
SIEGE, Brian Michael Bendis
DEATH NOTICE, Todd Ritter
TARZAN AND THE LION MAN, Edgar Rice Burroughs
Troy Smith’s Nashville-set crime novel is one I read in manuscript, and I don’t believe it’s out yet. The others are all either in print or easily available in used copies on-line. A couple of them, THE HARDBOILED DICKS and TARZAN AND THE LION MAN, are rereads of books that I loved when I was a kid, and obviously I still do. And yes, I’m aware it’s an odd list overall. I’m an odd reader. There were dozens of other books that could have made this list, and might have if I’d been coming up with it on a different day. I don’t believe I read a really bad book all year (mostly because if I start one I don’t like, I don’t finish it). But I’m happy with the mix and hope to keep it up.
In conclusion . . .
2010 was a pretty good year, very, very busy but enjoyable for the most part. I was able to stay on a fairly even keel and get a lot done. If 2011 continues that trend, I’ll be pleased.
As you can see, it’s the usual Hitt formula with the hero/heel juggling three women. Clem is a little more of a heel than some Hitt protagonists, as he continually mooches money off the women in his life, but he’s not as bad as some and wants to do the right thing, he just can’t seem to figure out what it is sometimes. Common Hitt themes such as fear of pregnancy, dirty pictures, and lesbianism show up, too, although for the most part SUMMER OF SIN revolves around money: Clem’s desperate, grasping need for it and his inability to get enough of it. There are a couple of crime angles, including a murder and a blackmail plot, but neither of them really amount to much. The ending is a series of abrupt deus ex machina twists, as if Hitt realized he had gotten enough words and wanted to wrap things up so he could get on to the next book. (I know that feeling!)
So why, given all that, should you read SUMMER OF SIN if you come across a copy of it? Because nobody was ever better than Orrie Hitt at creating an atmosphere of sheer, gritty desperation. Take away the phony happy endings that were probably required by the publishers, and Hitt’s books are the noirest of the noir, inhabited by people who don’t have enough money or love or anything else, people who numb themselves with sex and booze in order to cope with their grinding unhappiness, people who go down the wrong paths knowingly because they can’t seem to find the right ones. Even the rich people in Hitt’s novels are flawed and miserable. SUMMER OF SIN doesn’t belong in the top rank of Hitt novels, but it’s well worth reading because it captures that small-town darkness so vividly, yet still manages to hold out a small sliver of hope, whether it’s really believable or just another trick of fate. I had a great time reading this book, just as I do with nearly all of Orrie Hitt’s novels.
I’ve seen Australian thriller writer Matthew Reilly’s novels around for a number of years now and even used to own a few of them I never got around to reading. However, I recently came across HELL ISLAND, a slim little volume that was written originally for the Australian government to give away in an effort to promote reading, as Reilly explains in his introduction. At 30,000 words or so, it seemed worth taking the chance, especially since it features one of Reilly’s series heroes, Marine Captain Shane Schofield.
The plot is fairly simple: the U.S. aircraft carrier Nimitz has stopped at a remote Pacific research station known as Hell Island, and something has gone terribly wrong. Four teams of high-level operatives – Delta Force, Navy SEALS, 82nd Airborne, and Force Recon Marines (the latter commanded by Schofield) – are parachuted in to find out what happened and set it right. Chaos ensues.
Or to boil it down even more, to only four words: Apes with machine guns.
If that doesn’t get your blood to pumping, well, then . . . you’re not a 12-year-old boy at heart, I suppose. I am, at least some of the time, and so I really wanted to like this book. It has plenty of action, some of the characters are interesting, and it reads fast. However, Reilly’s frantic, hyper-kinetic writing style, with its abundance of italics and exclamation points, didn’t really work that well for me. I found just enough intriguing in HELL ISLAND that I might read something else by Reilly. It may take a while for me to get around to it, though. If you’re already a fan of his work I’m sure you’ll want to read this one, too, or if you’d just like to sample it, this is a good way to do that.
Judas Payne: A Weird Western / Webb's Weird Wild West: Western Tales of Horror (Wildside Double #11)
There’s a line in the author’s bio at the back of this book I really like: “Michael Hemmingson writes books in every possible genre he can.” That’s my kind of writer. I’ve read Hemmingson’s Orrie Hitt pastiche, THE TROUBLE WITH TRAMPS, but JUDAS PAYNE is the first Western by him I’ve read. It’s an unusual book, and it’s a fine example of taking a traditional plot and doing something new with it.
In JUDAS PAYNE, you’ve got homesteaders, a hellfire-and-brimstone preacher, Indians, a friendly sheriff, a wagon train, a gang of vicious outlaws and slavers led by a former cavalry colonel, a mysterious gunfighter, and a young hero trying to make his way in a world full of tragedy and strife. Sounds like a pretty traditional Western, doesn’t it? Oh, yeah, the young hero is the son of Satan. Literally. Satan takes on the form of a handsome, wounded Indian, and seduces the wife of the preacher. Lots of horrific things happen, to go along with shootouts and fistfights and assorted other Western plot elements.
Hemmingson writes in a somewhat formal style reminiscent of the TV show DEADWOOD, and it’s very effective given the Gothic overtones of this yarn. It’s a short, fast-moving novel, and spawn of Satan or not, Judas Payne winds up making a fine, likable hero. Everything is set up for sequels, and I hope we get them.
JUDAS PAYNE is half of Wildside Double #11, published by Wildside Press. On the other side of the book, continuing the Weird Western theme, is Don Webb’s short story collection, WEBB’S WEIRD WILD WEST. I’ve met Webb several times at conventions but haven’t read any of his work yet. These stories look good, and I plan to get to them soon. In the meantime, if you enjoy a definitely off-beat Western, check out Michael Hemmingson’s JUDAS PAYNE. Recommended.
If you’re a fan of the Marvel Universe and haven’t read MARVELS, the graphic novel by Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross, you really should. It’s an everyman’s history of the Marvel Universe from the Golden Age through the beginnings of the Silver Age, told from the point of view of news photographer Phil Sheldon. And it’s wonderful stuff, certainly one of the best, if not the best, graphic novels I’ve ever read. Of course, I may think that because it retells from that slightly different point of view many of the stories I remember reading in their original versions when I was a kid.
Now there’s a sequel, MARVELS: EYE OF THE CAMERA, written by Kurt Busiek and Roger Stern, with art by Jay Anacleto. It picks up just about where the first one left off and carries the stories on through the Seventies and Eighties, when a lot of things changed in the Marvel Universe. The simple days of the Sixties, when Stan Lee wrote nearly everything and Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Dick Ayers, and Don Heck drew nearly everything, were gone. A lot of different creative voices were at work then, and the stories got longer, more complicated, and considerably darker (although it’s hard to get much darker than some of those early Spider-Man stories by Stan and Steve). As a regular reader of almost everything Marvel published from 1964 on, I knew when things began to shift during the Seventies. Some of the stories didn’t seem to be as much fun, but I figured part of that was because I was older, and we know that nothing is ever quite as good as it is when you first discover it.
During the Eighties, though, things definitely changed, and it wasn’t just me. Part of it was economic: the rise of comics shops and the direct market changed the way publishers did business, and that leaked over into the creative end of it. Big, company-wide “event” stories, like Marvel’s SECRET WARS and DC’s CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS, became popular. So did changing characters’ costumes, and sometimes the people wearing the costumes were even different than what we were used to. Everything seemed to be a state of flux. I’ll be honest – I didn’t like it very much. But I found enough to enjoy in comics that I kept reading.
It was all the stuff that happened in the Nineties that drove me screaming for the hills and caused me not to even pick up a comic book for eight or ten years . . . but that’s a different post.
To get back to MARVELS: EYE OF THE CAMERA, the real “eye” of Busiek and Stern’s story isn’t the camera at all, but rather the man holding the camera. (And if the fact that Phil Sheldon has only one eye isn’t a rather obvious bit of symbolism, I don’t know what is.) The story doesn’t just retell Marvel history from that era, although there’s plenty of it in there, and an appendix in the back of the book even details which issues all the events came from. The central focus of the book is Phil himself, his personal story and how it’s reflected in all the superhero chaos that seems to be going on all the time. There’s some sly humor here, as the writers consider what it would be like for average people to be witness to all these earth-shaking events over and over again. It’s a little like Norvell Page’s Spider stories. Just how often can New York be destroyed, anyway, before it’s back to normal the next issue? Quite a few, evidently, if we’re to believe the pulps and the comics.
Busiek and Stern wind all this up in a closing chapter that’s almost guaranteed to leave you a little misty-eyed, especially if you’re a writer. I haven’t said anything about the art. It’s pretty good. Not as good as Alex Ross’s in the original, but Jay Anacleto does a fine job at what must have been a huge task of capturing the look of scores of different characters. All in all I’d rank this one just below the original MARVELS, and it’s definitely worth reading. Highly recommended.
It was 34 years ago today I opened the mailbox at my parents’ house and took out a check for my first professional fiction sale. I’ve written about that day and the story involved here, so as usual I won’t repeat all the details. I can’t let the occasion pass without at least mentioning it, though, and I can’t help but think about all the changes that have occurred since then. That story was written on a manual typewriter, stuck in an envelope, taken to the post office, and mailed. The check for it, also filled out on a typewriter, came back to me in the mail. Nothing digital involved anywhere in the process. On a personal level, I was not only 34 years younger, I was 60 or 70 pounds lighter, my eyesight was better (not good, just better), and I didn’t have to say “Huh?” a dozen times whenever somebody tried to talk to me. I didn’t have a beard, but I had more hair on top of my head than I do now. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I had a full head of hair, though. I was born balding, and I stayed that way. I was already married, but we didn’t have any children. That was still almost eight years away. I was working for my dad and had no idea what the life of a full-time freelance writer was really like. All I knew was that I wanted it.
So, 34 years later, after being a writer for more than half my life, has it been worth it? From a financial standpoint, almost certainly I could have made more money doing something else, and my family definitely suffered during some of the really lean times. But although it seems like I’ve been chained to the keyboard for years, I know that’s not really the case. The freedom writing has given me allowed me to be very much involved with the lives of my kids as they grew up, and I’m a lot more proud of the way they’ve turned out than I am of anything I’ve written. Writing was a means to that end, though. It’s also enabled me to be around to help out when other family members needed me, as they’ve helped me countless times. From a creative standpoint, I’ve always been a storyteller, and I’ve been able to spin lots and lots of what I hope are good yarns. They haven’t always been the stories I might have told if things had worked out differently, but I’ve always found something worthwhile to tell in all of them. And when I think about the millions of times over the past 34 years that someone has sat down, read something I wrote, and enjoyed it, well, you just can’t beat that feeling.
Worth it? In the words of the TV commercials, it’s been priceless.
As further evidence that I’m either a brilliant iconoclast tilting at the conventional wisdom or else just too damn weird for my own good, I watched the universally-reviled JONAH HEX and found it surprisingly entertaining.
Now, I’ve been reading Jonah Hex in comic books for close to forty years now, and don’t get me wrong: JONAH HEX the movie is nowhere near a faithful adaptation of the character. The back-story is the same, but just about everything else is different, as the filmmakers give Hex the supernatural power of being able to bring the dead back to life long enough to talk to them and find out things he needs to know and have him fighting an old enemy who has built a super-weapon (originally designed by Eli Whitney) that he intends to use in a series of terrorist attacks meant to bring the country to its knees. Hex, who at the beginning of the movie is a bounty hunter like in the comics, is recruited by the government to stop the bad guy’s plan.
Yes, it’s silly, but for somebody who’s never read the comics (like the people watching it with me), I think it’s a serviceable plot. Josh Brolin does a good job as Hex, although the scarred-face makeup didn’t look quite right to me, and John Malkovich chews the scenery just fine as the bad guy. Megan Fox plays a whore who’s an old friend of Hex’s but doesn’t have a lot to do.
I do have some complaints about the movie that have nothing to do with whether or not it’s faithful to the comic book. The movie calls itself a Western, and yet nearly the entire thing takes place in South Carolina and Virginia. It seems to me it would have been more effective if the writers had found some way to move the action out west. Also, the big centennial celebration at the end where the final showdown takes place never would have been held at night. In 1871, such things were held during the day. Also, for a movie with as many special effects as this one has, at times it looked surprisingly cheap, like the producers couldn’t afford enough extras to make things realistic.
A lot of critics complained about how short JONAH HEX is. Not counting the credits at the end, it runs about 75 minutes. Well, that didn’t bother me. There’s always a lot going on, and it didn’t seem like a particularly short movie. Hey, a lot of B-movies from Thirties, Forties, and Fifties managed to pack plenty of stuff into 75 minutes. I do think this one could have used a little more exposition, as some of the plot was a little hard to follow, but another five minutes or so would have done it.
Overall, I wouldn’t say JONAH HEX is a good movie, but it entertained me more than I expected it to. If you can just forget about the comic book, or have no knowledge of the comic book, it’s an okay way to pass some time.
These are the books I received as Christmas presents from Livia, Shayna, and Joanna this morning.
Since Friday falls on Christmas Eve this week, I thought it would be a good idea to read a Christmas-themed mystery as my Forgotten Book. Or in this case, re-read one.
When I was growing up in the Sixties, Carter Brown books were everywhere. You couldn’t find a paperback rack without at least a couple of Carter Brown titles in it, and the used bookstores had shelves after shelves of them. And I was a fan. What teenage boy wouldn’t be? The books had fast-paced plots, racy dialogue, and McGinnis covers. I gobbled ’em up.
One of them I remember reading was A CORPSE FOR CHRISTMAS, but that’s all I recalled about it. So I scrounged up a copy (ordered it off ABE, to be precise) and read it again. The results were sort of mixed. This is one of the books featuring Lt. Al Wheeler, probably the best-known of Brown’s detective characters. I’ve always liked Al, and he’s his usual abrasive but charming self here. The action takes place during the last few days before Christmas, and at one point the murderer wears a Santa Claus suit, but overall there’s not much Christmas atmosphere in this one, despite the title. The fact that the fictional Pine City, where Al works as a detective for the sheriff’s department, is in Southern California probably has something to do with that. And Brown’s writing was never really very strong on any sort of atmosphere to start with, being concerned mostly with plot and dialogue.
Add to that an unimpressive cover and a fairly bland plot about the murder of a guy who owns a public relations company, and you have a book that’s something of a disappointment. However, it does pick up steam late, with more murders and a flurry of plot twists (the Carter Brown novels tend to be fairly complex and usually well-plotted), so I wound up enjoying it enough to consider the couple of hours it took to read it not wasted time. And it’s put me in the mood to read more Carter Brown books, although who knows when or if I’ll actually get around to it.
Now, as a bonus since the book I picked didn’t work out quite as well as I’d hoped it would, here’s a rerun of a post I wrote back in 2005, before the Forgotten Books series began and I suspect before many of you were reading this blog:
I'm a nostalgic kind of guy, and let's face it, I never really grew up to start with. I still read comics and pulps and old paperbacks. But some of my interests have faded away over the years. During my junior high and high school years, I read lots of British mysteries (along with all other sorts of mysteries). Many of them were by Agatha Christie. I haven't read anything by her in years, though.
Sure, it's a hokey set-up, and characters tend to have conversations with each other about things they already know, simply as a means of filling in the readers on the backstory, but I'm willing to forgive that. The characters themselves are pretty interesting and Christie does a good job of sketching them in without going overboard on the background. The prose is fast-paced and quite readable, and I haven't figured out who the killer is yet. (Unlike a novel I read recently by a current big-name thriller writer, where I saw every single plot twist for the entire book in the first fifty pages or so.)
So, while I doubt that I'll ever gobble down Agatha Christie mysteries like I did in the old days, I'm having a lot of fun with this one and will probably read a few more now and then.
