WHAT IF BILL WATTERSON WANTED TO DO 3 ILLUSTRATIONS OF YOUR BOOK?

Legend has it that when Steven Spielberg called Bill Watterson to see if he wanted to make a movie, 

Bill wouldn’t even take the call.

That's reclusive.

 

PEARLS BEFORE SWINE creator, Stephan Pastis, wanted to meet with the man. 

He reached out.  Nothing.

So he penciled a strip where he won over a lady fair by claiming to draw CALVIN & HOBBES!

He emailed Bill the strip.  

(I'm impressed old Stephen had his email address!)

Bill wrote back!

Bill had a comic strip idea he wanted to run by Stephen!

 Bill said he knew that in Stephen's strip, he frequently make fun of his own art skills. 

And that Bill thought it would be funny to have poor Stephen get hit on the head or something and suddenly be able to draw. 

Then he’d step in and draw his comic strip for a few days!

AND THEN, STEPHEN SAID HE HAD 

ANOTHER IDEA!!

Bill was kind enough to go with it and the 3 strips can be found HERE, HERE, and HERE.

 

BUT IF BILL WATTERSON WANTED TO DO 3 SPECIFIC ILLUSTRATIONS FOR YOUR BOOK,

 WOULD YOU INSTEAD SUGGEST ANOTHER IDEA?

 

 

Or say STEPHEN KING wanted to write 3 specific interludes for your novel, 

WOULD YOU INSTEAD ASK HIM TO WRITE SOMETHING ELSE FOR YOU?

 I think what Stephen Pastis did and what Bill Watterson did in response says worlds of them both.

 

 

If your favorite living author wanted to collaborate with you in a specific way, would you instead suggest another?

Or would you just gratefully grab the opportunity to work with a giant?

WHEN A GOOD SERIES GOES BAD

OR HALF BAD ...

 

I waited TWO YEARS for this continuation of the always excellent DRESDEN FILES.

I remember asking myself as I listened to the first half of this audio book:

I WAITED TWO YEARS FOR THIS?

I thought to myself:

"Has Jim Butcher become CHARLAINE HARRIS?"

I mean there was even a Charlaine Harris sex scene in it, written as if by someone other than Jim Butcher.

Is Jim just grinding out the remaining 5 novels to complete his contract?

The first half was difficult to "read" and depressing.  Jim seemed to have lost his fire.  Worse, it seemed unnatural for him as if a ghost writer were writing the chapters.

Jim's inane use of Parkour clashed with his angst of having become the Winter Knight and his grief over losing Molly, his apprentice, to Mab as the Winter Lady.

The deadly spirit of the cursed island upon which Harry lived now talked naturally not with great effort to put words into speech rather than just being as one with the land.

The longer I listened the more it seemed a ghost writer was mangling the prose of delicate scenes in clumsy fashion. 

Words and phrases never used before were inserting themselves into the narrative.

Prior comments from past books were written as if new.

If I hadn't been listening to the audio book and on a long blood run, I probably would have stopped.


{And Amazon what is it with charging $13 for the Kindle book when you charge $17 for the hardcover?}

THEN ...

I reached the second half, and it seemed as if Jim had gotten his rhythm back.

The emotions and characters were taunt, tense, and back to form.

The moment when Harry stumbles upon his maimed friend, Michael was Jim at his best.  You bled with Harry.  Michael was as wise and strong and kind as I remembered.

The Harry I knew was back ...

But it was too good to last:

Harry's meeting with his little daughter was so badly handled and unbelievable that it took me right out of what should have been a very moving moment.


The thing about urban fantasies ...

   the interpersonal exchanges have to be dead-on for you to suspend disbelief about the supernatural elements.


The cliffhangers started to become classic again, and I started to breathe a sigh of relief.

Jim has become famous for his ever-worsening cliffhangers as his tale progresses that,

with the next chapter, either become worse or become resolved with clever plot threads from earlier in the book.

In this novel, a chapter ends with a certain death, no way out trap.  I truly did not know how he was going to get Harry out of this one.

The next chapter began THREE DAYS EARLIER inserting a deus ex machina in the mix! 

Jim, the Way Back Machine is not a plot devise.  It is a cheat ... and lazy writing.

There have been several brewing problems passed from one novel to the next, becoming worse with each novel. 

Like a ticking time bomb, they grew in intensity, and the reader tensed, knowing the explosion was coming ... just not when.

TICK.  TICK.  TICK. 

And with this novel ... you guessed it: FIZZLE.

They were resolved off camera, unsatisfactorily, and unrealistically.

It really is too bad, for in the last half of this book, Jim has done some of his best writing.

But with all the flaws and mis-fires, reading this book was like riding in a Rolls Royce with bad spark plugs and rotten shocks.

I suppose I should just be happy that the 14 books before this one were excellent, right?

HAVE YOU EVER LOOKED FORWARD TO A BOOK

ONLY TO BE DISAPPOINTED?

TO HAVE EVERYTHING ... AND NOTHING_THE TURQUOISE WOMAN

{Courtesy of the genius of Orietta Rossi}

I am Day.

I am Night.

I am the World.

I am the Turquoise Woman.

And a traveler like all of you.

You walk miles. I spin through the vastness of space, listening to the ghost songs of the solar winds.

I awakened already spinning through space, hugged to the sun's warmth by his invisible arms of gravity.

But the sun is a distant lover and following his own path through the stars, drawn by bonds of his own.

He is caught like a glistening bead of dew in the web of the solar system.

Together, he and my sisters journey in a cluster which is itself part of a moving community of stars you call the Milky Way.

Travelers all, we can neither turn to the left nor to the right of our own volition.

We are children of gravity and explosion, cast into the darkness by forces we little understand or know.

I used to envy you your freedom of movement, of choice. But the longer I watched your scurrying over my surface, the more a dark truth spoke to me:

You, too, are children of the gravity of your species and the explosion of the times around you which you little understand or know.

You bristle with denial?

If you cannot understand your own heart, how can you understand another's?

Which choices are yours totally?

As gravity and momentum send me on my path, so does your DNA, location, and experience spread the pattern of the paths before you.

You are no more free than I am or the goldfish wandering the narrow confines of its bowl.

From within its bowl, the world seems so large to the goldfish. Yet, it is trapped within invisible walls.

As are you.

Freedom is an illusion to the goldfish, to me, and to you.

Do we choose or do the choices choose us?
*

WHEN SEX IS NOT ENOUGH

I remember reading a post with a cover reveal ...

    The heroine was stranded in the desert.  A mysterious cowboy found her.  He had a past.  She had a past.  Both were looking to start anew.

   I was interested ...

then I scrolled down to the cover:

A bare chested model in jeans was pressing an enrapt, totally clothed woman against a tree.

I didn't think cowboys got wax jobs on their chests

in the Old West ...

     And if they were traveling across the desert, they buttoned up to keep from broiling like a crab.

Needless to say, I dropped the idea of buying that book.

I've read that the sexiest scene on series TV in the 80's was from the pilot of Magnum,

when he is bare chested (with hair) as he infiltrates an estate from the ocean.

But he was in swimming trunks in the sea ... an actual reason for the bare chest. 

But as a youngster seeing that scene, I still knew what it was for ... and almost switched the channel.

There was a similar scene from the first or second episode of LOST

where Evangeline Lilly stood exposed in the ocean in skimpy, wet attire. 

It came out of left field and totally took me out of the mystery and danger of the situation.  If I had been watching on TV, I would have switched channels.

But I had bought the DVD set and was watching it as I was exiled from my city due to Hurricane Rita.


The best stories…the ones that pulled me into the plot, made me root for the lovers, cry for them, bleed with them…

always had a very good reason for the sex. It was the proverbial icing on the cake or the cherry at the top of the sundae.

The books that are heavy on sex and short on deep POV, plot or motivation, I would think are quickly forgettable.

It is the connection between people that sells a novel for me.

Of course the premise has to be good, but I have to care for the people involved to not put the book down in boredom.

All those bare chests covers start to blur into one after awhile, none standing out.

Same for those close-up's of pretty boy models on the covers.

I don't get a sense of the specific crisis or adventure of the novel presented that way.  Those covers seem to say "This novel is shallow."

I hear that many readers do not like images of the characters on the covers but prefer symbolic covers that suggest the particular crisis presented in the novel.

How do you feel about bare chests on covers?

Do you like to see characters on covers or

do you rather prefer a symbolic cover

with evocative images?

WHAT EVERY STRUGGLING WRITER NEEDS TO KNOW_IWSG POST

John Green would tell you it is to find emotional truth ...

   Even if we’re not the same as the characters we read, they are all dealing with things:

   issues of who they are, who they should be, what they should and shouldn’t do

   that we all deal with, in their own ways.


Authors from John Steinbeck to Nicholas Sparks would say it is Perseverance.


Authors from Stephen King to Alyssa Rosenberg explaining that to be a successful writer

you to need to read everything and everyone on your subject.

If you’re a day late on an old idea, you’re not of any use.


If you want to get further depressed, listen to the poet, Ranier Maria Rilke tell you:

“Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody.”  

But that's poets for you.

Work ethic, knowledge, skill, perseverance -- 

 

none of them is as important as the one, single most important thing:

LUCK.

You don’t want to be told that, to some fairly consequential degree, your success, or lack thereof, is beyond your control.

But it’s good to keep in mind that if there were a sure formula for success, everyone would be successful —

and that if talent and hard work were the key to fame and fortune,

there wouldn’t be so many talented hacks with bestsellers.

So do you give up?

Of course not.

You just accept reality for what it is: mostly out of your control.

Since you cannot control luck --

You work on what you can control:

Work ethic, knowledge, skill, perseverance

There comes a point where no one is going to tell what you should read,

what you should write,

and moreover, no one is going to point this out for you.

Making time to write is not easy, but until we all win the Powerball,

we all need to carve out a few hours each week to focus on our writing.

Protect this time with your life.

One last thing:

 

 Pick an Idol & Act “As If”.

You may not know what to do, but your professional idol does.

When I’m working on a novel, and I’m stuck, I often think

“What would Roger Zelazny do here?”

 

Sometimes, Roger would have the exact right approach …

other times, it’s obvious that he’s no help.

Maybe it’s Fitzgerald. Maybe it’s O’Connor. Maybe it's Raymond Chandler.

Maybe it’s none of them.

But thinking about the writing as if I were (fill in the blank)

helps to make me see that there are multiple ways to approach a story,

multiple ways to make decisions, organize the manuscript.

I hope this helps in some small way.
 

MAN DOES NOT CHANGE

John Steinbeck
Sag Harbor
June 3, 1953

Dear Roland:

How odd it is:

Here I am much older, not nearly as wise as I would have hoped to be, still writing to you unchanged in the year 2014!

Your words over the years have helped me, though I fear mine to you has not helped any at all.

I am back from Washington, D.C.  and just now reading the newspaper and your latest letter to me.

Two first impressions:

First, a creeping, all pervading, nerve-gas of immorality which starts in the nursery and does not stop before it reaches the highest offices both corporate and governmental.

Two, a nervous restlessness, a hunger, a thirst, a yearning for something unknown— perhaps morality.

Then there’s the violence, cruelty and hypocrisy symptomatic of a people which has too much, and last, the surly ill temper which only shows up in humans when they are frightened.

Nothing seems to have changed in the nature of Man.

You mention this best-selling author, James Patterson, no longer writing his own books.

He does the outlines and hires different co-writers. He does credit the other writers,

and he probably does pay them handsomely,

but the whole thing is coiled up in my stomach like bad diner food.

Ghost-writing 

How to express my feelings for it?  Let me try:

Early on I had a shattering experience in ghost-writing that has left its mark on me.

In the fourth grade in Salinas, Calif., my best friend was a boy named Pickles Moffet.

He was an almost perfect little boy, for he could throw rocks harder and more accurately than anyone, he was brave beyond belief

in stealing apples or raiding the cake section in the basement of the Episcopal church,

a gifted boy at marbles and tops and sublimely endowed at infighting.

Pickles had only one worm in him.

The writing of a simple English sentence could put him in a state of shock very like that condition which we now call battle fatigue.

Imagine to yourself, as the French say,

a burgeoning spring in Salinas, the streets glorious with puddles, grass and wildflowers and toadstools in full chorus,

and the dense adobe mud of just the proper consistency to be molded into balls and flung against white walls—

an activity at which Pickles Moffet excelled.

It was a time of ecstasy, like the birth of a sweet and sinless world. And just at this time our fourth-grade teacher hurled the lightning.

She assigned us our homework.

We were to write a quatrain in iambic pentameter with an a b - a b rhyme scheme.

Well, I thought Pickles was done for.

His eyes rolled up. His palms grew sweaty, and a series of jerky spasms went through his rigid body. I soothed him and gentled him,

but to show you the state Pickles was in—he threw a mud ball at Mrs. Warnock’s newly painted white residence. And he missed the whole house.

I think I saved Pickles’ life.

I promised to write two quatrains and give one to him. I’m sure there is a moral in this story somewhere, but where?

The verse I gave to Pickles got him an A while the one I turned in for myself brought a C.

You will understand that the injustice of this bugged me pretty badly. Neither poem was any great shucks, but at least they were equally bad.

And I guess my sense of injustice outweighed my caution, for I went to the teacher and complained:

 “How come Pickles got an A and I only got a C?”

Her answer has stayed with me all my life.

She said,

“What Pickles wrote was remarkable for Pickles. What you wrote was inferior for you.”

 You see what this says of your James Patterson and those who ghost-write for him?

If you do, please write and explain it to me.

Yours,

John

MAD SCIENCE

Scientists find secret to writing

a best-selling novel!

Computer scientists have developed an algorithm which can predict with 84 per cent accuracy whether a book will be a commercial success -

 and the secret is to avoid cliches and excessive use of verbs

A technique called statistical stylometry,

which mathematically examines the use of words and grammar, was found to be “surprisingly effective”

in determining how popular a book would be.

The scientists grudgingly admit that external factors such as luck can also play a role.

There is also a thing called WRITABILITY:

There must be more than detailed world building, a great evil to fight, very high stakes, and memorable, flawed characters.

There used to be a history program on Sundays in the early days of TV:

YOU ARE THERE

It made history alive by putting a modern reporter at the seige of Troy or at the building of the pyramids or interviewing Christopher Columbus as he was sailing across the ocean that first time.

It is called IMMEDIACY -- as you read, the prose is so compelling that you are there with the main character, rooting her on.

What makes a novel great for you?

What was the last novel that swept you up into its magic world?