Category Archives: Books

It’s OK. It doesn’t have to be perfect right now.

Not exactly rockin’ it out on a Saturday night, but that’s fine. It’s raining, it’s getting colder. I just put down another thousand-plus words on the sequel to The Daedalus Incident that, admittedly, weren’t great words. However, I’m OK with that because, in writing those words, I hit on some ideas and themes that just snapped into place brilliantly.

As you likely discerned from the title, first drafts are indeed allowed to suck. That’s because the book, as a total entity, doesn’t exist yet. There’s no real basis for comparison, because that particular story hasn’t been written until the first draft is done. How do you measure the worth of something before it’s even finished?

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There’s plenty of pie. No need to be a jerk about it.

R.J. Ellory is a British author of crime thrillers. He’s written ten novels that have sold a combined million copies, which qualifies as a major success. He’s won any number of awards, large and small, in his genre.

He also created multiple fake accounts so he could give his own books five-star reviews on Amazon.com. That, of course, would constitute a major lapse of ethical judgment. The fact that he also went on to give other crime writers one-star reviews on the same site is absolutely unforgivable.

I have a background in business journalism, and I’ve learned a lot about publishing over the last year and a half. One of my biggest takeaways is this:

Authors don’t have “rivals.”

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You ever been to Mars? No? How would you write about it?

It’s one of the hoariest, most misunderstood and now altogether useless clichés in writing: “Write what you know.”

Taken literally, it would seem to make the entire canon of modern science-fiction and fantasy utterly invalid, as well as the vast majority of crime fiction. Nobody has ever set foot upon another world, met an alien or an elf (that we know of, I suppose) or traveled faster than light. Few of us, though still far too many, have experience as either the perpetrator or a victim of crime on the scale of your typical thriller.

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The good folks over at Night Shade Books have given me an actual release date! (Likely preliminary and subject to change, I imagine, but still.) The Daedalus Incident will hit stores, online and off, on May 7, 2013. So save your pennies and mark your calendars! Or just have Siri remind you like I do. Seriously, the Reminders app on the iPhone is really handy.

Of course, that’s a good nine months off, but there’s stuff to start thinking about. First off, of course, is my editorial letter from Night Shade, which I’m actually pretty excited about. I feel like this is my chance to learn more about the craft of writing from folks who have produced Hugo-winning novels. Not many folks get that opportunity.

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Naturally, since the announcement last Wednesday, I’ve been getting more than my fair share of hearty congratulations from colleagues, family and friends old and new. Not everybody was aware I was getting all literary, and for some, the question was…why?

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So here’s a tidbit that just came out on Publisher’s Marketplace:

Michael Martinez’s THE DAEDALUS INCIDENT, about an evil alchemist and the brave naval officers who fly battleships between planets to save the universe, to Jeremy Lassen at Night Shade Books, in a nice deal, for publication in 2013, by Sara Megibow of Nelson Literary Agency (World English).

That’s right, people. It’s a done deal. Next summer, HMS Daedalus sets sail, and I join the ranks of published novelists! (And yes, it’s no longer Spacebuckler. I like the new title more.)

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The world lost one of the great SF/F writers this week with the passing of Ray Bradbury. When Ray started out in the late 1940s, science fiction and fantasy were considered kiddie fodder and escapist fare. Now, some 70 years later, some of our great contemporary literature comes from these genres. It was Ray who made sci-fi about more than just ray guns and squishy aliens, just as his contemporary J.R.R. Tolkien brought epic fantasy out of the realm of mere fairy tales.

It’s safe to say that Bradbury’s stories and novels are truly part of true Literature (TM), but there’s still a lot of debate out there as to what else actually should be deemed such. A couple weeks after The New Yorker gave genre writers a pat on the head for being so cute and clever — with all the backhandedness and condescention only said magazine could muster — The New York Times ran a Room for Debate entitled “Is Fiction Changing, for Better or Worse?” The concern was that fiction in general was becoming “more entertaining and less serious.”

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Forgive the headline. I don’t really think that. In fact, when it comes to your reading habits, I can only say that you should buy my books when the time comes, because you’ll like them. Yes, you. And your friends.

Anyway, literary tastes — or lack thereof — was the subject of a recent pair of articles that  were brought to my attention by my wife, herself a professional writer and avid blogger. Is so-called “literary fiction” better than “genre fiction?” The latter is, of course, everything from thrillers to horror to fantasy to romance — everything not, apparently, “literary.”

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