Crime Fiction Dossier

Blog hiatus

Until further notice, and possibly forever, the Crime Fiction Dossier will be hibernating. Other commitments, as well as an overall apathy to blogs and blogging in general, have prompted this decision. My book reviews will still appear in the Chicago Sun-Times and perhaps elsewhere as well.

Benjamin Franklin, a very wise and flatulent man, once opined that "guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days." I believe the same applies to blogs, and after 5+ years the CFD has started to stink to high heaven.

Thank you all for sharing your time with me. Now go do something useful, like read a book.

Vote for the blog awards

Voting is open to select the winners for the BBAW Awards 2008. I don't know most of these sites, but I do have favorites in a few categories:

Best General Book Blog: Bookgasm
Best Thriller/Mystery/Suspense Blog: Detectives Beyond Borders
Best Publishing/Industry Blog: Buzz, Balls, and Hype
Best Author Blog: John Scalzi

I don't know why this blog wasn't nominated -- clearly they're prejudiced against sites that are only updated once a week when the writer sobers up.

Caveat emptor

Readers of blogs are consumers of information. There are blogs on virtually every subject known to man -- and plenty that you wouldn't want to know about. A few of them are interesting and/or useful, most of them are filled with nonsense. Included among that nonsense is a lot of bad advice, especially with regards to writing and publishing.

So here's a friendly reminder; a little something to keep in mind when wasting time on the blogosphere:

• If a person offers you advice on how to get published, find out if that person is published. If not, does he offer some other legitimate credentials? (E.g., he's an agent or editor.) If not, you might want to look at his advice with a skeptical eye.
• If a person offers you advice on how to have success in your writing career, try to find out how much success they've had in their writing career. How many books have they published? Who published them? Are they still in print? Have they made any of the bestseller lists? Have they gotten significant reviews? Have they won any awards? If you've never heard of the writer, never heard of their books, perhaps their strategies are not as effective as they reckon.
• If a person offers you advice on how to become a bestselling writer, first determine if that advice has worked for him. If he's not a bestselling writer, perhaps it's because his advice doesn't work.
• If a person offers you advice on how to become a better writer, read some of that person's writing. Is it any good? If not, reconsider how much credence you want to give that advice.
• If a person offers you advice on how to break into Hollywood, find out if that person has broken into Hollywood.
• If a person recommends publisher XYZ or literary agency ABC, do some research. Find out who those companies publish or represent. If you've never heard of any of their books or authors, ask yourself if these are the right people for you to be in business with.
• If a person recommends you pay them or anyone else for publishing, representation, editorial services, a review, reading your manuscript, or anything else, be very, very wary. Chances are better than good that you're being conned.
• Yes, that's right: even those very nice people who promise to make your every dream come true. Them too.

A person does not necessarily have to have done something in order to provide sound, useful information on the subject. However, before you go taking advice from some random person on the internet, it would behoove you to discover if that person has a legitimate basis from which to offer that advice. If they don't, you're probably better off clicking onward and finding something else to occupy your time.

(Note: I'm writing this with masculine pronouns because the first time through I tried using a lot of he/shes, etc. and it just looked clunky. So feel free to substitute feminine pronouns where appropriate.)

New Evil E

Elain Flinn has a new Evil E column up, featuring an interview with author Jason Starr. Here is my contribution:

DAVID:

Jason, you’re closing in on 50…Isn’t it time to cut the hair?  Do you ever get tired of writing about creeps, crooks and cons and just want to write about a preschool teacher or something?  (not that I want you to do that…unless it’s a preschool teacher who’s also a dominatrix.)

JASON:

Whoa, Dave, I think I have about a decade to go before 50, but nope, I ain’t cuttin’ it, not until it starts falling out in a serious clip anyway, and you never know when that’ll start to happen.  We have a picture in my family of a great uncle who lived in Russia about 80 years ago.  In most of the pictures he has this thick, dark hair, and then in the next picture, boom, Kojack.  So I may wake up one day and find it all on the pillow…  But I’ll tell you what - if Barry Eisler gets a crew cut, I will too.  Deal?  If I thought of a preschool teacher who I thought would make a great character in a crime novel, I’d go for it.  But, as you say, there would have to be something off about him or her.  I think my strength is in writing about edgy people, though I think in my recent books like THE FOLLOWER, and some of the other projects I’m working on (including a graphic novel for DC) I’ve been expanding my approach, varying points of view more.

Check out the whole thing. It's good.

Miss me?

I was on vacation for awhile, thus the lack of posts. But I'm back now. I read a few books on our trip: Jeffery Deaver's The Broken Window, Ken Bruen and Jason Starr's The Max and Victor Gischler's Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse. (I never read very much on vacation.) I also picked up a couple books that I hope to read soon, including James Rollins' adaptation of the new Indiana Jones movie (which I haven't seen yet).

How 'bout you? What you been reading?

Paul Guyot on blogging and life

Paul Guyot has an excellent guest post over on Bryon Quertermous' blog. (Bryon just got married. Congrats, man!!)

Having blogged for almost 5 years now, I agree with almost everything he writes about the enterprise. It's seldom useful, always self-indulgent, of limited educational or promotional value, and probably a great big waste of time.

Yet I do it anyway. It's a kind of sickness when you think about it...

Remember Miss Snark?

Proving that nothing on the internet ever dies, I had two separate conversations recently in which the name Miss Snark came up. Remember her? She was (allegedly) a literary agent who wrote an acid, often tongue-in-cheek blog where she discussed the publishing industry and dispensed advice to aspiring writers.

Miss Snark shuttered her blog nearly a year ago, her true identity still a secret. What's funny is that the two people I spoke to -- both informed, savvy folks -- each had the opposite story on the Snarky one. One said she was a rep at a small agency, while the other swore she wasn't an agent at all and the whole thing was a gag.

That got me curious. (As did the rumor that it was really two gay male agents at William Morris.) So, if anyone out there knows the truth, please spill. (You can email me if you don't want to leave a comment.) Or perhaps Miss Snark would like to out herself?

Update: Two correspondents have confirmed the identity of Miss Snark. I am not going to reveal that information because apparently she still wishes to remain anonymous and no point would be served by doing so. I can confirm, however, that she is a legitimate agent. So for all you aspiring writers out there, her advice is definitely worth paying attention to.

Book of the Week: Robert Ferrigno's "Sins of the Assassin"

It's no secret how much I loved Robert Ferrigno's Prayers for the Assassin, last year's winner of the Gumshoe Award for Best Thriller. Now Ferrigno has returned to the world of a post-revolutionary, Islamic America, and the results are just as satisfying. In Sins of the Assassin, Rakkim Epps, Muslim special forces warrior, is sent into the Christian Bible Belt (the Old South of the former USA) to retrieve a secret weapon before the Christians can get their hands on. What ensues is an action-packed and suspenseful thriller, cast against a stunning backdrop of imagination. It's early in 2008, but this is one of the best books I've read so far this year.

A brief absence

I'm going to be gone for the next few days, so I won't be blogging. In the meantime, feel free to talk amongst yourselves.

Recommended topics:

• What's the best book you've read so far this year?
• What do you like best about Dave?
• Who is the most overrated author?
• Why is Dave better than other critics?
• Why is there a writers conference in Chicago in the dead of winter?
• Etc.

"The Liar's Diary" Blog Day

Over 300 bloggers from the world of publishing are blogging today in support of the paperback release of Patry Francis' book, The Liar's Diary. Patry was recently diagnosed with cancer and has been frequently hospitalized. Since she's unable to do any promotion in support of her book, a few of her friends decided to help out.

Patry is blogging about her battle with cancer, in case you're interested in learning more.

To learn more about how she came to write The Liar's Diary, read her Backstory.

You can watch a trailer for The Liar's Diary on YouTube:

Here's hoping that Patry's health improves soon!