What Dance Do You Dance at the End of the World?

Ted Krever: Writing and other forms of torture Posted on by

It’s hard to walk the streets these days without feeling like the whole damn place is collapsing around your ears.

I suppose proper writing style calls for me to document that statement, give a few examples but I’m not even going to bother. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, good for you. Enjoy your bubble as long as you can, I won’t be the one to pop it.

Besides, we might all have a slightly different list of specifics pointing to the same conclusion. That’s part of what makes this all seem so conclusive – the number of roads that seem to converge on that same nearby chasm. It’s simply a matter of when and how we get there.

I tend to optimism. If I have a religion, that’s it, really. Optimism, to me, isn’t some dreamy-eyed feeling that life is wonderful and we’re going to live happily ever after. It’s a clear-eyed understanding that everything is temporary and that pain doesn’t last anymore than pleasure does, that all experience is fleeting. And that almost all experience is worth cherishing and embracing, the good and the bad, because the boundaries between the two will seem much hazier and less conclusive when we look back. Only richness of feeling will remain, will live on inside us.

So, first of all, cause for optimism. If our present way of life collapses, life will go on. We who have very little will continue to have very little – and soon, we’ll have lots of company. Which might lead to fighting over scraps – or, if you’re optimistic, to people working together for their common benefit.

After all, what we’d have right in front of us is the example of that collapsed pigsty created by unrestrained greed and selfishness.

So what dance do you dance at the End of the World? Who cares? Just dance. There’s music in freedom and all of us newly-freed slaves.

 

‘Mindbenders’ Needs You!

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(Originally posted August 6th)

I’m working on the second ‘Mindbenders’. After a year of slogging along with the thing, abandoning it several times in frustration and just grinding away at it, it finally seems to be taking off. Characters humming on their own, story gaining depth instead of throwing off tangents and brain farts like a spoiled brat.

But now, I need your help.

I have a section coming up that involves work during the recent Financial Crisis, at the end of 2008, early half of 2009.

I need examples of situations where your job or your lifestyle was in danger or flat-out collapsed. I need examples of people in power – and working people (in this day and age, the definition of people without power) – acting in both exemplary and vicious petty fashion.

I need your stories.

I’m not promising you credit or royalties – although I may cite you on the acknowledgments page. All stories will be kept strictly confidential, however, if you want them that way. I’m not likely to use them exactly as you tell them to me anyhow – my norm is to rework things to fit the story I want to tell. But I need as much detail as you can share with me to make them feel real. The details in real stories almost always outstrip fiction – or make it credible.

If you don’t think your story’s relevant to what I want to say, don’t let that stop you. If I’m inspired, I’ll go far afield and find a context to make it work.

You can leave stories here as comments if you wish. Certainly, if you want some confidentiality, you can send them to my email, tedkrever@gmail.com – there’s a link on the right-hand column of this page.

Thanks for your help. I think this could be a very interesting good book – help me get it there.

Gilding the Lily

Ted Krever: Writing and other forms of torture Posted on by

Covers.

Every book needs a cover. And the cover is obviously a huge selling tool. If you’re an indie writer/publisher like I am, it might be the only tool you have, that first grabber moment that gets a potential reader’s attention.

However, in my case, it’s another detail I have to come up with myself. Art staff – me. Design staff – me. Photoshop specialist – me.

I had an odd experience recently. I went out to New Jersey to sell some copies of ‘Green’ to an audience of horse lovers (there’s a substantial subplot in the book involving horses and fox hunting, believe it or not). ‘Green’ takes on several subjects and horses is only one among many, but the response I got from the people who wandered up to my table of books was puzzlement.

Huh?

“Disregard the cover; the book really is largely about horses,” I ended up having to explain to almost everyone who came by. “If I’d known I was coming here, I’d have put a horse on the cover.” Yes, I know Di, you told me so.

‘Green’ was a tough cover to design, simply because there are so many threads to the story and so many of them reduce so easily to cliche. The book is essentially a romantic comedy with horses and politics. It takes place in Ireland a week before the beginning of the Iraq War.

If I’d gone to a publisher and the inevitable focus group (that’s assuming they care enough about your book to have a focus group), I so easily could have ended up with this:

 

Of course, this wouldn’t fit my book because my main character is middle-aged – the abs he has, you don’t put on a book cover – and the woman is either 44 and gorgeous (for her age, but not necessarily book-cover-fantasy material) or 37 and punky-charismatic (again, not a fantasy cover – and book covers like this are all fantasies, let’s face it).

 

 

 

If I was Nora Roberts, I could end up with this:

 

Which really is the cover I should have had at the horse benefit. But this cover only works because it’s Nora Roberts, who already has a following. All you do is put her name on the cover and give it a nice rustic field so everyone knows this is ‘the Irish one’. My books have to grab your eye in a thumbnail on a web page, so something has to MAKE you notice.

 

 

 

So go back to my cover again. I started out with this, which is actually surprisingly like Nora Roberts’ cover:

V1

 

It was pretty clearly Ireland, it had a little incongruity with the castle in the middle of the field and it had a horse. The field and sky were one picture, the horse a second and the castle wall a third.

But it just didn’t grab my attention, at least not at thumbnail size. Static, not attention-grabbing.

So….hmmm….

 

Next…

v3

I had just finished rewriting the book (that’s another blog post in itself). The story ends at Shannon Airport the night the war in Iraq began, as airplane after airplane of soldiers and cargo were being shipped through Ireland’s (relatively) peaceful gateway, against the wishes of many outraged Irish.  So suddenly I had the idea for the transport plane. I got the biggest honking picture of a transport I could find and threw the horse into the field.

Which just didn’t work. Too much. Too busy. No room for the title and my name (I’m willing to be humble at appropriate times but my name is going on the cover, dammit!).

 

So…

near clifden by Leo Righetti

 

I liked this. An innocent Irish sheep in a Connemara field. If I added a transport to this…

 

 

We get…

 

The sheep is twice the size it is in the original picture, the transport is a total Photoshop job. It’s bizarre, it’s incongruous, it’s…attention-grabbing. Even with the horsey audience, it did its job. Everyone that came by that desk stared at it long enough to go ‘Huh?’ Which is all it was intended to accomplish. And it does fit the book, though you have to get to the end to understand why.

So I guess I’m happy with what I have. If I’d gone through the focus group, I’d have so much work to do on my abs…

 

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purchase on Amazon.
click here for smashwords Other e-readers, click here for
Smashwords.
Click here for
trade paperback.

TEN DOLLARS OFF! SPECIAL SALE! (Same price as before)

Ted Krever: Writing and other forms of torture Posted on by

First off: Business. I want your stories of the Financial Collapse of 2008-2009. I’ll use the best ones in the next Mindbenders so send them here or to my email, tedkrever@gmail.com (link on the right-hand menu bar). More details just below, in the next blog item.

Now, with that out of the way:

I Google’d myself this morning. I’m dating and the girl will surely do it, so I do too in self-defense (we live in a paranoid world, kiddies). And found this.

Paperback at $24.95? WTF?!

My trade paperback version of ‘Mindbenders’ at $24.95?!!  *&#@!!!  What’s that about? Were they planning on cutting me in on this deal? No wonder they went out of business…

That book’s on sale here for $14.99! Always has been!

Well now…thanks to Borders…it’s TEN DOLLARS OFF! SPECIAL SALE! Only $14.99, like it always was.

Special Sale for you guys, because I love you…

And for those of you who don’t know already, FREE BEER with the Author! Details here.

(Okay, I know it’s not exactly $10 off. But it sounds better than $9.96 off and this is Marketing! Image is Everything! Which is why I don’t do marketing too much…)

Give them to your friends who are allergic to ebooks…they’ll thank you…me too…

ADDENDUM: I just realized this is Borders Australia. I thought this might draw them a pass – maybe the exchange rate works out so it’s not so outrageous. Wrong. $24.95 Australian actually works out to $26.26 American! How do I get a piece of this deal? Okay, so maybe they haven’t sold anything yet but still…they’re going out of business in Australia too, so there’s the moral, I guess…

 

An Interview with Max Renn (Part One?)

Ted Krever: Writing and other forms of torture Posted on by

The Attack on the G8 -(RAI Italian Television photo)

 

 

 

 

 

 

See the terrific new review of ‘Mindbenders’ from the Paranormal Romance Guild here.

The following is an exclusive interview with Max Renn, the reputed former Soviet spy and now alleged terrorist. The interview was conducted several months after Renn and three others were implicated in an assassination plot at the G8 in Rome:

Ted: Thanks for agreeing to this interview.

Renn: No, it doesn’t matter and not on your life.

Ted: Excuse me?

Renn: Those are the answers to the first three questions you were going to ask.

Ted: Well, okay, great—we get you’re a mindreader—but nobody will understand the answers unless I ask the questions first.

Renn: Just insert them in the transcript. I won’t tell.

Ted: I can’t do that. I have just a little integrity left and I’m trying  to hold onto it. Can’t we just do this normally?

Renn: It’ll be over much faster my way. In the Lab, in Novosibirsk…

Ted: Why did you agree to do the interview if you’re going to make a shambles of it?

Renn: My colleagues persuaded me this would be good for us. And Greg wanted the publicity for his book.

Ted: You mean ‘Mindbenders’? Available in ebook and paperback, links for purchase at the end of this interview.

Renn: I see what you mean about your integrity.

Ted: And, by the way, it’s my book. I wrote it. It says ‘Ted Krever’ on the cover.

Renn: You are a front. You edit Greg’s manuscript and fill in a few details that Greg doesn’t have at his disposal.

Ted: I wrote every word of that book. Several times.

Renn: I delivered Greg’s manuscript into your mind. You typed it and did a little minor editing. You wrote the one chapter that Greg didn’t directly witness, the Jerry Lowery chapter. Which, if I may say, read like a cheap thriller.

Ted: Good thing you’re not a literary critic.

Renn: Unfortunately for you, others are. You are also useful because you possess a Social Security number and  bank account so you can collect the income from the distribution websites, which Greg can’t do at the moment.

Ted: Because he’s a wanted terrorist.

Renn: We are innocent of that charge.

Ted: Then why are you on all the ‘Wanted’ shows on television? On the cover of the New York Post every couple of days?

Renn: The Kardashians are on the cover as much as we are. We are in the media because they have ratings to hit and newspapers to sell. The government says we are terrorists so they parrot that line.

Ted: So this is all a government conspiracy against you?

Renn: It is a conspiracy of people who influence government—and business and media—at the highest level.

Ted: And you’re going to claim the income from the book?

Renn: At the moment, you’re not making enough to be worth claiming. Your tax man will take more to do your taxes next year. But if you should ever develop any meaningful income, there are things you’ll want to do for us.

Ted: Because you’ll suddenly become my best friends?

Renn: Because I’ll make you want to.

Ted: If you can do that, why not just make me send you money out of my account now? Why wait?

Renn: Because that is my integrity. And if I was going to raid someone’s bank account, you wouldn’t be top of the list.

Ted: You’re a pretty ruthless guy. Greg doesn’t portray you that way.

Renn: At the moment, I have every intelligence and police network in the world focusing on capturing me. The niceties tend to fall away.

Ted: But if we were to meet at a cocktail party, I would find you charming?

Renn: At a cocktail party, you would find me near the piano, concentrating on the music.

Ted: You’re a music lover?

Renn: If my other choice is listening to the thoughts of everyone at a cocktail party, yes, I’m a music lover.

Ted: That’s right, you can hear everyone’s thoughts. But isn’t that a useful skill?

Renn: If your purpose is to manipulate people and steal their secrets, yes.

Ted: That’s a bigtime business these days.

Renn: That’s certainly correct. Far too big.

Ted: So what’s the downside?

Renn: We think of others as civilized beings precisely because we don’t know what they are thinking. When you hear people’s real thoughts—when you understand the confusion, anger and fear that drive them—it’s hard to be very hopeful. I’ll admit, Kate tells me I’m a pessimist.

Ted: Ya think? Is that why you were living in the Everglades when all this began?

Renn: it’s peaceful there. Alligators and pythons are disagreeable but they don’t have stressful thoughts. And no guile. I’ll take them over people most of the time.

Ted: But Greg and Kate are your friends. Dave Monaghan was your friend.

Renn: Dave knew who I was and asked nothing of me. That made him unique in my life. Greg is a brave man, a soldier. I admire him. He remembers almost nothing, most of what he remembers comes to him as nightmares. He has seen the dark side of the world. He doesn’t deny it but prefers to see the bright. That’s bravery to me. Kate…is Kate. She is like me, she knows people’s thoughts, though she’s fortunate in that she can turn them off if she wants to. She…understands me as well as anyone can.

Ted: That sounds like a good thing.

Renn: It should be.

Ted: You seem uncomfortable with the subject.

Renn: I’m not.

Ted: It didn’t seem to bother you that the world’s cops and spies are after you but she makes you nervous.

Renn: She’s a woman.

Ted: You don’t like women?

Renn: I’m a man. I long for them. But longing is dangerous. Women get under your skin. You’re telling me you don’t know what this is like?

Ted: No, I’m not saying that.

Renn: Ah yes, I see you have your own problems…

Ted: Well, thank you for the interview. I wrote the book, by the way. I made you up out of nothing.

Renn: Right. Which is why you’re interviewing me. And why you’re annoyed I’m getting the better of you.

Ted: I’m not…

Renn: I’m quite willing to continue. We can talk at length about your relationship issues…

Ted: I don’t have any issues. I’m just emotional.

Renn: I see a hole there that isn’t going away anytime soon.

Ted: Something you should know something about.

Renn: True. We have this in common.

Ted: I know. I wrote that scene. I wrote the damn book.

Renn: Alright, have it your way. Enjoy your illusions. While you can.

 

click here for Amazon Click here to
purchase ‘Mindbenders’ ebook on Amazon.
click here for smashwords For other e-readers, click here for
Smashwords.
Click here for the
trade paperback.

Living in the Moment (Part 72,653)

Ted Krever: Writing and other forms of torture Posted on by

I feel that most of us allow ourselves all the pain and half the pleasure of life.

When you’re hurt, there’s no denying it – and most of us don’t really try very hard. You feel it and try to move on.

But we approach moments of joy, of ecstasy, with such caution. The best and most important people in my life have always defied  and challenged my expectations, demanded more of me than I was comfortable giving. Sometimes they demanded I be more than I am – sometimes they challenged me by being so nice to me that I had to admit how unworthy I felt.

These people promised the brightest moments in my life but, all too often, I held back, afraid of their power over me, afraid they might not live up to expectations or might come back to bite me later.

And usually – let’s face it – they do.

So what?

When I look back (which I don’t do that often), I realize the brightest moments of my life were just that – moments. Sometimes moments in the midst of longer relationships, sometimes not. Sometimes the best moments were followed by swift or lingering pain. But the joyful moments are still inside me and always will be.

More to the point, I realize that protecting myself never bought me a joyful moment. I haven’t had near enough of them for the amount of pain I’ve had, maybe because I ‘protected’ myself from too many wonderful moments, while nothing protected me from the painful ones.

So I’m trying real hard these days to live without buffers, to feel what I feel, to take what comes, chew it up and swallow. I’ll worry about digesting later.

Time isn’t creeping up on me; it’s sprinting past. I want EVERYTHING that’s real and I’ll take a few mirages too if they add to the richness when it’s all over. There’s no such thing as living life too fully.

I read a quote from an Israeli general recently, that life is so short and we’re dead so long…

That kind of sums it up…

 

Vets – Better off Dead?

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I’m reposting this as it wasn’t up top very long and I think it’s an important issue. It’s also one that keeps coming back to me as I watch the Masters of the Universe lob spitballs at each other in Washington:

For the past two years, America has lost more soldiers to suicide than in combat. And the figures are actually slanted to minimize the numbers–several services only list suicides by soldiers specifically on active duty, do not list soldiers detached from their specific unit, the VA only tracks soldiers enrolled in the VA health service, which 3/4 are not. So these figures are almost guaranteed to be laughably low.

A friend of mine has a friend who’s married to a returning vet. She told me bluntly what’s going on in all too many cases. “These guys come home wrecked, emotionally shot,” she said. “The VA pumps them full of antidepressants until they can’t make love to their wives. So they go off the meds and get worse.”

So there’s too little care and ineffective care, institutional indifference and individual neglect.  Think about how all this plays out as you watch the Washington pissing match over the debt ceiling.

beware the suits

Republicans have made a big fuss for the last thirty years about being the Defense party, the hawks and proud of it. Democrats have continued insanely wasteful Defense spending rather than being accused of being ‘soft’.

So we have $150 million fighter planes and a million and a half private contractors with ‘Top Secret’ security clearances while we abuse and ignore the people who did the fighting.

The dead, at least, got a funeral. That is apparently all the help our government can afford a soldier.

There are lots of people ill served by this government. But there is no more vivid example of the hypocrisy of the inmates running this particular asylum.

 

In a Relationship with The Muse (it’s complicated)

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This new book is killng me. I love it but it’s killing me. Those of you who have kids will nod your heads and wonder ‘Where’s the headline?’

It’s the second ‘Mindbenders’. I had a complete first draft but I plotted it out ahead of time, which I’ve never done before and that killed it for me. Once I wasn’t seeing it happening in front of me while I was writing, I lost all interest. So I threw out the beginning and I’m going to make up the end as I go. And that’s helped but even so, it’s started and stopped on me several times.

The last several weeks have been as smooth as I could remember – the Muse and I were cooking. And then yesterday I came to the first scene that pretty much came out of the old draft and the thing died on me again. The Muse wasn’t speaking, wasn’t even whispering near my ear. This happens–artists understand the Muse has lots of lovers to satisfy, though she insists (and convinces us to believe) that we’re the only one that matters.

There are certainly times when I mull a scene for a day or two because I don’t have it right but I can feel it next to me, just an inch away, so it’s not a concern. But this felt barren. It was as though that old version was a virus, that anytime I came close to it, I got infected again. Worse yet, it felt like I’d run out of juice, the thing you really worry about creatively.

They've got Muses in Greece

I tried to open up communication last night but the Muse was on the other line. It happens. I meditated and went to sleep. Haven’t had much sleep lately.

Woke up this morning – nothing. That’s more disturbing. Usually sleep reracks all kinds of problems. So – on with the sneakers. I have calluses now–never had them before. They’re not fun but I run so I run with calluses.

I’ve run early the last few days –  it isn’t quite as beastly hot first thing in the morning – but yesterday’s run was just short of suicidal. I felt it a couple times during the day, my body saying ‘That was stupid, pal.’ So today I was going to take it easy. And it fit the way I felt – listless. When she isn’t talking to me, everything’s uphill.

But once I got going, I noticed it wasn’t anywhere near as hot today. It was worse in the house with the AC struggling than it was outside. And then I started the long uphill section of the run and the music in my headphones kicked in and I stopped thinking and worrying and missing anything and – there it was.

I’m writing a thriller. The characters are supposed to do something at every turn, take the initiative, make things happen. But this time, all at once, I wondered: what if they don’t do anything? What if they stop trying ? What if they just wait and see? What happens then? And from there, the whole scene changed. It turned into three or four scenes and gave me a whole other layer for the rest of the book.

I promised myself when I started rewriting it that this book would ignore convention whenever it wanted to. It’ll still be a thriller – I enjoy the action parts and have most of those worked out already. The difference might even be invisible to the reader. But it’ll be fertile for me, because it’ll put the emphasis back on the characters, who are really all I care about.

 

You can’t fight the Muse and you can’t run after her. It’s a relationship – it ebbs and flows like any other. Sometimes, you get  better gifts than you can imagine and more of them, all at once, than you thought possible. And sometimes – other times – you just have to find the Muse inside yourself.

Vets-Better off Dead?

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For the past two years, America has lost more soldiers to suicide than in combat. And the figures are actually slanted to minimize the numbers–several services only list suicides by soldiers specifically on active duty, do not list soldiers detached from their specific unit, the VA only tracks soldiers enrolled in the VA health service, which 3/4 are not. So these figures are almost guaranteed to be laughably low.

A friend of mine has a friend who’s married to a returning vet. She told me bluntly what’s going on in all too many cases. “These guys come home wrecked, emotionally shot,” she said. “The VA pumps them full of antidepressants until they can’t make love to their wives. So they go off the meds and get worse.”

So there’s too little care and ineffective care, institutional indifference and individual neglect.  Think about how all this plays out as you watch the Washington pissing match over the debt ceiling.

beware the suits

Republicans have made a big fuss for the last thirty years about being the Defense party, the hawks and proud of it. Democrats have continued insanely wasteful Defense spending rather than being accused of being ‘soft’.

So we have $150 million fighter planes and a million and a half private contractors with ‘Top Secret’ security clearances while we abuse and ignore the people who did the fighting.

The dead, at least, got a funeral. That is apparently all the help our government can afford a soldier.

There are lots of people ill served by this government. But there is no more vivid example of the hypocrisy of the inmates running this particular asylum.