‘Green’ Review

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

By Mark McKenna on Goodreads, posted 5/16/11:

‘Green is a delightful book. Written by Ted Krever, it’s a smart, witty and wise look at love later in life by a writer who’s . . . well, later in life. Green couldn’t have been written by a younger man; there’s too much hard-won wisdom in its pages.

Fifty-something Paul Roget has been invited to Ireland by his college friend, Emily Ormond. Paul is a former on-air celebrity–a business news reporter who’s been out of work for a year. Paul is currently repping the “Getaway Bed,” an eleven-thousand dollar sleeping environment being marketed as an antidote to stress in a post 9/11 world. Paul does manage to sell the Getaway Bed franchise–and meets one of the book’s most fascinating characters in the process–but the bed is only an amusing sub-plot.

Green is not about beds or bed salesmanship; it’s about love. In fact, there’s so much love in the air that–just like the beautiful light in Ireland–every character seems bathed in it.

First, Emily and Paul have an attraction, a push-pull that has existed since their college days. Emily herself is wondering if she might be gay and has a giddy, stammering crush on an art dealer named “Maeve” who’s sexual preference is, as the novel begins, unknown. Then there’s Malcolm Lowell. Malcolm is Emily’s “horse landlord,” a world-famous rider, a dashing Colonel in the Irish Defense Forces and, initially, Paul’s rival. Malcolm is also steadfastly in love with Emily and is waiting patiently for her to realize it and fall into his arms. And then Paul meets Jillian: a poet, a barmaid, an anti-war activist, and a bold, challenging woman who beguiles him as much as the beauty of Ireland is starting to do. And, they’re off!

Well . . . not really.

dingle

If I’ve made Green sound like a bodice-ripping romance novel, I apologize. It’s not. Green rests solidly in the literary novel genre.

Ted Krever’s characters have all been wounded, but they carry their wounds with them in their search for love and happiness. Emily has survived the death of her husband, Devon. A beautiful woman, she’s also a cancer survivor. Here she talks about life after chemo.

“I just don’t want the sex, which is the only thing anyone thinks of. But I wanted to be wanted. Doesn’t everyone? I’ve put so much of myself into…this,” she ran her hands across her shoulders and breasts, her belly and hips and thighs.

“Desire. It’s the most powerful constant, more than money or power or love. Anticipation’s better than reality, over and over. And I’m going to have to give it up—soon. Women’s bodies wear out faster than men’s. I might be a better person when it’s gone—but I don’t really believe that. And I surely won’t be the same. It’s my power. No one gives up power in this world voluntarily. Not countries. Not people. No one.”

Paul’s romance with Jillian is central to the tale. In this passage, he is leaving her apartment at dawn.

“I spotted the signs before reaching Jill’s front door. Alongside the radical’s library—Marcuse! Das Kapital with pages thumbed and notes scribbled in margins!—two pair of jeans way too big for her perched atop the laundry bin; a pile of music magazines sprawled across the cheap coffee table. I wasn’t checking—they were just there. There was another man who made himself comfortable in this apartment. It was the reason she’d dragged me through the living room when we first came in.

kinvara

I held back the protest inside—what was the point? It was just one more place in life where I had no say. She was funny, lovely, uninhibited and skilled at charming and juggling the attentions of all things male. I’d had my romantic dream; now here was reality. I pulled the door closed and marched up the hill toward Em’s house.

Violet light seeped through morning fog.

Green is funny, too. Krever has done a wonderful job with the descriptions of Ireland. Here’s a small village market:

The packages on these shelves were simple and functional, designed by some underpaid artist in a back-room instead of an army of marketers and seven terabytes of extrapolated focus groups. The milk in the stand-up refrigerator said ‘Lisheen Creamery’ above a simple line drawing of the bridge at the center of town. Chrome and glass cabinets displayed fresh-cut meat and cheese. Next to these bits, American produce looked cartoonishly unnatural, inflated helium and candlewax, hype and hubris. I wondered how expensive it would be to go vegan when I got home.

Green is a charming book. Ted Krever writes with a sure hand and a light touch. The lightness, love and witty dialog made me think of A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, so I can heartily recommend Green to anyone who enjoys a rich love story — and feels like taking an armchair trip to Ireland.’

So, someone’s compared me to Shakespeare – I can die happy. If you want to die happy too (and only a couple of dollars lighter in the wallet), get your own copy here:

Green at Amazon: for Kindle

Green at Smashwords: for all other ebooks

Trade Paperback will be available on Amazon by the end of the week, I swear…

The Mockingbird, the Web and Me

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

Commercial interruption: My two best books, ‘Green’ and ‘Mindbenders’, are on sale NOW on Amazon and Smashwords as ebooks—trade paperbacks to come in a matter of days (the Amazon Gods willing). Read all about ’em at the links above.

That said—

The Web is a wonderful thing. They say humility is a fine thing too, though I think I’ve had enough of it to last me a lifetime or two.

I’ve had more hits to this website in the past few days than ever before. The numbers were pretty impressive and I hoped that they were somehow linked to the two books that just went live. And they are, to some extent. F. Paul Wilson was nice enough to place Tom Monteleone’s blurb for ‘Mindbenders’ on his Facebook Wall.

For those of you who may have missed it (you sure didn’t miss it if you came to this site, but just in case), here it is again: “A dead-on thriller for the decade . . . . I can’t imagine anyone reading this and not wanting more” — Thomas F. Monteleone, author of the NY Times bestseller The Blood of the Lamb and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Writing a Novel

So I got a bunch of hits from Paul’s Facebook page and please God I should only be in a position to pay him back someday.

But, do you know where I’m getting 25% of these new hits from?

HIM? Yes, him...

Him. Yes, him—the stupid mockingbird who tormented me the other day. 27 Google searches today led to this page: ‘mockingbird’, ‘picture of a mockingbird’, ‘pics of a mockingbird’. 30 searches yesterday.

Who knew how popular mockingbirds were?—or how hard it is to find a decent picture of one online? I wish I could remember the page where I found the pic in the first place—that site must be a goldmine.

Anyway, so you know what has to follow, right? Expect to see this stupid bird up here a couple of times a week from now on—at least until I figure out something else people want to see. It’s the American Way.

The True Religion

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

My two best books are now up on Amazon and Smashwords.

‘Mindbenders’ is a thriller with, I think, a fascinating central character and a fun-house mirror take on the absurd society we live in. It’s gotten raves from published authors and a few agents (Why didn’t they take me? No sensible reason and just as well…).

‘Green’ is a comic novel about love and friendship, sex and passion, Ireland, horses and the War in Iraq (!).

More details and excerpts from each can be found on their pages on this site.

I’ll have lots to say about them in coming weeks. Today, though, I want to talk about books. Old-fashioned books. Paper books.

Indie publishing is a wonderful step forward. I can sell an ebook at $2.99 and make the same money as a $25 hardcover. The indie ebook eliminates the middleman. No publisher, no agent, no gatekeeper. The downside of this, of course, is that people who shouldn’t write have books out. The upside is, there are an awful lot of good writers who aren’t producing blockbusters or seventeen genre books a year, which is all publishers have been interested in recently.

But the best thing about $2.99 is that it’s $2.99—for $2.99, most of us can afford to give a promising newcomer a chance.

So all of these factors tilt heavily in favor of the ebook. But…

Nothing prepared me for the experience the other day of opening a cardboard box from Amazon and finding evaluation copies of the paperback versions inside.

Looks even better on paper

For ‘Mindbenders’ and ‘Green’, I’m doing a Print on Demand version. When they’re up (hopefully in the next week or ten days), you’ll be able to go to Amazon.com, order the trade paperback and have it shipped to you like any other book. Each copy is printed as it’s sold and Amazon ships directly to the purchaser. Unfortunately, the economics of paper and ink mean the trade (large-size) paperback retails at $14.99. So I can’t expect to sell as many of those—harder to take a $15 chance than a $3 one.

Nonetheless, there is something about a real book—the paper, the cover, the visual impact of print on a page—that gave me a chill up the spine. It was literally thrilling.

CreateSpace (Amazon’s Print on Demand subsidiary) does a wonderful job of executing the covers and insides—they actually look better (better paper, for one thing) than major publisher’s books. And, just holding the thing in my hand, I felt like a real author. As much as I’m indebted to the new technology, without which I’d still be begging agents for handouts, this was a book.

So here’s a suggestion for those of you who might be interested in my books but don’t have an e-reader: Kindle software can be downloaded free—there’s a link to the right of this page, just below the links for my books. There are versions for your smartphone, computer, tablet, etc. 25% of each of my books can be downloaded from Amazon for free. Give them a look on a Kindle reader and, if you like the writing—but you’re not comfortable reading on a screen—then buy the paperback.

And maybe even if you do have an e-reader—buy the paperback. Sometimes old technology is really cool.

Random Notes and Viruses

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

mockingbird

– There’s a mockingbird in my neighborhood. I never understood what a mockingbird was until I heard this guy. He sits in the tree outside my house and mimics the cries of the other birds relentlessly.

Yesterday, I woke to my alarm, which has a very unmusical three-note tone. I turned it off and stepped outside to get my newspaper. The mockingbird was on a branch outside my open window, singing my alarm clock tones over and over again, the sadist.

 

-I’m thinking about how art is viral—and contagious.

I didn’t care about music growing up. My parents made us listen to the Texaco Opera on the radio (they had subscription tickets to the Metropolitan). I had no use for opera, it sounded like shrieking to me. The only thing I liked about the Texaco Opera was Milton Cross, a man with one of those old-time radio voices that whispered ‘dignity’ at every turn. Here’s a little Milton, though I think he got a bit more melodious on the Texaco broadcast. Poor Milton had the unenviable job of reading the plot of the opera between acts. No one with a sense of dignity should ever be given such a job.

For example, an excerpt of Act One of Prokofiev’s Fiery Angel, chosen at random:

The innkeeper shows Ruprecht, lately returned from America, to a poor room. From the next room he hears Renata crying and begging some visitant to leave her alone. When he breaks down the door and finds her cowering against the wall, he can see nothing when she points to the figure which is terrifying her, but orders it to vanish and takes the distraught woman in his arms to comfort her.

She becomes calmer, and addresses him by name, ignoring him when he asks how she knows it, and tells him that when she was seven she first saw a fiery angel called Madiel, who continued to appear to her in his own and other forms. When she was older he told her that she was destined to be a saint, and she undertook a life of self-abasement and penance, until she was 16, when she estranged Madiel by begging for a physical as well as spiritual union. When he became angry, she seized him, but he vanished. Her despair was alleviated by his voice in the night telling her that he would come again in the guise of a man. Recognising him in young Count Heinrich, she had become his lover, but Heinrich always denied that he was Madiel and after a year he left her and now she constantly searches for him.

Believe me, there are plenty worse. So I found Milton Cross reading these things totally hysterical. I’d be curled on the floor laughing while my mother demanded ‘be quiet, this is culture’.

the boys

My sister caught on to the Beatles and dragged us to ‘Hard Day’s Night.’ I liked the Beatles. They were funny and even an idiot like me couldn’t deny those songs. But they weren’t my band, they were everybody’s band, they were everywhere. So I didn’t identify in any personal way.

Later, I heard ‘Eleanor Rigby’ which opened a hunger in me that I barely recognized and had no idea how to satisfy. It was like I knew there was something out there that could fill a hole in me but had no idea where to find it.

So for a while, I continued doing what we did at home, which was to watch television. If you seek something long and hard enough, you’ll find it wherever you look. So even on TV, I found two musical influence that sent me on a sublime path, even though they started from absurd roots.

First, there was Ricky Nelson on Ozzie and Harriet. Early Ricky wasn’t much in the way of rock n’ roll, not really, but he seemed like a nice guy and very American. I could kind of relate, at least to the TV character. I was too young to really understand the disconnect between characters and real people, even on a cartoon like Ozzie and Harriet.

You learned music from WHO?

The second influence was Flatt and Scruggs. I heard them every week on The Beverly Hillbillies.

So let’s just repeat this for those of you who just came in: you’re reading the reflections of a man who couldn’t learn music from opera but could from the Beverly Hillbillies. You’re on your own from here.

I eventually noticed that I was willing to wait through that entire show just to hear the bluegrass theme song at the end.

Buffalo Springfield

Anyway, so a year or so goes by and a friend plays me a new band—and when I look back now, 45 years later, I realize that what I found there was the mashup of Flatt and Scruggs’ intricate instrumentals with vocals that owed more than a little to Ricky Nelson: ‘Go and Say Goodbye‘ by Buffalo Springfield. My first musical love, the first band that was mine.

Since then, I’ve fallen in love with Miles Davis and Gustav Holst, Planxty, the Band, Gato Barbieri, Dylan and Joni, Bernard Hermann, Mark Knopfler, and Anton Webern. All that music and more came to me through Ricky and Flatt and Scruggs, whom I still admire and Neil and Stephen and Richie, whom I still love.

How much excuse do I need to put up a picture of Joni? Not much...

But it’s funny looking back at the way things come to you, recognizing the threads and watching them grow on into Drive-By Truckers and Mumford and Sons, among others. And still growing beyond…

If you’ve got a story like this, I’d love to hear it. Weave straw into gold, indeed…

Living without Privacy

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

McNealy-if you looked like this, would you need privacy?

Back in 1999, I read an interview with Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems where he was quoted as saying, “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.”

The flap over iPhones and Androids tracking your movements only shows how far the horse is out of the barn.

Anyone who thinks they can keep from being tracked these days is just uninformed. The people who are arguing over that level of privacy have no shot of winning.

I have friends in Ireland. I was on Google Earth the other day, one of the world’s wondrous creations, walking the streets of a town in County Galway. It was heartening to note that the Irish government, like many in Europe, makes Google blank out faces and license plates on its Street View over there. Not here.

On the other hand, there is another argument that needs to be made, an argument that could be, I think, both effective and important. And that is: You Have to Let Us Know What You’re Doing With Our Information.

I got an email from Verizon yesterday. “Good News!” it chirped. The next sentence, to rub it in, read: ‘Below please find the description of changes to the Verizon Online Terms of Service (TOS) effective 4/19/11.’

Even the three people who believe they might someday get good news in an email from Verizon know it’s not coming in the changes to the Online Terms of Service, sorry.

So finally, eight paragraphs later, I find the other shoe I know must be lurking somewhere here: Verizon is giving itself the right to change the administrative password for your router ‘to safeguard Internet security’ (of course).

Nothing wrong with this in itself. If they’re just changing the cases where the customer has left the name ‘Admin’ and the password ‘12345’, good for them. On the other hand, I gave my router a new password and have my laptop set up to run off it whenever it’s in the house. If they decide to change that at some random moment without telling me, they can reap havoc.

And here’s where it gets sticky: ‘We will use reasonable means to notify Subscribers whose home router administrative passwords are changed, which may include email notice to your Primary Email Address and/or an announcement on the My Verizon portal.’

Should be easy to find here, right?

An announcement on the Verizon portal?! WTF? Excuse me, does anyone read the portal? That’s like the idiotic ad banks place in the paper telling you they just discovered that $57,000 savings Uncle Henry left you, along with 50,000 other cases just like it. Write them care of their accountants at the address in the tiny print at the bottom and, after 126 other steps, you might get some of it back.

No. That’s it. No more. All my information’s out there and no one’s doing anything to protect it or put it back in a safe place. It’s too late. Fine, I accept that. All I’m asking is, if you’re going to track my location, send me an email detailing what you intend to do with it and get my permission. And if you’re going to change the terms of my security systems—even if they’re also yours—let me know and get my permission.

Or—just to offer an alternative—open up the marketplace and give me five or six companies really competing for my business, offering me equal-quality products with different service levels or different degrees of customer service (which is to say, several levels better than Verizon’s) if I’m willing to pay for it.

That would be even better. But I’m not holding my breath.

Publisher going the e-route

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

My friend Steve from Chicago sent me this link to a story about a romance publisher going all ebook and Print on Demand with their upcoming releases.

I’m not sure I’m convinced this company isn’t just using the low-cost of epublishing to lay off staff – I’m not at all sure epublishing is a panacea for the publishing business as it presently exists-but it’s surely an indication of which way the wind is blowing…

Jimi, Vincent and Duke

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

A friend of mine opened a can of worms the other day by bringing up an old argument.

‘Hendrix wasn’t really much of a musician.’

jimi

Now, I’m letting him off the hook a bit right away—he didn’t say that himself. A musician he met online, someone who knows far more about music than either of us, had played with Hendrix a bit in the old days and apparently made a comment about him not really being much of a player outside of twelve-bar blues. So I’m getting this all thirdhand and if I knew all the details of what the original guy was saying, maybe I’d agree with him.

But, since I’m unburdened by facts here, I can just say what I want. That’s what a blog is for, right?

I’ve always had musician friends and this argument has gone on forever and I’ve never quite gotten it. It always seems beside the point to me. Pure ‘musicianship’ seems to be defined by the ability to fit yourself into any musical context and fit right in. Studio musicians are the ideal because they can play jazz, blues, rock, punk, ska, R&B—anything—and sound right. They’re malleable, flexible, endlessly adaptable.

So?

In painting, you don’t hear this argument. Nobody suggests that the best painters are the guys who work for the ad agency just because they can simulate Escher in the morning and Rothko in the afternoon.

primitive

Van Gogh had five or six different styles as a painter but all of them started in his gut. He couldn’t have changed the style he was currently working in to save his life—literally. He was a narrow technical player, caught in something original and expressive.

Hunter Thompson could and did write straight journalism at a certain point in his career but, once he’d discovered the voice that came out of ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’, he wasn’t going back. Although the truth is, he wrote himself into a corner that I think did limit him in the end. Joseph Heller worked for Time, Inc. for many years and surely did a lot of writing in the terse, backassed type of prose that magazine used to specialize in but nobody has ever suggested that made him a better writer or better than Saul Bellow, who was similarly ‘limited’ (if you use the musicianship argument) by a very specific voice.

Hunter-Bogie could have played him

Let’s throw acting in for just a moment. Dustin Hoffman is the actorly equivalent of the studio musician—whoever you want him to play, he loses himself in the role. He’s a thousand times more versatile and fluid than Humphrey Bogart, who was trapped in as narrow a range as any actor that ever had a career. But there are certain roles that cry out for Bogart because what he did, he did more authentically (on-screen at least) than anyone else ever has.

So I think the musician argument is a mistake when it comes to Hendrix and most of the people I care about—because they’re artists and artists aren’t about technical mastery, they’re about conveying feeling and authenticity. You’ll notice the carefully-chosen word ‘conveying’—I’m not in any way suggesting these people were anything like their image or their art in daily life. That’s another essay…

Great musicians: Steve Gadd, Skunk Baxter, Jim Keltner, James Jamerson, Barney Kessel, Carol Kaye, Hal Blaine, etc.

Really primitive limited musicians: Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Roger McGuinn, John Lennon, Ringo Starr, Jimi Hendrix (maybe).

I know which band I want to listen to.

 

The 99 Cent Quandary

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

Karen’s latest

Karen Dionne is an interesting writer and a good soul. She’s written a thoughtful piece on Huffington Post today about how 99 e-books are bad for writers.

Thoughtful, sensible—but (in my opinion) wrong.

First, you have to understand the overall transition that’s taking place in the book business. In the traditional business plan, publishers controlled supply (they owned the press, supplied reviewers and filled the stores) and used that control to maintain higher prices and profits (for the company, not the writer). Only so many books appeared each month; publicity and marketing were controlled from the top down—you knew about the big books coming months in advance.

The ebook marketplace is one of unlimited supply, with the great majority of profit going to the writer—if the writer can find a readership. The gatekeepers are gone—newspapers are dying and very few of the living maintain a book review section worth discussing anymore. And even those few don’t deign to mention indie ebooks.

The blogging universe is chaos like most of the Internet world—eventually some reviewers will rise to the top but things aren’t close to settled at the moment. So the hard part even for established writers these days is being heard over the din.

For indie (or self-published, if you prefer) ebook writers, things are even tougher. We have neither name recognition nor a publisher sending out review copies to ensure even a trickle of attention. Our whole focus at the start has to be getting our names out any way we can.

It turns out that there is a support structure in existence—a network of blog sites that review ebooks. Type ‘ebook reviews’ into Google. Or type ‘indie ebook reviews.’ What you find is a hodgepodge of ‘how to publish’ and ‘how to market your ebook’ articles and reviews of e-reader hardware along with a few actual ebook reviewers. Now type in ‘free ebook reviews.’ BAM! Suddenly, you’ve got pages of reviews, download sites, videos, offers, etc. There’s a world out there—of free content.

That’s where the 99¢ title actually functions in this new marketplace; as the seawall against the tide of free books. Sure, most of them might deservedly be free. Nonetheless there’s an enthusiastic group of readers out there who might be enticed away to a 99¢ book, but who definitely aren’t considering (for the moment) a $2.99, $4.99 or certainly a $9.99 ebook (check the angry reviews on Amazon for publisher-released $9.99 ebooks—that price point is never going to fly).

My latest-only $1.99

Once we get readers, we have the chance to move up. I have three books online now, two of them at 99¢. They are short and I’m unknown to the public. The third, at $1.99 is full-length and a real novel. Its sales are slower than the other two but my feet are dug in (for the moment). My two best will go live in the next week or two; those will be priced at $2.99.  But I might offer a deal: buy one of the $2.99 titles and get one of the 99¢ ones free.

The idea is to be read, to have people tell their friends and establish a baseline from which to grow. I’ll have more books to sell as time goes on—that’s my focus.

In twenty years, the marketplace will have sorted itself out some. You’ll have a couple bloggers whose ebook taste coincides with yours (and expands upon it—I found a lot of filmmakers over the years through Pauline Kael and David Thomson). If they say something’s worth reading, it goes on your list. Prices will settle into several rational tiers that reflect a writer’s success and the effort it takes to do good work.

But I still think you’ll see a thriving marketplace of 99¢ books then. And at the moment, while we’re living in the Wild West? The arguments in favor of a 99¢ indie ebook, particularly for unpublished or underpublished authors, are very compelling.

 

The Funhouse Mirror

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

Creative work is its own reward. One of the major differences between creative work and ‘work’ is that, over time, you come to expect a satisfaction not just from the finished product, but from the process of creation itself.

charade

Charade

My fix—the reward I crave on a daily basis, staring at the blank screen for two years to write a book—is laughter. I have to find the humor in a situation or character or I’ll never finish the book, no matter how good or important I otherwise think it is. I just won’t be able to drag myself to the desk day after day if I can’t locate that absurd, satirical core somewhere inside. I grew up with Hitchcock. I think the first thriller I ever saw was Charade, which was really a comedy masquerading as a thriller and I still love the mixing of humor and adventure.

The thing that makes fiction particularly tough these days is that our real-life world is already so absurd that it’s hard to exaggerate—and exaggeration is the heart of storytelling.

But, there’s always a way…

In my thriller, Mindbenders, which will be out soon, my main character is a refugee of the Cold War—literally. Max Renn is a Soviet genetic experiment, the product of three generations of psychics bred by the Soviet state to produce a mindreader superspy. He hears every thought of every person for three blocks around, whether he wants to or not (mostly, he doesn’t). He can stop your heart, give you cancer, make public your deepest secrets or make you forget who you are with a nod of his head. We meet him twenty years after the fall of the Soviet Union, living in the Everglades and trying to stay the hell away from people—but of course (since it’s a thriller), his best friend is shot dead on page one, paragraph one and he’s forced to seek out the rotten conspiracy behind it all.

Not exactly laugh-a-minute stuff. So where’s the humor? All over the place, actually. The story is told by Greg Hirsh, a PTSD Iraq vet who’s forced to travel with Renn—and Greg is a source of all sorts of real humor. Real humor, which is to say, not forced lame jokes but the kind of incongruous reactions you’d have if someone was really reading your mind and sharing other people’s thoughts with you. Of course, to Greg, none of this is the least bit funny but that’s the ‘There-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I’ aspect of storytelling, catharsis and humor being just two sides of the same coin.

And then there are my villains. At first, I was assuming I’d find some enemy nation’s mindreader to oppose Renn, but, from the first, that just seemed contrived and old-fashioned. I found a better alternative by wondering: If I was unscrupulous and discovered the world had a pool of mindreaders out of work after the end of the Cold War, how could I make the most mischief out of it?

As soon as I did that, the door opened.  I found not only my villains, but an etched-glass refracted  window on some of the most ridiculous aspects of our daily life. For instance:

You bought an SUV for $60,000. It drives like a truck and gets half the gas mileage of a car and gas is past $3.50 a gallon. The only advantage the thing offers is going off-road and you never go off-road. So why buy it, at twice the profit margin of a car? Well, did it ever occur to you that maybe you were influenced? Maybe it wasn’t just marketing or a slick salesperson. Maybe there were other voices inside your head, compelling you to make a purchase that gave you a headache a week later.

Or let’s go a step darker: Politicians get elected, which means they are at the mercy of voters, right? Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to work? Meanwhile, if you’ve read the headlines lately, you know that large numbers of politicians have been voting all kinds of laws and tax breaks that hugely benefit a very few people at the very painful expense of the rest of us. Laws and tax breaks that are widely opposed in opinion polls by a sizeable majority of those voters. Sure, maybe the politicians are getting paid off for those votes, but what good will that do them if they’re booted out next November? If democracy is the rule of the majority, how can you have a democracy where the majority is routinely getting screwed?

Well, what if someone was out there influencing the voters? What if you as a politican knew that the voters would be influenced on Election Day to vote against their own best interests over and over again—you could get away with murder, couldn’t you? Literally and figuratively.

This all starts out with me just having fun, riffing away with ‘What if’s’—the problem is, it sure does fit what’s going on, doesn’t it? It sure starts to sound just like real life. The etched glass becomes a mirror…a funhouse mirror, with a reflection that makes you want to laugh and cry all at once.

 

From the Heart

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

Let’s talk some more about publishing yourself, what is thought of primarily as the e-book revolution (it turns out, with print-on-demand, that it’s not just ebooks but that’s a discussion for another day). I’m gaining a new understanding as the days go by and I dip deeper into this pool of the change indie publishing brings in the writer’s head and so far it’s all heartening.

My main focus these days (when I’m not reformatting or retouching old books for publication or working on this website or my day job or trying to find places to publicize these books or trying to find time to eat) is the sequel to ‘Mindbenders.’ It’s a thriller and a good one, I think.

I know the emotional ride my characters are going on. I had a storyline worked out but it fizzled on me, which is a sign that it wasn’t working. If it has no juice for me, I can’t finish it, even if it would sell a million copies (I’m not suggesting it would, only how useless I am if the book isn’t bubbling in my gut).

I realized two things in the last few weeks: the beginning was too bulky—and I’d betrayed my whole conception of the stories without even realizing it.

One of the things that I loved about the series from the beginning was the idea that these people could be living under our noses, in our world, manipulating our politics, sales figures of our major consumer items, stockholder votes, things that get written up on the news and that affect all our lives, without our ever even considering their existence or influence. They’re mindreaders, right? If they don’t want you to know about them, you won’t, even if they’re right under your nose. But the idea then is to keep it somewhat low-key, keep everyone under the radar.

But the new book had a bombastic ending that took all kinds of convolutions to happen and that weighed it down like a ton of bricks. And, as soon as I started down this indie publishing route, I somehow organically knew without any soul-searching that it wasn’t right, didn’t fit.

Because it didn’t fit my characters or the type of story I want to tell.

I hadn’t realized that before because I’d felt I had a publisher to impress, an agent to impress. Whatever book I wrote had to be pitchable, had to sound bigger and better. I never consciously thought about those things but the expectations were on my mind—and as soon as I was in charge of my own ship again, I saw right through the bad ideas.

I’ve now thrown out the beginning and the end of the book as planned. I’m back to my usual approach, which is not planning, as though there is no series, no sequel. I’m going on a journey with my characters again and we’ll see where it goes. And I’m excited again, which hopefully means the result will be exciting for readers.

And all this came easily, simply because my own expectations for an indie book future are of necessity far more modest than the old publishing model. Ain’t no million-dollar advance coming. No New York Times articles, all the fantasies you play out in your head. Those things don’t happen for 99% of the writers out there anyway but they clog up your brain like ozone. This way, I know what I’m up against. I’m going to be fighting for years just to get readers who don’t know me already. But now I’m seeing the benefits of this path as well.

I had the feeling  that this direction would make me a better writer and here’s early evidence that that’s right.