My zombie erotica debut: 

2 is for Taboo

in  the anthology

Fifty Shades of Decay

is now available in a print edition at Amazon

REVIEWS are waxing poetic.  A few tastings:

" I have no hesitation in admitting that I don’t read horror, and I generally do not like zombies.  That being said, my curiosity and love of erotica got the better of me... I would definitely rate Fifty Shades of Decay 5 out of 5 stars.  It is well worth the read."  
--  Becca Butcher 

"First off I have to say that I’m not a big fan of zombies, and I haven’t read any of the 50 shades books; but I love short stories, and I have a warm spot for erotica (in my heart you dirty minded readers you!).  So, when this book came across my radar I thought “sure why not? ... All in all I enjoyed this anthology, it was different from what I normally read and even though there were some parts that made me gag, I was very entertained throughout."
--  Rina Lee  

"A couple of things I really enjoyed about Fifty Shades of Decay.
1) 51 different authors.  The vast majority were new to me and I discovered several, that I'm excited about seeing what else they have to offer.
2) 51 different concepts of zombie erotica.  That in itself was pretty amazing.  Hat's off to editor Stacey Turner for presenting such a varied assortment of stories.  The theme was consistent, but the stories all came at the subject matter in unique ways.
Needless to say, Fifty Shades of Decay is strictly adult fair and certainly not for everyone, but if you'd like to spice up your zombie experience then this is just what you're looking for." 
--  Frank Michael Serrington 

"This book is seriously fun and has a tremendous selection of stories. Ranging from sexy to gory to downright disturbing. When a friend told me about it I thought they were out of their mind. I took a chance and, while I am not finished with it, I have come across a few stories that were just awesome. Worth looking at."
--  Cool Hat Luke, Amazon review

"Great job, I liked the range of stories and enjoyed the humor. I didn't finish the other fifty shades no problem here."
--  Connie Lipscomb, Amazon review

"First, I want to reiterate, this book is rated MA for a reason. This is not a book for the squeamish either! With fifty-one different authors, there is plenty of variety in this collection. And while some were able to gross out the best of 'em, (me), there were others that ... dare I say ... touched me with sincerity and possibly a bit of romanticism. And then there were others that were just plain hot. :)"
--  Melissa Stevens, Amazon review

Fifty Shades of Decay

For all you zombie erotica fans out there, I have a short story in the new anthology Fifty Shades of Decay (Angelic Knight Press).   As they self-describe:

What's sexy about zombies? 51 authors answered that question with wild, weird, and titillating tales. From love during the apocalypse, to love that goes beyond the grave and back again, to love that well, never dies, you'll find these pages filled with desires demanding to be fufilled, hungers to be slaked, and lovers who won't let a little thing like death (or undeath) come between them. Do zombies need sex as much as they need brains? What would you do to bring a lover back from the dead? What if you survived the apocalypse only to find yourself alone and sexually frustrated?

Light some candles, put on some mood music, and cozy up with 50 Shades of Decay. The zombie sexpocalypse has begun...

I gave myself one day to write this and am now considering expanding it into a screenplay.  I think I created an interesting world and a new take on the culture of zombieism, though I can't be sure since I don't really read the literature or watch zombie shows.  I assume most of the rest of the genre is as far from the '50s stereotypes as mine is, but that's just a guess.

At any rate, the Ebook is out and the printed version is coming in the next week or two.  It's available on Amazon.  It's almost 100,000 words long but I haven't read any of the stories besides my own yet, so I can't comment on the quality, but you'll certainly be getting some creative efforts and if my interaction with editor Stacey Turner is any indication, it is meticulously edited.

THE NEXT BIG THING

The Next Big Thing is a viral blog event, or a pyramid scheme or a chain letter--the jury is still out.  The idea is for an author to answer ten questions about his or her work in progress or current release, then tag other writers to answer the same questions a few weeks later, linking back to the tagger and forward to the taggees.

I was tagged by Travis Richardson whose novella Lost in Clover was recently Published electronically through Untreed Reads, and his short story “The Movement” is in the anthology Scoundrels: Tales of Greed, Murder and Financial Crimes, edited by Gary Phillips and published by Down and Out Books earlier this year.

So, tag, I'm it:


1. What is your working title of your book (or story)?

Go Down Screaming

2.  Where did the idea come from for the book?

It's a sequel to the noir novel my agent is currently shopping called Go Down Hard. The initial responses I got from publishers were lengthy rave rejections.  They all wanted to see my next book but had little to say about the first one that revealed why they wouldn't buy it.  I think they wanted more suspense.  Go Down Hard is a pretty straightforward hard-boiled mystery about a writer who looks into a twenty-year-old rock-and-roll murder and stirs the killer to strike again.  There's a bit of action but no serious jeopardy.  So I decided to develop the sequel as a suspense novel.

The first book was written in the first person present in the voice of Nob Brown, an ex-cop, bottom-feeding crime writer for the tabloids.  When I started the sequel, Go Down Screaming, I began to tire of being inside Nob's head, so I switched narrators to his best friend (with benefits), an LAPD Lieutenant Detective named Gloria Lopes (rhymes with "hopes").  Writing first person in a woman's voice made the writing much more exhilarating.  And, surprisingly, the women in my writers group liked her better than Nob.

Getting back to the question at hand, now that I had my protagonist/narrator I came up with various scenarios to put her in jeopardy and picked the one that seemed to offer the most fun for me as a writer.  Gloria encounters a psychopathic murderess she caught eighteen years earlier who just got paroled.  The killer has spent almost two decades in prison plotting to seek revenge for her arrest. This basic premise was only a jumping off point.  The story evolved as Gloria interacted with her antagonist.  I'm not an outliner, I'm a seat-of-the-pantser (a reaction against decades of writing treatments for clueless network execs when I made my living as a TV writer).  This writing strategy tends to nurture plots into thickets but with constant attention, they can be trimmed into some semblance of topiary.

3.  What genre does your book fall under?

Noir Mystery/Suspense

4.  Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

LAPD Lieutenant Detective Gloria Lopes = Rooney Mara or Jennifer Lawrence or Jessica Chastain
Nob Brown = James Franco or Nikolaj Coster-Waldau or Johnny Depp

5.  What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

When vicious mass murderess Billie Breech is paroled, the life of LAPD Lieutenant Gloria Lopes--the detective who caught the killer almost two decades earlier--is thrown into a vortex of terror when Billie absconds with the son Lopes had given up for adoption long ago.

6.  Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

Since Go Down Hard got me my agent, Ann Collette (along with a marriage proposal, the pros and cons of which are still under consideration by my wife), I've left both books in Ann's capable and loving hands (of course, the second is still a WIP).  

I am keeping the door ajar on the first book and do have a cover prepared (on the right) in case I change my mind.  But due to the aforementioned rave rejections, Ann feels confident that she can sell Go Down Screaming, after which thinks she can sell Go Down Hard.  The best laid plans...

7.  How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

It took me two and a half years, but I wasted a lot of time on a draft that alternated between Nob's first person POV and a third-person omniscient narrator.  I threw out about 30,000 words when I decided to dump the third-person narration.  I also had to make major structural changes to my story since the first-person POV eliminated many of the plot twists I had developed.

To complicate matters, I was working simultaneously on a screenplay (currently in preproduction), which was a major time suck.

8.  What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I wouldn't presume to compare my work to books I admire, and hope they aren't comparable to books I don't, but they aspire to live in a neighborhood where Elmore Leonard might hoist a glass with Charlie Huston.

9.  Who or what inspired you to write this book?

I took my Writers Guild pension early and began to think of myself as retired.  Of course a writer never retires, but I was at a point in life where, as I mentioned, I was tired of pandering to the whims of TV execs.  So I used my alleged retirement as an excuse to write the kind of stuff I like to read.  And I chose the novel form because I could be my own boss.  Since the publishing industry was in the process of collapse, I figured it would be perfect time to knock on the door.

Go Down Screaming was inspired by the need to stop rewriting Go Down Hard.

10.  What else about your book might pique the reader's interest?

It's a noir romp through the worlds of aging rock-and-rollers, live Internet sex, abusive psychiatrists, Slavic mobsters, child molesters, emotional betrayal, arson, murder and estate planning.  Sex, thugs, rock and roll.   What more could you ask for?

Since my books are not yet available, you can get a taste of my work in my short story Dead End.

I've tagged the following talented writers as The Next Big Thing:

Susan Goldstein, author of Hollywood Forever and the upcoming Hollywood Heartbreaker 

Joel Engel, author of L.A. '56: A Devil in the City of Angels

Surveilling an Illegal Gun Sale

I'm not a Federal agent, but I play one at the mall.  At least I did last week as part of my ATF Citizen's Academy surveillance night.  Citizens Academies are PR outreach programs for law enforcement agencies to help the public understand what they do.  They put you through a mini-version of their academy curricula, minus the most difficult physical activities.

I did the LAPD Citizen's Academy last year as part of my ongoing attempt to make my crime writing as realistic as possible, but it was nothing like ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms),  the agency that brought down Al Capone (while Hoover took the credit) among other uncredited victories.  Unfortunately, the ops that go public tend to be more along the lines of Fast and Furious or Waco.

Nonetheless, ATF is responsible for policing illegal arms, explosives, interstate and international gangs, cartels and other criminal organizations, and black market alcohol and tobacco smuggling.  The last item may not seem like much of a big deal but a $200,000 investment in untaxed and/or counterfeit (from China) cigarettes can yield a profit of $1.5 million with few consequences if you're caught.  Because of this, cigarette smuggling has become a major source of money laundering for drug cartels and terrorist organizations as well as a key entry point for ATF undercover agents to infiltrate these organizations.

But I digress.  I was talking about the mall.  The LAPD Academy takes place mostly in a classroom (homicide detectives, bomb sniffing dogs, crime scene divers, white crime detectives, firearms instructors, etc.).  LAPD does one session with a video simulator and laser guns, but the ATF does three sessions in the field -- surveillance, tactical and shooting range.

Last Wednesday, our class of 35 broke up into four 8-person units and went out to various malls where ATF agents staged fake gun buys.  We were fitted with radios snaking into our ears like Secret Service agents, and sent off to find out who our CI's (confidential informants) were meeting with, tail them to the guns without being seen, collect as much identifying information as possible (photos, videos, license numbers, overheard bits of conversation, distinguishing marks or clothing, etc.), and follow the guns to their getaway vehicle.

I'm sure, from the agents' POV, we all made quite a spectacle of ourselves, but we thought we acquitted ourselves pretty well.  I had the misfortune of being chosen as a team leader, which meant I had to direct everyone without a clue as to what I was supposed to do.  We were broken into two-man teams, not because that's how ATF agents do it, but because that way we don't end up with one clueless person getting lost or having him or her lose contact because a radio goes down.

The first hitch in my giddyup was when the gun dealer showed up with a backup man.  That meant I had only four teams including my own to follow two men plus watch the CI.  The point of not getting caught is to be able to abandon a suspect if you think you've been seen, knowing another agent will pick him up.  Of course I was supposed to be orchestrating all this as the two suspects wandered off in opposite directions and quickly disappeared into the mall.  For a panicky five minutes we'd lost all contact with the suspects and we'd just begun.  I just hoped the nervous sweat didn't short out anyone's radio.

Fortunately, we picked the main suspect up a few minutes later and were able to tail him to a car where he received a bag of guns from someone we were not able to see but whose license number we got.  Unfortunately, there were not many cars parked on the structure roof where this took place, so my partner and I stuck out like sore thumbs.  We immediately grabbed our car-key fobs and began holding them up and clicking while arguing like an old married couple about who lost the car.

We picked up suspect Number Two again when suspect Number One took the guns back into the mall to make the exchange with the CI.

Even though the buy was fake, the experience was incredibly fun and seemingly dangerous (especially since Mall security had refused to cooperate with ATF, so we were on the QT).

Next week we do tactical, where they take us through an urban course with paint guns and we have to shoot bad guys, avoid friendly fire incidents and not get shot.  I expect to come home looking like a Jackson Pollack.

The third field day is at the range where we will get to fire fully automatic weapons, including Prohibition Era Tommy guns.

All in all, it's a surprisingly enlightening experience.  I recommend it to everyone who has any procedural elements in their work.

-- Special Agent Craig Faustus Buck

RP Dahlke's Amazon review of Dead End

I've been remiss in posting here but I know I have to be more regular if I want to retain followers, so here's a short description of my Kindle Direct Publishing experiment.

I wrote a 6,000-word short story called Dead End  for the Sisters in Crime L.A. upcoming anthology, but it was not one of the ten ultimately selected.  The story is very dark.  It probably didn't fit in.

So I was stuck with this story and it seemed obvious that Epublishing of one sort or another was in every author's future, if not present, so I decided to throw it up on Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing and see what would happen.

I worked up a cover (even a short story is a "book" as far as KDP is concerned).

I cleaned up the formatting of my story (basically, replacing all the TABs with indents built into the paragraph style).

And I published it for the minimum price allowed, ninety-nine cents.  I didn't know what to expect, but I figured I'd just put it up there, offer it free a couple of times, and see what happens.

I announced the first free offer to my Facebook friends (of which I've capped out at 5,000 and can't Friend anyone anymore).  I announced it on the SinC LA and SoCal MWA facebook groups and a few other small mystery groups.  And I Tweeted to my 322 Twitter followers.  That was about it.

Unsurprisingly, sales were pathetic.  More surprisingly, when it was free, only about a hundred people downloaded it.  You'd think, with 5,000 friends, more would have been curious enough to download it, even if they never got around to reading it.

But one person was gracious enough to write a review and it was positive, to say the least.  It was someone steeped in the genre, author RP Dahlke who also publishes the All Mystery enewsletter and runs the AllMysteryNewsletter Yahoo! group.  Here's her review:

5.0 out of 5 stars
A Brilliant Debut
By RP Dahlke
Amazon Verified Purchase

"When the author posted at All Mystery e-news yahoo group that this short story was Free for the weekend, I figured it would be perfect for an hour of bedtime reading.... and it was, and so much some. This very skillfully written short has all the elements that one would expect from say, Michael Connelly or Lee Child. Set in LA, it's at turns humorous, gritty, violent and poignant... with an ending that is nothing short of a gut punch. I really hope the author is writing a full-length novel, because I predict that once he gets the first one published, his fans will be howling for more."

RP Dahlke's Amazon review sparked a number (2) of emails requesting another FREE offer of my noir short story Dead End, (click on the link to get it gratis, Oct 6-7 only).  So I decided to try another free offer, but this time I included the review (below).  I pretty much marketed it in the same haphazard way through the same channels.

If you haven't already, grab the short story yourself and if you miss the Amazon offer... hey, it's only ninety-nine cents.

If you're a subscriber and don't have a Kindle, Email me and I'll send you a free PDF.

I'll keep you posted on the postmortem of the experiment.

To be in full compliance with this blog's full disclosure rules, I have to note that, while I don't know Rebecca Dahlke, I have had some dealings with her in my capacity as one of the organizers of the California Crime Writers Conference 2013.  She will be a speaker there, on a panel called "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly: Marketing Your Book and Your Brand."

UPDATE (10/25/2012): Two more reviews have been posted.  I did a second free weekend with the same minimal marketing and another 65 people downloaded.  A total of 16 people have bought it.  Granted, it's just a short story at the same price point as a book, but still...

I've been Ngramming lately. "What?" you ask. Ngramming. Using Google Books' Ngram Viewer to play around and today we're going to talk about the long-standing rivalry between the colon and the semicolon. Here is a chart of how the two have fared against each other from 1550 to the present.

The Ngram is too small to read in the blog so I'll tell you what you're seeing. The blue line represents how often a semicolon was used in virtually any book published during the time frame and digitized by Google. The percentage is derived by comparing how often a word--or in this case a punctuation mark--is used compared to any other "1-grams" or "unigrams" which means a single word or character in all those millions of books (as opposed to a 2-gram or bigram like "vampire nostril" or a 3-gram or trigram like "three little pigs").

Along the bottom of the chart, or the X-axis, are numbers you can see but probably can't read. From left to right, they go from 1550 to 2000 in increments of 50 years.

The Y-axis, going up the left side of the chart, gives N-gram percentages, which are pretty meaningless to me except as they compare to each other.

If you set aside the wild swings at the beginning of the chart--which I suspect are due to statistical spikes caused by the fact that relatively few books were published back in the 16th and 17th centuries so a single influential work could throw the stats off--something interesting occurs between 1950 and the present.

Somewhere around the time of the anti-Vietnam War movement, the sexual revolution and the hippy movement, the semi-colon, which had enjoyed a pronounced lead over the colon since around 1670, suddenly took a nosedive while the colon soared. The trend eased just before the turn of the century, but did not reverse.

What does this mean? Was it the self-help craze that brought us billions of books with colon-laden subtitles? Was it the rising tide of em dashes incorrectly supplanting semicolons? I'm looking for answers and welcome any theories. As it is, this conundrum is keeping me up nights.

Recipe of the week... well, of the time period between now and my last recipe. I threw this together last night for a dinner party as a result of a friend's feta largess. She went to Costco and bought a small ton of feta, took one taste and decided it was too salty for her. Why someone would buy feta if they don't like salt is a mystery to me, but that's another blog. At any rate, I had a couple pounds of feta on my hands so I decided to use some of it up.

Thanks to my wife, I also had some fresh tarragon growing in the garden. This was a surprise to me, but she harvested quite a bit a few days ago and it's been drying on our window sill ever since.

So I chopped up a bunch of semi-dry tarragon, and mixed it with feta, a bit of panko, a little olive oil, a little rosemary, garlic and chipotle powder.

Then I got some big bone-in, skin-on chicken breasts and stuffed the feta/tarragon mixture under the skin.

A little olive oil on the skin and then I popped the suckers into my smoker (actually just a Weber kettle with coals banked hard against one side and moderated to about 225 degrees). I used two kinds of wood for the smoking: apple and chips from old Jack Daniels whiskey barrels, which are oak steeped in Kentucky sippin' whiskey. I love the flavor those chips impart.

After about two hours, I took them out of the smoker when they reached an internal temp of 150. The skin has to be discarded because the smoke makes it leathery, but the feta mixture held onto the chicken nicely. I've tried this before and the cheese melted away completely which is why I added the panko (maybe a quarter cup per half pound (maybe three quarters?). It worked nicely and the resulting dish was a huge hit.

As a side note, I had some leftovers in a sandwich today and the chicken and feta/tarragon mixture worked perfectly in that context, too.

I made North Carolina style pulled pork for the 4th of July.  North Carolina was, after all, one of the original thirteen colonies.

The traditional sauce calls for yellow mustard (like French's), white or cider vinegar, salt, pepper and, usually, sugar or honey.  There are no traditional proportions as there are with, say, a vinaigrette.  Some recipes call for three times as much vinegar as mustard, some call for just the opposite, and some call for anything in between.  So this is a sauce that truly requires you to create your own blend to taste.

Here's the noir version with considerable depth of flavor in the Macho Cooking tradition. I refused to forsake all BBQ orthodoxy, so the traditional ingredients are there, but I pimped them up and the result was a smash hit, both as a glaze in the smoker and as a sauce. This stuff is also great on sandwiches of pork, poultry, lamb, roasted veggies and even beef. Here's the recipe:

BUCK'S MUSTARD SAUCE

1/2 cup yellow mustard
1/2 cup Dijon mustard
2 Tbsp. sweet-hot mustard
1/2 cup red wine vinegar
1/2 cup Balsamic vinegar
1/2 cup agave syrup (or honey or sugar to taste)
1 tsp. chipotle powder (or your favorite hot sauce to taste)

Directions: Mix it all up, no cooking required unless you need to melt the sweetener you use.  If you do need to heat it, it will work out fine as long as you don't bring it to a boil.  Just heat it over medium heat until your sugar or honey melts enough to blend with the other ingredients.

It's preferable but not necessary to make this sauce a day ahead to allow the flavors to meld.

Well it occurs to me that I haven't been blogging in a loooooooooong time, so here's the scoop.

I'm about two inches away from deciding to Epublish Go Down Hard.  In the pursuit of that possibility, I've crowd-source a book cover at crowdSPRING.com.  For your viewing pleasure, here it is:

The space under my name is where my blurb from Michael Connelly will go, assuming I can figure out a way to get to him and persuade him to read the book.

CrowdSPRING is a pretty amazing place.  I had more than 100 entries from 25 or so designers.

I chose my favorites and then used their "focus group" function to have Facebook friends vote.  The function isn't great in that there is no way to corrolate the votes of people who voted for more than one.  For example, if someone gave 5 stars to their favorite, 4 stars to their second favorite, and 1 star to their least favorite, and someone else only voted for their one favorite, but gave it 3 stars because they didn't like it that much, I would have no way of ascertaining that.  They only give you stats on the total number of votes for each cover and the average number of stars it received.  Not helpful. I wish I knew how the votes fell out between men and women because I wanted to make sure my cover was not a turnoff for those women readers who enjoy noir.

Interestingly, when I got to my final focus group (I did it twice), I chose my three favorites without noticing who the artist was and they were all from the same person (I don't know if it's a man or woman, but I suspect he/she is from a foreign land as I was continually addressed in messages as "Sir."

Nonetheless, I highly recommend crowdSPRING to anyone who has any sort of creative project to put out to bid.  Their tech support communications, btw, are rapid and personalized.  I was impressed.

Let me know what you think of the cover.

Finalism

UPDATE:  Go Down Hard made the final three!

**************************
July 27:  I was notified a few days ago that my novel, Go Down Hard, which is making the rounds in New York as I write this, has been selected as a finalist for the Killer Nashville Claymore Award!

There were ten finalists chosen from 223 entries through a blind judging process. Each MS was read by two author/readers to move out of the first round. Then by a third and, in case of a tie, a fourth to move into the final ten.

Now the finalalists will be read by Killer Nashville's 2012 publishing partner, Five Star Press/Tekno Books. The publisher then chooses the winner and two runners up and, presumably, offers one or more publishing contracts.

Onward and upward.