An Interview with Michael Koryta

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Aug 07, 2012 in Guest Posts, Writing

Today we celebrate the publication of Michael Koryta’s THE PROPHET with Michael’s interview with Dean Koontz, which originally appeared on Amazon.com.

DEAN: Your new novel, THE PROPHET, is a crime novel, a suspense novel, but also a good novel about brothers and family relationships. I know you a little, and I’m 99% sure that you weren’t cloned, that you have a family, but I don’t know about siblings. You write so well about brotherly relationships that I wonder – do you have any? And football – playing it, coaching it – serves both as a background and as a solid metaphor for the value of traditions. Did you play football in school? Have you coached any?

MICHAEL: I was a natural athlete. Played every sport, and the responses from my coaches were unanimous and emphatic. Whether it was a basketball or football or baseball bat or golf club in my hands, they’d say, “Son, I think you should be a writer.” It’s good to have consensus. So, no, never played football beyond pick-up games, I bruise too easily and lack fundamental coordination, but I was hopefully able to bring some authenticity to the book due to the tremendous level of help and access I received from Scott Bless, Tyler Abel, and the rest of the Bloomington High School North coaching staff. I spent a full year with them in coaching meetings, practice fields, and on the sidelines, and it was tremendous and fascinating. The bad news for them is I’m hooked now and currently drawing up plays. If they’ll just give me a chance…As for brothers, I have none. Just friends who feel like brothers to me, in the good ways and the infuriating. And I have a sister who brings only the positive side.

DEAN: You quickly built a reputation for crime/suspense, and then went for a touch of the supernatural in SO COLD THE RIVER, THE CYPRESS HOUSE, and THE RIDGE. Did your agent freak out? Many years ago, when I first began ricocheting from genre to genre, I received more than a few heartfelt lectures about how I was destroying my career. Now THE PROPHET has no supernatural edge. What is it with you, pal? Easily bored? Creatively restless? Enjoy walking a cliff’s edge? Multiple personality?

MICHAEL: Dean, please stop answering the questions before I can. Yes, yes, yes, and, certainly, yes to those last four. As for the genre ricocheting, I had a supportive agent. I lost a publisher, but that’ll happen, and somehow I fell into the hands of Michael Pietsch at Little, Brown, who I think is one of the all-time-great editors. Can’t say enough about the team over there. They’ve indulged my flights of fancy and I know it isn’t easy and I’ve heard plenty of lectures from other parties about the career suicide I’m cheerfully carrying out, but I’ll always say the same thing here: you’ve got to tell the story that wants to be told. That’s the joy of it, the privilege of it, and, I’d argue, the responsibility of it. To write the best story you can. That won’t always fit the same tidy box. And to try and do so seems far too close to actual
work. I’m not cut out for actual work.

DEAN: When researching THE RIDGE, you became interested in big-cat rescue – lions, tigers, nothing as safe as your common tabby. Now you participate in rescues. In a way, your fiction entered your life and became part of it. The same has happened to me with Canine Companions for Independence and other things that I wrote about and subsequently became involved with. Tell us why big-cat rescue so appeals to you. And are there other examples of research/writing changing your life?

MICHAEL: The experience of working with the Exotic Feline Rescue Center is one of the truly special things in my life, I couldn’t imagine not having those cats and those people in my life at this point. It’s an amazing mission and deserving of support and, as you did with Canine Companions, I simply fell in love. I’d drop anything to go on a big-cat rescue, and will continue to do so as long as they’ll have me. Research is forever changing my life and bringing new interests and new people into it, and that’s one of the great privileges of this craft, the chance to visit so many different worlds. Continue reading ›

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Start Reading Dare Me

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Aug 01, 2012 in Excerpts, Fiction

This week, Megan Abbott’s DARE ME,  an O Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, Newsday and Wall Street Journal Summer Reading pick, arrives at bookstores across the nation. Start reading the book that led Daniel Woodrell proclaim:  ”Abbott has become expert at revealing truths we thought we knew but didn’t, delivered in prose that is by turns elegant and incantatory.”

“Something happened, Addy. I think you better come.”

*

The air is heavy, misted, fine. It’s coming on two a.m. and I’m high up on the ridge, thumb jammed against the silver button: 27-G.

*

“Hurry, please.”

*

The intercom zzzzzz-es and the door thunks, and I’m inside.

As I walk through the lobby, it’s still buzzing, the glass walls vibrating.

Like the tornado drill in elementary school, Beth and me wedged tight, jeaned legs pressed against each other. The sounds of our own breathing. Before we all stopped believing a tornado, or anything, could touch us, ever.

*

“I can’t look. When you get here, please don’t make me look.”

*

In the elevator, all the way up, my legs swaying beneath me, 1-2-3-4, the numbers glow, incandescent.

*

The apartment is dark, one floor lamp coning halogen up in the far corner.

“Take off your shoes,” she says, her voice small, her wishbone arms swinging side to side.

We’re standing in the vestibule, which seeps into a dining area, its lacquer table like a puddle of ink.

Just past it, I see the living room, braced by a leather sectional, its black clamps tightening, as if across my chest.

Her hair damp, her face white. Her head seems to go this way and that way, looking away from me, not wanting to give me her eyes.

I don’t think I want her eyes.

*

“Something happened, Addy. It’s a bad thing.”

*

“What’s over there?” I finally ask, gaze fixed on the sofa, the sense that it’s living, its black leather lifting like a beetle’s sheath.

“What is it?” I say, my voice lifting. “Is there something behind there?”

She won’t look, which is how I know.

*

First, my eyes falling to the floor, I see a glint of hair twining in the weave of the rug.

Then, stepping forward, I see more.

“Addy,” she whispers. “Addy…is it like I thought?” Continue reading ›

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Daughters of Daughters of Eve: An Interview with Megan Abbott

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Jul 30, 2012 in Books, Film, Guest Posts, Writing

Laura Lippman: One thing that struck me about DARE ME is that it’s told by an insider, someone inside the group, not an outsider who’s infiltrating it (Mean Girls) or an outsider (pretty much every book I read as a teen). And it struck me that was a bit new for you, too, especially when compared to THE END OF EVERYTHING or even BURY ME DEEP. If history is written by the winners, isn’t fiction usually written by the outsiders? 

Meagan Abbott: Absolutely. And since most writers are introverts, at least in part, one of the hardest parts for me was writing from the point of view of someone whose position in the world of social power was so different from mine at that age. I’ve written male protagonists, female gangsters, women whose lives were circumscribed by conditions (the Great Depression, pre-feminism) I’ve never experienced, even women who have to commit gruesome acts to save themselves. But somehow it was harder, at first, to imagine myself as a member of the high school elite (and an athlete, but that’s another story).

Of course most writers are voyeurs too, and I certainly am, so the more I dug my feet into those trenches, I saw the same power machinations occurring within the elite group of girls as I’d experienced from the outside. Someone always seems to have what you want and there’s always a moment when you realize: ah, this is how I could get it? Would I do this to get it?

LL: I wrote to you about my fascination with names, once I glommed onto Tacy and we joked about the very small cohort of people on the planet who would recognize a Wire reference and a Betsy-Tacy reference. (Us.) As it happens — awful moment of self-reference coming up — I wrote To the Power of Three from the point of Tib, the third friend in the Betsy-Tacy books who can never catch up; Betsy and Tacy will always have been friends longer. But while this is a book from the inner circle, it’s also a book from the POV of a Tacy, a #2, right? 

MA: Oh, that’s so right about Tacy, though I can’t say it was conscious. And that makes so much sense about the Tib connection in TO THE POWER OF THREE (a book which spoke with such intensity to me, having occupied each of the triangle corners in different friendships in my life).

Interestingly, I have always had a complicated relationship to Tacy. As a girl, I identified with Betsy as the aspiring writer, though I think Tacy’s shyness and reserve was far more my own. In the later books, when they’re in high school, I remember feeling disappointed with how Tacy becomes even less ambitious, even more of a homebody, lacked Betsy’s Jo March-verve.

So it’s particularly compelling to consider how Tacy’s presence might be felt in DARE ME. Because doesn’t the Number 2 (to reintroduce THE WIRE) always harbor their own ambitions? Continue reading ›

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Movie Review: Savages

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Jul 24, 2012 in Film, Guest Posts

Adapting Don Winslow’s 2010 novel Savages was never going to be easy. The book is both revelation and revolution whose joys come from its distinctive prose as its propulsive plot. Winslow’s novel feels like the culmination of years of experimentation in previous books like The Winter of Frankie Machine, The Death and Life of Bobby Z, and The Dawn Patrol, albiet infused with the anger and politics of The Power of the Dog. It has strong sexual content and ultraviolence aplenty — plus, it’s funny and sad and beautiful and a Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid for Generation Y.

Now it’s a movie, directed by Oliver Stone, working from a script co-written by Shane Salerno and Winslow himself. In many ways, it’s an excellent adaptation of the book, honors the spirit of Winslow’s work with a deft, affecting touch. It has almost as many flaws, including a controversial ending that is sure to outrage fans of the novel.

The film begins in Laguna Beach, California — present day. Botanist Ben (Aaron Johnson, Kick-Ass) and ex-Special Forces soldier Chon (Taylor “Tim Riggins” Kitsch) produce some of the best marijuana in the world. Ben is the brains, Chon, the enforcer — and both of them are in love with O (Blake Lively, xoxo Gossip Girl), who’s the kind of California girl Brian Wilson writes songs about. The three of them share an unusual but comfortable relationship, until the Baja Cartel, led by Elena comes calling.

When Ben and Chon spur the advances of the cartel’s generous offer to buy their business, Elena instructs the vicious, perverse Lado (Benicio Del Toro) to kidnap O. She hopes this will send Ben and Chon into her embrace. Chon has other plans, plans best summed up by Tommy Lee Jones in Rolling Thunder:

“We’re gonna kill a whole bunch of people.” Continue reading ›

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TNT Options Marcia Clark’s Rachel Knight Series

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Jul 23, 2012 in Mulholland Authors, Mulholland News, Television

Marcia Clark‘s best-selling crime novels (GUILT BY ASSOCIATION and GUILT BY DEGREES) featuring L.A. Prosecutor Rachel Knight have been set up at TNT as a one hour series. Clark will Executive Produce with Dee Johnson and Nelson McCormick. Show-runner Johnson will also write the pilot and McCormick is attached to direct. The e-book edition of GUILT BY ASSOCIATION is currently available for $2.99 through the month of July wherever e-books are sold.

To learn more about Rachel Knight and her Los Angeles haunts, check out Rachel Knight’s LA the GUILT BY ASSOCIATION edition and the GUILT BY DEGREES edition.

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Popping Fresh Popcorn Every Monday

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Jul 23, 2012 in Mulholland Authors, Mulholland News, Popcorn Fiction

GlacesThree years ago this week, I started a website called Popcorn Fiction. The idea arose from a conversation with my buddy Craig Mazin, in which we were both lamenting that Hollywood never looks at contemporary short fiction anymore for inspiration. A slew of movies had popped up in the aught years based on sci-fi short fiction from the 40s and 50s it seemed, but if contemporary genre stories were being published, Hollywood wasn’t paying attention.
I turned to my brother, Austin, who is a programming whiz, and even though it was beneath him, I asked him to design a website where I could launch a new story each week. He enlisted his wife, Yoko, and they came up with both the code and the look. With that in place, I just needed material.
I hit up all the screenwriters I knew and asked if they were interested. Most were. They had prose itches they wanted to scratch, and the idea of penning something original – instead of working on the latest adaptation – intrigued them. They wouldn’t have to worry about budgets or set-pieces or notes or focus groups; they could just run wild on the page. I asked them to keep it under 8,000 words, and everyone but Les Bohem listened. I paid twenty bucks to make it official, because writers deserve to get paid for their work. ($25 now, because that’s how much you need to be eligible for contests.) I said to write anything you want as long as it wasn’t the type of story that would appear in the New Yorker. Comedy, horror, sci-fi, western, crime… make it count. Just write me the kind of story that would make a good popcorn movie.

Continue reading ›

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Brian Michael Bendis Interviews Greg Rucka

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Jul 19, 2012 in Books, Comic Books, Guest Posts, Mulholland Authors, Writing

iraqOur post-Comic Con celebration of come of our enormously talented, cross-media authors continues with an interview between Brian Michael Bendis, writer of Ultimate Spider-Man, Ultimate X-Men, Ultimate Fantastic Four and The Avengers, and Greg Rucka, whose first new thriller series in a decade kicked off with ALPHA, now in bookstores everywhere.

Brian Michael Bendis: So we’re being honest with our reading audience. Last week you were cool enough to come to my class—I teach a class at Portland State—and you came there and dropped some truth bombs on them, and rattled them to the core. It was a lot of fun. But I had questions left over that we never got to because it was more of a free floating conversation, so there was questions I was going to ask, and I didn’t. And the primary question I had that I think is more pertinent to this conversation than the one we were going to have in front of the students, was if you’ve given thought to your goals as a novelist at this point. Like, there’s the goals that you had when you started, which was to get published—and now you’re starting a new kind of phase in your career, in that age we’re in, we get more introspective. OK, we’ve been published—now what? OK, I get to do this—now what am I going to do with it? So I was curious if you had given thought to that, or if you were bring more take it as it comes.

Greg Rucka: You know, it’s weird, because coming into Mulholland, and Alpha is the first new series that I’ve done in over decade in novels, in prose.  Stumptown was sort of the next step, but Alpha is the first in what is initially conceived of as the first of three novels, and may grow beyond that. I did give it some thought. There were two factors at work. The first is the obvious commercial one—you want to write something that’s going to be successful and you want to justify the publisher’s faith in you. You want to return them the money they’re willing to extend to you to write this thing, and most of the other novels are selling pretty well, but none of them have really broken out, and I’m not sure that’s a top agenda point.

But I would like to be able to write something that rewards the publisher’s faith. That actually does matter to me. I don’t hear a lot of writers talk about it. But self publishing is so viable that if you do go with a publisher you do want to make it worth everybody’s time. Content-wise, you touched on it, you know—I’m older. Like you, I’ve got kids. I have a different perspective than I did when I was 24, when my first novel was published. Continue reading ›

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A Conversation with Duane Swierczynski and Ed Brubaker: Part I

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Jul 17, 2012 in Books, Comic Books, Guest Posts, Mulholland Authors, Writing

Suffering from post-Comic Con withdrawal? Get your fix with the below conversation between award-winning writer Ed Brubaker, author of CRIMINAL, SLEEPER and INCOGNITO, among many others, and Duane Swierczynski, originally appearing to celebrate the publication of FUN & GAMES. Hardie endures!

Ed Brubaker: So, Duane – FUN & GAMES, am I right in saying this is your first non-Philadelphia book? (Not counting any co-writing) Did you leave your hometown behind in life and fiction?

Duane Swierczynski: You’re right — this is my first book set in a place other than Philly. I still live in Philadelphia (for the time being), and my fictional heart still lives here, too. But I do cop to a little bit literary wanderlust. The idea for FUN & GAMES, grew out of repeated visits to the Hollywood Hills over the years, and even though I tried (at one point) to set it closer to home, it refused to work anywhere but L.A.
Ed, how important is “place” in your work? You’ve created this brilliant fictional location in CRIMINAL‘s “Center City,” but was that on purpose? Why not, say, Chicago, or Seattle, or NYC?

EB: I think with CRIMINAL, it was to make it like the city in Walter Hill’s The Driver, or to use Chandler’s Bay City and Macdonald’s Santa Teresa as location names. Also, I was a Navy brat, so I don’t have that hometown thing a lot of writers have. I lived in DC (or right across the bridge in Arlington) in the summer of 1979, so I get Pelecanos’ views of it from the little I experienced at age 12, but I think one of the reasons I’m drawn to a lot of crime writers I love is the way their books inhabit a city, in a way I never could, as the always traveling outsider.

Continue reading ›

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One-Shot Stopping

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Jul 11, 2012 in Fiction, Film, Guest Posts, Television, Writing

GunfightOne of the worst myths created by movies and TV is the one-shot stop. You know how it goes: an action-adventure hero runs into a warehouse filled with bad guys. A gunfight breaks out. The hero runs through a maze of crates and equipment and takes down every bad guy he encounters until he reaches the evil mastermind, who is too skilled and devious to be taken down so easily. Cat and mouse ensues until the evildoer is either brought to justice or killed in some vengeful and Technicolorful manner.

A lot of these scenes take place with the hero using a handgun. He shoots guys on catwalks a hundred feet away (and they fall dramatically into vats of acid or molten metal or they get impaled on some sharp object). Apart from the incredible skill needed to shoot people fatally while running and using a pistol, the even greater fiction foisted on audiences through repetition is that one bullet will kill a human being.

Bad guys go down with one shot, yet the good guys often sustain multiple wounds and keep on going like Energizer bunnies. Isn’t this becoming a cliche’?

One handgun bullet can kill a human being, but at any distance other than close-up, it’s unlikely. The ultimate one-shot showstopper in movies is always the head shot. But in real life, even a head shot is not certain. Just think of Gabby Gifford, the Arizona Congresswoman who in 2011 was shot in the head at point blank range by a would-be assassin. She survived and is gaining back her normal functionality at an amazing rate. Continue reading ›

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Don Winslow, Interviewed by Shane Salerno

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Jul 06, 2012 in Books, Film, Guest Posts

Today, the film Savages, based on the Don Winslow novel of the same name, opens in theaters. Check out the trailer, if you haven’t already. Directed by Oscar winner Oliver Stone, the film’s screenplay is the product of a collaboration between novelist Don Winslow and screenwriter Shane Salerno. Winslow and Salerno have known each other for a long time – thirteen years to be exact. They have worked together, including creating the NBC TV series UC: Undercover, trust each other implicitly and often exchange early drafts of their work and talk on the phone every day, usually about film adaptations of Winslow’s work which Salerno produces. At our request, Salerno rang up his buddy Winslow who was in the middle of a cross-country book tour and interviewed the acclaimed crime writer about his life and work.

Salerno: What does it mean for you to be a writer?

Winslow: It means everything to me to be a writer. You know I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was a little kid. I grew up with great story tellers. My old man was a sailor, and I used to sit under the dining room table when he had his old Navy buddies over, and he’d pretend to think that I’d gone to bed and he’d let me sit there and listen to some of the best story tellers in the world so I always worshiped those guys. And we always had books around the house. My old man came out of World War II, you know 17 years old on Guadalcanal and what he wanted to do was ride around on boats, go to every zoo in the world and sit around and read books. So there were always books around our house and we were allowed to read anything we wanted at any age. There was no censorship, no nothing and so I imagined from when I was 5 or 6 years or so that if I could be a writer that would be the best thing in the world to be.

Salerno: Tell me 5 books that knocked you out?

Winslow: Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential–where am I? that’s three?–a book called A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, it’ll come to me, a really beautiful Indian novel about Mumbai, and, without question, All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy.

Salerno: Name some authors’ you consistently admire in the genre?

Winslow: Well, James Ellroy, T. Jefferson Parker, Michael Connelly, Ken Bruen and John Harvey, Dennis Lehane and Lee Child.

Salerno: You’ve been married for twenty-five years, and yet all of your characters are a mess. How do you access that?

Winslow: [laughs] All of my characters are a mess?

Salerno: They’re a mess!–Every single one of them.–A beautiful mess in some cases but…

Winslow: Y’know, I think methods are interesting. You know what I mean? Vulnerability’s interesting. I don’t think like ‘steady’ is real interesting in fiction, you know? I think that a character’s flaws are what give a character depth and interest. So, I’ve been married for 25 years but I had a life before I was married. It’s a little hard to remember sometimes but I did and I think I was the same kind of flawed, kind of vulnerable kind of character so it is pretty easy for me to access that .

At the same time, I think, you know any writer looks around him. You know, you look at people you look at relationships, you look at other people you know, you look at people in restaurants and cafés, you sit there and you make up stories about them you hear snatches of conversation you see little bits of behavior and that finds its way into your work. But if I was to just sit and write about myself I think we’d have some damn dull books. It would be about some guy sitting alone in a room typing. Not very interesting

Salerno: Give us a short history of your childhood, your parents and growing up.

Winslow: Oh, man. There’s no short history. My dad was a Navy man, Marine in World War II, and then into the Navy, Childhood was spent on most of the destroyer ports on the East Coast. My mom was from New Orleans, my dad met her while he was on leave during World War II. They got married six weeks later, and she came from a family of gamblers. My grandmother was a ward healer for Huey Long after the depression, and then she worked for Carlos Marcello the Mafia chief who probably had Kennedy killed — who by the way I met as a child we used to go to parties at his house in Algiers.

Continue reading ›

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