I decided to make Crunk a $0.99 ebook. My apologies to anyone who purchased at the $2.99 level, but I gave it a lot of thought and wanted to really promote my writing. Sometimes, as a marketing technique, you have to do things like this. Crunk as a $2.99 ebook was selling fair on amazon and not at all at smash words. Funny how specific websites sold better, and we'll see if this changes things.
I also increased the sample material on the smash words to 35 percent from 20 percent. I think this will allow more investment for anyone reading the characters and attempting to determine whether it is a good purchase or not.
All of this is in anticipation of the follow-up for Crunk. Which is off to my readers and the person who edits the ebook. I am now starting to think in terms of how to best design a cover and will be putting something up as soon as everything is complete. I'm really happy with this book, enough so that I don't want to give away the title until everything's publish. Because after that fact, then it's mine and no one can take it away from me.
I'm looking into the design of my next book. It will be crime, the same world as Crunk and its follow-up, but only with maybe a few mentions. I want to challenge myself to continue to design really good crime stories, not just continue on a storyline from book one to book seventeen.
Yes, I will be throwing up a few good short stories. Trying to develop one as we speak which may be longer than usual, but in the world of the internet and ebook reading, there is no such thing.
Showing posts with label crime. Show all posts
Showing posts with label crime. Show all posts
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Saturday, May 21, 2011
Noir and reality of detective commercials
I've been a playing a lot of L.A. Noire on XBOX 360.
It holds a lot of the images that people collectively have of the late 1940s, especially the L.A. Noir which was developed in pulp magazines, books and film. James Ellroy holds the key to this revival. And the video game actually plays homage to the author and the crime by creating the entire game around the 1947 death of Elizabeth Short murder (The Black Dahlia).
Regardless of how the history actually played out, this is the type of image we hold dear.
Which leads me to a question: Are we portraying history in actual terms or how we wished it would have played out?
You see tough cops in fedoras, marching with a keen sidearm, a notebook and the idea that every case is solvable. Every ethnic group has specifics to them, especially the Irish captain and the way the squint of a detective's eyes hones in on the truth.
But we know now there were a lot of people railroaded from that era. Suspects confessed or had it beaten out of them. Evidence was tampered with, misread or never found. And assumptions were made. Clearance rates were as important, but less publicized, during that era. Investigative skills, interview tactics and other scientific measures were not as good as they are now.
Does this mean that they were in the dark ages in terms of detective work?
Hardly. This stuff goes on to this day. In some ways, the cops of the 1940s may have developed a case more now with the advancements of blood, semen and D.N.A.
Our scientific advancements may have helped us. But it may have made us lazy as a society. Anything has the possibility of being fakes, misread, tampered (purposefully or not), and it all comes down to a confession, sometimes, anyway.
The detectives of that era are romanticized since they dealt with a short-term decay. The idea that there was one crazy out there, in a world that was being rebuild after World War II with the hopes and dreams of a utopian society which never existed (and could never exist). Now, people expect their scandals. The rarity of someone fighting the system, exposing corruption, within the police force or city hall, has been removed.
Every other day is a scandal of sometime. Communication is rampant. The criminals know the tactics of a police investigation. It's difficult to use the tactics of the 1940s police work now, as those who are guilty now know what every investigator is looking for.
Noir detective stories also play into our suggestion that something can be solved within a few days, hours, minutes. There are always clues around. There are people who are suspects, who give themselves away if you ask the tough questions. The evidence always leads to someone.
That's the farce of criminal detective work in a fictional story.
Sometimes, nothing adds up. The bad guys do get away with it. Those who are suspects can be made to be guilty, confess even if they didn't do it, and the crime can be unsolved forever.
Zodiac (2007) is a perfect film about obsession, how an investigation can stall, have few answers even with a suspect or two, how leads can go dead, be garbage from the start, and how everything might be a MacGuffin.
One of my favorite examples of this is Homicide: Life on the Street (1995-00) which was a television series on NBC. The murder of Adena Watson, a case which haunts Det. Tim Bayliss throughout the series. Risley Tucker, the main suspect, was once in the interview room for 12-hours, but never truly confessed. He appeared guilty as hell, but there wasn't enough evidence for a D.A. Not only that, but Tucker dies in the fourth season. The case continues on, Bayliss keeps it back of his mind, and learns of a 1932 child murder similar to his which was never solved. That gives perspective that sometimes, evil does exist and does get away with it. To my knowledge, the series, nor the TV film afterward, ever solved the murder.
It's funny, but I think of Adena Watson sometimes. In terms of wondering what exactly happened. I was a fan of the show, and it stayed with me. I've read articles which said that NBC executives wanted the murder solved and the show producers kept delaying, saying that they would in a few episodes and never did on purpose. That's really police work, to continue on long after the leads are cold, the story is no longer fresh, and the idea that sometimes, the murderer stays free because there wasn't enough of those damn clues that any good detective pulp novel leaves behind in order to keep the reader's interest.
The Black Dahlia case had thousands of interviews. Hundreds of suspects. Fifty people confessed to the murder. The Black Dahlia prime suspect named in early 1980s was Jack Anderson Wilson, who was the prime suspect in the Cleveland Torso Murders in the mid-1940s. Wilson had never been a suspect until he was interviewed by a book author, John Gilmore, who wrote Severed. L.A.P.D. Detective John St. John told the newspapers that he was "closing in" on Wilson, who would die in an apartment fire in 1982.
The reason for expectations on The Black Dahlia case were the constant media sensation of the William Randolph Heart papers (trust me, they were worse than TruTv and make Nancy Grace look like a puppy). It was also the largest case since 1927.
All of these factors play into murder cases. And this is coming from a layman. I have no inside knowledge which would tell me otherwise. But still, sometimes we suggest how things were "different" back then. But that has more to do with the way we view history.
The younger we are, the less hardened we tend to be. And as we grow, we start to know more. Too much, in some sense.
I'm thirty-five and starting to think that the 1980s were an innocent time compared to now. But I have to catch myself. Because I used to hear how horrible the 1990s were by adults who remembered how cool the 1970s were. It's the 20-year itch. A lot of remembering the way we never were. Because fiction is a lot easier to deal with than the reality of the situation.
Ask those who expected The Black Dahlia murder to the be solved a week after it happened. Because if Sam Spade had been investigating it, the case would have been, right?
It holds a lot of the images that people collectively have of the late 1940s, especially the L.A. Noir which was developed in pulp magazines, books and film. James Ellroy holds the key to this revival. And the video game actually plays homage to the author and the crime by creating the entire game around the 1947 death of Elizabeth Short murder (The Black Dahlia).
Regardless of how the history actually played out, this is the type of image we hold dear.
Which leads me to a question: Are we portraying history in actual terms or how we wished it would have played out?
You see tough cops in fedoras, marching with a keen sidearm, a notebook and the idea that every case is solvable. Every ethnic group has specifics to them, especially the Irish captain and the way the squint of a detective's eyes hones in on the truth.
But we know now there were a lot of people railroaded from that era. Suspects confessed or had it beaten out of them. Evidence was tampered with, misread or never found. And assumptions were made. Clearance rates were as important, but less publicized, during that era. Investigative skills, interview tactics and other scientific measures were not as good as they are now.
Does this mean that they were in the dark ages in terms of detective work?
Hardly. This stuff goes on to this day. In some ways, the cops of the 1940s may have developed a case more now with the advancements of blood, semen and D.N.A.
Our scientific advancements may have helped us. But it may have made us lazy as a society. Anything has the possibility of being fakes, misread, tampered (purposefully or not), and it all comes down to a confession, sometimes, anyway.
The detectives of that era are romanticized since they dealt with a short-term decay. The idea that there was one crazy out there, in a world that was being rebuild after World War II with the hopes and dreams of a utopian society which never existed (and could never exist). Now, people expect their scandals. The rarity of someone fighting the system, exposing corruption, within the police force or city hall, has been removed.
Every other day is a scandal of sometime. Communication is rampant. The criminals know the tactics of a police investigation. It's difficult to use the tactics of the 1940s police work now, as those who are guilty now know what every investigator is looking for.
Noir detective stories also play into our suggestion that something can be solved within a few days, hours, minutes. There are always clues around. There are people who are suspects, who give themselves away if you ask the tough questions. The evidence always leads to someone.
That's the farce of criminal detective work in a fictional story.
Sometimes, nothing adds up. The bad guys do get away with it. Those who are suspects can be made to be guilty, confess even if they didn't do it, and the crime can be unsolved forever.
Zodiac (2007) is a perfect film about obsession, how an investigation can stall, have few answers even with a suspect or two, how leads can go dead, be garbage from the start, and how everything might be a MacGuffin.
One of my favorite examples of this is Homicide: Life on the Street (1995-00) which was a television series on NBC. The murder of Adena Watson, a case which haunts Det. Tim Bayliss throughout the series. Risley Tucker, the main suspect, was once in the interview room for 12-hours, but never truly confessed. He appeared guilty as hell, but there wasn't enough evidence for a D.A. Not only that, but Tucker dies in the fourth season. The case continues on, Bayliss keeps it back of his mind, and learns of a 1932 child murder similar to his which was never solved. That gives perspective that sometimes, evil does exist and does get away with it. To my knowledge, the series, nor the TV film afterward, ever solved the murder.
It's funny, but I think of Adena Watson sometimes. In terms of wondering what exactly happened. I was a fan of the show, and it stayed with me. I've read articles which said that NBC executives wanted the murder solved and the show producers kept delaying, saying that they would in a few episodes and never did on purpose. That's really police work, to continue on long after the leads are cold, the story is no longer fresh, and the idea that sometimes, the murderer stays free because there wasn't enough of those damn clues that any good detective pulp novel leaves behind in order to keep the reader's interest.
The Black Dahlia case had thousands of interviews. Hundreds of suspects. Fifty people confessed to the murder. The Black Dahlia prime suspect named in early 1980s was Jack Anderson Wilson, who was the prime suspect in the Cleveland Torso Murders in the mid-1940s. Wilson had never been a suspect until he was interviewed by a book author, John Gilmore, who wrote Severed. L.A.P.D. Detective John St. John told the newspapers that he was "closing in" on Wilson, who would die in an apartment fire in 1982.
The reason for expectations on The Black Dahlia case were the constant media sensation of the William Randolph Heart papers (trust me, they were worse than TruTv and make Nancy Grace look like a puppy). It was also the largest case since 1927.
All of these factors play into murder cases. And this is coming from a layman. I have no inside knowledge which would tell me otherwise. But still, sometimes we suggest how things were "different" back then. But that has more to do with the way we view history.
The younger we are, the less hardened we tend to be. And as we grow, we start to know more. Too much, in some sense.
I'm thirty-five and starting to think that the 1980s were an innocent time compared to now. But I have to catch myself. Because I used to hear how horrible the 1990s were by adults who remembered how cool the 1970s were. It's the 20-year itch. A lot of remembering the way we never were. Because fiction is a lot easier to deal with than the reality of the situation.
Ask those who expected The Black Dahlia murder to the be solved a week after it happened. Because if Sam Spade had been investigating it, the case would have been, right?
Friday, April 29, 2011
Sinister People & The Royal Wedding
Sinister people can’t be made up. That’s my thought for today. I watched the movie Bronson last night with my friend, Andrew. This character of the movie is actually based on a real man. And it doesn’t matter that I only see him hold a gun once (never firing). The man is about as cold-blooded as you can get. Aside from Queen Elizabeth when it comes to royal divorces. Charlie Bronson, or Michael Peterson, appears to be one of the most sinister characters I have witnessed. Mainly due to his stare, the fact he does not shout but speak slowly at times, and he has those cold eyes staring at you. No, he is not a celly you want to have in the big house.
This brings me to the point of British Crime novels or movies. The rest that they are popular is that there is a bit of naivety to their creation. They have nuance, even if they come from the bad part of town. Americans are pull out guns, shoot first and ask later. The Brits across the Pond appear content to know why they must kill a person and then beat them to death. One of the rests may be that pistols are illegal in the UK. If you are going to kill someone in that country, you have to do it with your hands.
It is tougher, grittier to deal with. And makes for great situations and characters. Bronson uses a piece of cloth to strangle a man from behind. He does so in such a removed fashion, holding the cloth firm around the man’s neck as the victim struggles, that it appears more inhumane than if he walked up, shot the man in the chest without much dialogue.
The British Royal Wedding occurred last night. To fanfare of a billion viewers and a lot of choreographed ritual that kept them watching. This is story. Even though the occupants appeared in certain aspects to be removed, cold, isolated, it is that very reaction which appears more passionate than if the Queen had stood up and scolded Kate Middleton for not doing a proper curtsies. That being said, it held the interest of several countries, including the United States, even though British ceremony should be viewed as more of an oddity than it is. Didn’t we leave them in 1776, by chance? Interesting how story makes us multi-national.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Tear it apart, damn it...
Some of the people reading this blog have asked me what do I use as a device to ensure that my ideas become clear to the reader.
I have Andrew Ouellette. Not a device, but a stand-up comedian.
He helped out a lot with the formations of the Crunk storyline. In one of the upcoming novels I am writing, I based a character on Andrew. In terms of Crunk, he told me what worked, what didn't, because I asked him to read it and tear it apart. Andrew is very good at tearing things down. Here is some of his stand-up comedy.
Andrew also writes articles for Whiskey & Skittles.
As an exercise, you should have someone who is willing to tear apart your work read it, then give you feedback.
Your friends will want to be non-offensive. My grandmother would never be a good critic, even when I have done something wrong, she thinks I am correct. Yes, even now.
But as a writer, I would encourage you to find that person(s) to tear apart your work. It is the only way you can improve upon it.
I have Andrew Ouellette. Not a device, but a stand-up comedian.
He helped out a lot with the formations of the Crunk storyline. In one of the upcoming novels I am writing, I based a character on Andrew. In terms of Crunk, he told me what worked, what didn't, because I asked him to read it and tear it apart. Andrew is very good at tearing things down. Here is some of his stand-up comedy.
Andrew also writes articles for Whiskey & Skittles.
As an exercise, you should have someone who is willing to tear apart your work read it, then give you feedback.
Your friends will want to be non-offensive. My grandmother would never be a good critic, even when I have done something wrong, she thinks I am correct. Yes, even now.
But as a writer, I would encourage you to find that person(s) to tear apart your work. It is the only way you can improve upon it.
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