I’d like to welcome author Geoffrey M. Gluckman to StoreyBook Reviews today.  I have his book to read and review (coming soon!), but wanted to offer him the opportunity to share some of his thoughts with you here today.

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Today I welcome author Gregory Widen to StoreyBook Reviews!  He is the author of Blood Makes Noise which is a story about Evita.  I will be sharing my thoughts on the book in the next week or so, so make sure to come back and check it out!

I remember the moment I got the idea for Blood Makes Noise. I was visiting a friend in an unnamed Latin American country who was a field officer for the CIA. Now, this friend has been involved in all sorts of craziness, including – on direct orders – supervising not only the murder of certain bad individuals, but “making it hurt.”

Despite a life of anecdotes like this, in the nights we spent drinking, the only time I ever saw him express disgust for anything was the following anecdote: “On 9/11, the FBI office in Miami was given the photos of the hijackers. This was critical – it had to get to Washington immediately – and they sent it by FedEx. Why not e-mail? Because there wasn’t an agent there who knew how to attach a photo. That is all you need to know about the FBI.”

I’d already decided at this point to write a novel titled Blood Makes Noise, centered around the craziness that accompanied the disappearance of Eva Peron’s corpse in 1955 Argentina. I knew my hero would be a troubled CIA officer sucked into those events and nearly destroyed by them. But when you write a novel, character and plot are just two of three things you need. The third, and often most elusive, is a unique background that provides the kind of catalyst to propel characters forward beyond the requirements of plot.

It occurred to me that I might have just found my catalyst.

As my friend’s white-gloved butler served us bourbon martinis at precisely six o’clock, I pressed further. Everyone knows of the historical mistrust between the CIA and FBI, but I quickly learned just how toxic it had been in South America – to the point where the CIA and Hoover’s FBI were nearly in open warfare with each other.

Prior to the CIA’s creation in ’47, the FBI had always been in charge of spying in South America. But Truman, who never trusted J. Edgar Hoover, now wanted to hand that responsibility over to his new agency. From that moment on, Hoover committed himself to strangling the baby CIA in its crib.

As servants built a fire in the living room, “drinks” became a cocktail party as various local spooks arrived. There was the BND (German spy agency) guy, another who’s family ran Cuban Intelligence, and some current and retired CIA. Working through my third martini, I soaked up the stories.

Despite Truman’s change, Hoover managed to keep many of his people in place, effectively creating an FBI-run CIA within the CIA. As the agency fought to get control, Hoover just went to greater lengths to discredit it.

As the party devolved, I remembered a dinner commitment. My friend’s crew decided to join me. Off we went to a large dinner party most memorable for the moment my friend informed me that my host was the son of the country’s biggest narco boss. I worried I’d unknowingly made some terrible mistake. But he only smiled wryly: “No. Thank you. It would have taken me months to make this meeting happen by accident.”

Both the drinks and stories kept coming: how in an effort to discredit the CIA, Hoover had ordered his men – while a CIA team burglarized a foreign embassy – to fire shots outside to alert the security people within. Or the time the CIA had arranged the defection of a KGB officer in Buenos Aires and Hoover, wanting the credit – and to embarrass the CIA – had his boys grab the defector in a restaurant first. But a CIA team arrived at the same moment and a brawl broke out between the two groups, trashing the place.

It was chaos in the CIA stations down there at the time. The old FBI officers still in place did everything possible to frustrate and humiliate the new arriving CIA personnel, including burning their files when they were finally ordered out. Those days in South America, sighed an old hand, were one wild circus.

As evening crawled to dawn, I knew now the atmosphere my character would be thrust into: a freshly minted CIA officer arriving in Buenos Aires and going to war against the old FBI hands still in place. A young man whose greatest threat would turn out not to be the KGB, but the people in his own embassy.

Walking home later, I thought, not for the first time: It’s funny where ideas come from.

This is a guest post by Gregory Widen, author of Blood Makes Noise. Gregory studied film and screenwriting at UCLA, and penned scripts for the films Highlander, Backdraft, and The Prophecy. He’s a native of Laguna Beach, California and he lives in Los Angeles. Blood Makes Noise is his first novel.

I want to give a BIG welcome to Mysti Parker, author of A Ranger’s Tale and other books!  I hope you enjoy her post and check out her books when you have a moment (links at the bottom!)

If It Ain’t Workin’…

Recently, I read an article written by author Ted Heller, entitled ‘The future is no fun: Self-publishing is the worst’. In it, he laments the fact that his third book, which he self-published, has not drawn the attention of his first two, which did quite well in the traditional print market. Beyond the pity-party attitude of this article lies something I caught as I read it, as did several commenters.

Mr. Heller did all the right things in trying to promote his third book, but he did all the things he did as a traditionally published author. He wrote to print newspapers and sought out interviews on radio stations like NPR.

The problem, I believe, is his book is electronically published, yet he’s promoting as though it’s in print at all the major booksellers. Though he did seek some online venues, he became discouraged after not getting replies in the first couple of weeks. Despite his popularity as a traditionally published author, he’s basically shifted gears and has become a beginner at indie publishing. He’s expecting too much too soon with a brand new venture.

Therefore, I say if it ain’t workin’, do somethin’ different! Whether you’re trying to publish a book or trying to find a new job, if what you’re doing isn’t getting you ahead, change how you go about it.

If you’ve written a good book or story, for instance, and I mean REALLY written, as in it’s been critiqued, edited and polished up to the best of your ability, then keep fighting for it, but know your market. Don’t limit yourself by sending ads for an electronic book to places frequented by the print market. I mean, really, how many subscribers to print newspapers have their eyes glued to e-readers? Target the e-reader markets: book blogs, social media, online mags and news outlets. Get interviews through online radio stations, like those on Blog Talk Radio.

Seek out active book reviewers, but do your research! Don’t send your contemporary romance to someone who has a preference for the young adult genre. Target those sectors in the e-market that are most likely to work with you.

With persistence and hard work, you won’t have to join Ted Heller’s blues band.

****

About Mysti:

Mysti Parker (pseudonym) is a full time wife, mother of three, and a writer. Her first novel, A Ranger’s Tale was published in January, 2011 by Melange Books, and the second in the fantasy romance series, Serenya’s Song, was published in April 2012. The highly anticipated third book, Hearts in Exile, has already received some great reviews. The Tallenmere series has been likened to Terry Goodkind’s ‘Sword of Truth’ series, but is probably closer to a spicy cross between Tolkien and Mercedes Lackey.

Mysti’s other writings have appeared in the anthologies Hearts of Tomorrow, Christmas Lites, and Christmas Lites II. Her flash fiction has appeared on the online magazine EveryDayFiction. She has also served as a class mentor in Writers Village University’s six week free course, F2K.

Mysti reviews books for SQ Magazine, an online specfic publication, and is the proud owner of Unwritten, a blog voted #3 for eCollegeFinder’s Top Writing Blogs award. She resides in Buckner, KY with her husband and three children.

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		Cover not revealed yet!
A Ranger’s Tale, Tallenmere #1	Serenya’s Song, Tallenmere #2	Hearts in Exile, Tallenmere #3 (Coming May 26!)

I want to welcome author Ninette Swann to StoreyBook Reviews!  Yesterday I reviewed her recent release, Just the Messenger, and she was kind enough to drop by and share some of her thoughts with you.

Show Up

Writing isn’t hard. Well, it can be hard. It can be as hard as you make it, really. But a lot of people shoot themselves in their feet by staring at that blank page, afraid that any word they write down will be set in stone, unchangeable. And if that’s the case, well, it had better be perfect.

Since we’re not perfect, you can bet those words won’t be, particularly first time out, and that’s okay. That’s what edits are for, and read-throughs. Just start. Just show up.

Many people will get a few thousand words in and stop. It’s no good, they’ll think. There’s no continuity. I can’t make this flow. Wrong. The unwritten piece in your desk drawer could be written. You just have to keep writing it. Keep in mind that it doesn’t have to be good. The point is to finish. Write something, anything.

If it makes you feel better, know that many published writers have the skill of a third-grader writing on an i-phone. You’re not alone. They don’t know your/you’re, or there/their/they’re. They confuse then and than. Hell, they float body parts, and have scenes that don’t make any sense at all. That’s what the editors do. So if you think people who are published are handing in these polished works to publishers and agents, and making it big off their massive skills as wordsmiths, you’ve got it all wrong. You’re just gearing yourself up for an excuse not to write.

And that’s okay, too. Just because you start something doesn’t mean you have to finish it. But don’t rationalize your choice by knocking yourself down. You didn’t not do it because you suck at writing. No. You didn’t do it because you didn’t want to finish it. Take some ownership! Owning our decisions is hard, no doubt. It gives us the responsibility and power to create or not to create, and if we are not creating, sure, we could feel like failures. But to replace that ownership with something that automatically makes us a failure in our own eyes is missing the point entirely. Sure, now we’re not responsible for finishing. Now we just suck.

Is that so much better? Is that better at all?

How to finish that piece you are working on:

1)      Start small. Don’t start with your 80,000-word masterpiece. Do a 6,000-word short story first. See if you can finish it.

2)      Write something every day. Even one sentence. Do not let that project go untouched for a day or you will lose touch with it. It’s easier to walk away from something you haven’t looked at in a week. Every day, add a sentence, a word, anything.

3)      Don’t love your work. Start with something you are not personally invested in. If you are the type who gives up, thinking the work is not good enough, you’ll find it a lot easier to motor through it if you don’t give two tosses about the purity of the message. I know this one seems counterproductive, but it’s not. It helps you to practice the art of writing and the discipline of doing it regularly without putting your self-esteem on the line. It’s an excellent shallow end to this crazy pool.

4)      Make your friends look at it when it’s done. Remember, you don’t even really care about it anyway, so if they come back with harsh words, separate the criticism from yourself and attack that silly story you made, using their suggestions. You will make it better. And you will learn how to accept criticism when it counts, when it really is your baby on the line.

5)      Submit it. Who cares if it gets rejected. It probably will. By a lot of people. But sometimes it doesn’t. And the validation / rejection cycle is a really great way to stop feeling like an amateur sitting alone at your desk, and start feeling like a writer engaging in the entire process. Plus, you never know when someone will recognize your “genius.”

Long story short, the only thing that’s keeping you from writing or from being a writer if you want to be one…is you. So get yourself out of the way, and start writing. The most important part of any job is simply showing up.