Noir fiction for the modern reader.

This year, Sleuthfest was held in Orlando, breaking its long ties with Deerfield Beach, a suburb of Fort Lauderdale. My advice: go back to Deerfield Beach.

Orlando is a pretty dreadful place. Utterly lacking in any character or any indigenous local culture beyond the plastic Disney attractions, it’s a morass of freeway traffic and retail chains. What I like to call a gathering ground for people from somewhere else to get together and exploit one another.

The event was held at the Royal Plaza Hotel, which appeared to have been preserved in its original 1980s format, right down to the smallest detail. The first major tipoff was the RCA analog TV, circa 1985, that sat in my room. No HBO, Showtime, or any decent channels, but at least the TV was color.

The carpeting looked like heavily-woven indoor-outdoor stuff, and there were no pens, paper, or envelopes in the room. Another red flag was the presence of “conditioning shampoo” in the bathroom instead of separate little bottles of shampoo AND conditioner.

Where do we go from there? Well, the restaurant was not up to the task, neither with their food nor the service. Only one bartender manned the bar (for a writer’s conference!), with no waitstaff, and the bartender had to recruit someone from somewhere else in the hotel to do barbacking chores for her. Unfortunately, she had to stop what she was doing and explain each chore to the new recruit each time she wanted her to do something, delaying matters even more.

Okay, so what about the conference?

Well, they got off to a rocky start, with registration beginning about 45 minutes late. Also, I looked inside the goodie bag each of us received and saw a copy of the conference program,  an issue of Mystery Scene magazine, and three items that could have been lifted from the card rack in the hotel lobby: two tourist guides to Orlando and a trolley map. Pretty exciting stuff!

Once the conference actually got underway, though, it was clear sailing. The first day, there were no panels, only talks given by individual speakers.  I heard Daniel Palmer, John Gilstrap, and Reed Farrel Coleman, all of whom were excellent, entertaining, and worthwhile. The next day, the panels began.

I was eager to contrast this year’s panels to last year’s, when every single panel, regardless of topic, swerved into a discussion of the digital/self-publishing revolution. At that time, none of the panelists–who were all traditionalists–was willing to admit that the flood of self-pubbed ebooks was anything to worry about. By this year, however, their eyes had been opened, if only a little. The panels talked about self-publishing, ebooks, and the big changes in the publishing business, and even accorded these changes a little respect. I was on a panel called “The Virtues of a Small Publisher”, since I had been with a small publisher. When I started talking about how I could do what my publisher did and do it better (and make more money at it, by the way), I wasn’t shouted down. The audience didn’t throw stones at me. The moderator seemed interested in what I had to say. Chalk up a little progress.

One day at lunch, Jeffery Deaver gave an informative talk about thrillers and was very accessible throughout his stay.

Everyone seemed in good spirits and the whole thing had a very friendly, welcoming tone. Now, if they’ll only go back to Deerfield Beach.

I drifted into The Kill Zone today and read John Gilstrap’s post on the future of big publisher advances to authors. The consensus was that the days of six and seven-figure advances are numbered. John went on to say that advances will probably shrink right down the line, to the point where only the biggest of the big authors will be able to make a living writing fiction.

Dana King added a comment likening the situation to that of professional musicians, where only those at the top can really make a living.

Having been a professional musician for thirty years (now retired to become a writer), I see the analogy to full-time writing. During those decades, though, I never held another job, not even once, and yet I remained the “midlist author” version of the music world: a journeyman musician.

Through those years, I made a good living, never large but never in squalor, either. I played in concert venues in front of tens of thousands of people and in smoky bars for no one at all. I played in recording sessions in state-of-the-art Nashville facilities and in makeshift home studios. I played on TV and I played while the TV was on. But I always worked. I might add, a lot of my fellow players could make the same claim. I was by no means a glaring exception.

John Gilstrap also said this, later in his post: Self publishing will become the solution for some, I suppose, but I continue to believe that the only writers who have even a remote chance for success via self publishing are those who have already established their names via traditional means. There’s just too much noise out there for newbies to have a real shot. Here I must respectfully disagree.

It only seems that way because yes, there is a lot of noise, but traditionally-successful writers do not have a lock on the self-publishing business. Not by any stretch. On January 7, 2011, Robin Sullivan did a guest spot on Joe Konrath’s blog, where she unleashed these astounding figures:

These are DECEMBER sales figures for some indie authors. In other words, they account for only 31 days of sales. Are you ready to be blown away?

Blake Crouch – 2500+
Nathan Lowell – 2500+
Beth Orsoff – 2500+
Sandra Edwards – 2500+
Vianka Van Bokkem - 2500+
Maria Hooley – 2500+
C.S. Marks – 2500+
Lee Goldberg – 2500+
Lexi Revellian – 4000+
Zoe Winters – 4000+
Aaron Patterson – 4000+
Bella Andre – 5000+
Imogen Rose – 5000+
Ellen Fisher – 5000+
Tina Folsom – 5000+
Terri Reid – 5000+
David Dalglish – 5000+
Scott Nicholson – 10,000+
J.A. Konrath 10,000+
Victorine Lieske – 10,000+
L.J. Sellers – 10,000+
Michael R. Sullivan – 10,000+
H.P. Mallory – 20,000+
Selena Kitt – 20,000+
Stephen Leather – 40,000+
Amanda Hocking – 100,000+

For a more detailed breakdown, visit Derek J. Canyon’s bloghttp://derekjcanyon.blogspot.com/2011/01/keys-to-epublishing-success.html. This was compiled by him, and Robin Sullivan.

###

Now, of those names on that list, only six had ever had a traditional publishing deal as of the date of that posting. Six. I don’t know about you, but up until a few months ago, I had never heard of most of those names. I still don’t know some of them. And yet, look at the figures.

Traditionally-published authors, I think, look at the world of self-publishing through a very different prism than the purely indie author who has never had a legacy deal. The trad guys, who, like myself, used to sneer at self-publishing as a place where people go when they’re not “good enough” to get published and where they pay to put out their own crap, are slowly beginning to see self-publishing as a beckoning candle in the darkness of the uncertain future. They look into it and they see that they are going to have to do all the work previously done by their publisher and they become intimidated by the very scope of it all. Soon they figure they have no shot, and hope, like the rest of the New York world, that self-publishing will self-immolate or otherwise go away.

The pure indies, though, see it quite differently. They see their chance to have a novel out there, being read by people other than family and friends. Sure, it’s going to take a lot of work to promote it, but they don’t care. They’re tired of querying agents who are so arrogant, they never even bother to respond with a rejection notice. They’re tired of publishers unctuously telling them they only accept “agented manuscripts”. And they’re really tired of having every door slammed in their faces when they know they have novels better than a lot of the “agented manuscripts” that grind their way through the New York mill. Rather than figuring they have no shot, they see their opportunity like an approaching brass ring, and they’re willing to do what it takes to get their books in front of readers.

Last year, I wrote that there was a brave new world coming. Well, it’s here.

Over on the Kill Zone blogspot today, John Gilstrap posted a provocative piece about his latest novel, which centers around the Iraq War. One of his characters, it seems, refers to the enemy as “Hadjis”, a term commonly used among GIs on the field of battle. John’s editor took a dim view of the word, thinking it would be “offensive” to some group or another, claiming it was like using the word “Kraut” or “Nip” during World War II.

Well, you see where we are here. The PC Gestapo has reached right into John’s novel and is threatening to, I don’t know, call him a racist or something for using this word, which by the way, is now apparently referred to as “the h-word”.

I take great offense at someone telling a writer what words he/she can or cannot write. If the words are technically incorrect, or if they’re overused, or some other traditional objection applies, I have no problem. But to axe a word simply because it might “offend” somebody is BS. Or rather, let me say, bullshit.

In my humble opinion, the more people who are offended by a writer’s output, the better. You can tell he’s done his job if he can get that kind of reaction from people. These are people who probably have no business reading anything in the first place, since they apparently reach for the smelling salts at the merest hint of “offensive” language.

The only people who can truly judge a writer are the readers. If they don’t like what they read, they won’t read that writer again. It’s that simple. But believe me, a lot more goes into that judgment than whether or not the readers are “offended”.

Anybody out there familiar with the controversy surrounding Rhett Butler’s use of the word “damn” in Gone With The Wind? It was thought, in 1939, to herald the end of civilization, so many upright (or is it uptight) people were “offended” by its inclusion in the novel and the movie. If they’d thought about it, they probably would’ve assigned it the label of “the d-word”.

This deal with John’s use of the word “Hadjis” is basically a variation on the same theme that is currently propelling the heated differences swirling around the violence in serial-killer novels. There are people out there who want to censor what is being imagined and written during the creative process, and they will never relent. We’ll always be on defense, but we have to keep fighting them off or else we’ll move into an era of censorship, strict oversight, penalties, and God knows what other restrictions on our freedom.

When a writer caves in to these PC terror tactics, we all lose a little something. We lose it for the silliest of reasons, namely that someone out there–maybe even just one person–won’t be “offended”. That is true BS (excuse me, bullshit!).

I think any writer should be free to use whatever words he/she feels are appropriate.

If someone is “offended”, that’s their problem. Get it? Their problem.

If someone wants to write about spics, wops, niggers, micks, chinks, limeys, kikes, fags, towelheads, wetbacks, japs, or any other “sensitive” group, go ahead. Provided, of course, that it fits the story, is not gratuitous, is not overused, or any of the other common-sense criteria that writers follow. I might also add, these criteria don’t just apply to “offensive” words, they apply to everything in the novel. Characters’ names, use of certain punctuation, syntax, all the tools available to a writer should follow these common-sense guidelines. The work should live or die in the marketplace, not in the twisted imagination of some PC fuhrer.

The notion that something might “offend” someone is not a reason to refrain from anything in writing. I also believe that “offense” is not the real driving force behind these “sensitive” complaints. I believe there’s a down-and-dirty effort out there to clamp down on creativity, and ultimately on every aspect of our lives.

As I mentioned above, we’ve got an h-word now. This will fit in quite nicely with the b-word, the n-word, the c-word, and so on. Eventually, you know, you’re going to run out of letters to connote these words. Then the PCers will have to move to maybe the Greek alphabet and we’ll all be running around talking about the gamma-word and the omicron-word.

But when you run out of Greek letters, where do you go from there? Cyrillic script?