Damned If You Do--Book Review: If You Read It, You're [see title]

 Photo: Book's hardcover, from robertbparker.net. 

The real title is Robert B. Parker's Damned If You Do, but if you read my reviews, you know how I feel about using a name as part of the title, especially if he's dead, so I won't further go at it here.  But...argh...

And that's pretty much what I have to say about this book itself, as well.  This is a giant step back from the other two Brandman novels, neither of which were exemplary to begin with.  What a horribly written story!  The dialogue is wooden and preposterous.  The story is tired and distant.  It's told and not shown.  And it's got little writer edits at the end of some sentences, like Brandman's explaining it to us.  (Note to Brandman: Mystery and procedural readers like to remember such things for themselves.  Even if they're unimportant--because you don't know until the end what was important and what wasn't, right?)

There are too many examples to cite them all.  There were so many that I had to put the book down and do something else.  I actually groaned and complained out loud.  And I can't find the one now I really wanted to put here, so...From page 247, after Jesse Stone saw a character, who he'd liked, die: "He hoped that the scotch would accomplish what he was unable to achieve himself...He wanted it to erase the haunting look in her dying eyes from his mind and his heart."

First, that's just bad writing.  Second, that's telling, not showing.  Third, if you've read Parker's--and even Brandman's--Jesse Stone works before, Stone (and the 3rd person narrator) would never think or speak like this.  Fourth, we all know why people drink after they've seen someone they like die.  Fifth, we all know why borderline alcoholics (or former alcoholics, which Stone is) drink after such an event.  Sixth, that last sentence--melodrama, anyone?  And Stone, and Parker--well, they're so anti-melodrama that this is just blasphemy, in of itself.  And I know that comparing Brandman and Parker is unfair because they're different people--but Brandman is so obviously trying to emulate Parker's sparse style, and failing so miserably at it, that the comparison is just here.  I feel certain that Parker would be upset with this book.

And the action sequences are just as bad.  This from page 239: "Suddenly everyone was on the move.  Chairs scraped loudly and tables were overturned as people began to anxiously respond.  There were shouts of panic.  The crowd began a confused surge towards the exits."

Again, this is just bad writing.  The word "suddenly" was used tons of times in this book.  That's bad.  When chairs scrape, it's loud.  So that's redundant--and it tells.  And it overuses adverbs, which I learned in high school and college is bad to do.  When people are "on the move," what is that, exactly?  When settlers are on the move, they're just walking along, and slowly.  There's probably lots of dust.  And when there are "shouts of panic" and scraping chairs and overturning tables--that's not how people "anxiously respond."  That's chaos.  Stuttering is anxiously responding.  And notice the word "began" is used twice in this one short paragraph.  Nobody begins to do something.  That's a huge pet peeve of mine, and it's used a million times in this book.  You're either doing that thing, or you're not doing that thing.  In this image, the people were well beyond the "began to anxiously respond" stage, whatever that is.  They were panicked and running over each other.  By definition, a surge is an action in progress, so there's no "began" there, either.

Literally almost every sentence and every paragraph has an instance of lazy writing, bad writing, passive writing, and...Oh, man, it was just plain horrible.  What a disappointment!  I don't want the reader to think I'm just nitpicking here, or in a bad mood, or whatever.  I'm telling it straight--the writing of this book is that bad.

So bad I was shocked at its badness.

So bad it gives hope to all unpublished writers out there--if this can find its way into Barnes & Noble, your book can, too.

So bad I pictured Parker rolling over in his grave.

So bad it was a blight on all the Jesse Stone books I've bought and read before--all in hardcover, too.

So bad that if someone else hadn't bought this book for me for Christmas, I would've stopped reading it.

So bad that I can't even say to save it for bathroom reading, which is the advice I usually give for bearably bad books.  But this isn't even bathroom reading--unless you need to use its paper.  Which you probably should.

This is so bad that it reminded me of Dorothy Parker's quip: "This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly.  It should be thrown with great force."

By the way, the characters and story are bad, too.  Stone, a police chief, tells a mass murderer that he feels "surprisingly comfortable" that he's watching his back.  I'm not kidding.  I actually disliked Stone at the end.

The best things about this book are the title, and the cover.  And that it ended.

Skip it, even if you have all the others.  It is worth having a hole in your collection so you don't have to put yourself through this.  It is that bad.

Don't even buy it in the remainder bin.  Don't start off the new year with this.  Don't do that to yourself.
   

Happy Holidays 2011

This time of year finds me working hard on The Gravediggers and Cursing the Darkness, anticipating the arrival of "Hide the Weird" in the upcoming Winter 2012 issue of Space and Time Magazine, and waiting to sign a contract for a very short nonfiction piece I just sold a few days ago.  A few other stories are out pounding the internet pavement.  Reading, writing, taking care of the new house and hangin' with my better half.  What's better than that?

I hope this time of year finds you well.  Happy holidays, all, and happy New Year!!!

Writing and Moving

Well, actually, it's moving and writing, but I've had a few better ideas lately, and I don't feel that all is lost like I have been for awhile.  I've written a short nonfiction piece that I think I'll send out after I move--which is Thursday and Friday.  Yup, two days.  I'll be setting up an office, clearing a ton of space, and I'll be sticking to a few self-imposed rules.  (I'm very excited about setting up this creative environment and writing more.)  Among them:

--I'll write for at least one hour every day.  After X amount of time, that'll grow to two; then three.  I may hope to grow to four, especially on weekends, vacations and summers, but we'll see.  Stephen King said in a video for his latest book that he writes for three hours a day now; I just finished reading a Writers Digest interview with him where he said he wrote for four to four and a half hours--in March 1992.  I'll be happy with one, and ecstatic with two or three.

--I'll read for at least an hour every day.  This reading time won't count into my writing time.  In other words, editing my work won't count as reading time.  I especially will read books and magazines.  I have tons of Writers Digests and Times (just saw Susan Smith); reading those again would be cool--and it'll fire me up.

--I'll write a lot longhand again, and on something that doesn't have the internet.  Too much of a distraction!  I have an Epson Expert 2000 that'll do the trick.  Also a typewriter from the 30s.  And I think I have another word processor somewhere.  But a notebook--both paper and electronic--will work.  Looking forward to that.

--I'll keep track of my ideas, my submissions, and my rejections better.  I often go long lengths of time in which I don't write anything or send out anything.  Then something comes back and I don't remember sending it out to begin with.  Now I'll keep a ledger of submissions.  Keeping an Excel spreadsheet and a Word table about them just didn't work for me.  I'm a write-it-down kind of guy.

--I'll work out, or walk, or run, or bike more.  As reading gets my gears going, so does physically moving.  I read an article recently that said that watching an hour of tv every day, on average, takes over 22 minutes off your life.  It's not the TV, they say--though that's debatable considering much of what is on--but the slothful lifestyle of those who watch that much TV.  It occurs to me that reading can do much the same thing.  Some people--not me!  not me!--are such vicious readers when they're on a roll, that they're not very active.

--I won't stop writing or reading when I go back to work.  This is much easier said than done.

Well, that's it for now.  I might not be around for awhile as I move out and move in, and then set up.  And then return to work 10 days after I move in.  But I hope to produce more writing, here and elsewhere.

Tricks to Write Consistently

I used to write very consistently, every day.  Of course, that was before I had a rewarding, but draining, job; this was also before I had anything closely resembling a life, as well.  Now I have both, and the caveat to that, which in a million years I never would have foreseen, is that I don't do as much writing anymore.  Sitting down and getting into a writing zone now takes more time than the actual writing itself used to.  I just can't focus; I can't shut my mind down on my day, or things coming up, etc. and focus on what I need to write.

If you've read this blog for awhile, you saw entries on all of my ideas about viruses, vampires (of course; though in my defense, I started The Gravediggers in the mid-90s, before it actually became something that everyone and their brother wrote), concentration camps, WW2, and all of the other things I've mentioned as ideas.  I have a million of them, and I start things, and then I get excited about something else, or my career rears its head, or I simply lose focus on writing in general--and everything just peters out.  All of those great ideas, all of that energy and positive feeling...just...drift away.

Reading a lot used to help.  Now, all of that reading time is all I've got for creative time, so all reading, no writing.  Reading used to help writing--until about two years ago.  Then a few months ago, I started taking pictures that tied into my writing, and that helped a lot...for a few months.  Now that I've taken all the pictures I can take, that process is of little help now.  These days, it's all photos, no writing.

Then, a few days ago, I realized that I hadn't written any poems in a long time.  While I would never say I was a gifted poet--or even a good one--I can say that writing poems would focus me, ground me into whatever I was writing at the time.  The poems themselves didn't have to correlate with whatever project I was working on at the time--though they sometimes did--but the very process of writing them apparently would hone my focus to such a degree that I was able to work on my longer creations.  Somehow, as so often happens to hyper and unfocused people like me, I stopped doing that, got sidetracked, and never went back.

So now I will work on poems again, and although Frost and Dickinson don't need to worry about their posterity, maybe, just maybe, some present-day novelists should be looking over their shoulders and not ignoring the dustcloud that just kicked up a long, long way back, just ahead of the horizon behind them.  Wish me luck, everyone, and if you have any tricks to help me along, I'll gladly listen.

A Lucky Addiction

Wow!  Has it been 5 days since the last post?  Well, time flies when you have the blahs.  Which I do.  Big-time.  It hasn't helped that I'm back at work, getting caught up, going through piles and piles of things and writing out tons of forms.  Also I had a competition of something I coach, and we did well enough, I suppose.  I was given a plaque, too, which is not only very nice--but the plaque and inscription also look very nice.  'cuz I'm materialistic and shallow like that.  But the whole thing was a good time.

Now...back to writing.  Getting caught up at work, and going back to work (after the bereavement leave), really took its toll on me, to the extent that I haven't written much, read much, or slept much, for that matter.  When I've been reading, it's been Mary Karr's Lit.  I don't know why I decided to start at the end--which normally in a trilogy is a very, very bad thing to do--but I read a bit of the others and actually made the decision to start at the third.  Odd, I know, but my reasoning is that I wasn't in the mood to read about self-destructive sexual escapades (Cherry) and I wasn't in the mood to read about parents who screw up her entire childhood (The Liar's Club).  And what I'd read, at random, of Lit was better than what I'd read, at random, of The Liar's Club, so I stuck with it.  Why?  Because I'd had--and may still have--a very heavy case of the blahs, and I didn't really give a damn, though I knew that I should have.  Which is a textbook definition of the blahs, by the way.

And when you're feeling like that, and something--blessed, effin' anything--is working, you stick with it.  Because it makes you feel something akin to happy.  Because you don't screw with anything, no matter how small, that's working when you're feeling like this, because you never know if anything else is going to.  And, well, because.  That's why.  Just...because.  When you're feeling like this, that really is a good enough reason.

Having said this, I realized that reading (and writing, I suppose) has been there for me through many episodes of the blahs, most of them much deeper and more profound than this one.  While reading is undoubtedly an escape, one could say the same for alcohol and drugs, and reading is by far the cheapest and least destructive of the three.  If you're gonna be addicted to something that obliterates the void, it might as well be a turning of the pages.  I am lucky to have this addiction.