I love writing about court cases where the target is moving. Where things are not what they seem. Because, in truth, that is the human condition: that things are never what they seem. We think we know our spouses or our children or our best friends, but do we really? The same thing is true with what happens in court. A guy gets arrested for something. Lawyer A, who has been paid $100,000 to defend the guy, pulls out all the stops. There is scientific evidence, there is a human factors expert, there is an economist, a treating physician, DNA testing and etc. Lawyer B, who has been paid $10,000 to defend the guy, shows up for court in a new suit and a recent haircut. There are no experts, no paid witnesses, no DNA testing experts and evidence, and no stops are pulled out. Lawyer C, the public defender, is paid $0 and immediately starts looking to plead the guy guilty to something. No offense meant; this is a budgetary matter. PD's are damn good lawyers, many, many of them even better than private lawyers, but, alas, they have no money to work with.
What's this all mean to me? That a lawsuit in my novel can have many different faces, depending on the motivation and expertise of the attorneys involved. So my main guy, Thaddeus Murfee, has money to burn. Why? Because that's how most all of us lawyers would like to handle our cases: ones where resources are unlimited. What a different world that would be.
In my latest Thaddeus adventure, due to be released in about 5-6 weeks, Thaddeus is defending a man with multiple motives to murder his wife, opportunity, and means. But there are other possible suspects as well. They also have motive[s], opportunity, and means. Are things as the client says they are? That's the rub: they never are. Which is the great thing about fiction: you can have two legitimate narrators in one book and they can both report the exact same scene differently--even vastly differently. So my client tells me one thing in the office, the police say something entirely different in court, and then the judge comes along and decides out of all of it what parts the jury gets to hear and what parts they won't access.
This is courtroom fiction at its best, this latest Thaddeus book. Be sure and preorder on Amazon. A good one-half of the book is taken up with the trial, my most ambitious yet.
Entertainment.
Friday, August 21, 2015
Thursday, August 6, 2015
How I Wrote and Published 10 Books in 18 Months
Whew!
And I get asked about it lots. How the heck did you write so many books in a year and half, books with hundreds of reviews and high (low) rankings?
Truth be told, I wrote them over the past forty or fifty years. Not these published books specifically, but other books. Books that kept me writing nonstop over weekends with work weeks in between. Books that kept me up until three or four in the morning while my future readership was sleeping (or not yet conceived...), books that tortured me with misgivings because I couldn't make the damn book say what it was I was trying to say. And on and on. I wrote wrote wrote. And I submitted submitted submitted. All the major magazine's saw my short stories: Harper's, New Yorker, Atlantic--they all got a taste of my art.
And they all turned me down. "Not quite there," they might scrawl on their rejection slip, or "Please try us again--" -- very popular with the New Yorker way back when. Now I don't know what they write on their rejection slips by way of encouragement, if anything. I don't know because I no longer submit to them. Why would I, when, with the advent of self pub, I can put my voice out there for millions to hear simply by clicking through a few Amazon categories and sub-categories.
In January of 2014 when I published my first novel, it really wasn't. Wasn't really my first novel. I had written my Hemingway lookalike while in college. I had written my Updike lookalike a year after. I had written my Salinger shorts during that same era (all dialogue, all trying to sound East Coast cranky). I had written my Ken Follett novel, my LeCarre ambiguous spy thriller, my Thomas Harris minimalism and my John Grisham soundalike careless toss-away flashes of genius (the other John's: I'm not saying I've ever had any of my own.) So when I published in 2014 you were able to buy a writer who had sounded like everyone else out there and who now had found his own voice and you could hear that and decide whether it was your cup of tea or not.
I then washed, rinsed, repeated nine more times. Or is it ten more times? The count is beginning to escape me. And my writing speed is mine to click into because the structural-grammatical-dramatical pieces are long ago in place. Through practice practice practice.
Now you know. How I published 10 novels in 18 months, downloaded 450,000 of them, and earned well over $100,000. The next twelve months look to be 2.5 times better. Wow on me.
One other thing. I would be remiss not to mention this. Bookbub allowed me to grace its email ten times over the last twelve months (counting this coming Saturday's number 10). Sales upon sales upon sales.
There's a bit of luck involved with all this too.
And I get asked about it lots. How the heck did you write so many books in a year and half, books with hundreds of reviews and high (low) rankings?
Truth be told, I wrote them over the past forty or fifty years. Not these published books specifically, but other books. Books that kept me writing nonstop over weekends with work weeks in between. Books that kept me up until three or four in the morning while my future readership was sleeping (or not yet conceived...), books that tortured me with misgivings because I couldn't make the damn book say what it was I was trying to say. And on and on. I wrote wrote wrote. And I submitted submitted submitted. All the major magazine's saw my short stories: Harper's, New Yorker, Atlantic--they all got a taste of my art.
And they all turned me down. "Not quite there," they might scrawl on their rejection slip, or "Please try us again--" -- very popular with the New Yorker way back when. Now I don't know what they write on their rejection slips by way of encouragement, if anything. I don't know because I no longer submit to them. Why would I, when, with the advent of self pub, I can put my voice out there for millions to hear simply by clicking through a few Amazon categories and sub-categories.
In January of 2014 when I published my first novel, it really wasn't. Wasn't really my first novel. I had written my Hemingway lookalike while in college. I had written my Updike lookalike a year after. I had written my Salinger shorts during that same era (all dialogue, all trying to sound East Coast cranky). I had written my Ken Follett novel, my LeCarre ambiguous spy thriller, my Thomas Harris minimalism and my John Grisham soundalike careless toss-away flashes of genius (the other John's: I'm not saying I've ever had any of my own.) So when I published in 2014 you were able to buy a writer who had sounded like everyone else out there and who now had found his own voice and you could hear that and decide whether it was your cup of tea or not.
I then washed, rinsed, repeated nine more times. Or is it ten more times? The count is beginning to escape me. And my writing speed is mine to click into because the structural-grammatical-dramatical pieces are long ago in place. Through practice practice practice.
Now you know. How I published 10 novels in 18 months, downloaded 450,000 of them, and earned well over $100,000. The next twelve months look to be 2.5 times better. Wow on me.
One other thing. I would be remiss not to mention this. Bookbub allowed me to grace its email ten times over the last twelve months (counting this coming Saturday's number 10). Sales upon sales upon sales.
There's a bit of luck involved with all this too.
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