...and Schreiber is German for "Writer."

Off to the left, along with links to my other books, I've posted a link to the newly available Untot, the German translation of Chasing the Dead, now available on the Amazon German site. The translation just came out this month, and it seems to be doing pretty well, getting what appear to be good reviews. I got a box of author's copies in the mail the other day and it's pretty neat, and a little surreal, to see the book in a different language.

Meanwhile, I'm finishing Stillwater this weekend. Have a good holiday, y'all.

Profit and Loss

I got my first royalty statement from Ballantine today, via my agent. It was, like, six pages long, and I stared at it for a long time trying to figure it out. I turned it upside down and sideways, looked at all the different pages, looked at the different columns of numbers, and felt the cogs and pistons and flywheels of my brain scraping off layers of rust.

Basically, it said I haven't earned back my advance.

My first thought was, crap. I stared at it some more. My daughter wandered over and began painting fruity-flavored lip gloss all over my mouth. My son came over and asked me where his most recent Happy Meal toy was. My wife told me to put my flip-flops on. I kept staring at it. When nobody asked me why I had such an unhappy look on my face, I held up the pieces of paper and said, "Look, I'm costing Random House money!" Or something like that. I was a little distracted by the lip gloss smell wafting up into my nostrils. But I was pretty sure I felt the first heavy shadows of Major League Gloom coming on. These were numbers that nobody should be allowed to see -- especially not the author.

For example, do you want to know how many people bought Chasing the Dead as an electronic book?

Forty-seven.

That's right. Since September, across the face of the entire planet, forty-seven people bought the e-book. Granted, e-books don't sell (per my editor) unless you're The Da Vinci Code or Lucasfilm, but still, that figure just looked so damn lonely there on the page. Forty-seven people isn't a number, it's a freakin' margin of error. Amid the entire human population, how can you even tell when forty-seven people do anything?

Yes, I thought, this was the beginning of a deep grayish-black depression. Even if it smelled like artifical cherries.

"Here, stupid," my wife said gently, and looked at it (I'm just kidding. She doesn't call me stupid. She calls me honey.) "This isn't that bad."

"Not that bad?" I howled. "Look at this! It says I still haven't earned back over $11,000 dollars!"

"But that's okay," she said patiently, tossing me one of the dog biscuits that we keep marinading in a jar of Jack Daniels for occasions when I panic and begin flailing about uncontrollably. "Look. You've earned back most of the money -- and they're subtracting it from the combined two-book advance that covered everything. Chasing the Dead doesn't come out in mass market until next month. And look, Eat the Dark doesn't hit the shelves to October. You haven't even received the last installment of that money yet. I think you're doing just fine, honey."

After considering this for a second, slowly chewing the dog biscuit, I decided to allow myself be reassured. After all, this wasn't like my very first novel, the ill-fated Next of Kin, which Putnam brought out in '94, whose solo hardcover performance (no paperback for that little baby, not then, not ever) was so mortifyingly bad that for years afterward I was dogged by "amount unearned by author" royalty statements and eventually considered going to work in the bindery to work off my debt to Big Publishing. Surely if I spent a few months stirring the glue vats, or whatever, I could pay off what I'd cost my publishers and wipe the egg from my face. Right?

Anyhow, that was how my adventure with my royalty statement went. And the next time I think I get a big thick envelope like that I'll just pass it off to Christina without even opening it. She used to work in publishing.

Besides, she knows where the dog biscuits are kept.

Scary Food

Every so often I come across something whose existence I can't believe I've managed to overlook until now. I was feeling peckish, doing a little research on the giant oysters known as pied du cheval (horses' feet) when I struck pure gold.

I give you the geoduck.

Please forgive me if I am the last person on earth to have become aware they existed. Pronounced gooey-duck, also known as the king clam or elephant trunk clam, this tasty Pacific Northwest critter looks like the answer to my seafood loving, horror-film watching prayers. It's the largest burrowing animal in the world, and can weigh fifteen pounds. Apparently James Gunn based the creatures from Slither on them.

Not to mention, for some oddreason, it has reputed powers as an aphrodisiac.


I've been reading up on this baby online. My next step is to catch a flight out to Seattle and head to Puget Sound to dig some up myself. I'll let you know how it tastes.

Kill Your Hero

Unhappy endings don't bother me.

Understand, this is the world of fiction we're talking about. In real life, where unhappy endings are the norm, eh, not so much. But in books I've always thought it was kind of cool when a writer was ballsy enough to end the story with the hero dying. A great example of this is the Richard Bachman novel The Running Man, which for my money is, page for page, one of Stephen King's most successfully sustained performances ever. Viewed in a certain way, it's just a countdown to the hero's messy death. It's also a clinic on how to write suspense. And it works like a mofo. Of course, in the film adaptation -- which has about as much to do with the novel as Billy Walsh's Silo script has to do with Lost in the Clouds -- Schwarzeneggar lives.

Then again, The Running Man, the movie sucked.

When I was on the Kill Your Darlings panel last month at Comic Con, we were all talking about murdering our characters and David Morrell mentioned that at the ending of First Blood, the book, John Rambo kills himself. That ending was actually filmed too, but of course it got changed (though apparently the new edition of the DVD will include that other ending, which in itself is enough reason to check it out, I think). I think the whole suicide angle works great too.

It's probably not the best idea to kill your hero every time around. Some folks don't like downbeat endings, and I can definitely see why. After you've spent three hundred pages with the characters, watching them fight for their lives, you want to see some kind of reward for them. You want to see them sit down and have a cold beer, or win the lottery, or something. Relax a little. And while I can sympathize, as I sit here, I realize that my tendancy is exactly the opposite. For me, nothing resonates more than the appearance of normalcy, followed by a last-minute oh-shit twist. Those of you who have read Chasing the Dead will know what I mean. It's just so hard to resist.

Why is he telling you this?

As it stands now, The Black Wing, in its current incarnation, upholds my tradition of not-entirely-happy endings. Suffice it to say that for all their suffering and turmoil, the characters don't all go out for coffee afterwards and talk about it. I don't know if the ending will stay like this, but I do feel that it's appropriate. I'm open to the possibility.

This coming weekend, I'm planning on finishing the book I was born to write (TBIWBTW), now called Stillwater. Which means, in the next few days, I'm going to have to decide whether or not to let my heroine live. I'd love to see her pull it off, but I'm not sure she can, and frankly I find this level of uncertainty bracing. It means the gloves are off, and it stops me from holding back on the action...because in my mind, she really could die.

It could happen.

What a week

I worked sixteen hours straight on Monday. Around seven PM, my wife called and told me our son Jack was having an asthma attack. He ended up in the ER half the night and when they finally let him go, I lay in bed next to him till morning, listening to him laboring to breathe.

On Tuesday morning I called the hotel out in LA that had been promising to reimburse us $250.00 after failing to give us the room we'd prepayed for, when we were there last month. The people I talked to had no record of any such conversation and told me to call back later. I dragged myself back to work. The steroids were making Jack's breathing better, but the radiologist saw something she didn't like on Jack's chest x-ray, a prominence in the ascending aorta that might be something...or might be nothing. Cardiology is going follow up once his lungs are clear enough that they can actually listen to what his heart sounds like. And now my wife didn't sound so good. The virus that our daughter had picked up the week before, that had triggered Jack's asthma, was working its way over to her. I realized that I'd had the same low-level headache for about a day and a half. I kept thinking of that last haunting line from that Raymond Carver story: "Things kept falling."

Wednesday, Christina crashed hard. Couldn't move. Couldn't stop coughing. Couldn't get out of bed. I ran out for Theraflu, heated it up in the microwave, left the kids in front of Noggin with a plate of meatballs and headed out to work. By nightfall Christina was feeling well enough to take the kids outside to play.

Thursday, I took the day off. Played trains with my son and danced to Queen with my daughter. Hugged my wife. Remembered why I love being a father and a husband. And, not coincidentally, a writer. Duane Swierczynski's super rare advance copy of his forthcoming SEVERANCE PACKAGE arrived in the mail. The hotel called to say they were FedExing the check. I ate some homemade manicotti with a glass of wine and took a long shower.

Today, I'm back at work. I'm working overtime Saturday and Sunday and all next week as well, but I've got Labor Day weekend on the horizon, and meanwhile, things have normalized in my house. I'm going to finish my novel next weekend, take my wife to dinner and my kids to HersheyPark.

See you next week.

How could she possibly have guessed?

From the blog of Elisabeth Vincentelli, Arts and Entertainment Editor of Time Out New York, who recently "polished off Eat the Dark over a couple of subway rides":

"Eat the Dark, on the other hand, is plain embarrassing, like something written by a ten-year-old weaned on Z-grade serial-killer books and movies."

Heh. Heh-heh-heh.

What's the Biggest Thing You've Ever Lost?

The hard drive on my laptop died last week.

It happened quickly, and as always there was that odd pop of startlement, of a trusted thing abruptly gone, poof. I didn't lose much except for the page or two that I was working on at the time -- okay, it might have been three or four pages. Whatever the word count, it was enough to make me more upset than I'd been in a long time, pissed off enough to forego the episode of Entourage I was going to watch and head upstairs to attempt to rewrite what I'd lost, from memory. I think I did an adequate job, but in my mind the pages I rewrote will never be quite as good as the ones I lost.

Over the years I've become better at backing stuff up, and I've been lucky in that I've never lost anything major in a crash. Only once, after going over the galley proofs of a travel guide I was writing about Martha's Vineyard, did the entire uncorrected manuscript disappear, when my backpack was stolen out of my unlocked house on the island. But this hardly counts -- it was an inconvenience for Insight Guides to send me another copy, but that was all. I didn't have to do anymore actual writing.

These days I back up constantly and I carry a flash drive with me whenever I leave the house for more than a few hours, just in case the place burns down. This is the equivalent of Richard Yates keeping his last, unfinished novel in the icebox -- and back then, there were no backups. These days, when you hear about something like this happening, you can only shake your head with a combination of sympathy and horror. I still remember the odd moments when the power failed or one of my kids pulled the plug while I was mid-sentence, and that feeling of several hours of intense concentration, gone up in smoke.

Literary history is full of colorful stories of authors losing work to accidents, carelessness or thieves. Hemingway and a thousand others. What's the biggest thing you've ever lost?

Ants-A-Million

Just got back from five days in South Carolina and came home at midnight to discover we're not alone. We just had the place sprayed earlier this month but now it looks like the guy is going to have to come back again. The ants in question are itty-bitty bastards that are apparently called "crazy ants" and I hate every last industrious one of them. The way they run around erratically until you slaughter them reminds me of the worst aspect of American culture.

Adding unnecessary irony to the situation is the fact that my son recently bought an ant farm and had to send away for those ants. So while we were in San Diego, his ants showed up and because nobody was there to put them in the ant farm, they all died. So my house is full of tiny little insect yuppies crawling everywhere, except the ones we actually paid for, which are dead.

Freakin' ants.

Real Time

Both Chasing the Dead and my forthcoming novel Eat the Dark are written in what might (not quite accuately) called real time. That is to say, the action in the book unfolds start-to-finish without any deliberate manipulation of time on my part. I don't flash forward or cut to a scene at the Pentagon two weeks later. Everything happens on a very compressed scale and ideally the reader speeds through the thing in one or two sittings. I like that.

In neither case was this a conscious decision. I happen to enjoy the immediacy of writing under confined circumstances and, in the case of my current work in progress Vacationland, the circumstances are more claustrophobic than ever. It once occurred to me that it would be a fascinating challenge to write an entire novel that took place as a car was sinking in the water with the driver trapped at the wheel. Vacationland isn't quite that compressed, but it's close.

And you ask, Why does he do this to himself?

The easy answer is that my readers seem to like it. Talking to some kind folks at the Comic Con, I met a few who were very glad to find that out Eat the Dark is a real time book -- and this kind of storytelling is definitely one proven way of establishing suspense. (It can be a little silly, too. I'm sure the Johnny Depp vehicle Nick of Time sounded good on paper, at least at first.)

As a writer, though, I find an entirely new level of gratification in writing real time stories. There's a sense of paradoxical freedom working under such self-imposed restraints. The boundaries are set from the beginning, and within them, you feel weirdly liberated, and your sense of resourcefulness and play suddenly seems unlimited. I feel the same way when I sit down with my kids to play Thomas the Tank Engine versus the Creature from Dimension X -- when all you have to play with is a toybox full of mismatched trains and Happy Meal action figures, you discover an entirely new toolbox of materials at your disposal. Which is just another way of saying, the closer the walls, the harder the bounce. Or, in the words of Stephen Sondheim: "If you tell me to write a love song tonight, I'd have a lot of trouble. But if you tell me to write a love song about a girl with a red dress who goes into a bar and is on her fifth martini and is falling off her chair, that's a lot easier and it makes me free to say anything I want."

My recently finished novel The Black Wing, currently on the desk of my editor, is not a real time book. The action covers perhaps four weeks of time, and while that allowed me much more freedom to come and go from the lives of my characters, I have discovered that it's a much more challenging book to bring into focus. I've already done two major rewrites and I smell a third one coming, meaning the finished novel won't be ready for publication for at least another year, if then. If ever.

Vacationland, on the other hand, is coming out more or less exactly as I'd hoped. Whether it's what my editor has in mind is another matter. Stay tuned.

Comic Con Day 2

"A pissing contest of randomness."

That's how my friend Mike described the Comic-Con by the end of Day 2. He meant it affectionately, though, I'm sure. My own feeling by the end of Day 2 was that I had been reduced to a pair of staring eyes in a vat of fluid, on rollerskates.

We had, for example, Stormtrooper Elvis:



And Caveman Robot:


And perhaps my all time fave, Leisure Suit Boba Fett:

On Day 2 I saw more of the floor. A lot more. And random or not, a lot of it was pretty frickin' cool. I found a cool booth by a guy selling a graphic novel called The Age of Insects, and he had a jar of Madagascar hissing cockroaches to get people's attention. They were much cooler than the equally large cockroaches that prowl outside my sister-in-law's front steps in Fishtown.



I also got to hang out with Cameron Hughes, legendary internet journalist, avowed San Diegoan and tireless booster of mystery, thriller and horror writing. Even though he claims he doesn't really dig horror, Cameron also claims to have enjoyed Eat the Dark, and I believed him. I believe him even more having read some of his reviews on CHUD, where he can be both venomous and generous in the same paragraph. For an example of this merciless style, check out this recent review of Warren Ellis' Crooked Little Vein. Cameron and I spent some time talking about The O.C. and McG, and why the city of San Diego rocks just in general, and Cameron confided to me that while he was reading the first 50 pages of Duane Swierczynski's forthcoming novel Severance Package, a bird pooped on him, which is certainly good luck for all involved. Right, Swierczy?

At three, I bought an oceanic cup of Starbucks and went back to the Del Rey booth to sign Eat the Dead ARCs and hand out Hershey bars and Eat the Dark flashlights. It turned out the Starbucks wasn't necessary. The line of people waiting to talk to me and get books signed was a mainline hotshot of adrenaline straight to the neural plexus. The galleys were gone in 30 minutes and I hung out to talk to people about horror, writing and the Con. I'd promised my family I'd bug out after that and go to the beach with them, but I ended up wandering the floor with my camera, getting all the pictures I could. Here are a couple faves:

Doing my token line whore dance, I ended up standing in line at the Paramount booth for a coveted Marshall College Department of Archeology T-shirt, the stealth promotional item for next year's Indiana Jones movie. I've already worn it, so I haven't paid too much attention to what they're going for on eBay.

My dream purchase of the day (as in, the one I didn't go home with) was an original painting by a Hollywood artist named Mike "Soz" Sosnowsky. He was there with a painting called "To Live Forever Watching Cartoons" that I just kept going back and staring at. There was no price on it, so I decided I probably couldn't afford to hang it on my wall. But you should definitely take a peek at his website.

None of this detracted from the coolness of the item I did get my hands on, a copy of Soon I Will Be Invincible, by Austin Grossman. I'd picked up the sampler from the Pantheon booth on Friday, read the first two chapters in my hotel room that night (despite the fact that it was bound incorrectly and I had to chase through it like one of those old Choose Your Own Adventure books), and was instantly won over. Austin was the one guy I definitely wanted to meet on Saturday, but it turned out that he was signing at the same time I was, ten feet away. Fortunately I tracked him down and got him to sign my copy from Mysterious Galaxy Books. Besides being an awesome book with a totally unique and compelling narrative voice, Invincible was the perfect book to take home from the Comic Con. You get dual first-person accounts of a supervillain, Dr. Impossible, and up and coming female superhero, Fatale, but they're written with the kind of flavorful, almost Chabon-esque serio-comic texture that sets the book apart. Imagine The Incredibles' baddie Syndrome, for grownups, and there you are.

I've read a lot of coverage of the Con since I got back, and it's funny--if you're there as an exhibitor, you tend to miss a lot of the big ticket events, because you're there hawking your wares or making contacts. I didn't really mind, but it is odd to read about all the big panels and announcements that were made while I was signing books and meeting people. There's definitely two sides to the convention, but I enjoyed my end of it thoroughly.

As an additional bit of yumminess, Eat the Dark got it's first online review today from uber-reviewer Harriet Klausner, on Alternate Worlds. Check it out!

California Day 1

My family and I got back today from a week in California, including several days at the San Diego Comic Con. It was great. The trip started out a little rough--we arrived in our hotel in LA at one AM local time to find out they'd given us a smoking room, and my son has asthma, so we were carted off to another hotel downtown, a half hour away. By the next day, after juggling luggage, rental cars, a 50 pound box of promotional chocolate bars, two different hotels and the traffic on the 405 South, I was more stressed out than I had been back in Pennsylvania.

But then we got to San Diego and everything got better. Way better. We spent the afternoon body surfing at La Jolla beach, and that evening I met my editor Keith and a couple dozen other people for dinner at the Edgewater Grille on the harbor, next to the convention center. After some king crab legs and a couple mojitos, things started looking much better. We spent about four hours eating, drinking and swapping stories about writing, editing, being humiliated by Japanese manga superstars, working for Lucasfilm and Mad Magazine (same guy), and how all clowns are basically terrifying. When they kicked us out of the restaurant (San Diego inexplicably closes down at 10:30 PM) we went back to the hotel bar. After more beers I found myself pitching The Book I Was Born To Write to various publishing folks, all of whom offered to buy it on the spot. I begged off, claiming it needed time to forment, not to mention additional beer. I had an author panel the next day with David Morrell and F. Paul Wilson, among others, but it wasn't until 2:30 in the afternoon. I was fine.

Friday morning, it was still a little intimidating--they were expecting 123,000 or so people, and I'd never been to the Comic Con before. Within the first half hour I'd spent fifty bucks buying stuffed Totoro toys for my kids. Right now My Neighbor Totoro is their favorite movie, which made this stuff impossible to refuse.
The con itself was its own entity, with a self-replicating language and culture. There are certain phrases, like booth babe, and line whore, that are tossed around pretty frequently. A line whore will stand there forever for something free or for a chance to buy some limited edition con exclusive (I saw a near riot at the Hasbro booth) and a booth babe -- well, this was my personal favorite.
The best part was watching people realize that she was an actual amputee, their lust hitting them in the face like a splash of cold water. Pure genius. Here's another one that speaks for itself:
And a more standard, but no less effective example:
There were lots of big name celebrities around, but I quickly discovered that the best way to see these people is by accident. Standing in line for a glimpse of Robert Downey Jr. or Kevin Smith is one way to go about it, but it's more fun and exciting to run into them by accident, like bumping into George Romero at the pool or finding yourself sitting next to Angelina Jolie in an otherwise empty sauna. Not that either of these things happened to me, you understand...but it would've been really cool if they had. Plus, I'd have pictures.

Anyway, somewhere in the midst of all this, I managed to find my friend Mike, who's an assistant director on The Simpsons, and we wandered about like the two teenage geeks we were the last time we'd attended a convention together, until my cell phone rang. It was Keith, my normally cool-headed editor, and he sounded panicked. "Did you get my message?"

"What?" I said.

"Your panel. It's not at 2:30. It's at 1:30."

"Holy shit!" I looked at the time. It was 1:40. "They've started without you," Keith said. "I'll meet you there."

I had no idea where I was going. My friend and I took off at a dead run through the crowded floor, by itself the size of a few football fields, packed with people and stuff, until we found an escalator and more enormous, sprawling space filled with people, still running, looking everywhere until I stumbled through a door into a ballroom packed of people with the panel in progress up at the front. I made my way to the empty spot in the middle, trying not to gasp into the microphone, while the moderator introduced me.

The topic of the panel was "Killing Your Darlings." We talked about killing off our characters, and the audience listened and laughed in all the right places, and it was amazing. Afterward we found our way back to an autograph session in yet another part of the convention center.
That's me at the end on the left. Next to me, David Morrell sits blissfully unaware that in the next twenty minutes someone is going to come up and ask him to sign a Rambo doll, followed by someone else who want him to sign a Rambo RCA Laserdisk circa 1982. "They're not really book people, are they?" he said at one point. I don't know about that, but they sure dug the free Eat the Dark Hershey bars I was handing out.

Afterward, I caught back up with Mike and we walked the floor a while longer. Tomorrow was Saturday, the big day, and I was supposed to be doing a signing at the Del Rey booth, handing out galleys of Eat the Dark and hopefully luring as many people as possible into my own nightmare vision of reality. I'll post it tomorrow along with the photos. We've still got giant Madagascar hissing cockroaches, Elvis Stormtrooper and Caveman Robot to discuss...not to mention my own act of line-whoring, and our triumphant return to LA, including real life adventures with Jay Mohr and Nikki Cox at the La Brea tarpits. But for now I'll just leave you with this excellent Carman Miranda Darth Vader helmet.